Exile
By Bradford Morrow, Peter Straub, Lance Olsen and
4/5
()
About this ebook
From the moment homes and homelands came into being, exile ensued. While narratives of exile share themes of banishment, loss and longing, they are as diverse as the human experience itself. Writers as different as Homer and Heinlein, Aeschylus and Camus addressed this subject. In The Satanic Verses, Salman Rushdie conceives of exile as “a dream of glorious return. Exile is a vision of revolution. It is an endless paradox: looking forward by always looking back.” Its permutations know no bounds. The political dissident deported, or jailed, under house arrest; the defected spy; the classic prince banished by his royal father from the city gates; the communal exile of the diaspora. Through cutting-edge fiction, poetry and essays by emerging voices and contemporary masters, Conjunctions: 62, Exile explores the ramifications of expulsion and ostracism. Contributors include Edie Meidav, Peter Straub, Can Xue, H.G. Carrillo, Ales Steger, Maxine Chernoff and others.
Peter Straub
Born in Milwaukee, Peter Straub is the author of fifteen novels, which have been translated into more than twenty languages. He has won the British Fantasy Award, two Bram Stoker awards and two World Fantasy awards. His most recent publications are his acclaimed novel Mr X, a collection of short stories, Magic Terror, and Black House, the international bestselling novel that he co-wrote with Stephen King.
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Reviews for Exile
12 ratings12 reviews
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5I don’t usually read political thrillers (Tom Clancy and Brad Thor are the only ones I’ve ever read: one novel each) so I admit I got this book because of the love story between David Wolfe, a Jewish-American lawyer, and his former lover and now client Hana Arif, a Palestinian woman accused of a terrorist plot to kill Israel’s prime minister. It is true that the novel starts slow and no character seems compelling enough until later, when Hana is reintroduced as the accused. I decided to give the novel a chance and, though not convinced of the effectiveness of its storytelling devices, it is better than I had at first determined.Patterson makes the best he can of a very complex subject. Using the love story between the main characters as a contrivance to frame his plot, the author takes readers on a long journey through the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, informing them of its intricacies and slowly revealing its multiple levels of truth. In doing this, he achieves an understated balance between both points of view. Patterson’s real interest is to explain the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and the love affair between his main characters seems almost back-story, a stratagem to hook readers. Because of this the novel lacks a strong, cohesive point of view even though the story is seen mostly through David’s eyes.The novel jumps around between political thriller and courtroom drama. While the courtroom scenes are well-paced and tightly written, the rest of the novel seems more like a treatise on Arab-Israeli relations. The way the author exposed his subject was better suited for a lengthy essay in a mainstream magazine. However, I admit that I found it rather pleasant to know about a subject I knew nothing about through a work of fiction, rather than an arid, scholarly article.The book is over plotted, and there’s a lot of telling and not enough showing, especially characters’ emotions. For a thriller, there aren’t many thrills. Even the anticipated climax during the last fifth of the novel comes as no surprise. It seems hard to believe that for such an incisive lawyer, David Wolfe had not suspected that truth, at least from half the book onwards.Compared to Tom Clancy Patterson’s writing is clunkier, but he treats his subject matter with a lot more depth and leaves room for ambiguity and interpretation.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Engaged to be married and poised to run for the senate, David Wolfe's life is turned inside out when ex-lover and "the one that got away" Hana Arif asks him to defend her in a trial in which she is accused of leading a conspiracy to murder Israeli leader Amos Ben-Aron on American soil. His friends and colleagues are outraged and his fiance doesn't understand how, he as a Jewish man, can even think of defending the Palestinian woman charged with their family friend's murder, regardless of whether he believes in her innocence.David was not immersed in Jewish culture growing up and doesn't understand the all-consuming attachment many people have to their cultural identities. Researching the case, he travels to Israel and gets a "total immersion" lesson in Israeli-Palestinian history.As with his other novels, this story is so detailed with actual facts and discussions about real life legal and political dilemmas, that it almost doesn't seem like fiction. I have to admit that I had to replay some of the scenes when David was overseas because I got characters and historical events confused. Both sides are so passionate and articulately portray their wounds and desperation. Although it was good, this was my least favorite of the Patterson books I've read so far.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/59-23 2d reading of this excellent international political/legal nvel. Written almost 5 years ago. The plots entails events that could come straight out of today's headlines.The Israeli PM is assassinated in SF by an unknown Islam terror group. A Palestine mother and lawyer, a graduate of Harvard and a strong critic of US/Israeli policy in the West bK is accused of being a major suspect in the assasination. She retains as her lawyer a prominent Jewish lawyer who briefly was her lover while they both attented Harvard.The legal and political complexities of the case are masterfully well handled by the author who also demonstrates a well researched and balanced perspective of the two sides in this sanguinous conflict that has been going on now for well over half a century.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Very good and very suspenseful. Loved that I found a new author!
