The Paris Review's Blog, page 123

One Word: Loose

Melissa Febos’s essay “The Mirror Test” appears in our Winter 2020 issue, and this essay grows out of that one.

“She’s tight,” they kept saying with glee about this girl or that. This was before tight meant good or mad and after it meant drunk or cheap. The boys scanned the school cafeteria for girls they deemed chaste, the ones with modest figures and monied homes. “She’s tight,” they’d agree with approval.

“What about me?” Is it possible that I actually asked this? That I was once so plaintive? Of course. I was a child.

“No, you’re loose as a goose.”

I remember exactly what I wore that day: button-fly jeans, short-sleeved shirt with a floral pattern. It must have seemed important.

The Remarkable History of Chicken Little, the 1840 tale by John Greene Chandler (adapted from a 1823 Scandinavian version), is populated by farm birds with rhyming names, including one Goose-Loose (Gaase Paase in the original), who spread their terror of the sky’s alleged falling like a bad game of telephone. Fox-Lox then lures them into his den for supposed protection, and bites off all of their heads.

The moral of this story is that you ought not believe everything you’re told. In the first cut of the original film adaptation, which was requested by the U.S. government and released by Walt Disney Pictures in 1942, the fox is depicted reading Mein Kampf, and then convincing Chicken Little that the sky is falling.

All those birds got so uptight over this fabrication. Tightening is a response to fear. The amygdala engages and our perceived options are reduced to two: fight or flee. Our muscles clench, blood flow to the brain is constricted—we walk straight into the fox’s den. Stay loose as a goose and remain under the intact sky.

“Loose as a goose” originated from the perception that geese have loose bowels. The Canadian geese surely shat all over the town I grew up in, roving in flocks across the athletic fields, ruining them with waste barely distinguishable from the grass. We gave them a wide berth because they were frightening, though beautiful, with their muscular necks and distinctive feathered faces, like arrogant bandits. No one doubted the freedom of a goose to fuck you up simply for jogging through their clique.

I would have liked to be loose as the geese that flew over our wooded road, their wingspans longer than my body head to foot, bellowing as they cast themselves across the sky.

The origins of loose almost always mean free. Across seven centuries and as many languages, it signifies the liberated, unencumbered, wild, unbound. Hang loose, a term adopted by surfers and evolved from the Hawaiian shaka, is read sometimes as a term of respect, and more often as an encouragement to stay loose, not get uptight. Still, men have been intent for almost as long on convincing women that loose is a bad thing, a thing we don’t want to be.

In John Camden Hotten’s 1859 edition of The Slang Dictionary, the term refers to prostitution with the stipulation that it can only apply to women. The 1879 Roget’s Thesaurus offers it as a term for impure or unclean and gives on the loose as a euphemism for prostitution. Prostitutes didn’t wear corsets; they weren’t respectable women, unlike the straitlaced. Their bodies were loose, theirs to give away or to sell if they pleased. Funny that when I was a sex worker, I wore a corset so often. Still, tell me again why I shouldn’t want to be loose, let my organs settle where they ought to be? Every other thing on the loose is free. The only reason we are ever given not to be is to avoid the punishments of men. Like every other bad thing a women can be, they invented it.

The boys in school interpreted the term more crassly: to be loose meant that one had a baggy pussy, presumably from being penetrated so often. Fucking a loose girl was like “throwing a hotdog down a hallway.” Loose girls were “wide as the Callahan Tunnel,” through which we drove under Boston Harbor into the city.

No surprise that a corresponding interpretation exists for hang loose. Loose junk on a man is a good thing; no one denigrates boys for letting their genitals swing. Obviously no one wants uptight balls, shrunk with fear or cold. Meanwhile, women should find a way to retract our meat curtains. The flagrancy of gendered double standards is awe inspiring, even after all these years, brazen as a story about the sky falling.

“Hot dogs are made of lips and assholes,” I once heard one of those same boys claim. I’d never eaten one and I still haven’t. Though I could count on one hand the penises I’ve touched since I stopped doing so for money, I saw a fair number before that, starting when I was an adolescent girl. They were never so big as a hot dog, though I’m not interested in reciprocating shame via the body—there’s no redemption in that.

There was a story about a girl in junior high who rode my school bus. She was a year ahead of me, someone we’d all known from grade school. The story was that she had fucked herself with a frozen hot dog and it got stuck. “That’s a story from time immemorial,” said my beloved. Is there a girl at every school in this country about whom this story is told?

Those raconteurs clearly had never met a pussy. Perhaps they had never met pleasure, either. During middle school, I tried everything—zucchinis and carrots and the leg of an old Barbie, but a frozen hot dog? A frozen anything? Cruelty is so often illogical. Literal nonsense. But if they tell it to us young enough, it needn’t be nuanced.

The hot dog story didn’t even derive from speculation about that girl’s sexual proclivity. It was just that she was tall and fat. At fourteen years old, she looked like a woman in a Renaissance painting. She was gorgeous and could have kicked the ass of any boy on that school bus. Her midsection was loose as a goose and that made their testicles uptight. I don’t know what happened to that girl but I hope she is hanging loose in every way she wants. It was also my body that earned me a sexual reputation, though in my case it became a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Like so many things, they succeeded at convincing us that loose was a thing we shouldn’t want to be. Penned was better. Into the den, safety. Tight, ideal. Two fingers, one finger, let nothing thicker than a pencil fit inside you. Let your perspective narrow straw-thin with fear of what they might say about you, what else such stories might permit. But you know what? I refuse to cinch myself up. I want to arrange a living room inside me, invite all of my friends over for game night. No hot dogs here. We eat expensive cheese and black licorice. We drink cases of fancy seltzer and laugh until we weep. There’s space for all of us here, or anywhere we please, once we’re on the loose.

Over the years, a surprising number of my college students have confused the spelling of lose and loose. It always startles me to see, but in a good way. I want to loose my mind, loose my marbles all over the floor. Let me loose the thread, unravel all sense that makes no sense. Let all lost things be loosed instead, not gone but freed. Call me a looser, shout it across the school cafeteria, into the cavernous tunnel under the harbor. Looser! This is the one command I will obey, grow looser by the minute, until I am loose as a goose, menacing men with my rebel flock, all of us spreading across the sky—not fallen yet—as we take our freedom.

 

Read Melissa Febos’s essay “The Mirror Test” in our Winter 2020 issue.

Melissa Febos is the author of Whip Smart and the essay collection Abandon Me. Her second essay collection, Girlhood, will be published by Bloomsbury on March 30, 2021. A craft book, Body Work, will be published by Catapult in 2022.

Staff Picks: Viruses, Villages, and Vikings

Torrey Peters. Photo: Natasha Gornik.

I am not one of those people who, in the early days of the pandemic, watched Contagion and read Blindness. If anything, finding the waking hours difficult enough, I have largely avoided pandemic-themed works. So this week, when I revisited Torrey Peters’s Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones, it was not in an effort to live out this current crisis in a fictionalized one. Actually, I’d kind of forgotten the complete centrality of a virus to the work and instead best remembered the magnetic, sometimes erratic Lexi and her unforgettable declaration: “In the future, everyone will be trans.” Of course, she’s referring to the pandemic itself—Lexi creates a virus that stops hormone production in the body, forcing everyone to actively choose their gender and seek out hormone-replacement therapy. She infects our unnamed narrator with her virus, and five years later, it appears that society has collapsed, war has broken out, and things have gone full-on apocalypse. Peters does a phenomenal job of examining the complicated, difficult relationship between the narrator and Lexi and capturing the social dynamics within their community. Peters has said she forgoes including “Trans 101” in her work, instead writing for other trans people and expecting cis readers to keep up, and Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones is no exception. What struck me on this particular rereading, however, was the structure of the book. At the novella’s center is the moment that Lexi infects the narrator (“Contagion Day”), with the story moving backward and forward in time from there, oscillating from a prepandemic Seattle to a postpandemic Iowa. This, as we steadily approach our various one-year anniversaries of local shutdowns, felt like an eerily uncanny framing of the narrative. —Mira Braneck 

Making lists has become a go-to method for expanding my tastes. With cinema, for example, I have encountered remarkable variety in searching for films by their treatment of a particular object—cereal or telephones or eggs. What literary discoveries might emerge from a list of books with chairs on their covers? My latest list-driven venture was musical: a playlist of twenty-four songs wherein each track is titled after an hour of the day. This process led to the golden-cassette-tape treasure that is Bona Dish, a UK-based pop punk group who never saw the release of a studio album but did manage to crank out the ultimate just-woke-up-in-a-garage jam, “8am.” Push play on this track as you climb out of bed or brush your gums or fill the first kettle of the day, and note your transformation from a groggy prisoner of the morning grind to the gritty protagonist of a grind house smash. The aptly named Captured Tracks, an indie record label out of Brooklyn, has ensnared the feral Bona Dish sound, rescuing it from the wilderness of obscurity, rehabilitating it, and releasing it as The Zaragoza Tapes: 1981​–1982, which serves as a kind of sonic consolidation or catalogue or curation or list. Ah, knowing how list leads on to list … Bona Dish—for fans of film grain, fog, bathtub gin, half-remembered dreams, benday dots, dust on the mantel, matte finish, the houndstooth stitch, echoes, alleyways, and raw, unfiltered honey. —Christopher Notarnicola

 

Henry Louis Gates Jr., 2013. Photo: Oregon State University. CC BY-SA 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/...), via Wikimedia Commons.

 

Finding Your Roots, the TV show in which Henry Louis Gates Jr. tells famous people about their ancestors, is pure, restorative joy. His guests—two per episode—represent a range of backgrounds, but they share an all-American ignorance of family history. Some of their ancestors were kidnapped and brought to the U.S. in enslavement, their African lineages lost, their centuries of history here shattered by family separations. Others came voluntarily but declined to share the past with their American-born offspring—it was too traumatic, or they hated to jeopardize assimilation, or there was some lie that had once seemed necessary and now felt cemented. Gates sits across from the likes of Ava DuVernay, Fred Armisen, and Pharrell Williams, asking gentle questions and sliding census records, news items, and photos of distant villages and townspeople across the table, drawing a long crooked line from immigration (and sometimes points further back) to celebrity. Often, his guests discover that their roots are far more widespread and complicated than they thought—maybe their ancestors were on the wrong side of the war somewhere, maybe they weren’t exactly who they’d been mythologized as, or maybe they were worthy of myth but previously unknown. Each episode approaches the satisfaction of a good novel, and Gates is the perfect narrator—a model of compassion and grace, even as he explodes his characters’ truth. —Jane Breakell

I used to hear all the time about how bookstores were dying, and I’d come back with tales from 192 Books in Chelsea, where I worked on and off for three years in a temple of literature. All sorts of folks visited—composers and artists, an older man who was the sole inhabitant of an island off the coast of Maine and read David Foster Wallace with his daughter, tourists, pop stars, writers I revered, and editors of this magazine. This extraordinary audience was in part because the store is owned by the publisher Jack Macrae and the gallerist Paula Cooper, two book lovers who understand what literature can do. One of my favorite customers was an extremely impressive young person who came to the register with, among other things, the highlights of Beat literature. At the time I was a bit surprised, but this morning I can’t see why. I loved the Beats when I was her age. Before college, I crossed the country to attend an art program in Oakland based on little more than Jack Kerouac and the light on Coit Tower. I crossed the country again once I graduated because even after four years of college, I still asked, “Are you my Angel?,” just as Allen Ginsberg had taught me. Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who died this week at the age of 101, didn’t create Ginsberg or Neal Cassady, Kerouac or Diane di Prima, Gary Snyder or Bob Kaufman, but he may well have created the Beats. A poet and a painter, he understood the occasional chill of creative work and the heat of community. When he opened City Lights, the now-landmarked bookstore in San Francisco, he did so with the intention of selling cheap paperback editions and establishing a space for browsing and arguing. With the Pocket Poets Series, he published some of the best English-language writing of the twentieth century, including Frank O’Hara’s Lunch Poems and Ginsberg’s Howl. The Beats didn’t speak for everyone, and they didn’t speak to everyone. But Ferlinghetti helped to place literature in the counterculture and the counterculture in literature in ways that improved both camps. Until we can pack into the shelf-lined rooms of independent bookstores again, stumbling upon old friends and new titles, I’ll buy a book directly from one such beacon and hope they outlive Ferlinghetti many times over. —Julia Berick

I picked up Neil Price’s Children of Ash and Elm: A History of the Vikings earlier this week after being subjected to several animated retellings of it from my roommate, whose obsession seemed like a good sign. Price, a Sweden-based archaeologist and academic, is adept at bringing this cosmopolitan and brutal world to life, interweaving many complicated strands of history with his own experience in the field along with poetic meditations on a people and time long since passed. (The militaristic society that we are familiar with as “Viking,” for instance, is most likely the direct result of a sixth-century volcanic eruption in modern-day El Salvador that had catastrophic effects for the rest of the world, plunging Scandinavia into a three-year winter that killed half the population. I had no idea!) Price is especially careful to break the real Vikings—who, he emphasizes, were sophisticated traders and travelers who recognized no such thing as a “pure Nordic” bloodline—away from the white supremacists who have attempted to claim kinship. The everyday world of the Vikings is, like those of all premodern peoples, simultaneously familiar and repellent, fascinating in how different the conceptions of spirituality, time, gender roles, the value of life, and more are from our own. One passage from the account of a Caliphate emissary who witnessed the ten-day ceremonies and human sacrifice required for a chieftain’s death is, to be frank, incredibly disturbing, while the idea of the self and soul as divided into four beings—including a living personification of one’s family lineage and another personification of one’s personal good luck—charms. But what Children of Ash and Elm is particularly deft at conveying is that for all of us—Viking or not—time, and the cruelty of its passage, remains the largest commonality of all. —Rhian Sasseen

 

Neil Price. Photo: Linda Qvistrom. Courtesy of Basic Books.

