In this week’s Translation Tuesday, two immigrants bare the wounds of their respective traumas in this excerpt from Elvira Mujčić’s novel On How to Be a Good Immigrant. Our narrator, a Bosnian immigrant haunted by the atrocities that robbed her of her family and her home, finds kinship with an immigrant from Mali, who opens up about the systemic racism he endures in Italy. Colarossi’s superb translation captures the subtleties of Mujčić’s prose: the uncomfortable silences, the hesitant divulgences, and the quiet pain that follows when the narrator’s emotional walls break down. A meditation on the myriad ways immigrants face trauma and are expected to appease Western stereotypes.
Chapter X
“Can you light a fire wherever you like in Italy?” asked Mele, a friend of my brother’s whom I had met the last time I was in Bosnia.
“What do you mean?” I asked surprised by the sudden turn the conversation had taken from the surreal dissertation on the non-existence of God of just a few minutes ago.
“I mean: can a man light a fire wherever he likes and cook lamb on a spit?”
“No, you can’t.”
“Well, life isn’t worth living in a country like that!”
Why did everything have to take a folkloristic hue, I wondered, annoyed and uncomfortable, like some sort of Austro-Hungarian elementary teacher sitting on an Oriental futon. I was going to meet Ismail when I remembered the incident. It was probably because of our last discussion and the African proverb with which we had greeted each other: “When you don’t know where you’re headed, remember where you came from.” You should have instructions on how to be a good immigrant when you go back to your homeland, I thought. And suddenly I realized that the longing I had felt for tens of years was gone, replaced with a renewed curiosity for that country’s present. But I only loved it if it was set in the past, because it couldn’t harm me from that distant place. My curiosity was not, however, light and untroubled: it was often laden with overwhelming sorrow and paralyzing fear. It was a visceral bond I could do absolutely nothing about, an incessant alternating of thoughts that went from the conviction that I had left something there that I absolutely needed to find, and the realization that what I was looking for was made of the same substance as fog.
I got off the tram and saw Ismail standing on the other side of the road. He was just about to cross. He noticed me too, and nodded, smiling fleetingly. He stopped to wait for me. It was a great demonstration of affection, I thought as I got closer. We shook hands, as always, standing there in embarrassment and in silence after that formal and somewhat cold exchange. And yet we couldn’t seem to progress to a warmer greeting. During our talks we shared intimate details of our past, but we continued to greet each other as if we were strangers. We walked silently towards our usual wall; and we sat down as if we had agreed that it was the only place our exchange could take place. I told him the anecdote about Mele, about the fire and the lamb on the spit. He laughed and said that at the start of his life in Italy he used to have similar thoughts, but that with the passing of time they had become less frequent. He had changed so much that at the Integration Center they made fun of him, saying he had become a Swiss-African: prompt and efficient. When he arrived in Italy, he did not think the Western concept of time was a problem. Like all Africans, he never thought about wasting time: this concept made no sense to him. This was one of the reasons the Reception Committee got annoyed; they wanted the details of the journey to respect Western canons of time and space, of how much space was travelled in what amount of time. If it was less than standard, they would ask: Why? If it was more than standard, they would ask: Why?
They were unnerved when they listened to their accounts, and never took into consideration the fact that other people had other ways of telling a story, other criteria. No, they tried to put lives that were packed with incidents, intervals, and then other incidents into perfect order. Chaotic lives. All the chaos that Ismail carried inside him had made him sick, and so he thought that maybe he should put his story in order, follow a thread, a line of reasoning, like people did here, and be prepared. Maybe that’s when he started thinking about time, about establishing, cutting, and re-cutting pieces of his life as if it were a solid object, as if it were something you could hold in your hands. And it was an incredibly strange thought, something he had never had before, because he came from a land where the main occupation was waiting, and in that wait you walked, you moved together with hordes of humanity, as if you were one body, and that may very well have been the case. He soon realized, however, that waiting here, in the situation he was in, meant dying in the Center. That’s why he encouraged new asylum seekers on: he did it for educational purposes, to teach them something he had had to learn the hard way.
“So you already had instructions on how to be a good immigrant!”
“Yes, maybe, but I hoped you could give me better ones.”
“Well, unfortunately . . .”
“So, you’re saying I have to accept the fact that I can’t learn anything more?”
“It depends on what you mean by more.”
“Freedom . . . the freedom to be what we are.”
“Oh, yes, but that’s something altogether different. We’re talking about getting you a permit.”
“So, you think that’s all we’re talking about?”
“Maybe I wasn’t being clear. What I meant was that these instructions only work when we’re talking about getting your papers to stay. They don’t work for your life . . . I mean, of course we’re talking about a lot more . . .”