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Patterson does an even-handed job of presenting the issues surrounding the Israeli/Palestinian conflict in this novel. Not everyone will agree with his assessments, but that's nothing new when it comes to this subject. It is however, a story worth reading especially considering today's events.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5This was an engaging, well-researched book that is about so much more than the assassination of a prime minister. Both sides of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict are explored, the good and the bad. I think the only thing that was missing was a little more on David's motivations. You learn oodles about everyone's history but his.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5David Wolfe, a lawyer and Jewish, is drawn into a political assassination of a high Israeli dignitary. An old Palestine girl friend from law school (Hanna Arif) is accused of running the operation. David travels to Israel to try and understand the case. It turns out that Hanna's daughter is David's son and that Hanna's husband is the real person behind the assassination attempt.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5RNP is a craftsman with his adroit plotting. His heroes are - well - heroic. However, to excell as a lawyer or politician there has to be a hint of greatness and it all contributes to a compelling read. In this story the tension between terrorists, wether 'islamic' or 'jewish', is explored with insight and fairness. The story is plausible and at times shocking. The suspense keeps you going until the very end. And it is a love story as well; a good combination for the beach or long winter nights. Recommended.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Patterson strays a bit from his normal formula to deliver a long (700+ pages) somewhat pedantic story involving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. At his best when he sticks to courtroom scenes, this was still a good read, just not one of his best.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Too much of this book was not credible. I did not mind reading about the plight of the Palestinians, but many of the facts they presented are fiction promulgated by an oppressed population.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The assassination of the Israeli Prime Minister by a Palestinian suicide bomber in San Francisco sets off a well written who done it. The plot, featuring a Jewish lawyer defending a Palestinian woman who had been his lover at Harvard Law School, is almost secondary to the exploration of the Israeli Palestinian conflict. Mr. Patterson is careful not to take sides but to present the stories of Palestinians and Israelis; Zionist settlers, Muslim extremists, secular Jews and Arabs and people just trying to survive.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5a good beginning to understanding the conflict between Israel, Palestinians, and the U.S.
Book preview
Exile - Bradford Morrow
Exile
Conjunctions, Vol. 62
Edited by Bradford Morrow
CONJUNCTIONS
Bi-Annual Volumes of New Writing
Edited by
Bradford Morrow
Contributing Editors
John Ashbery
Martine Bellen
Mei-mei Berssenbrugge
Mary Caponegro
Brian Evenson
William H. Gass
Peter Gizzi
Robert Kelly
Ann Lauterbach
Norman Manea
Rick Moody
Howard Norman
Joan Retallack
Joanna Scott
David Shields
Peter Straub
John Edgar Wideman
published by Bard College
Contents
EDITOR’S NOTE
H. G. Carrillo, Splaining Yourself
Aleš Šteger, Three Berlin Essays (translated from Slovenian by Brian Henry)
Christie Hodgen, Customer Reviews
Peter Straub, The Collected Short Stories of Freddie Prothero, Introduction by Törless Magnussen, PhD
Laura van den Berg, Havana
Lance Olsen, Dreamlives of Debris
John Parras, Song of Magsaysay
Marjorie Welish, Folding Cythera
Paul West, Omobo
Charles Baudelaire, Poor Belgium: The Argument (translated from French with an Introduction by Richard Sieburth)
Maxine Chernoff, Five Poems
Brian Evenson, Cult
Robin Hemley, Celebrating Russian Federation Day with Immanuel Kant
Edie Meidav, Dog’s Journey
Stephen O’Connor, The Zip
Gillian Conoley, Preparing One’s Consciousness for the Avatar
Can Xue, Coal (translated from Chinese by Annelise Finegan Wasmoen)
Martin Riker, Samuel Johnson’s Eternal Return
Wil Weitzel, The Gujjar at the River
Matthew Pitt, A Damn Sight
Arthur Sze, Water Calligraphy
Gabriel Blackwell, The Invention of an Island
Robyn Carter, Aftershock
Notes on Contributors
EDITOR’S NOTE
Few subjects are as rich, complex, and profound as exile. This is especially true if one allows its definition to venture beyond the political, religious, or cultural, so that it embraces the deeply personal, psychological, and emotional terrains in which individuals inhabit a place of self-exile, or even exile from sanity and surety.