The Storyteller of Tangier

In her column, Re-Covered, Lucy Scholes exhumes the out-of-print and forgotten books that shouldn’t be.

Like many readers, I suspect, I first came across the name Mohammed Mrabet in relation to Paul Bowles. Throughout the sixties, seventies, and eighties, everyone from Life magazine to Rolling Stone sent writers and photographers to Tangier—where Bowles had been living since 1947—to interview the famous American expat, author of the cult classic The Sheltering Sky. “If Paul Bowles, now seventy-four, were Japanese, he would probably be designated a Living National Treasure; if he were French, he would no doubt be besieged by television crews from the literary talk show Apostrophes,” wrote Jay McInerney in one such piece for Vanity Fair in 1985. “Given that he is American, we might expect him to be a part of the university curriculum, but his name rarely appears in a course syllabus. Perhaps because he is not representative of a particular period or school of writing, he remains something of a trade secret among writers.” This wasn’t to say that Bowles was reclusive. In fact, he kept open house for one and all, whether they be curious tourists, his famous friends—Tennessee Williams, William S. Burroughs, and Allen Ginsberg among them—or the crowd of Moroccan storytellers and artists he’d befriended over the years. And of these, one man in particular stands out: Mohammed Mrabet.

Bowles and Mrabet met in the early sixties, and they remained close until Bowles’s death four decades later in 1999. Mrabet worked for Bowles in various capacities: as a driver, a cook, general handyman, and sometime traveling companion. But theirs was much more intimate a relationship than that of employer and employee. They were friends—and it’s assumed, at one time or other, lovers, too—but most importantly, artistic collaborators. Throughout the sixties, Bowles increasingly turned his attention to translating. His wife, the novelist Jane Bowles, suffered a stroke in 1957, from which she never fully recovered. From then until her death in 1973, she was plagued by depression, impaired vision, seizures, and aphasia—health problems that also had a notable impact on her husband, depriving him of the “solitude and privacy” that he needed to write. “The real reason I started translating, was that Mrs. Bowles was ill and I couldn’t write, because I would only have twenty minutes and then I would be called downstairs,” he explained to McInerney.

But what started out as a piecemeal activity that could be squeezed in between the demands of caring for his spouse soon became an impressive project in and of its own right. Bowles worked with oral storytellers who hadn’t learned to read and write, Mrabet included. Thus, in taping, transcribing, and translating their tales, he was, as McInerney points out, “virtually inventing a new genre.” He also developed close bonds with many of the men he worked with. Take, for example, the writer, playwright, and painter Ahmed Yacoubi, who was Bowles’s protégé (and most likely also his lover) until he emigrated to New York in 1966. But his collaboration with Mrabet was by far the longest of these relationships. The first project they worked on together was 1967’s novel-length Love with a Few Hairs—the story of a young man who pays a witch to cast a spell over the girl he loves so she will agree to marry him, and which the New York Times declared “an engaging and readable story, often touching in its account of a Moroccan youth still in the grip of old tenets and customs while struggling with the new”—and the last was Chocolate Creams and Dollars in 1992. In between they coproduced another eleven volumes, mostly stories, but also Mrabet’s memoir, Look and Move On.

As entertaining as Mrabet’s stories are, they inevitably lack a certain polish. For all Love with a Few Hairs’s charms, the New York Times argued that Mrabet would have done well to explore more perspectives than that of his central character. Meanwhile, although Mrabet’s talents as a raconteur are widely noted—McInerney, for example, calls him a “born performer”—this isn’t something that necessarily translates onto the page. As such, it’s easy to understand how his stories have fallen out of print over the years.

His memoir, however, is a different beast. It’s no masterpiece, but it is a fascinating literary curio. Mrabet’s no-nonsense attitude and unadorned style makes for comfortable reading, and—if, indeed, any further evidence of this is needed—here it’s clear that he’s a man who knows how to tell a good story. As he pinballs from one escapade to the next, freewheeling between moments of comedy and tragedy, Mrabet’s life reads like the adventures of a picaresque hero of old. It’s not that he’s at the mercy of those around him—he’s happy to assert his own agency when he needs to—but more often than not, he’s content to sit back and see where fate takes him. The book offers an intriguing counterpoint to the accounts written during this era by Bowles, et al., Westerners who flocked to Tangier because of its louche, exotic, and international atmosphere. To see this world through Mrabet’s eyes—as well as his take on Americans and America—is to see it anew.

*

When he’s interviewed by Michael Rogers for Rolling Stone in 1974, Bowles explains that once Mrabet tells a story, “it gets lost.” If the morning after Mrabet’s been entertaining people with his tales Bowles then asks him to retell one of them so as to record it, Mrabet inevitably professes to have already forgotten the details, and tells a new story instead. So, Rogers asks, he just makes them up on the spot? Bowles explains that he’s not sure whether it’s this, or whether Mrabet “synthesizes them.” He thinks not even Mrabet himself quite understands the process involved, explaining that, since “Moroccans don’t make much distinction between objective truth and what we’d call fantasy,” the whole notion of making something up in the way Westerners understand it might simply not be relevant. When in Look and Move On Mrabet describes the stories he tells to Bowles, he credits a wide array of inspiration: “Some were tales I had heard in the cafés, some were dreams, some were inventions I made as I was recording, and some were about things that had actually happened to me.”

When it comes to his memoir, though, Mrabet had little need to embellish; his life was so full of incident, it was a story begging to be told. Much of what he writes about concerns the years before he met the Bowleses (it’s actually Jane whom he meets first, and then she introduces him to Paul). They appear relatively late in the book, and they’re certainly not the most enigmatic Americans featured in its pages. That privilege is reserved for another couple, known here as Maria and Reeves, whom Mrabet meets when he’s only sixteen and working as a caddy at the golf course at Boubana, just outside Tangier, in the early fifties. The teenage Mrabet is already a singular figure. He’s unworldly in that he’s had little in the way of memorable experiences; he didn’t finish school and he isn’t trained for a particular profession. He spends much of his time drinking to excess and smoking copious amounts of kif. But he’s not at all naive, and he immediately gets the measure of these two American predators.

Mrabet and the couple get to chatting in a café, and in a matter of hours they’ve taken him back to their apartment. “It was at that moment I said to myself: Both these people are vicious,” Mrabet recalls. “They both want to sleep with me.” Not that he minds being taken advantage of. He’s drunk, high, and attracted to both, so he makes love first with Reeves, and then Maria. If anything, it’s the couple who don’t know what they’ve let themselves in for. They come barreling into Mrabet’s life with a serious white-savior complex. “As soon as we saw you, the first time, we both thought the same thing in the same moment, that we were going to do something to try and save you from the terrible life you’re living,” Maria tells him condescendingly. “We felt we had to help you somehow. We don’t want to see you hungry, or sleeping in terrible places. It hurts us to think of you suffering like this.” Mrabet, however, is quick to correct them: “Excuse me, I said to Maria, I want to say something. I’ve never gone hungry. I come from a big family, and we don’t need friends to help us. The life you see me living is the life I picked out for myself, the kind I wanted. I’m not a boy. I know the difference between what’s good and what isn’t. It’s very kind of you to worry about me and want to help me. I appreciate it. But it’s impossible.” All the same, he lets himself become embroiled in a tense ménage à trois, one that sees husband and wife bickering over whose turn it is to have him in their bed that night.

As with everything he relates, Mrabet doesn’t provide much context outside his own immediate experience, but we are able to infer that this sort of sex tourism is abundant in Morocco at this time. When Maria rather foolishly professes that she and Reeves want to treat him like a son, Mrabet is having none of it. “Half the Europeans who live here in Tangier like to live with young Moroccans,” he tells her frankly. “When the old English ladies go back to London they leave their boy-friends behind, and you see the boys wandering around the streets looking like ghosts. They have money in their pockets, but their health is gone. And it doesn’t come back.” He’s wise beyond his years when it comes to the predilections of his paramours.

Mrabet is, however, eager to see the world. When Maria and Reeves invite Mrabet to sail back to New York with them, he agrees. His family is worried, believing America is a “very dangerous country, full of savages killing each other,” but Mrabet doesn’t let these fears deter his search for adventure. But for Mrabet, as for many who’ve made the same journey both before and after him, the American dream fails to deliver. One of the things he notices immediately is the glaring racism. He’s an astute observer of the uncomfortable reality behind the polite façade. He’s only been in New York for two days when he asks Maria why the white people don’t like the Blacks. “Mostly it’s because they’re dangerous to society,” she tells him. “You mean society’s dangerous for them,” Mrabet corrects her. He understands immediately how American society works:

The white people think they’re better because they have white skin. It’s really the opposite. The only dark thing about a black man is his skin, but the white man’s heart is black. And yet they’re both the same race. The big difference is that the black man is poor. And the white man wants him poor, so that he’ll do the work the white man doesn’t want to do himself.

Mrabet’s sojourn in America is full of such moments of clarity, namely because he refuses to play by the rules of so-called civil society. And nowhere is this more apparent than when he travels to Iowa to visit Reeves’s family. Reeves’s parents are horrified by their hard-drinking, chain-smoking houseguest. Reeves’s father insists Mrabet cut his long hair, going as far as to give him a buzz cut himself. When Mrabet kills and cooks robins he catches himself in the family’s garden, everyone is horrified by what they regard as his savagery. Yet rather than allowing himself to be shamed for his behavior, Mrabet is adamant that he’s done nothing wrong.

The book is peppered with occasional moments of searing acuity, but most of the time, Mrabet shows no interest in analyzing or picking apart the decisions he has made, or displaying much empathy to those closest to him. Due to the almost slapdash way in which Mrabet offers us his keen insights, the true extent of his powers of perception are easily underestimated.

*

Mrabet is still alive today—he’s eighty-four years old—thus Look and Move On only tells a fraction of his life story. He has survived Bowles and all those other American and British writers and artists who found both inspiration and sexual freedom in Morocco during a time when their own countries were much less forgiving. According to Jeff Koehler, who traveled to Tangier to interview Mrabet in 2019, he’s still telling stories. These days, he also paints, though his attitude toward that medium is similar to his attitude toward storytelling, in that he’s never been much interested in critical acclaim. “His literary success is a source of some amusement to Mrabet,” Rogers reported when he met the Moroccan back in the early seventies, “who does not, himself, think too much of writers, intellectuals and kindred occupations.” As for his paintings, “he won’t explain their narrative or help decode the symbolism that is so obviously present, or even give the works names,” reports Koehler. “Questions are met with a disinterested shrug.” Indeed, if one pushes Mrabet into identifying his profession, he apparently claims he’s neither a writer nor a painter, but rather a simple fisherman.

One sees the same refusal to conform in Look and Move On. Not only does Mrabet treat his work with Bowles, and the subsequent publication of his first book—by the extremely well-regarded British publisher Peter Owen—as an incident of no more or less import than anything that was happening in his life at that time: becoming Bowles’s driver, for example, or the nefarious means by which he steals another man’s bride’s virginity. But neither does Mrabet show any interest in celebrity. The book is littered with mentions of famous people, such as Bill Burroughs (the “tall American they call El Hombre Invisible”), the Woolworth heiress Barbara Hutton and her seventh husband, Prince Champassak (a title that she’d purchased for the man formally known as Raymond Doan), and Tennessee Williams, whom Mrabet meets when he travels to California with Paul. (His second trip to America leaves him just as disappointed as the first; he’s especially unimpressed by Los Angeles, which he finds “like the Sahara, only dirty.”) But he’s not name-dropping in the way we might expect. As both a writer and a man, Mrabet continually defies expectations, something that makes Look and Move On a curious book, and an important artifact among so many others of its time, one that made some notable headway in articulating a non-Western perspective.

 

Read earlier installments of Re-Covered here . 

Lucy Scholes is a critic who lives in London. She writes for the NYR Daily, the Financial Times, The New York Times Book Review, and LitHub, among other publications.

The Charms of Tom Stoppard

In the following excerpt from her landmark biography of Tom Stoppard, Hermione Lee explores the background of one of his most personal works to date, the 2020 play Leopoldstadt.

Tom Stoppard. Photo: Gorup de Besanez.

Time and again Tom Stoppard had talked about his good luck. He told people that he had had a charmed life and a happy childhood, even though he was taken from his home as a baby in wartime, his father was killed, and many members of his family, as he later discovered, were murdered by the Nazis. This narrative had become part of his performance, his built-in way of thinking and talking about himself. And that story of a charmed life was profoundly connected to his sense of luck in having become English. A patriotic gratitude, and a pleasure in belonging to his adoptive country, which, in contrast to many other places, was a free country, was the lifelong outcome of his childhood luck.

