Call Me Zebra: A Coming-of-Age Journey Across the Mediterranean

by Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi

I felt as though my heart had been put through the shredder.

The New World.

There it was, shamelessly conducting its business while halfway around the globe whole towns, cities, and villages were being razed to the ground. Then I thought, what does that word—new—mean anyway? I had never seen anything new in my life. All I had seen was the anxiety of people wanting to say something new. The New Poets! The New World! I examined the word.

I found myself saying that I intended to reverse our exile—“Our forced retreat from the past,” I said with emphasis—by retracing our jerky, incoherent journey across the Mediterranean, street by street, in a backward manner. As soon as I heard myself say the words, I realized I had been nurturing the idea since the start of my father’s decline, the onset of his blindness.

It became clear to me then and there that my father’s missive to record the uselessness of our suffering would become, over the course of the following months, an unstoppable impulse. An impulse that would require everything of me.

I said, “I intend to dive into the lacunae of exile. In other words, just like my father and my mother, I am going to become nothingness, fade into the white noise of death—only I will do so by physically retracing the ill-fated steps of our journey from Iran through the Mediterranean to the U.S.A.”

“The U.S.A.,” I said, letting out a chuckle. “The Unanimous Station of Apathy, a station where the selfish and the greedy readily set up shop with the intent of exploiting the vulnerable!”

And, boy we sure know that now!

I said, “Just so the message is clear”—at this, he looked like I had slapped him in the face with a dirty dish towel—“I intend to prolong this ridiculous habit of living just long enough to examine the landscapes we traversed during our long and brutal exodus. After that, there is no knowing what I will do.”

After that, I don’t know what happened. At some point, hours later, I was standing out in the cemetery under a cluster of trees looking at the plot I had seen on eBay.

It occurred to me that I would need a new name for my journey of exile, one that referred to my multiple selves.

At that critical moment, the light came down through the trees in the cemetery and fell across my father’s casket so that it appeared striped. The image was charged with an electric force, and for a brief moment, my inner and outer worlds were in perfect alignment. I felt as though the fate of my future self were tied up with that image of my father’s casket wrapped in alternating bands of light and darkness.

That’s when the word appeared in my head: zebra.

I turned the word over on my tongue; I muttered it to myself. I examined it. Zebra: an animal striped black-and-white like a prisoner of war; an animal that rejects all binaries, that represents ink on paper. A martyr of thought.

That was it. I had arrived at my new name. To the funeral director’s astonishment, I declared out loud, “Call me Zebra!”

It was then that Acker’s words trumpeted through my void. I whispered them to myself: I travelled all over the world, looking for trouble.

Good trouble, I hope.

I sat back down on the La-Z-Boy. I thought: If Ulysses can set off on a Grand Tour of the Mediterranean, Don Quixote on a Grand Tour of Literature, and Dante the Pilgrim on a Grand Tour of Human Nature, then it stands to reason that I, Zebra, can do all three at once.

to embark on a GRAND TOUR OF EXILE.

When the day came, Morales offered his condolences, and then he reprimanded me: “The Grand Tour makes exile sound like a delight!” I felt irate. “Am I so worthless that I am barred from taking pleasure in my own suffering?” I rejoined.

Texts have been leaping across eras for centuries in order to cross-contaminate one another.

“Yes,” I said. “I am preparing for a Final Exit from the New World and its lineup of fakes who refuse to acknowledge the warped nature of reality!”

AAA.

Autodidacts, anarchists, atheists.

I have had to travel in punctuated movements from East to West with such dizzying frequency that I remember nothing. No, not nothing,” I corrected. “Nothing except the shards of memory that shoot up at random from the swampy lagoons of my mind to pierce the surface of my consciousness with fresh wounds.”

He looked alert, at the ready, like a man who is always at his post. He was holding a sign that read: Here to reclaim José Emilio Morales’s friend.

My words were misshapen by a kind of nervous affliction. “Have you ever possessed me?” I asked, pointing at his sign.

“Technically speaking,” I said, pointing again at his sign, “you can only reclaim something if you’ve claimed it once before.”

“Then I suppose this is as good a moment as any to tell you that all of my relatives are dead. With the exception of Morales, I have no contacts left in this vast and ghastly universe.”