From Africa to China, Pakistan to the Philippines to locales that are not to be found on any map, this issue examines exile as both a literal expulsion or ostracism and, as Primo Levi has it, the prevalence of the unreal over the real.
H. G. Carrillo’s Splaining Yourself
explores, with an incandescent ferocity of bilingualism, the difficulties of living on the racial, ethnic, linguistic divide between two cultures, a member assimilated into and yet estranged from both. Aleš Šteger investigates the sensibility of exile in Berlin. Edie Meidav offers a boxer’s-eye view of postrevolutionary Cuba, whose system of privilege and constraint under Castro drives a gifted fighter from his homeland across the waters to Miami, where he is a man finally without a country. Robin Hemley’s Celebrating Russian Federation Day with Immanuel Kant
delves into that singular world of exclaves, with its own highly individual problems about nationality and cultural identity.
The permutations of our theme are extensive. Here is an agonizing story of love that impels a man far from the precincts of rational decision making, exiling him to a locus where all that remains is a guarantee of personal destruction. Here is an orphan who exiles himself from his home to live in makeshift proximity and spy on those who move in to take his place. Here is Charles Baudelaire’s proposal for a book excoriating Belgium, a country to which he has grudgingly fled after abandoning his native France—a vitriolic, painful, and hilarious document appearing for the first time in English in a superb translation by Richard Sieburth.
We hope this issue provides some fresh insights into the exiles’ worlds, and makes a modest contribution to a literature that is ancient, essential, and multifarious.
—Bradford Morrow
April 2014
New York City
Splaining Yourself
H. G. Carrillo
You throw the sand against the wind,
And the wind blows it back again.
—William Blake
Oye ese, before you set sail to your black male body with its Spanish-speaking tongue across El Estrecho de Florida into the arms of the country you believe will understand you, you will need more than that electronic pocket translator you wrapped in plastico for the journey. Although it is only a ninety-mile stretch between La Habana y the Bay of Biscayne, there is something in the air, in the water over which you have to cross, that performs an alchemy for which there is no limpia that will mark you forever as the unknown.
Aquí, with the free and the brave, history is short, though its emotive states are long. Therefore, the majority of questions that you will be asked will be more about your body than your personhood. As if in a protracted game of Cowboys and Indians, what
you are rather than who
you are is the average height of the hurdles set in the circuitous series of marathons you are about to run.
Walk into a department store in an Armani suit or throw up the arm with which you are holding your briefcase in an attempt to hail a cab headed southward on Michigan Avenue and you are likely to make yourself invisible. Automatic car doors will lock as you stand or cross intersections, women will clutch their handbags as you enter public transportation and elevators. Assume the discussions you have with men in airports, train stations, and at adjacent urinals that seem to begin midthought—Kobe was looking good last night, no?
—to have something to do with the NBA, because you have inherited a historical lineage in which Michael Jordan endorses underwear on television, Tupac has been elevated to sainthood, and the mention of someone like Percival Everett or André Watts can turn a listener’s eyes to X’s.
Abre la boca, y porfa, you will just as easily be assumed African as you will be told that you look like some celebrity. Claim Latino identity and nonhispanoblats will request a demonstration of your native language even though they have no idea what you are saying. You will find, though, that they like to use the term Latino
—particularly in statements like Our department is very diverse; we have a number of African Americans, Asians, and Latinos
—although they have no idea they have conflated cultural background with notions of race. Y entonces, try to explain that the term Latino
in English is representative of the intersection of both Latin and Anglo colonial enterprises in the United States, and you will be told, But you don’t look Latino.
Cuban
is much more difficult. Even though the I Love Lucy show first aired over sixty years ago, Ricky Ricardo is hard to shake. As you try to explain that when Arnaz’s character on the show sings Babalú . . . Babalú ayé, he is not singing exclusively in Spanish, but something that is representative of the mingling of African and European cultures on the island; that the chorus, which was never translated on the show—Quiere pedi / Que mi negra me quiera / Que tenga dinero / Y que no se muera / ¡Ay! Vo le quiero pedi a Babalú ’na negra muy santa como tú que no tenga / otro negro / Pa’ que no se fuera—not only references the blackness of the deity he is evoking, but does so in what Arnaz believed to be an Afro Cubano dialect. Even your dentist, first generation from Greek immigrants, will stop to ask, Are you Cuban or are you black?
and will not put his hands back in your mouth until you suggest he think of major league baseball or the Buena Vista Social Club. Clearly, even though Santiago de Cuba is at the southernmost tip of North America, the Asiento System is not a term given to memorize for North American middle-school exams.