A charmed life seems a highly appropriate phrase for Stoppard, too—not that he would put it like this—because of his own charm. Charm is a difficult word. It usually makes a person sound shady: glib, superficial, manipulative. If it’s possible to redeem the word, you’d want, in his case, to talk about “deep” charm: a charm that comes from attention, kindness, intelligence, humor, physical charisma—as well as glamour. And, also, charm as a form of concealment. Stoppard’s charm is not a barrier to the extent of the worldly, famous novelist Felix Abravanel in Philip Roth’s The Ghost Writer, whose “charm was like a moat so oceanic that you could not even see the great turreted and buttressed thing it had been dug to protect. You couldn’t even find the drawbridge.” But it does work as a form of defense and a means of persuasion. He knows what effect he has on people. Charm is also a vital characteristic of his work: the 2017 production of Travesties shows that off perfectly. And “charm” in its sense of spell or enchantment—like the “charms” that Prospero says goodbye to, having set Ariel free, at the end of The Tempest—is the secret of Stoppard’s profession, the magical thing that happens in the theater, hard to say quite how or why: “It’s a mystery.”

But his sense of having had a charmed life has its dark side, too. Luck, the fall of a coin, plays a big part in his plays. Some of his characters get away with it, and get lucky. They escape the war to the blessed zone of Swiss neutrality. They visit an oppressed Eastern European country, but are free to go home again. They find the person they love, at the very end of the play, by accident or coincidence. But there are as many characters who don’t have any luck. They don’t know who they are or what they are supposed to do. They are uncertain and confused, and they never get any answers. They are far from home, in exile with no hope of return. They do not get their heart’s desire. They do not escape the worst of history. They die bewildered, or too soon.

As Stoppard came into old age, his sense of his “charmed life” underwent a retrospective shift. Of course there had been profound changes before that. His thoughts about his own history, and the way he used it in his work, had been altered by his friendship with Václav Havel, by finding out the facts of his Jewishness and returning to Czechoslovakia in the nineties, and by his mother’s death. But, in his eighties, the past came back for him in a different way, entailing some pain and self-reproach. He was a person and a writer for whom “kin” and “kinship” had always mattered deeply: a family man. And he was thinking more and more about his kin, his family history and the responsibility he owed it. He had rethought, many times, what it meant to be Czech, to be an Eastern European child turned Englishman. Now—as can happen in old age—his history and his family’s past became increasingly a preoccupation. What had once been obliterated came back to haunt him.

He reproached himself for having trotted out his line so often over the years, of having had a charmed life. What if you turned it inside out and looked behind the cliché? What was the other side of the story? What of those who did not have the luck, who did not escape the worst of history? Late in the day, he asked himself why he had not thought or written about this, why he had not faced up to it.

It was in March 1993 that he had learned from his cousin Sarka Gauglitz, at the National Theatre, about his Jewish family history, to his mother’s distress. It was in November 1994, in Prague, that another of his cousins, Alexandr Rosa, had shown him the family album. But, even though, after that, he had asked his mother a few more questions, he hadn’t pressed her or gone far with it. After her death in 1996, he felt freed up to write autobiographically in the 1999 piece “On Turning Out to Be Jewish,” and to create a version of the Czech life he might have had, in Rock ’n’ Roll, in 2006. But otherwise he had continued to do what his mother had wanted, to face away from his family’s past. He had not gone any deeper into that history or used it as material for a play.

Some time after 2012, he read a novel called Trieste by a Croatian writer, Daša Drndić (who died in 2018). It’s an extraordinary, harrowing story, in which fiction and fact overlap, of an old Catholic-Jewish Italian woman, Haya, who comes from a Habsburg Empire–era, multilingual Jewish family. She had a son, by a German officer who then became the barbaric commander of the Trieste concentration camp. She has been trying to find her son, who becomes obsessed with the family past. Haya lacerates real historical figures whom she describes as “bystanders” or “blind observers.” They include Herbert von Karajan, Madeleine Albright, and Tom Stoppard: people who discover their family history, but turn a blind eye to it. Her “blind observers” are “ordinary people” who “play it safe. They live their lives unimpeded.” She tells Stoppard’s story (with many inaccuracies). Once escaped to England, his family “live happily ever after, as if there had never been a family, a war, camps, another language.” “Until 1999 [sic] Tom Stoppard has no clue he is Jewish; then (by chance) he finds out that he is … ” He learns of his family, she says, in the Czech Republic. “He learns that his grandfathers and grandmothers, uncles and aunts, all of them disappeared as if they had never lived, which, as far as he is concerned, they had not, and he goes back to his lovely English language and his one and only royal homeland.”

Reading this, Stoppard accepted the charge. She was clearly saying, well, fuck you and your “charmed life,” good for you. He thought: yes, actually, she’s right. He felt that Drndić was justifiably blaming him for excluding from this “charmed life” all those others who had “disappeared.” He took it as an intelligible rebuke. He felt regret and guilt. It was a late echo of his mother’s own survivor’s guilt. He went back over his family history, and his Jewishness. It began to seem to him that he had been in denial about his own past. He increasingly felt that he should have been rueing his good fortune in escaping from those events, rather than congratulating himself. As a playwright, he needed to inhabit those lives he never lived, in his imagination. He started to think about a play that would answer the rebuke.

His everyday memory was getting worse, his long-term memory was changing. Very early scenes and moments came back ever more clearly, as if he were recovering memories that had always been there. But it was a sadness to him that he had no physical memory of his father. He remembered being on a beach in Singapore when his father must have been there, but he couldn’t actually remember him, except from knowing what he looked like from photographs. He disappeared, like all those family members whom he only knew from photographs, and all that remained of him was a scar on a Czech woman’s hand. It was only his mother who didn’t disappear.

 

Hermione Lee was president of Wolfson College (2008–2017) and is emeritus professor of English literature at Oxford University. Her work includes biographies of Virginia Woolf, Edith Wharton, and Penelope Fitzgerald (winner of the James Tait Black Prize and one of the New York Times’s 10 Best Books of 2014). She has also written books on Elizabeth Bowen, Philip Roth, and Willa Cather. Lee was awarded the Biographers’ Club Prize for Exceptional Contribution to Biography in 2018. She is a fellow of the British Academy and the Royal Society of Literature, and a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2003 she was made a CBE, and in 2013 she was made a Dame for services to literary scholarship. Read her Art of Biography interview.

Excerpted from Tom Stoppard: A Life , by Hermione Lee. Copyright © 2020 by Hermione Lee. Excerpted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

Farewell to Ferlinghetti

City Lights Books/Twitter

We didn’t drive in over the bridge. That was one surprise. I remember thinking we’d see the Transamerica Pyramid piercing the fog, or the bay sparkling in the distance. Instead, when I first visited San Francisco in the eighties, we arrived by tunnel. The BART train from Berkeley spat us out into the noisy, echoing heart of downtown. This was 1984, the city in near collapse, AIDS a full-blown crisis—the Reagan administration mocking its sufferers. As my family trudged up Kearny Street, we were stopped every few paces. Men whose clothes were in tatters asked us for money, food, anything. You’ll still encounter destitution in the city today; tech wealth merely rivers around it. To my child’s eye, it seemed apocalyptic then. How could a city pretend it wasn’t collapsing?

By midday we stumbled into a bookstore. Perched on the corner of Columbus and Broadway, City Lights emerged like an oasis. Stepping into the shop, I recall thinking it had a very different idea of what we all needed to drink. Books about revolution, the theft of the North American continent, and community action sprawled over several levels. Poetry had an entire floor. I may have been ten, but my parents were radicals; I could recognize the tribal markings of left-wing thought. Everywhere you looked, there were the city’s problems, written about in books. On placards. Broadside poems. Slogans sketched right onto the shop walls. The store was promising an escape by showing you how to escape back into social engagement. I’d never been anywhere like it.

That was thirty-seven years ago. Now, in the middle of the pandemic, the store is still open and it’s thriving. But yesterday it said goodbye to its eternally hip hundred-and-one-year-old cofounder, the poet, publisher, and community activist Lawrence Ferlinghetti. No one in American letters ever pushed back against power over such a long time as Ferlinghetti. He fought power as a poet, as a bookseller, and as a publisher. His poems in Coney Island of the Mind woke up a generation to the nightmare of the military industrial complex in America. In City Lights, the first all-paperback bookstore in the country, readers found fellow travelers for cheap prices. From City Lights Books, which has published everything from Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” to Rebecca Solnit’s first book to a recent title on drone strikes, the question of moral values in the age of empire has been explored more deeply than anywhere else in American publishing.

It’s an aging history to some degree, judging by Ferlinghetti’s hundredth birthday celebration nearly two years ago. For the longest time, City Lights was a young person’s holy site. On that Sunday afternoon in 2019, though, the store was crammed with people in their fifties, sixties, seventies, and older. Many men wore hats—bowlers, watch caps, fedoras, berets, even cowboy hats. Almost no one was under thirty. Following a rousing opening address from Elaine Katzenberg, the store’s director, the day began with a reading of a Ferlinghetti poem by eighty-six-year-old Michael McClure, one of the five poets who’d been on the bill for the famous Six Gallery reading in 1955, which scholars often pinpoint as the start of the Beat Movement. The other four were Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, Philip Lamantia, and Philip Whalen. Ferlinghetti published all of them in the store’s Pocket Poet Series. Jack Hirschman, eighty-five-year-old former San Francisco poet laureate, followed by reading Ferlinghetti’s great poem, “The Sea,” in “which he gives death a kick in the ass at age 90.” Hirschman’s voice was the sound of the Ancient Mariner.

Over the next six hours, North Beach—the still-scuzzy neighborhood of strip clubs and Italian eateries that City Lights barnacled itself onto—hosted a day-long celebration. I wandered into Cafe Zoetrope down the street from the store and listened to one of America’s most exciting young poets, Sam Sax, reading Ferlinghetti’s poem “Dog,” which follows an animal across the city, “looking / like a living questionmark / into the great gramaphone / of puzzling existence / with its wondrous hollow horn.” A group of actors performed one of Ferlinghetti’s interventionist plays from the seventies in Jack Kerouac Alley. Former U.S. poet laureate and longtime Berkeley resident Robert Hass talked about the way that having Ferlinghetti in the Bay was like having a benevolent sun forever shining, making clear sight possible. Ishmael Reed showed up, and Paul Beatty, too, although he was just watching. As the day warmed, more young people appeared and the store became what it always is—a many-ventricled heart, pumping out light and ideas.

Ferlinghetti wasn’t around. The store’s staff sang him happy birthday shortly after dawn, serenading him in his North Beach apartment from the street. He came to the window, natty as ever, wearing a red scarf, and waved. For a person at the center of things, he was always a little off to the side, eschewing the light—he preferred instead to reflect it. You see this in the work. Ferlinghetti’s Greatest Poems, published several years ago by New Directions, covers an astonishing sixty years of production, and no matter where you dip into it, there’s a cascading movement across and through the day’s darkest events—Vietnam, the eco-cidal creep of climate change—back into lightness. Like Walt Whitman, Ferlinghetti writes a long, prosey poetic line, but his I is softer, stranger, and less verbose. His lineation steps across the pages with sudden, perfectly timed enjambments that allow for swerves toward tenderness, wonder, and mourning.

The magic of Ferlinghetti’s writing exists entirely in those transitions. They allow for his politics never to become the hinge upon which the door of a poem swings, but rather something larger and more eternally humane, even, hopeful. In “Two Scavengers in a Truck, Two Beautiful People in a Mercedes,” the poem smashes together two opposite social classes at a red light and, briefly, finds a chink of optimism in that sudden juxtaposition, “all four close together / as if anything at all were possible / between them / across the at small gulf / in the high seas / of this democracy.” In America, the long fallout of Modernism and confessional poetry has made someone like Ferlinghetti hard to place. Unlike T. S. Eliot, whose “Wasteland” he revered, Ferlinghetti was deeply allergic to the idea of art for art’s sake. And, unlike the confessionalists, such as Sylvia Plath and Robert Lowell, he was skeptical of the self and ego and mythologizing.

The key to how Ferlinghetti found a line between these poles lies in his time in France. It was to France he went on the GI Bill for a graduate degree at the Sorbonne, and where he read in great depth the surrealists, like André Breton and Antonin Artaud, both of whom he’d publish. He also read Jacques Prévert, whose “Paroles” was published in 1948, and which Ferlinghetti translated for the first time into English and published in the Pocket Poet Series. Prévert’s playful realism, his rhythmic repetition of lines, such as in “Sunday” (“Remember Barbara”), and his bent conception of the real are all also hallmarks of Ferlinghetti’s work.