“Well,” Ludo said callously, as I sat there remembering the trials and tribulations of my dead father’s mustache. “It’s a good thing you can always procreate.”

I pressed my hand against my chest to dull the ache and pushed the memory aside. Then I told him that I don’t believe in procreation, that I would never do anything to perpetuate this worthless race of humans. “But I do believe in sex for the sake of sex, and should we have it, I plan to be on top since, metaphysically speaking, I’m already carrying your burden on

my shoul...

They were pink and plump. I could feel my blood coursing through my legs. I wanted to walk over and smack them across the head, but I stopped myself because ignorance cannot be slapped out of anyone.

That night I dreamt I was walking through a tunnel illuminated by a garish light. I was thirsty, weary, famished. But I kept putting one foot in front of the other. I was afraid that if I didn’t keep on walking I would vanish into thin air. I persisted, and the tunnel deposited me in front of an ugly building devoid of character, a funereal administrative building constructed of slabs of concrete that were covered in smog stains. The facade was interrupted only by a series of windows, all covered in protective metal bars casting geometric shadows across the glass.

Sounds like a DeChirico landscape.

Raphèl maì amècche zabì almi.

With a definitive air, I raised my sick hand and gave the pájaro sabio a pat on the head. The bird winked at me. He was still walking across the counters. “Aha,” I wrote in my notebook. “At last, the bird and I are on the same page.”

“Where should I begin?” I asked myself, opening my eyes and walking over to the recamier. “At Antoni Gaudí’s famous Park Güell,” I answered.

Yeah, let's start with the tourist stuff. It's boring to be reading all the time.

“And why wouldn’t a philologist know about Roquentin, beloved bearer of Sartre’s cross?”

The "hero" of "Nausea" by Jean-Paul Sartre

Without realizing it, I mumbled: “I prefer not to eat.”

I sure wish I felt like that most of the time!

“Consider yourself warned: This map, like all maps, is a lie. Literature is the only true form of cartography in the world.”

“You,” I said, “are at liberty to turn your nose away from the cadavers of history, to protect your stupidity and your innocence”—her smooth cheeks flushed and her blue eyes went round—“but I could never do the same.”

“Even if I wanted to turn away from the miasma of death,” I added, stepping toward her, “I couldn’t because I have been ghettoed in the Pyramid of Exile for the benefit of people like you.”

We're kinda going around the bend here, a little bit.

I thought, the Matrix of Literature is a centerless swarm of interconnected books that tirelessly mirror back to us the pile of ruins that is humanity.

“Are you referring to your friend’s vaginal archives?”

Jealous, jealous. So full of herself.

Life + Death = Totality Totality = Unreality of the Whole

Pretentious poppycock.

Besides, you need to get out of your head and have some fun.”

Best piece of advice I've read in a while.

thought I heard a donkey braying in the distance. I thought I heard a house collapse. I thought I smelled the rotting of corpses. I imagined the sky splitting open, ink spilling through it.

Ludo was keeping close.

My thoughts doubled over themselves. What, I wondered, am I doing with this man when I am bereft of everyone I have ever loved...

After all, I had loved my mother and father, and what had that led to but pain?

Oh, the self-indulgent joys of post-adolescence!

Suddenly, I wanted nothing more than for him to come closer, press his palms against my pelvis, push me back against the wall, lift me onto a table, unbutton my jeans. I wanted him to slide his hands under my shirt, cup my breasts, and say something lyrical consistent with the fact that our ancestors had led their lives according to the laws of literature, under the sign of poetry. I wanted him to say: “Ah, a pair of perfect pomegranates. The fruit of the earth!”

Oh, adolescence!

I was about to take his hands to my breasts and say “Repeat after me”

Good thing THAT didn't happen!

I was beginning to realize that he, despite inhabiting the Pyramid of Exile, had no idea what it means to be squashed by history; ground down to the atomic level; reduced to dust; pulverized; flattened to a singular surface; rendered as thin as paper, two-dimensional; and drained of any real power while those who have only been grazed by the incendiary flares of history strut about full of themselves, their hearts pumping with fresh oxygenated blood.

Completely different backgrounds.