There appears to be only one Cuban tale of immigration allowed here, despite the collectors of Celia Cruz and La Lupe albums on vinyl you will meet at cocktail parties who will accurately chronicle the careers of both musicians from beginning to end, and then admonish you for not knowing your own heritage.
Oye, hombre, aquí en los Estados Unidos de América, the story of Cuban immigration must begin with the loss of a finca—a great main house, land as far as the eye can see—that culminates in a flight in the middle of the night, and ends in Miami with a hatred, and a painful longing for a place to which you can never return. Apparently, here, Jefferson never attempted to negotiate Cuba away from Spain and adopt it as a state with the hope of reducing the cost and expediting the traffic of the US slave trade, José Martí never made a landmark visit that challenged US scholars’ notions of color, and Saturnino Orestes Armas Minnie
Miñoso Arrieta was never signed to the Cleveland Indians in 1949.
It also seems that on this side of the bay, it’s easy to forget that up until Castro’s 1959 revolt, there was what can only be defined as a shuttle
that traveled daily from Manhattan to La Habana that—in addition to offering sultry tropical nights, gambling, and inexpensive entertainments—provided enough distance from scrutiny to those who had a penchant for las negras they couldn’t find in Harlem. Which could be why, with a population of over eleven million, the fact that over 38 percent of Cubans might be nonwhite seems disruptive to the concept of Ricky Ricardo or, por ejemplo, the newer model of Cuban American male identity, the dark-eyed, olive-skinned Richard Blanco—both of whom, as you know, asere, are considered white only on the island. Pero, you will need to abandon the question ¿Quién se hubiera imaginado que Desi Arnaz no era blanco? They don’t nor do they want to hear it, y they will make sure you look like a comemierda for asking. It will only make you sound silly in your failure to recognize the cost for both Arnaz and Blanco of crossing el Estrecho de Florida was a racial claim to whiteness. They are the Cubans, you are black, and everyone knows who everyone is just by looking at each other. Y, ahi-nama, pendejo, is the subtle difference between who you are and what you are. Aquí, they insist there is a difference between who and what, but it is unclear and le ronca el mango, the way you could spend a lot of your time trying to figure it out.
Unlike during any trip you may have made to Paris, Istanbul, Caracas, Buenos Aires, Mexico City, Vancouver, Amsterdam, Warsaw, St. Petersburg, or Dublin, in the States your body will always be an obstacle to articulating the differences between race, ethnicity, space, place, and culture. Pues, you will need to stumble upon A Dialogue (1973) based on the November 4, 1971, conversation James Baldwin had with Nikki Giovanni in London, in which Baldwin asserts, The reason that people think it is important to be white is that they think it’s important not to be black.
Pero, you will find even you will elide the most salient portion of his proclamation for the safety of the established racial binary that divides the country between white and black. You will hold fast to this reading of Baldwin’s statement until you attend a Latino literary conference in California, where you will be introduced by brown Latinos to other brown Latinos as an Afro Cubano, a black Latino, an Afro Cubano Americano writer and scholar, as if to somehow explain away your blackness. To segregate your latinidad from theirs, because after all, the afro they can see, ¿no?, the americano can be assumed, and your Hispanic surname should be enough to tell your lineage, if that is important. Why, you’ll ask, can’t you be a writer and a scholar in the same way they are? Pero, ese, if you can’t recognize ellos no tienen dos dedos de frente, your mamá did not raise you right.
On the same trip, you will be in casual conversation in Spanish with other Latinos—what to eat, where to shop, what movies you should see, what book to read next—at the end of which someone will ask, Where did you learn to speak such good Spanish?
Pero, it is a series of events and a question that will confuse you until you get back to your hotel room, where you will realize it is not the black/white binary Baldwin is talking about, but the anxiety of blackness. Nonetheless, in these circles, get used to the floating terms Latino
and Hispanic.
Because even though these same scholars will talk about the imperfections of using Hispanic
—defining it as a marker of linguistic or colonialist historical origins rather than race—they are as quick as the federal government to categorize, introduce, and regard you as black Hispanic.
You will meet other black Latinos who carefully differentiate and segregate themselves from African Americans. You’ll know them because they are the ones who will only speak to you in Spanish and will not look or speak to the African Americans in the room. The same way other Latinos speak of los otras
to mean white people,
los otras
between Afro Latinos is code for African Americans.
At first it is a difficult concept to understand, but it should be implicit if you were raised in an Afro Latino household or have the privilege of watching Afro Latino mothers attempt to scold away laziness, provocative behavior or dress, and slovenliness by suggesting la vida como los otras
is far less desirable and therefore unacceptable.