Asked recently by Dwight Garner of the New York Times about the Beats, Ferlinghetti named their only committed surrealist, William S. Burroughs, as the best writer of that generation.  Ferlinghetti’s affinity to Burroughs wasn’t just artistic—it was generational. The two of them were born a decade before Ginsberg, Kerouac, and Snyder. Born Lawrence Ferling in Yonkers, New York, in 1919, Ferlinghetti had been sent off to France as an infant. His father had died and his mother had been committed to what was then called an insane asylum. (He later restored his original family name.) Ferlinghetti didn’t learn English until he returned to America at age five with his aunt. She raised him in a suburb of New York City, where she worked on an estate as a governess. She later abandoned him, and he stayed with other family members until the stock market crash of 1929, when he was taken in by yet another family, who sent him to boarding school after he was caught stealing.

Though technically an orphan twice over, he somehow wound up with degrees from the University of North Carolina, Columbia University, and the Sorbonne, when the cultural capital of the world was shifting from France to the U.S. His patriotism had carried him away from America: in World War II, he captained a submarine on D-Day, but when he saw what the atomic bomb had done, he instantly became a pacifist. He stayed away so long he began, like so many expats, to identify with elsewhere. “When I arrived in San Francisco, I was still wearing my French beret,” Ferlinghetti once told me, laughing, in an interview. “The Beats hadn’t arrived yet. I was seven years older than Ginsberg and Kerouac, all of them except Burroughs. And I became associated with the Beats by later publishing them.”

Through the long lens of history, it seems likely Ferlinghetti’s legacy as a publisher will stand as much on the Beats as on the younger writers he published. In the last sixty years, a cavalcade of Black Marxists (Bob Kaufman), Latin American poets of resistance (Daisy Zamora, Ernesto Cardenal), stylish young short story writers and novelists (Rebecca Brown, Rikki Ducornet), and left-wing thinkers have emerged from the presses on Columbus Avenue. For many readers, the Pocket Poet Series was their first introduction to Frank O’Hara (Lunch Poems) and Denise Levertov (Here and Now), let alone the great Bosnian poet Semezdin Mehmedinović (Nine Alexandrias). To this day, you can find all these titles in the store.

Ferlinghetti wound up a bookseller by accident almost. A friend, Peter Martin, had been publishing a literary journal called City Lights, after the Charlie Chaplin film, and needed revenue to keep the magazine afloat. Martin suggested opening a bookstore, an idea Ferlinghetti loved because he had just returned from Paris where books were sold from stalls along the Seine as if they were loaves of bread. It turned out to be a savvy business decision. City Lights opened at the height of the paperback book revolution, in a city crawling with avid readers.

“We were filling a big need,” Ferlinghetti once told The New York Times Book Review:

City Lights became about the only place around where you could go in, sit down and read books without being pestered to buy something. That’s one of the things it was supposed to be. Also, I had this idea that a bookstore should be a center of intellectual activity, and I knew it was a natural for a publishing company, too.

While some of the Beats drank their talent away, Ferlinghetti worked diligently on his own poems. The jazzy, scabrous rhythms of Coney Island of the Mind were a call to arms for resistance in an era of unchecked American power:

I am waiting for my number to be called
and I am waiting/for the living end
I am waiting/for dad to come home
his pockets full of irradiated silver dollars
and I am waiting/for the atomic tests to end.

This message eventually reached more than a million readers, making Coney Island of the Mind one of the best-selling poetry volumes of the twentieth century. The book trailed him like a friendly ghost. It also bought him the space to continue experimenting. In the sixties alone he published his first novel (Her), an environmental manifesto, a broadside about Vietnam, a book of a dozen plays, and his own Whitmanesque third collection, Starting from San Francisco, which landed in advance of the hippy movement with a kind of warning that with liberation-lite comes responsibility. “As I approach the state of pure euphoria / I find I need a large size typewriter case / to carry my underwear in and scars on my conscience.”

One of Ferlinghetti’s great gifts was his ability to be a public and private poet at once. In the sixties and seventies, his poems appeared in the San Francisco Examiner, sometimes on the front page, as they did when Harvey Milk was assassinated. For decades you could find him in Caffe Trieste, writing, as Francis Ford Coppola later did. He traveled widely, as 2015’s Writing Across Landscape: Travel Journals made clear with its dispatches from Spain, Latin America, Haiti, Cuba—where he witnessed Castro’s revolution—and Tibet. But Ferlinghetti always came back to North Beach. His lovely poem from the seventies, “Recipe for Happiness in Khabarovsk,” is a kind of melding of the cosmopolitan world and the one you’ll find today still inside Caffe Trieste, no matter how many tourists turn up.

One grand boulevard with trees
with one grand cafe in the sun
with strong black coffee in very small cups

One not necessarily very beautiful
man or woman who loves you

One fine day

On the day of Ferlinghetti’s hundredth birthday last year, the March sky was a bright blue uncharacteristic of San Francisco. As the sun dipped below the horizon, and the aging beatniks drove back to Marin, I left some friends at a bar and walked up past City Lights, expecting to find it a wreck, or at least showing the telltale signs of dissipation. Instead, the rolling bookcases had been pushed back into place, the interior lights were illuminated, people were browsing. Here was the missing thirty-and-under crowd. They were moving about in the light Ferlinghetti had kept lit in the Bay so that others could see the wreck we’d made of the world—and also, hopefully, the way to repair it.

 

John Freeman is the editor of Freeman’s and author of The Park, a collection of poems. 

 

Redux: Idlers of My Kind

Every week, the editors of The Paris Review lift the paywall on a selection of interviews, stories, poems, and more from the magazine’s archive. You can have these unlocked pieces delivered straight to your inbox every Sunday by signing up for the Redux newsletter.

George Saunders. Photo: Chloe Aftel. Courtesy of George Saunders.

This week, we’re looking at some of the writers whom both The Paris Review and BOMB Magazine have published in the past. Read on for George Saunders’s Art of Fiction interview, Renee Gladman’s essay “Five Things,” and Cathy Park Hong’s poem “Happy Days.”

If you enjoy these free interviews, stories, and poems, why not take advantage of our current subscription offer with BOMB Magazine? Until the end of February, subscribe and save on both of these New York magazines, bringing you the best in literary and visual arts, for only $62.

 

George Saunders, The Art of Fiction No. 245
Issue no. 231 (Winter 2019)

My view of myself is that I came in through the basement window of literature. I’m not well educated or well read enough to do things correctly, and when I write what seems to me a “correct” story, it’s got low energy and isn’t true to my experience. Somehow the story and the language have to be a little messy or low. I love the idea of pushing an idea through a too-small linguistic opening—that feeling of overflow. I love the idea that the passion contained in a story is so great that it fucks up the form and makes it unseemly and impolite.

 

Photo: Wellcome Library. CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/...), via Wikimedia Commons.

 

Five Things
By Renee Gladman
Issue no. 217 (Summer 2016)

I began the day standing at a threshold of time—the beginning of something, the end of something. I had a method for standing that was called art, then writing. The way I stood allowed me to see how things could begin and end this way—simultaneously. It was hard to follow these opposing tendencies, especially when you were writing and couldn’t see anyway, see anything other than these words appearing on the laptop screen. You were writing about something you weren’t looking at. There had been a break. I was saying this on paper. I am not ready for school.

 

Jean Béraud, La lettre (detail), 1908, oil on canvas, 18 x 14 1/2″. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

 

Happy Days
By Cathy Park Hong
Issue no. 211 (Winter 2014)

Garçon, you snore so rhapsodically but hup hup,
peach schnapps & Coke Zero
with a gumball-green mermaid swizzle stick—
I need me a diabetic shock.

I yearned so long to be ensorcelling,
yet I’m always a meter maid, never a mermaid.
I’d populate this world w’ idlers of my kind,
but pistil-less, I’m pissily only one …

 

If you enjoyed the above, don’t forget to subscribe! In addition to four print issues per year, you’ll also receive complete digital access to our sixty-seven years’ worth of archives. Or take advantage of our current subscription offer with BOMB Magazine. Until the end of February, subscribe and save on both of these New York magazines, bringing you the best in literary and visual arts, for only $62.

The Resistance

James McNellis, Wikimedia Commons

The problem of resistance was humming in my mind when I passed through an iron gate in France that read NÉCROPOLE DE LA RÉSISTANCE. Here were the graves of men and boys who had lost their lives fighting the Nazi occupation of their country. This cemetery of the resistance was on a plateau above Grenoble, positioned so that an enormous mountain stood beyond the graves like a monument. The sun was high over the mountain, reflecting off the white gravel paths, the white walls, and the rows of white crosses. I stood in that white glare with my son, harboring an inchoate fear and shielding my eyes.

If I feared then, in 2017, that resistance in my own country would lead to this, the graves of the young, I also feared that it would not—that it would come to nothing. This was when headlines read: “The Resistance Grows” and “Resistance is Not Enough” and “Resistance is Futile.” Some newspapers put resistance in scare quotes, and some termed it the “so-called resistance.” The news didn’t believe in the resistance. And the question remained of what, exactly, was being resisted. Was it just one politician, or the enormous white shadow behind him?

This resistance, some argued, was too multiple and too defuse. It was difficult to locate—it was without a single leader and it didn’t have a platform. It was new and it was not new. It began before the 2016 election, with Black Lives Matter and Standing Rock, and after, with the Women’s Marches and the airport protests of the Muslim ban. It was many resistances. It was everywhere and nowhere.

From a distance, the French Resistance of the forties could appear more singular in purpose. It had the solidity of monuments and museums, though it also seemed far away, entombed in history. “This history looms each time the word ‘resistance’ is evoked in the current American political crisis,” Teju Cole wrote in 2018. “It judges the triviality of our responses.” I felt judged, standing among the graves of resistance fighters, and all my responses felt trivial. “The triviality is not in the predicament—so many have died here, and many more will die,” Cole wrote. The triviality, he clarified, was in the public tone.

“Cheers to the resistance,” Taylor Swift said, raising a glass of white wine after publicly declaring her support for a Democrat in the midterm elections. This rebranding of political participation as resistance would be easier to dismiss as fad or fashion if the political system itself was not under threat. What constitutes resistance is necessarily different in a democracy than it is under an authoritarian regime or an autocracy. “We still have a democracy, at least on paper,” one of my friends remarked, with some hesitation, after the 2016 election. But we were already uncertain about that.

Four years later, the armed crowd that erected a gallows before pressing past police officers into the Capitol Building shouting “Whose house? Our house!” illustrated one of the sources of our uncertainty. Not everyone in this country is subject to the same governance. Some people can forcefully occupy the People’s House, while others—those who are prevented from voting, who are aggressively policed, who are imprisoned at rates unmatched even by South Africa at the height of apartheid—are locked out. Now, as ever, Black Americans live under an authoritarian regime within a partial democracy. Maintaining this democracy, history suggests, will not be enough to abolish that regime.

*

A candidate for president who wanted to restrict immigration and expel foreigners, who was hostile toward Muslims, an authoritarian candidate who openly appealed to white fears and racist resentments had just lost the election when I arrived in France in 2017. This was Marine Le Pen, whose supporters shouted “Give us back our house,” the house being France, to which Le Pen promised to return the keys. Political graffiti was still fresh on the walls of Paris, where someone had written NAZI on a Le Pen poster. The commentary I read before the election had warned that a win for Le Pen would be a win for white nationalism, in France and the world. But neither France nor the world was saved by her defeat, and her party went on to gain support in rural areas and small cities. After the election, as Jon Lee Anderson wrote in The New Yorker, France “resumed its brooding normalcy.”

In that brooding normalcy, I found myself talking with a French scientist about the French national football team, commonly known as Les Bleus. Most of the players on that team, the scientist complained, were not French. “They are from other countries?” I asked, not quite understanding. They are French citizens who were born in France and speak French, my husband clarified, understanding perfectly. Yes, the scientist allowed, but they are not “historically” French, not “genetically” French. They are not, in other words, white.

My husband had heard this all before. He was living in France when Les Bleus won the World Cup, improbably, in 1998. That team was “not a real French team,” according to Jean-Marie Le Pen, the father of Marine Le Pen, who inherited his political party. Les Bleus was real enough to be celebrated in that winning moment for representing the colors of the French people: “Black, Blanc, Beur.” Its players, wearing the tricolors of France, reflected the history of French colonialism from the French Caribbean to Senegal to Algeria.

Among them was Zinedine Zidane, born in Marseille to Algerian parents, the player who in 2006 exchanged a few words with an Italian player, ran lightly forward, and then turned to face the Italian before ramming his head into the Italian’s chest, knocking him to the ground. In the American bar where I watched that game, there was immediately speculation that the Italian had used a racial slur, speculation that is now widely assumed to be true, but neither the Italian nor Zidane have ever revealed exactly what was said. Zidane’s headbutt was dismissed by his critics as a temper tantrum. That game, the World Cup final, was also the last of Zidane’s career, and he left the game disgraced, as some saw it. Zidane himself did not see it that way.

Slow-motion footage of Zidane’s encounter with the Italian stretches those nine seconds to five minutes in Situation One, a film by Claudia Rankine and John Lucas. Here, Zidane’s action is understood as a rebuttal. “The rebuttal assumes an original form,” Rankine says, in the words of James Baldwin. But the rebuttal is not always recognized as resistance. More often, it is condemned as bad behavior.