Do you want to end up como los otras?
is thrown into the air like an incantation—set out like a vela—meant to ward off poverty, ignorance, incarceration, unwanted pregnancy, drug abuse, and—possibly the most important—misidentification as non-Latino. Por si las moscas, jefe, see it long and often enough and you will find yourself quoting from the same Baldwin essay that illuminated US blackness for you: You know, it’s not the world that was my oppressor, because what the world does to you, if the world does it to you long enough and effectively enough, you begin to do to yourself.
Entonces, it is when you are looking directly at a face and a body that looks so much like yours it could be your brother’s that you are told what it is you have inherited. Rarely, when he asks you where you are from, is it not presented at the level of a challenge. It is a question about what you got that he didn’t, what is more available to you and less available to him. Chico, he is checking your tongue—your background, your cultural heritage—because if it is not as black as his, he is looking for an opportunity to remind you that everything else about you is, as if you didn’t know.
Concede a body suspended in a space, pedestalized and policed for the suspicions it generates independent of itself. Imagine a space in which suspicions
are only mediated by innocence.
Pero, the difference between the two—suspect
and innocent
—is marginal at best in the ways in which they need each other to exist, and the mediation between the two is enacted on the body without ever engaging it. Therefore, the possible innocence of any black male infant is floated as suspect of what it might grow into. Por cierto, as the boy grows, it is a body that will be more likely than others to be asked if it knows anything about missing wallets, televisions, petty cash, and cars; more likely than others, it will be asked where to buy reefer even if it doesn’t smoke; more likely than others, it will be expected to know where to procure a prostitute.
Claro, in fact, it is a body more often than not associated with most notions of criminality, unless of course the offense could cause the country to change its political direction, bring a Fortune 500 company to its knees, or otherwise be defined as a white-collar
offense. Toss all caution to the wind and contemplate a country in which black male bodies only constitute approximately 6.8 percent of the total population, yet nearly 40.1 percent of the prison population, and according to the US Criminal Justice System, one in every fifteen men and one in every thirty-six Hispanic
men are incarcerated in comparison to one in every one hundred and six white men. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, one in three black men can expect to go to prison in their lifetimes. Not terribly dissimilar to Cuba, the United States you will find is a country that can attribute—but doesn’t—its entrance into modernity on the backs of slave labor, though at the same time it is a country in which more black men are incarcerated than were slaves. Yet their violence, their vitriol, their anxiety, their fear, and their anger are more often described when linked with their criminality—their rebellion and distrust and tears—as being generated from what will be named in the media as senseless.
As with US slave heritage, hip-hop music, poverty, welfare, poor education, float yourself over the Bay of Biscayne and senseless
too becomes part of the lack of agency that is assumed of your body until you prove otherwise.
Even with a body that looks like yours in the White House, you will meet other men who share bodies similar to both his and yours who still speak of the man.
Y, cuídate ese, you will need to learn that it means white,
you will need to know that it is the stealth signifier of your oppressor as well as your ignorance. Because the same brothers who will tell you that you are being brought down,
kept down,
kept in your place by the man
will ask you if you think you are better
or somehow more privileged than they are because your tongue does not operate the same way theirs do. They are the ones, not the man,
who will tell you that you are not black enough when you reveal your mamá did not put the same dishes on her dinner table as theirs, or your musical tastes fall into categories they don’t recognize. They are the closest monitors and police of your body, and they will tell you You need to choose
whether you are black or Latino as if you could separate the two. They will school you on what the man
says, tell you what it means, warn you about being hauled into jail just for walking down the street, chained to a truck and dragged down a dirt road in the South, and derided and infantilized for the man’s
entertainment when you work alongside him even if you are his supervisor. And they will teach you the ways of the man
the same way they teach their way to their sons and nephews—the way they learned it—by using the same language they heard from their fathers and their fathers’ fathers, who learned it from the man.
Unlike actresses like Melissa De Sousa, Lauren Vélez, Esperanza Spalding, Zoe Saldana, or Rosario Dawson, por ejemplo, because, as a man, you will be sexualized differently, you too will regard them as beautiful—without regard for their accomplishments—just for existing in the world, and without needing to recognize the line that marks that which is perceived as domitable from the indomitable. And unlike the scores of white male celebrities of negligible talent, an accomplishment as great as consistently hitting from the three-point mark in the NBA will be required of you before you too can be listed as one of People magazine’s Most Beautiful. And the moment you begin to question why the value placed on the performances of black male bodies is lower than those placed on black females, remember, Jessye Norman has sung the roles of Aida, Alceste, and Ariadne on the stage of the Metropolitan Opera Theater in New York; in the 1990s, Kathleen Battle gave highly critically acclaimed performances of Mozart, Handel, and Donizetti on the same stage; however, ese, you are moving to a country in which, on the same stage, the title role of Verdi’s Othello has a tradition of being sung by tenors in blackface. Assume, in this country, that the combination of your body and your voice, even when you are silent, arouses suspicion. And, black as you are, you bring no translatable experience with you that explains the possibilities of something different to the man
or those who reify what the man
says. There is no cognate, no comprehendible similar experience here where you will be told you can’t do something new because it has never been done before, and that misremembering seems to be the same as disremembering.
It is similar to negro, which you only know to mean love in the Caribbean, never quite finding a place here without an explanation. Here, all that is heard when you say it is what your body was called before it was black,
which it was called before it was called African American.
The difference, mi negro, between our negro and their negro is the line of demarcation between love and hate, affection and derision, the past and the present. It’s black and white.
Oye, negrito, you will need to learn nigger in all its valences, acclimatize yourself to be prepared to know when it is calling you to fight, fuck, or just go out and play pool and get drunk. Pero, without a lifetime of hearing it—like American football will seem to you—understanding it or getting a clear explanation of what it is may be as illusory and abstract as attempting to describe to a yanqui who is trying to learn Spanish the differences between por y para.
Unless you choose to settle outside Miami or parts of Manhattan, the majority of your experiences with your native language will be had with non-Cubans. The need to have some part of yourself that is never expressed or never can be expressed, something that you will never find the words for in English, will outweigh your cultural and political differences, and the outcome is a coalition politic that is helpful in the event that you need to lobby a congressman or a cable company to consider Spanish to be as important to their overall success as English. If you live in an area where winters are unimaginably cold—por ejemplo, Chicago or Ithaca, New York—you will take turns banding together in one of your homes; you will crank the heat up until you all can pretend it’s a balmy afternoon and share each other’s music, cook flautas y tortas y tortillas of your own countries and compare them; you will watch boxing and futból, and stand up at each other’s weddings and become the godparents of each other’s children; you’ll sing the songs and tell the stories that have always seemed part of your life, and you will do it all in a language that is neither Cuban nor, for that matter, Spanish. It is something that sounds more like what you hear on Telemundo or Univision, and will not make a whole lot of sense to you at first—particularly if you have an argentino or two in your group—but eventually it will start to sound like home.
If you live in California around chicanos, you will find you will start to sound like a chicano, and their social concerns will become yours. Move to San Juan de Puerto Rico or Lorraine, Ohio, and the same will happen. It all changes—nearly every sound that comes out of your mouth will. Abre la boca, and need to change in a way that you are not quite prepared for because at no time when traveling from Oriente to Pinar del Río with your major amigo would you say, Necesitamos parking,
nor would you need to have a friend who understood both what you meant and why you were saying it that way. And at no time in English could you translate me emocionan
for someone who will also never understand, no matter which language you’re speaking, why you will always have a corazón instead of a heart.
Live here long and you will understand it so well that you will be leaving friends at a bar late one night and you will find yourself saying, Ya, me voy home,
simply because there is no expedient way of saying it in Spanish. Or, possibly, because it has become a separate place from where you started. Open your mouth and, sometime afterward, you will be asked, So, where is home?
And you’ll find you hesitate, and what sticks in your throat is no longer limited to English. And you will find that it is not just a predilection discrete to yanquis.
Go back to La Habana o Santiago o Mala Noche o Holgúin or wherever you set sail from, mi negro, and you will find things may have changed—buildings may have come down, the Swiss may have erected a tourist resort, a palma may have grown through the roof of what your mother may have told you was the grandest house she could imagine when she was a girl—but the air will feel the same. Smell the same. You will remember a way of walking and holding yourself that until you are back on the island you have reserved for the island. You will speak to everyone in a normal voice, without ever thinking to remove its natural basso as you open up your face and raise your eyebrows because you found that it calms white girls who are waiting on you in restaurants and grocery lines in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and Middlebury, Vermont. And you will find yourself in the middle of a conversation with a man who looks so much like you, with whom you have felt so comfortable you will have begun to call him primo or tío. He’ll say something like, ¿Qué es lo que te gusta major, Tupac o Biggie?
Just say, Tupac es depinga, because his next question is to ask you where you are from. If you tell him here,
he’ll tell you, No … it’s close,
meaning your Spanish, but it’s not from here.