In the fall of 2017, a stadium full of American football fans in Boston booed the football players who knelt on one knee during the national anthem. The team that was booed was called the Patriots. Among the many meanings of patriot, which is borrowed from the French, is one specific to the United States: “a member of a resistance movement.” The New England Patriots are named after this sort of patriot, but that did not prevent debate over whether the Patriots or the fans who booed them were the “real” patriots. That was a debate over what posture citizens should take toward the authority held by our government. The protest against police brutality is, among other things, a statement that we do not want to be governed violently, in an authoritarian manner.

“It’s something that can unify this team,” Colin Kaepernick said of his original rebuttal, performed with the 49ers in 2016. “It’s something that can unify this country.” Four years later, some fans booed the “moment of unity” when the Chiefs and the Texans linked arms in Arrowhead Stadium. This moment of unity followed two anthems, the national anthem and Lift Every Voice, the Black national anthem. The Texans sat out both anthems.

*

In Casablanca, which is set in 1941 during the occupation of France, the only act of resistance the Resistance leader, Victor Laszlo, makes on screen is singing the French national anthem, “La Marseillaise,” loudly enough to drown out the singing of a group of German soldiers. This was cinematic, but “La Marseillaise” was not the anthem of the Resistance.

“La Marseillaise” includes a verse about watering the fields of France with the blood of the “impure” and a verse about a threatening “horde of slaves,” which may be one reason why some members of the Les Bleus have, for decades, declined to sing it. Marine Le Pen has insisted that players who refuse to sing the anthem should not be allowed to play football, comparing them to “spoilt children.” Her complaint is not really about the anthem, but about citizenship, and the rights of the children of the colonized to occupy the land of their occupier.

When Mamadou Sakho, born in Paris to Senegalese parents, celebrated scoring two goals for a win in 2014, he sang “La Marseillaise” passionately, in what one observer interpreted as a kind of protest, a theatrical performance of his Frenchness. It seems to me that Sakho had no choice but to protest. For those players who are not white, the meaning of the anthem is so freighted, and their own citizenship is so fraught, that not singing is a protest and so also is singing.

When Whitney Houston performed the national anthem at the Super Bowl in 1991, she slowed it down from 3/4 time to 4/4 time. By slowing it down, Houston and the orchestra increased its difficulty and gave the song a new gravity. “They made it the blues,” Danyel Smith writes. “You have to understand. Key to American blues is the notion that by performing them and by experiencing them being performed, one can escape them.”

Some blues scholars have failed, Angela Davis notes, to recognize the singing of the blues as social protest. Blues lyrics are personal, full of individual longing and loss. Lost love, Davis writes, stands for other losses, too. “You treated me wrong, I treated you right,” Bessie Smith sings, “I worked for you both day and night.” There is protest in the very sentiment of the blues—in lament, in steady complaint, and in bawdy irreverence. And protest is born, Davis insists, of feeling.

The blues are both a feeling and a situation, Davis writes. America is in the blues now, and the blues are in our history. The United States isn’t occupied by Nazi Germans, it’s occupied by the same people it has been occupied by since it was colonized. “Occupied territory is occupied territory,” James Baldwin wrote in 1966, “even though it be found in that New World which the Europeans conquered, and it is axiomatic, in occupied territory, that any act of resistance, even though it be executed by a child, be answered at once, and with the full weight of the occupying forces.”

Baldwin was writing then of Daniel Hamm, and the act of resistance that eventually led to Hamm becoming one of six Black teenagers wrongfully convicted of murder. Long before Hamm was taken from his mother’s home with a gun to his head, and before he was beaten by police for putting himself between a child and an officer with a gun, Hamm was among a group of boys who were questioned at gunpoint for being on the roof of their building, where they kept pigeons. Baldwin wrote, “The police are afraid of everything in Harlem and they are especially afraid of the roofs, which they consider to be guerrilla outposts.” The police went up to the roof where the pigeons were kept and ordered the boys, without warrant, to come to the precinct, but the boys refused. They were later punished for this resistance.

*

The first person to be executed for resistance during the occupation of France was killed for jeering at a Nazi military parade in the streets of Bordeaux. This was just months after the armistice that divided France into an area occupied by the Germans and an unoccupied area governed by the French. The man killed in Bordeaux, which was just inside occupied territory, was a Jewish immigrant. He was also, in our parlance, a counterdemonstrator.

The Vichy regime, the government of unoccupied France, came into power in 1940 with a project, the National Revolution, which was a plan to make France great again. This would be accomplished by establishing an authoritarian government, restricting immigration, controlling the press, punishing abortion, persecuting gays, and passing anti-Semitic laws. The ideal of equality was abandoned, as was democracy, and Philippe Pétain was appointed head of state. One of the first acts of Pétain’s government was to repeal a law that banned hate speech in the press. Without any pressure from Germany, his regime went on to revoke the citizenship of thousands of immigrants, a third of them Jewish. The armistice did not require this, the historian Robert Paxton notes, and the Nazis did not want it. They would have preferred for France to accept the Jews who were being deported from Germany.

The history of Vichy France remains a contested history, the historian Molly Tambor tells me, exactly because it is so relevant to our time. When I met Tambor twenty years ago, she was a student in Paxton’s course on fascism. Now she’s the author of The Lost Wave, a book about the work that follows resistance. During the first year of Trump’s presidency, I called her in dismay after reading a short history of the French Resistance, a history that was essentially a litany of assassinations and executions. There’s no place for a pacifist like me, I told her, in a resistance like that. But the armed resistance was a very small part of the Resistance, Tambor told me. The civil resistance, which consisted mostly of women, was much broader. Women operated safe houses and edited underground newspapers and made forgeries and carried stolen documents in their shopping bags and bicycled hundreds of miles to recover lost radio equipment and pretended not to understand.

Much of the resistance took place in writing, in pamphlets and newspapers. One of the first glimmers of the Resistance was little stickers, “butterflies,” printed with messages and left on mailboxes to let anyone who might want to resist know that they weren’t alone. When I learned of those butterflies, I thought of the anonymous postcard I received shortly after the 2016 election, printed with one word: RESIST. And I thought of the sign a neighbor posted on her porch: RESIST. I passed that sign every morning as I walked my son to school, and it never ceased to bother me. It bothered me, I told myself, because it wasn’t doing anything. What we needed, I thought, was action, not a word, not a sign. But the sign was doing something by bothering me. It was inviting me, every morning, to consider what that word meant, and to face my own bafflement about what constituted action.

*

The French Resistance was really a collection of resistances. There were Communists who organized demonstrations and Catholics who hid Jews and academics who published underground newspapers and railway workers who derailed trains and gangsters who smuggled people out of the country for profit. These resistances didn’t share the same mission, or the same motives, but they converged nonetheless. “We sang ‘L’Internationale,’ ” one résistant remembered, referring to the Communist anthem. “We weren’t Communists, but Pétain sang ‘La Marseillaise,’ so we had to sing ‘L’Internationale.’ ”

There were resistants, Tambor told me, who kept their jobs in the Vichy regime so they could use their positions to falsify papers and help people flee the country. Later, after the liberation, some of them were tried for collaboration. Discerning between a resistant and a collaborationist could be difficult, as a person could be both. Some people changed their allegiances, some betrayed their comrades, and some moved back and forth between resistance and collaboration. Resistance was not a fixed position, but a decision that had to be made over and over again. In the end, most people didn’t resist.

Fewer than five percent of the French were engaged in active resistance, but that was enough to undermine the occupation. Another ten percent were passive resistors who read underground newspapers and took no other action. The majority of the population neither resisted nor collaborated. They accommodated, as Eliot A. Cohen puts it. “Accommodation was understandable and reasonable,” he writes. And that is why it haunts me now.

I am haunted, in particular, by one scene from The Sorrow and the Pity, Marcel Ophuls’s 1969 documentary in which he interviews a range of people who lived through the occupation in France—a Jewish shop keeper, a hairdresser, a bicycle racer, a former Resistance leader, a former fascist, high school teachers, German officers, members of the armed resistance, and collaborationists. The scene that haunts me features a well-off pharmacist who sits smoking a cigar, surrounded by his children. The only thing he could do when he saw Jewish people being loaded into trucks for the camps, he tells his children, was to take out his handkerchief and weep.

The black-and-white footage of The Sorrow and the Pity reveals that many people then, like many people now, lived through their political moment in fear and bewilderment. Afterward, they continued on in denial and delusion. When Ophuls asked a Pétain supporter why she supported Pétain, she couldn’t say. Pressed again, she said she just liked him. And she would support him again, she insisted. Her love for him was “apolitical,” a word that strikes me now as meaning either that she did not understand her own politics or that she did not want to take responsibility for them.

“An American who looks honestly at collaborationist France must judge not only with sorrow and pity, but with fear of what his own countrymen might do under equivalent stress,” Paxton warns. The fear he describes was the fear I felt when I stood in the Mémorial des Martyrs de la Déportation in Paris and studied a map of France marked with locations of “Camps for Foreigners,” among other kinds of internment and detention camps. At that moment, detention centers and deportation were the news of the day in my country.

The Memorial to the Martyrs of the Deportation was on the site of a former morgue, and it held a tomb containing the remains of an unknown deportee surrounded by two hundred thousand tiny lights, one for each of the deportees who died in the camps. All this was underground, invisible from the street, overshadowed by Notre Dame. The memorial was underground because it was designed as a crypt, but I wondered if it was also underground because this was a history that France wanted buried.

After the liberation, France went back to thinking of itself as great again. But within ten years, the French military was fighting against another resistance. Guerrilla fighters, maquisards in the spirit of those who had fought the Nazi occupation, now fought for the liberation of Algeria. During that war, a crowd of Algerian French protestors were fired on by police, beaten, and thrown into the Seine. Dozens of bodies were pulled from the water, and graffiti on the Pont Saint-Michel read, “Algerians were drowned here.” An unknown number of people, as many as two hundred, were killed. That was the Paris Massacre of 1961, just months before the Charonne Metro Station Massacre, when police charged a crowd of demonstrators protesting for Algerian independence, trapped them in the stairwells of the train station, and killed eight people, including a sixteen-year-old boy.

The chief of police at that time had been a collaborationist in the Vichy regime, and then went on to torture political prisoners in Algeria before becoming chief of police in Paris. He was later convicted of crimes against humanity for the deportation of 1,690 Jews, including 223 children. Many of the officers who worked under him were the same officers who had collaborated with the Gestapo during the occupation. Trained under one regime of white supremacy, they went on to enforce another.

*

MORT POUR LA FRANCE reads the inscription on the graves in the resistance cemetery outside Grenoble. I sometimes think of that phrase when I hear the litany of names of those killed by the police in the U.S. That litany includes, from just this past year, William Howard Green, Manuel Elijah Ellis, Breonna Taylor, Daniel Prude, Michael Ramos, Dreasjon Read, George Floyd, Tony McDade, David McAtee, Rayshard Brooks, Dijon Kizzee, and Jonathan Price. I wonder if they died for their country, or if they were just killed by it. They didn’t volunteer for battle, and they didn’t ask to be made martyrs. They were handcuffed or sleeping or running naked in the street or driving away from the police or buying liquor or protesting police brutality or sitting in a car or riding a bicycle or offering to shake hands with a police officer. Now their faces are painted on buildings and their names are chanted in the streets.

The résistants buried under the phrase mort pour la France fought in civilian clothes and hid in the woods from their own government. They weren’t fighting for the regime they died under. They were fighting for the possibility of a less compromised country. “Did they win?” my son asked me. No, I told him, they lost. They lost that battle, and they lost their lives, but they won the war. That battle was in June of 1944, and the liberation of France was already underway.

Driving down the mountainside from the resistance cemetery, I tuned to a radio station on which the announcer spoke the English phrase “Chicago blues” before continuing on in French. We listened to the blues as we descended the steep switchbacks into a fog. After a long stretch of road my son asked if the blues are always sad. The melodic structure of the blues, my husband told him, depends on a repeating pattern that feels not so much sad as determined. The blues, he said, are about perseverance.

I sat in silence, staring into the fog. I felt then, as I feel now, undereducated for my political moment. All I know about the blues is what I have read in my attempts to understand my country and my place in it. The blues were born under an oppressive regime that was a precursor to fascism. “The first version of the Klan in the defeated American South was a remarkable preview of the way fascist movements were to function in interwar Europe,” Paxton writes. The former Confederate soldiers of the Klan saw themselves as an aggrieved group whose traditional way of life was threatened by freed slaves. The tactics of the Klan, their use of intimidation and violence, and even their uniform, their white hoods, were later taken up by the Whitecaps, who drove Black farmers from their land, which was then repossessed by white farmers. We should recognize this practice now, the historian Carol Anderson writes, as ethnic cleansing.

Shortly after the 2016 election, I was at a bar in Chicago with a friend who grew up in the former Yugoslavia. He was trying to show me something on his phone, a list of the defining characteristics of fascism. He was reading the list to me, straining to be heard above the noise of the bar, saying, “Look, this is happening here now.” He had lived through this once already, he was telling me. I believed him, but I didn’t have anything to say and I didn’t know what to do. That was before George Floyd was murdered by a police officer, before protesters defied stay-at-home orders to fill the streets, where some were pushed from behind by the police, some were met by U.S. Marshals, some arrested and imprisoned, and where some were shot and killed. Before signs reading BLACK LIVES MATTER were carried through cities all over the world, including Paris.

My friend and his wife had marched against Milošević for several months in 1996, back when they were university students in Belgrade. There was a carnival atmosphere at those marches, where cars carried speakers blaring music and protestors sang and blew whistles. They were part of the movement that would later become Otpor, which means resistance. Otpor’s emblem, a graphic of a raised fist, is a version of the fist that was the emblem of many other resistance movements from the Industrial Workers of the World to the fight against fascism in Spain to the Black Panthers to the struggle against apartheid in South Africa. It is the same fist that is now spray-painted on the sidewalks of the city where I live.

The persistence of that fist is a reminder that the problem of resistance is always ongoing. Resistance must be remade and reimagined for each new political moment. Our resistance has its own history and its own blues, but it is continuous with other resistances. And while the word “resistance” carries a freight of history, resistance is not what the work of liberation has been called in the U.S. “Those who opposed slavery didn’t view themselves as resisters,” Michelle Alexander writes, “they were abolitionists.” The cause of abolition has been taken up again in the streets now, where it is marching on. Recently, deep into the Chicago winter, I saw a woman engaged in a protest of one. She marched up and down the sidewalk in front of a police station in the cold, shouting her protest. She was, to me, the embodiment of perseverance, part of a repeating pattern, a long song.

 

Eula Biss is the author of four books, most recently Having and Being Had. Her essays and prose poems have recently appeared in the Guardian, The New York Review of Books, The Believer, Freeman’s, Jubilat, The Baffler, Harper’s, and The New York Times Magazine. She teaches nonfiction writing at Northwestern University.

Someone Else’s Diary

Illustration: Elisabeth Boehm. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Aunt Galya, my father’s sister, died. She was just over eighty. We hadn’t been close—there was an uneasiness between the families and a history of perceived snubs. My parents had what you might call troubled dealings with Aunt Galya, and we almost never saw her. As a result I had little chance to form my own relationship with her. We met infrequently, we had the odd phone call, but toward the end she unplugged her phone, saying, “I don’t want to talk to anyone.” Then she disappeared entirely into the world she had built for herself: layered strata of possessions, objects, and trinkets in the cave of her tiny apartment.

Galya lived her life in the pursuit of beauty: the dream of rearranging her possessions into a definitive order, of painting the walls and hanging the curtains. At some point, years ago, she began the process of decluttering her apartment, and this gradually consumed her. She was permanently shaking things out, checking anew what objects were essential. The contents of the apartment constantly needed sorting and systematizing, each and every cup required careful consideration, books and papers stopped existing for themselves and became mere usurpers of space, forming barricades that crossed the apartment in little heaps. The apartment consisted of two rooms, and as one room was overcome by more objects, Galya would move to the other, taking only the absolute essentials with her—but then the tidying and reevaluating would begin again. The home wore its own viscera on the outside, unable to draw it all back into itself again. There was no longer any deciding whether a particular thing was important or not, because everything had significance in some way, especially the yellowing newspapers collected over decades, tottering piles of clippings that propped up the walls and the bed. At a later point the only spare living space was a divan, worn concave, and I remember we were sitting there on one occasion, the two of us, in the middle of a raging sea of postcards and TV guides. She was attempting to feed me the chocolates she kept reserved for special occasions, and I was attempting to turn down these precious offerings with anxious politeness. A newspaper clipping at the top of a pile bore the headline: “Which saint rules your sign of the Zodiac?” and the name of the paper and the publication date were written carefully at the top in her beautifully neat handwriting, blue ink across the dead paper.

*

We got there about an hour after her caretaker rang. The stairwell was in half darkness and there was a hum in the air. People we didn’t know stood around on the landing and sat on the stairs, they had heard about her death somehow and had rushed round to offer their undertaker services, to help with registering the death, dealing with the paperwork. How on earth did they know? Had the doctor told them? The police? One of them came into the apartment with us, and stood there without taking off his coat.

Aunt Galya died in the early evening on March 8, Women’s Day, that Soviet festival of mimosa and greeting cards festooned with сhicks. Women’s Day had been one of those celebration days in our family, when everyone gathered around a single enormous table and the minerals splashed liberally into ruby-colored wine glasses. On Women’s Day there were always at least four different types of salad on the table: carrot and walnut; cheese; beetroot and garlic; and, of course, the common denominator of all Russian salads, olivye. But all that had ceased thirty years ago, long before my parents had emigrated to Germany. Galya was left behind, fuming, and in the new post-Soviet world her newspapers began publishing unprecedented and titillating things: horoscopes, recipes, homemade herbal remedies.

She desperately didn’t want to end her life in a hospital, and she had her reasons. She’d seen her own parents, my grandparents, die in one, and she’d already had some sobering experiences of state medical care. But still the moment came for summoning an ambulance, and we might well have done so if it hadn’t been a holiday weekend. It was decided to wait for Monday and the working week, and in this way Galya was given her chance to turn onto her side and die in her sleep.

In the other room, where her caretaker slept, photographs and sketches by my father Misha hung like squares on a chessboard, covering the whole wall. By the door was a black-and-white photograph taken in the sixties, one from my favorite series of “pictures taken at the vets,” a beautiful picture: a boy and his dog waiting their turn, sitting against a wall, the boy a sullen fourteen-year-old, and the dog, a boxer, leaning into him with its shoulder.

*

Her apartment now stood silent, stunned and cowering, filled with suddenly devalued objects. In the bigger room television stands squatted grimly in each corner. A huge new fridge was stuffed to the gills with icy cauliflower and frozen loaves of bread (“Misha loves his bread, get me a couple of loaves in case he comes over”). The same books stood in lines, the ones I used to greet like family members whenever I went around. To Kill a Mockingbird, the black Salinger with the boy on the cover, the blue binding of the Library of Poets series, a gray-bound Chekhov set, the green Complete Works of Dickens. My old acquaintances on the shelves: a wooden dog, a yellow plastic dog, and a carved bear with a flag on a thread. All of them crouched, as if preparing themselves for a journey, their own stolid usefulness in sudden doubt.

A few days later when I sat down to sort through papers, I noticed that in the piles of photographs and postcards there was hardly anything written. There were hoards of thermal vests and leggings; new and beautiful jackets and skirts, set aside for some great sallying forth and so never worn and still smelling of Soviet emporia; an embroidered men’s shirt from before the war; and tiny ivory brooches, delicate and girlish: a rose, another rose, a crane with wings outstretched. These had belonged to Galya’s mother, my grandmother, and no one had worn them for at least forty years. All these objects were inextricably bound together, everything had its meaning only in the whole, in the accumulation, within the frame of a continuing life, and now it was all turning to dust before me.

In a book about the working of the mind, I once read that the important factor in discerning the human face was not the combination of features, but the oval shape. Life itself, while it continues, can be that same oval, or after death, the thread of life running through the tale of what has been. The meek contents of her apartment, feeling themselves to be redundant, immediately began to lose their human qualities and, in doing so, ceased to remember or to mean anything.

I stood before the remnants of her home, doing the necessary tasks. Bemused at how little had been written down in this house of readers, I began to tease out a melody from the few words and scrappy phrases I could remember her saying: a story she had told me; endless questions about how the boy, my growing son, was doing; and anecdotes from the far-off past—country rambles in the thirties. The woven fabric of language decomposes instantly, never again to be felt between the fingers: “I would never say ‘lovely,’ it sounds so terribly common,” Galya admonished me once. And there were other prohibited words I can’t recall, her talk of one’s people, gossip about old friends, the neighbors, little reports from a lonely and self-consuming life.

I soon found that there was in fact much evidence of the written word in the apartment. Among the possessions she kept till her dying day, the possessions she often asked for, sometimes just to touch with her hand, were countless used notebooks and diaries. She’d kept a diary for years, not a day passed without her scribbling a note, as much a part of her routine as getting out of bed or washing. These diaries were stored in a wooden box by her headboard and there were a lot of them, two full bag loads, which I carried home to Banny Pereulok. There I sat down at once to read them, in search of stories, explanations: the oval shape of her life.

*

For the interested reader, diaries and notebooks can be placed in two categories: in the first the text is intended to be official, manifest, aimed at a readership. The notebook becomes a training ground for the outward self, and, as in the case of the nineteenth-century artist and diarist Marie Bashkirtseff, an open declaration, an unending monologue, addressed to an invisible but sympathetic ear.

Still I’m fascinated by the other sort of diary, the working tool, the sort the writer-as-craftsperson keeps close at hand, of little apparent use to the outsider. Susan Sontag, who practiced this art form for decades, said of her diary that it was “an instrument, a tool”—I’m not sure this is entirely apt. Sontag’s notebooks (and the notebooks of other writers) are not just for the storage of ideas, like nuts in squirrels’ cheeks, to be consumed later. Nor are they filled with quick outlines of events, to be recollected when needed. Notebooks are an essential daily activity for a certain type of person, loose-woven mesh on which they hang their clinging faith in reality and its continuing nature. Such texts have only one reader in mind, but this reader is utterly implicated. Break open a notebook at any point and be reminded of your own reality, because a notebook is a series of proofs that life has continuity and history, and (this is most important) that any point in your own past is still within your reach.

Sontag’s notebooks are filled with such proofs: lists of films she has seen, books she has read, words that have charmed her, the dried husks of completed endeavors—and these are largely limited to the notebooks; they almost never feed into her books or films or articles, they are neither the starting point, nor the underpinning for her public work. They are not intended as explanations for another reader (perhaps for the self, although they are scribbled down at such a pace that sometimes it’s hard to make out what is meant). Like a fridge, or as it was once called, an icehouse, a place where the fast-corrupting memory-product can be stored, a space for witness accounts and affirmations, or the material and outward signs of immaterial and elusive relations, to paraphrase Goncharov.

There is something faintly displeasing, if only in the excess of material, and I say this precisely because I am of the same disposition, and far too often my working notes seem to me to be heaped deadweight: ballast I would dearly love to be rid of, but what would be left of me then? In The Silent Woman, Janet Malcolm describes an interior that is, in some ways, the image of my own notebook (and this was a horrible realization). It is littered with newspapers, books, overflowing ashtrays, dusty Peruvian tat, unwashed dishes, empty pizza boxes, cans, flyers, books along the lines of Who’s Who, attempting to pass as real knowledge, and other objects passing as nothing at all, because they lost all resemblance to anything years ago. For Malcolm this living space is Borges’s Aleph, a “monstrous allegory of truth,” a gristly mass of crude fact and versions that never attained the clean order of history.

*

My Aunt Galya’s diaries were completely peculiar, and their strangely woven texture, which reminded me above all of chain-link fencing, intrigued me more and more as I read them.

At any of the big art exhibitions I visited as a child, there were always a few viewers who stood out to me, and they were usually, and inexplicably, women. These women went from one picture to another, bending over the captions and making notes on pieces of paper or in exercise books. It dawned on me at some point that they were simply copying down the names of all the pictures, making for themselves a sort of homemade catalog—a shadow copy of what they’d seen. And I wondered why they were doing it, and hadn’t yet realized that a list creates the illusion of possession: the exhibition would pass and dissolve in the air, but the piece of paper held the order of sculptures and pictures, as freshly as when they first saw them, long after the actual images had faded.

Galya’s diaries were just such lists, but of daily occurrences, recorded with astonishing exactness, and with astonishing opacity. The diaries documented the time she got up and when she went to sleep, the television programs she’d watched, the number of phone conversations she’d had, who they’d been with, what she’d eaten, whatever else she’d done. There was a minute and virtuosic avoidance of content—how she’d actually filled her hours. It might say “read,” for example, but with no mention of what the reading material had been or what it had meant to her—in fact everything in her long and exhaustively documented life was the same. Nothing indicated what this life had been for, there was nothing about herself, nothing about other people, only the fastidious details, the fixing of the passing of time with the exactitude of a medieval chronicler.

I kept thinking that surely life would rear its head, if only once, and reveal itself in all its color. Hadn’t she spent her life reading—wouldn’t that alone have provoked intense reflection? There were also the constant slights and grievances that my aunt clung to, and only reluctantly relinquished. Surely something of this would be preserved and laid out in a final furious paragraph, in which Galya would tell the world, and us, its representatives, what she thought of us—the unexpurgated truth.

But there was nothing of the sort in the diaries. There were hints and semitones of meaning, folds in the weave that denoted emotion, “hurray” written in the margin against the note of a phone call with my father or with me, a few opaquely bitter comments on her parents’ anniversaries. And that was it. It was as if the main task of each and every note, each completed year’s diary, was a faithful witnessing of the exterior, and a concealment of the authentic and interior. Show everything. Hide everything. Preserve it forever.

What was it she held to be of such value in these diaries? Why did she keep them by her bedside until her dying day, frightened they would be lost, often asking for them to be moved closer to her? Perhaps the written text as it stood—and it was the tale of a life of loneliness and the imperceptible slide toward nonexistence—still had the force of an indictment. The world needed to read all this, to realize just how shoddily we had dealt with her.