Oye, negro, you’ll tell yourself that it’s your shoes, that the Nikes that you hadn’t thought anything about had given you away. Or the Levi’s you wore or your haircut. But if it is a legal trip—one in which you cross back through US Customs—you will recognize the same face you met at José Martí Airport as you and others who looked like you were ushered through Special Customs designated for those who left the island. It is a scan that moves over you head to toe before it meets you in the eye and, coño, waits for your narrative.
Three Berlin Essays
Aleš Šteger
—Translated from Slovenian by Brian Henry
CRACK BERLIN
When someone’s presence on the street becomes imperceptible as the presence of the street becomes imperceptible in this person. Mommsenstraße, Kastanienallee, Akazienstraße have moved to the shady side, to the side of obvious everyday life, going from admiration of exceptional things to inventory. Within the least expected lurks alienation, which demonstrates that it is only for the illusion of tradition, the illusion, that keeps my attention on a short leash. Sometimes it is enough that some bored dog barks. Midflinch I see at the intersection an excursion bus. A tourist guide with microphone in hand eagerly explains. I cannot hear the words, but I have a feeling I know everything she relates. Facing forward alongside the driver, with a gaze firmly directed through the front pane. This guide is me. Since I left the apartment, this continuous speech is performed in me. I speak and speak, without a dictionary and a map, aimlessly loafing. Only when the bus moves forward do I notice that it’s empty, except for the driver and guide in the bus there is no one the relating would be intended for, no one in this city of three and a half million who would hear what I speak and speak, only my footsteps and my monologue. To be discovered by the feeling of home in some foreign city? I lie in an empty room. Only one door, one window, one bed, me lying, naked walls, the space around me. Four meters above me the ceiling, on it a map of cracks, leafing through paint. As if names would fall off the streets, which I walked during the day, bringing me a child’s fear before the unknown. The slow sliding of white vowels in the light, which is falling through the window. The slow sliding of me, who is falling through the crack in the ceiling, through the crack with the name Berlin. But I am not hit, am not broken, not this time, as the alcohol and pills and depression trembled the hands of Ingeborg Bachmann, here somewhere, in 1963. Slightly dazed but safe I slip through the crack of my monologues, words turn in me like the heads of newborns sleeping in an unknown place. In the dark hallway I grope for a light switch. As if seized by my hand itself, I am guided over the house’s creaky steps to the large door to the study. I turn on a light and translate: Daß es gestern schlimmer war als es heute ist,* That it was worse yesterday than it is today, wieder kein Anschluß, die Anschlüsse sind da, again no connection, the connections are here, aber es wird nicht angeschlossen, but no one connected. Berlin is a monster. Berlin is the most beautiful city in the world. Both sentences are valid and at the same time are not valid. Like spoiled children they lean on me and demand, demand. I am still a tourist guide who talks and talks to an empty bus. But with weeks, with months of strolling around Mommsenstraße, around Kastanienallee, around Akazienstraße beside a babbling guide I also became this void in the bus, this hollow, unknown law surrendered to stillness, by which words spread without leaving some trace. Domestication? Home? In der Mauerritze habe ich, In a moment of terror, in der Schrecksekunde, in the crack in the wall, einen schwarzen Käfer gesehen, I saw a black beetle, der stellt sich tot, pretending it was dead, Ich möchte sprechen mit ihn, I want to speak with him, aus diesem feinen Haus ihm den Ausweg, show him the way out of this fine, zeigen, ihm einen Ausweg zeigen, house, show him out, oder ihn gleich zertreten, or just trample him on the spot, Ich lerne von ihm, ich stelle, I am learning from him, I pretend, mich tot, in diese Ritze Berlin fallen, that I am dead, am falling into this crack Berlin, verlaufen auf diesem Planeten, am lost on this planet. Translating words, I carry them from German into Slovenian, break them, spin them, just like I spin the map of Berlin, it turns me, searches me, moves me from place to place. The words of someone who died the year when I was born. Words of despair and loss in some city, which has the same name as the city in which I am now alone. Words of despair and loss, which could also be mine, which could be from everyone. In the middle of the night I lie down in them, in these words, and next to my whispering of Slovenian verses in these words lies also a quiet music. It penetrates from the floor above, now I recognize it, light as May air, it is The Girl from Ipanema
who in the middle of the night penetrates through the crack Berlin, through the terrible, through the loveliest crack Berlin.
*NOTE. The German phrases are from poems by Ingeborg Bachmann. The English translations that follow are translated from the Slovenian, not the original German.