Or, strange as it seems, for her these pinched records might have contained the substance of joy, which she needed to immortalize, to add to the pile of manuscripts that, as Bulgakov wrote, don’t burn, and which speak without any intention toward the future. If that’s the case then she succeeded.

October 11, 2002

Working backward again. It’s 1:45 p.m. Just put the towels, nightgown etc. except dark colors in to soak. Will do the bedlinen later. Before that I brought everything in from balcony. 3 degrees, the vegetables might have frozen. Peeled and chopped pumpkin and put in a box ready for freezer. Very slow work! Watched television and did it in two hours and a little more. Before that I had tea with milk.

Slept from 4:00–6:00 p.m., couldn’t resist a little nap. Before that T. V. rang about the telephone. And he rang before 12 as well to check whether the television was working. This morning not a single channel worked. Got up at 8 when Seryozha was washing in the bathroom. Left after nine, took my time to get ready. Bus No. 3 didn’t come till 9:45. We waited an age. Should have taken the 171. There were crowds everywhere and it took far longer than usual. Bus station. Newspapers. But I did manage to buy the pumpkin, first I’ve seen this year. And carrots. Got home around 12. Wanted to watch Columbo. Took my hypertension pills last night just after 1:45 after measuring B. P. Waited for it to come down so I could take more pills. Spent 20 mins trying. Couldn’t measure B. P. Got to bed at 3 a.m.

July 8, 2004

Lovely sunny morning, not the rain promised. Had coffee with condensed milk and went out around 11. Crowds everywhere. Sat for a long time, until 1:00 p.m., by the pond, looked at the grass, the trees and the sky, sang, felt very well in myself.

People were out walking their dogs along the paths, and pushing babies in strollers, and lots of parties of youngsters in their swimsuits, relaxing and having fun.

Managed to pay without standing in line, bought cream cheese. Strolled home. New school has a beautiful border. Tall plumes of bedstraw and wild rose. Just perfect! On the way home saw some boys playing in an abandoned old car. They had a plastic bottle stuffed full of seed pods. Apparently they’re edible.

October 11, 2005

Couldn’t sleep. Didn’t much want to get up or get going or do anything. 10:40 mail was delivered and I went back to bed after that. Sveta came just after that. She’s such a good girl, she gets the best of everything for me. Had tea and spent the day in bed. Thanked V. V. for bringing up mail.

Bobrova rang after 12. She came on Thursday.

I rang the clinic. Ira from Social Services, and Yura in the evening. Watched television and tidied all the washing on the chair. Went to bed at 11:30 p.m.

Hot day. I wore the skirt Tonya got me. “Dreary sort of life, of no use to anyone,” as you might say. Tea in the afternoon, coffee in the evening. No appetite whatsoever.

But there was one note, quite different from the rest. On July 17, 2005 she wrote:

Sima rang this morning. I got down the photo album afterward. Shook all the photos out and spent a long while looking at them. I didn’t want to eat, and looking at the photos gave me such a feeling of melancholy, tears, real sadness for the times passed, and for those who aren’t with us anymore. This pointless life of mine, a life lived for nothing, the emptiness in my soul … I wanted to lose myself, forget it all.

I went back to bed and slept for the rest of the day, strange, can’t think how I could have slept so long, didn’t get up till the evening, till 8:00 p.m. Drank some milk, closed the curtains and lay down, and again this sleep to transport me away from reality. Sleep is my salvation.

*

Months passed, maybe years. Galya’s diaries lay around the place, caught up in piles of other papers, the sort of papers you leave out, thinking they will come in handy, and instead they discolor and age like old kitchenware. I suddenly and involuntarily remembered them when I arrived in the town of Pochinky.

Pochinky had a dubious claim to fame in our household. This one horse, dead-end little town, over two hundred kilometers from Nizhny Novgorod, was the place we’d all come from and no one had ever returned to. No one had even made an attempt to return there in the last seventy-odd years. Nabokov writes about existence as “but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness”—well, this quiet little provincial town, of little interest to anyone, became over the years that first dark eternity in the collective memory of our family.

Ours was a large family back then. I dimly remember accounts of dozens of brothers and sisters, photographs of carts and horses and wooden buildings. But these accounts were eclipsed by the tales of the wild adventures of my great-grandmother, Sarra Ginzburg, a native of Pochinky. She had been in prison in Tsarist times and had even lived in Paris, and trained as a doctor and then treated Soviet children, including my mother and me, and everything I was told about her had the laurel-leaf taste of legend. There was no one left to verify all these fantastic tales and no one would have wanted to.

We had a relative, Leonid, who was constantly on the brink of visiting the shrunken husk of this nineteenth-century town. He talked about it as one might an imaginary polar expedition. He spent his days attempting to instill this enthusiasm in others, his near and distant relatives (I was one of his last converts). He had striking pale eyes, almost transparent, and his enthusiasm was a constantly running motor. On the rare occasions when he found himself in Moscow he would visit to discuss his plans with my parents. Then one day he arrived unexpectedly and found my parents gone, they’d emigrated to Germany. I was the family’s sole remaining representative in Moscow. I’d never considered a sentimental journey like this, and I was intoxicated: for the first time it seemed as if our family’s native home was within reach, and therefore a real place. The more Leonid insisted on the hardships we would face, the distances we would travel, and the elaborate preparations that would need to be made, the more the journey seemed quite against the odds—and the more promise it held for me. In the end this Leonid, who spent so many years planning a trip with the whole extended family, a sort of return of the Tribes of Israel, died without ever realizing his dream. Pochinky remained as fantastical and unknown to us all as the fairy-tale city of Kitezh.

And here I was, just that little bit closer to Pochinky. Why I went I can’t say, and I can’t remember what I hoped to discover there, but before I left I spent a long time online, turning up facts. Pochinky was at the outer limits of the known world, I found it on an ancient map: beyond Arzamas, tucked in the wilds beyond Pushkin’s estate at Boldino, surrounded by villages with doomsday names. There were no railway lines in these parts, the nearest station was three hours’ drive. I decided to cut my losses and hired a driver in Nizhny Novgorod.

We left Nizhny Novgorod early in the morning along wide, pink, still wintery streets. The town slipped into valleys and then reappeared in the car windows with its peculiar, not-quite-heedless clutter of industrial sites and picket-fenced wooden houses, conceding nothing to the modern world. When we reached the road out of town the car seemed to move by itself, racing along with unnecessary speed: the driver, father of a three-month-old baby, kept his hands on the wheel and was disdainfully silent. The road flexed up and down in tight little waves, frail remains of snow clung to the ground under the fir trees. The world grew poorer with every kilometer. In the blackened villages new churches gleamed like china, white as new crowns on old teeth. I had a guidebook extolling the beauty of Arzamas, now long behind us, and a little book on Pochinky, published twenty years before: it mentioned a shop owned by the Jew Ginzburg, who traded in sewing machines, and that was all. There was no mention of the legendary Sarra.

We traveled for long hours. At last the hills began, a dusky ridge of them, Umbrian hills, the color of dark copper, rising and falling as evenly as breath. Sometimes a brief flash of water. After we passed the exit for Pushkin’s Boldino estate there was a series of Pushkin memorials along the road. According to legend his local mistress had lived in the village of Lukoyanov. Little groups of trees like herds of animals.

Pochinky was built along a long main street: little side streets departed from the high street at tidy right angles. An attractive church in a classical style stood on the far side of the road. I learned from the guidebook that this was the Cathedral of the Nativity, where a certain Orfanov had once been priest. I knew the name, Valya Orfanova often sent us greetings when I was a child, and once she had asked my mother to buy me a book from her, so Masha will have something to remember me by. Mother picked out a poetry collection by the Symbolist poet Fyodor Sologub at the secondhand bookshop, but unfortunately it turned out to be a late work, The Great Good News Herald, a book of Communist poems published in 1923, filled with proletarians with flaming ideals. Useless to me, as I judged it then, not yet able to appreciate the exquisite soundplay underlying the hackneyed sentiments:

The officer’s horse
The enemy force
Treads in its dance
Treads on my heart

I had a strong desire to abandon the deserted main square in search of a place where there was something I could see and touch, but Maria Fufayeva, a local historian, was waiting for us there. It was a Sunday but they’d opened up the town library just for us. An exhibition of watercolors of Pochinky’s streets hung in the library; painted a hundred years before, they’d been sent from Germany for the exhibition. A German family had lived in Pochinky toward the end of the nineteenth century, and I had a sudden memory of the painter’s name, Gethling, being mentioned when I was a child.

The pictures were gemütlich, cheery: a pretty house with a chemist’s sign and some flowering mallow, the house of Augusta Gethling, the painter’s sister, who had tutored my great-grandmother for her school entrance exam. The house was still standing, but its little porch was gone, the facade had been concreted over and the mallow and the carved window frames had disappeared. No one could tell me anything about the house with the large yard and the horse and cart, the home of Sarra and her family at the beginning of the twentieth century.

And that was all. Much like the diaries of Aunt Galya, the reader had to content herself with shopping lists, notes of television programs, descriptions of the weather. Whatever stood behind this, swaying and rustling, was in no hurry to show itself, and perhaps didn’t intend to show itself at all. We were offered tea; we were taken for a guided tour of the town. I searched the ground beneath my feet constantly as if hoping to find a dropped kopeck.

The village had the shrunken feel of a vanished town, a once bustling center which had sprung up around the largest horse fair in the whole region. We crossed a vast market square, a vacant space now overgrown with trees, somewhere in its center a lead-gray statue of Lenin, but otherwise a place abandoned by people, too large to be useful in any new reincarnation. It was fringed by pretty little wooden houses, like the ones in the watercolors, some showing the signs of hasty, ugly renovation. And we were shown another square, a little asphalted space where Solomon Ginzburg, Sarra’s brother, had owned a shop in the twenties. Here we stood a while and took photos, a group of us, surly women in coats and hats. The wind was too icy for smiles. On a curb by the main road another monument glittered in the grass, dedicated to Kapral, a mighty stallion and a stud horse for a full twenty years.

A little drive beyond the bridge over the river Rudnya was a derelict complex of buildings, the size of a small town, used for horse breeding. They had been built at the beginning of the nineteenth century and had once belonged to the cavalry regiment of the Imperial Guard. But even before this, horses had been bred here: kabarda and Nogay, stallions, horses, geldings and Nogay mares, and Russian colts and herding horses.

Catherine the Great built up the business to an industrial scale. The resulting huge square building with its classical lines and peeling whitewashed walls, its subsiding central tower and the arched entrance, symmetrically matched on the far side of the square, was intended to be an outpost of civilization, a little island of Petersburgian refinement. It had fallen into total disrepair relatively recently, in the nineties, and it now stood surrounded by bare earth, blasted by the long winter. The last horses moved about the open paddocks: heavyset chestnut horses with pale and tufty manes. They lifted their heads and pushed their muzzles into our palms. By now the sky was dazzling, the clouds formed a mountain ridge across the horizon, and a skin-pink light glowed under the crazed white facade of the buildings.

We’d already traveled halfway back when I realized I’d forgotten the most important thing: there must have been a cemetery of some sort, Jewish or otherwise, where my ancestors were buried. The driver had his foot on the accelerator, the names of villages were flashing past: surreal, earthy names. I called Maria Fufayeva on my mobile. There was no cemetery, just as there were no longer any Jews left in Pochinky. Actually, no, in fact there was one Jew left in Pochinky, she even knew his name: Gurevich. Strangely enough it was my mother’s maiden name.

—Translated from the Russian by Sasha Dugdale

 

Maria Stepanova, born in Moscow in 1972, is a poet, essayist, journalist, and editor in chief of the online newspaper Colta. In 2018, she was awarded the Bolshaya Kniga Award for In Memory of Memory.

Sasha Dugdale is a British poet, playwright, and translator.

By Maria Stepanova, from In Memory of Memory, copyright © 2018 by Maria Stepanova, translation copyright © 2021 by Sasha Dugdale. Originally published in Russian by Novoe Izdatelstvo as Памяти памяти. Published in arrangement with Suhrkamp Verlag.

Staff Picks: Forms, Flounder, and Funerals

Spread from The Lost Soul, illustrated by Joanna Concejo. Courtesy of Seven Stories Press.

There are very few children in my life right now, but if there are in the future, I look forward to sitting down with them to read Olga Tokarczuk’s beautiful and melancholy The Lost Soul. Illustrated by Joanna Concejo and translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones, it is the brief tale of a man who, by moving too fast in life, has lost his soul. As a wise doctor explains to the man: “Souls move at a much slower speed than bodies. They were born at the dawn of time, just after the Big Bang, when the cosmos wasn’t yet in such a rush.” All is not lost: the man moves to the countryside and, as illustrated in Concejo’s delicate, wistful images, waits patiently for his soul to find him. Once this finally happens, he throws away all his watches and suitcases so as to no longer move through life too fast. When I was a child, the writing and art I liked best always disturbed me slightly and made me realize, with great surprise, that a very large and sometimes unsettling world existed outside the confines of my childhood. There is something disturbing about beauty, after all; it will, like all objects and experiences, wear away with time. The Lost Soul is a reminder to cherish the present, lest you, too, lose your soul. —Rhian Sasseen 

One of my close friends recently fathered a child, so I’ve been thinking a lot about death. In fairness, my mind is never far from the subject, but the arrival of my paranephew did inspire my latest read, Will My Cat Eat My Eyeballs? Big Questions from Tiny Mortals about Death, in which Caitlin Doughty, a practicing mortician and death-positive activist, seeks to satisfy the morbid curiosity of children by answering such questions as “Can I preserve my dead body in amber like a prehistoric insect?,” “Can everybody fit in a casket? What if they’re really tall?,” and “Why don’t animals dig up all the graves?” She responds to these adorably ghoulish queries with the same honesty and insightful humor that has made me a longtime subscriber to her YouTube channel, Ask a Mortician, on which she continues the death-centric discourse for millions of viewers (check out “The Real Moby Dick Was So Much Worse”). Doughty certainly doesn’t need my endorsement; she earned her macabre pedigree with her first two books, Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: And Other Lessons from the Crematory (2014) and From Here to Eternity: Traveling the World to Find the Good Death (2017), and has fostered a hoard of devoted followers and a successful career in the funeral industry. Still, something tells me we avoid these darker notions more often than we embrace them, and I can’t be the only weirdo uncle out there who not so secretly wants to field the question, “Can we give Grandma a Viking funeral?” —Christopher Notarnicola

 

Andrea Lawlor. Photo: Steve Dillon. Courtesy of Vintage.

 

I am definitely a straggler to the absolute blowout of a novel that is Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl, but wow, am I glad to be here. Andrea Lawlor’s book now sits comfortably in my Top Five Favorites of All Time for a myriad of reasons, chief among them the Patti Smith obsession, the details about zine production, and the well-placed rumination on the pros of cruising in bookstores. And of course, there’s our beloved title character, Paul Polydoris, a “shapeshifter” who can move among genders and morph his body on demand. Just as Paul (or Polly, depending on the day) tries on different gender expressions, the novel tries on different formal expressions, jumping from a seemingly traditional narrative to an origin myth to the history of Paul’s “big gay milestones” in footnotes to a screenplay and back again. My favorite form, though, has to be Paul’s acid-fueled, completely out-of-left-field monologue about the gender politics of covers in rock, “by which I mean alternative and punk” (of course). Even setting that particular moment aside, I love this book. I love it for its deeply referential nature, I love it for its formal play, and I love it for Paul’s wild journey of love, sex, gender, and youth. —Mira Braneck

Super Monster, the debut album from the NYC- and Chicago-based songwriter Claud, is the first release on Phoebe Bridgers’s record label Saddest Factory. It’s a largely upbeat collection of mesmerizing synth pop. Claud’s voice is sweet, smooth, effortless, childlike, and tinged with a hint of melancholy (as are most of Claud’s lovelorn lyrics) that creates meaningful tension with the catchy melodies. It’s not that this music is particularly original—it’s not. There’s a lot of eighties in here, with little flecks of stuff from the nineties and aughts. It’s just really good. If any one of these songs popped onto the radio, you’d find yourself singing along before it ended. My favorites include “Overnight” and “That’s Mr. Bitch to You.” It’s hard not to love this record. I bought it on LP (like Claud’s hair, the vinyl is blue and green), and I just keep flipping it over and over. It’s perfect music for this snowed-in February: a bit magical, a bit sad. If Claud is what the kids are listening to, then I’d like to believe this staff pick means I’m still one of the kids. —Craig Morgan Teicher

A few years ago, at a twenty-four-hour diner on Eighty-First and First, I saw a man at the table next to mine order and consume a “full flounder dinner” (whatever that meant) at around two in the morning. I suppose it’s not so shocking; diners can make you nearly anything, and they can pretty reliably do so at any time. At Bailey’s Cafe, the restaurant in the novel of the same name by Gloria Naylor, you really can order anything, but only on Saturdays and Sundays. The rest of the week, you’re at the mercy of the owner, the grizzled narrator and axis around which the world of the novel spins. In episodes vivid and poignant, Naylor moves through the stories of his regular customers, people who’ve found themselves at Bailey’s with only their bags of tragedy and misfortune. These pieces are sewn together by uncanny and strange thread. Bailey’s Cafe is near 125th Street, but it’s also at the edge of the world; go out the back door and the void is waiting. Maybe you know the feeling from sitting in a creaky booth with cold coffee and a sandwich; maybe you know it from Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks. In Naylor’s novel, things are not so lonely, but everyone you sit next to is sure to break your heart. —Lauren Kane

 

Gloria Naylor. Photo: David Shankbone. CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/b...), via Wikimedia Commons.

Najwan Darwish’s Poetry of the Unspeakable

Najwan Darwish. Photo: Veronique Vercheval. Courtesy of New York Review Books.

If I could come back,
I wouldn’t come under any other banner.
I’d still embrace you
with two severed hands.
I don’t want wings in paradise,
I just want your graves by the river.
I want eternity at the breakfast table
with the bread and oil.
I want you—
earth,
my defeated banner.

This poem, “My Defeated Banner,” is from the fifth section of the Palestinian poet Najwan Darwish’s latest collection, Exhausted on the Cross, and in its devastating beauty, it represents one of the peak moments of his poetry as well as of the writing of our time. As in all of Darwish’s poetry, this defeated banner presents us with a primordial scene, possibly inserted in the depths of what we persist in calling the human, where the feelings of a particular being, that sudden nostalgia that grips us, that desire, that love, crosses over and merges with the nostalgia, passion, and love of all humanity. We understand then that, from Nothing More to Lose and Je me lèverai un jour (I will rise one day) to Exhausted on the Cross, the multifaceted poetry of Najwan Darwish puts us again and again in front of the contours of something immemorial, almost unspeakable. It tells us that above all else poetry is solidarity and compassion for every detail of the world: for that specific bread and oil, for that eternity at the breakfast table, for that land with its “graves by the river.” The poem shows us those graves, it explicitly tells us that they are there, by the river; and for a second we see that if that image moves us, it is because—whatever our countries, origins, and histories, and even whatever languages we speak and, beyond that, whatever times we have lived and died in—we have all been buried in those graves and, at the same time, we have all wept over them.

The characters who move through the seven sections that make up Exhausted on the Cross are exhausted, exhausted on an infinity of crosses that rise in an infinity of places. Expelled from their ancestral land, permanently besieged and persecuted, women who have lost everything—their houses, their neighborhoods, their children—make present to others, to me, to you, to the reader, that in this land of victims and perpetrators, displaced and disappeared, all the rest of us are survivors. And if we can affirm that we are facing political poetry, it is because we do it as survivors of an unfinished war. Far removed from any pathos or self-pity and, on the contrary, endowed with a stirring familiarity with everything it names, a familiarity that often resorts to irony and humor, Najwan Darwish’s poetry travels through the villages, landscapes, neighborhoods, cities, and towns of a history that is three millennia old, one that, in each of its corners, preserves the remains of a permanently shattered eternity, as if there were an underlying god, not named, who took pleasure in weaving together suffering and misfortune.

It is that almost unbearable presence—not named, as I say—that appears, for example, in the poem “In Shatila,” whose central scene suddenly brings forth all the strength and courage that characterizes Najwan Darwish’s poetry. The poem’s elements are as simple as they are resounding: “There’s no dignity here,” says a woman to her interlocutor in the first line of the poem. There follows the fierce, unappealable observation that everything has been said in those four words, and therefore that the years of agony have been spoken as well, the “rivers of regret” of a history that seems dictated by the presence of a deformed god. If that god exists, the only thing it would show us is that the truth is the most dangerous lie because one kills and dies for it:

She says it all
in just four words.

Rivers of regret,
years of agony that drown
in just four words.

The poem ends with that lash with which the woman’s interlocutor recriminates himself while walking away. The scene is sacred, not because of that underlying god but because there is no being in the world that has not repeated such self-recrimination at one time or another:

What did she tell you as she said her goodbyes?
What did you promise her as you said yours?
How could you smile, indifferent
to the brackish water of the sea
while the barbed wire wrapped around your heart?

How could you,
you son of a bitch?

But what else is that unnamed god who is permanently glimpsed in the poetry of Najwan Darwish, as I already know from the title of Exhausted on the Cross (it does not matter who is exhausted on that cross; whether a god, a prophet, or an ordinary being, it is someone who suffers), if not the heartbreaking force that tugs at our sleeves, trying to hold us back while we are leaving?

We realize then that from the fantastic opening image of the sea whom the poet would like to invite in, like a good neighbor, to have a coffee, to the powerful ending of “All of It,” each line of Exhausted on the Cross is the scene of a physical fight, to the death, between words and what we can no longer say. We cannot express the tension of that centimeter that separates us from the woman from Shatila. There are no words to name the absolute horror, to account for the exact moment in which the body of a living child becomes the body of a slaughtered child, we lack images to fix that infinitesimal second in which someone becomes those lumps of flesh and bone thrown into the sea by Latin American dictators, or the heaps of scattered limbs of Palestinians crushed by Israeli bombs in Gaza, or those massacred in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps. We have no concepts to imagine what questions, what memories assail someone in that monstrous extreme, someone being killed by other men. And yet, for that very reason, precisely because those words do not exist, they must be shouted, to bring to this side of the world the terrible and ruthless porosity of each of those moments.

However, expelled from the horizon of language, we must rise from that impossibility to return again and again to that unrepresentable extreme of death in a land overflowing with the dead. This is the moral imperative that carries Najwan Darwish’s poetry. In a history full of unfinished words, of sentences broken halfway through, of stanzas that do not say what they wanted to say, poetry has been the colossal record of violence and, at the same time, the no less colossal record of compassion. Compassion for all the dead that we have been and that we will be, for all the times we abandoned that woman in Shatila (the poem tells us she is sixty-five years old), or for our own abandoned selves during those three millennia when the soldier in “A Poem by a Soldier in Disguise” stopped writing poetry and remained in hiding, not knowing that the war had ended. Yet when that soldier stopped writing, he failed to realize that love itself had also ended, and so he wakes up in a land overflowing with the dead. The poem is impressive because, among other things, it lacks emphasis, as if it’s revealing something that happens every day:

The last time I wrote poetry
was three thousand years ago.
Back then, I was a soldier in disguise,
a soldier who didn’t know the war was over,
and now here I am
trying to write all over again.
The dust of the years is like the dust of tombs.
I emerge from the earth like a seed bursting,
like a bud unfurling on the branch,
and like the dead
who spread across a land
only death inhabits.

With a kind of desperate hope, the poem opens, despite everything, to the pale glimpse of rebirth, like that seed that’s bursting, spreading like the dead in this land that’s filled with the dead. In a world of victims and victimizers, it has fallen to the poet to be the first victim to cross the land of the dead and of silence, and also to be the first to rise up and tell us that despite everything, new days will come. At ground level, then, Najwan Darwish’s poems reemerge from their own silence, signaling that nothing would exist were it not for the fact that the most imperishable aspect of the human dream is inscribed in the hope of a new day.

This is perhaps the final question that this extraordinary poetry leaves us, its readers, with: How, in the face of that endless cohort of sufferings, the thousands and thousands of refugees who die daily in the Mediterranean, the ones kidnapped and beheaded by drug traffickers, the constant bombings, the hunger—how can one bear it all? Why doesn’t the woman whose children were killed by a tank commit suicide? Why do those millions and millions of people who survive in indescribable conditions continue to fight for their right to life? Whatever the answer, if we add up, one by one, the reasons—almost inaudible, minimal, unthinkable—that allow the most devastated of people not to kill themselves and that lead them to choose, second after second, to remain alive, that sum would form the image of Paradise, or of a seed sprouting and budding. It’s there that the sunny morning would be—the broken husband returning from his work, the rebuilt house, the milk that the mother did not have for her dying child; it’s there that the bread would be, and the warmth of the bed whose mattress, still intact, peeks out from the rubble:

Carriages drawn by cheerful horses
and the tunes of accordions,
or sullen buses
and relatives weeping at their doors—
it’s all a journey, dear,
and here we are now, back from it.

I name it earth, and am not ashamed.
It’s all earth.
It’s all death.
All of it.

Exhausted, then, on a cross made of rubble and death, of love and shame, we glimpse the limits of an immortality we cannot escape, an immortality that condemns us to death. Yet by reading this poetry one can come to love that condemnation and thus love the whole earth—our defeated banner.

—Translated from the Spanish by Frances Simán

 

Raúl Zurita was born in Santiago de Chile. Zurita has received the Chilean National Prize for Literature, the Asan Memorial World Poetry Prize, and the Reina Sofia Prize for Ibero-American Poetry. His book INRI was published by NYRB Poets in 2018.

Frances Simán is a communications professional and translator. She is a member of the Alicanto Poetry Workshop, annually organizing the Alicanto Poetry Week in Honduras, and a contributor for the editorial board of the Cisne Negro publishing house. She lives in Honduras.

Excerpted from the foreword to Exhausted on the Cross , by Najwan Darwish, translated by Kareem James Abu-Zeid, foreword by Raúl Zurita, foreword translated by Frances Simán, published by NYRB Poets. Foreword copyright © 2021 by Raúl Zurita.