DRAGONS AND TRANSVESTITES
Above the entrance it says RUSSIAN BOOKS, but inside in the half light a leg immediately stumbles against Chinese pots, packages of Taiwanese plastic pistols, and heaps of socks made in India. Grab what you want, it reminds everyone who wanders into this place, so that some of the Slavic brothers from the taiga receive very specific socialization, in which a child places his melancholic head in the lap of Mother Rossi, while small sickles and hammers, which push against her apron, cause chronic allergies. Slovenians don’t really understand Polish, Czech, or Baltic ressentiment for a Slavic Gulliver. We were not close enough to hate. Thus, with unnecessary justification I pay for Russian vodka in a Finnish bottle, and while leaving the caravan get caught in the strings of a sailing dragon, which hangs from the ceiling, as if I were caught in the trap of national stereotypes. Already the display window of the neighboring sex shop corrects the design of the labyrinth in which the thought trudges. A plastic doll of a man dressed in women’s underwear. Who is a Slav, who German? Berlin is the city of national transvestism. With Prussian fastidiousness the Russian arranges his own boutique with select haute couture, the German grows a beard like some Orthodox priest and goes on foot to Moscow. Isn’t the most awful notion of death death by drowning? And isn’t language teaching us that the bodies of two during lovemaking are decanted? If water is a metaphor for annihilation and love, then Berlin is bound to its mirror image by the Marzahn well, discovered at the site of the first Berlin settlements. It is inconspicuously located in the dusty ground floor of the Märkisches Museum by the Chinese embassy. The yawn of a guard and the solitude of a visitor, who first followed his every step, as if the guest wanted to demonstrate in vivo the methods of the East German secret police Stasi. The Slavs who settled this area placed the well on the remains of a German well. The stones are loaded and broken, dilapidated wood replaces the arm of now one, now another tribe. Only water in the well remains, water, which turns Berlin into a city of transformations and changed identities. Water, for he who comes to Berlin for the first time, is the greatest surprise and revelation. Berlin floats on rivers and lakes, though never boastfully, rather timid. Unlike the swaggering water of Venice, St. Petersburg, Amster-dam, this city isn’t standing on its toes, so that it’s leaning over its extreme edge to better see Narcissus’s face. History, the movements of nations, forced relocation, today’s newcomers, tomorrow’s losers, and yesterday’s winners have shattered the mirror of this city. Only water, in which a fractured face looks, now and again pours together shattered pieces, but not in the majesty of harbors, fountains, and central promenades, rather in the lake, bordered by willows and lindens, ponds, beside which children play, banks of dreamy rivers with stalls with drinks and deck chairs arranged on the packed sand. Berlin has changed. From a man it became a woman, from a woman a man. From the capital of the world, from the Nazi capital Germania it became a group of suburbs, full of residents who are self-ironic and skeptical toward definitions of identity. Generation P is in Berlin a generation who still has a P in the word Prussia. Let the paws of plastic bears in Berlin amble up and down, the name of the national capital of transvestites comes from behind the Urals.
NEXT, PLEASE
Someone who sits in the first S-Bahn car, which runs west, will see at the Tiergarten station the mighty six-lane June 17 Road, how it slices up the city as if on command and vanishes beneath his knees. The widest road of Berlin, once Allee nach Berlin, after 1933 the east-west axis of the Reich’s capital. June 17 was attributed suppressed demonstrations by residents of the capital of the German Democratic Republic against their government in 1953. The avenue is bordered by imposing cast-iron lanterns. This is all that remains in Berlin of Albert Speer, the Führer’s architect and engineer of the conversion of Berlin to the capital of Germania. The marble that once covered Hitler’s government palace designed by Speer now clothes the imposing monument of wings of Soviet victory in Treptow and columns of memorials to Soviet honor in Tiergarten, but the street lights apparently do not bother anyone. A bird’s-eye view of the road’s axis is like a length of taut elastic around a child’s legs, jumping wide-eyed over it in a game of rubber twist. I had just jumped, but stumbled at the next figures, in front of the memorial to murdered Jews. The double brick trail in the asphalt, a pair of student’s fingers raised during history class in a question mark, climbs from the river, rises by the stairs next to the Reichstag, and, by the inconceivable logic of liberation and zigzagging negotiations in the middle of the road, jumps onto the sidewalk. As if they hadn’t torn down the wall, but only sunk it into the ground. For some time I stood in western Europe, then my feet pushed simultaneously from the ground, as if jumping over more than four decades, in lingering waves from the past and attentiveness and play. I jumped over the trace of the Berlin Wall on the east, like some Peter Schlemihl who