Ismail had started to stare at a spot between his feet. He had once again distanced himself from the outside world and was listening to an interior dialogue. A secret urgency was making his face muscles twitch, and I wondered if he would ever tell me about it, if he would ever trust me again. Our mutual trust fluctuated constantly: it was distressing how it could become stronger, or weaker. It was unstable, and we were always on the brink of either losing it, or consolidating it. He roused suddenly, as if something had stung him.
“I slept at Maurizio’s house a couple of days ago, and he told me about the war in Bosnia and in your city.”
I nodded, looked away, fixing my eyes on a spot on the ground in front of me with the force of someone who is driving a nail into a wall and hoping it will hold. I could feel that Ismail, too, was staring at a spot on the ground again, and all of a sudden I burst out laughing. He looked at me, confused. He was probably asking himself why I thought what he said was so funny; or maybe he was just shocked by my inappropriate reaction.
“Sorry,” I said pulling myself together.
“Maurizio told me that people from Bosnia can be funny,” he replied calmly, but his face still showed signs of alarm.
“Well, in truth, it was the scene that I found funny, not the war. I didn’t expect you to mention Srebrenica, and it caught me off guard. It scared me, and I automatically tried to avoid the conversation. So I imagined myself observing us from the outside: an ex-refugee and an asylum seeker sitting dazed in a park.”
“I’m sorry.”
My imaginary scene did not make him laugh.
“No, no, it just lasts a second. It’s a sort of automatic reaction. I feel much better now. We can talk.”
“I didn’t want to upset you. I thought it was something in your distant past.”
“Yes, on the one hand it’s in the past, and on the other it isn’t. Just mentioning it can throw me into a state of terror. The muscles in my arms and legs contract. It doesn’t last long, but that’s how it is.”
“Do you think it will always be like that?”
“Yes. It’s the very best that I have been able to achieve.”
“Oh,” he sighed unhappily.
“Did you hope I was going to say that it would pass?”
He shrugged his shoulders, almost embarrassed by the question, and added: “It’s sad.”
“No, I wouldn’t say sad, it’s something else altogether. Yes, perhaps it’s sad too, but not just that.”
Ismail nodded as if to say he agreed with me, then he added: “You don’t like talking about it?”
“Well, let me think . . .”
I could have answered with a definite no. I didn’t like talking about it, but there had been a time, a period that had lasted a year or two, preceded by years of silence, in which what I felt was not pleasure but the need to talk about it. It, of course, also depended on whom I was speaking about it to, and the circumstances: I didn’t like being the witness of a genocide, and it irked me to be forever trapped in the role of the survivor of something that happened so many years earlier, a past that had scarred me, but that hadn’t killed me, leaving me with time for other, newer experiences. To defend myself I had memorized a quote by the writer Danilo Kiš: “You must remember this once and for all, young fellow, you can’t play the role of a victim all your life without becoming one in the end.”¹
“Well, in our instructions on how to be a good immigrant, the thing about letting others make you into an unsurprising caricature of pain and suffering is an important lesson to be learned,” I said.
“Do you know that the other day while I was waiting for Maurizio in front of his house—I was leaning on the wall of the building, just looking at my phone— a lady came up to me, really close up to me, with her face right in mine, and she shook her head. She said: ‘OK, I’ll give you a euro, but you kids are so young and strong, get yourselves a job!’ And she insisted I take a euro from her. I tried to explain that I was waiting for a friend, that I wasn’t begging. It took a while for it to sink in: she just would not accept it.”
“You destabilized her . . . when have you ever seen a black man waiting for friend?!”
“I’m going to say something that’s not so nice.”
“Go on . . .”
“I hate this thing about immigrants always having to be needy, or not having the right to answer back. We always have to pretend to be nice and good, and smile, and say thank you, brother, thank you, sister. In my opinion, it makes us look stupid or something. When I see my friends doing it, they look stupid to me. So, of course Italians think Africans don’t have profound or intelligent thoughts . . . And then there are times when we lose it, and just start yelling at everybody . . .”
It had started to rain. In a few minutes the sporadic drops had become a violent rainstorm, and we went to look for cover. We found the entrance to a building, stepped inside, and watched the wind’s fury.
“I saw some videos about your city. A lot of people disappeared. Those videos are scary. I couldn’t sleep afterwards. I didn’t know that’s how it went. I didn’t know anything about it. Have they found the bodies?” He said this all in one breath, as if to free himself of the words.
“Every year, on the anniversary, they have a burial service for the bodies that were found during the year,” I said with the neutrality of a reporter from Rai History.
“It must be terrible.”
“I don’t think so, you know? It would be worse if they didn’t. Didn’t have a burial, I mean.”
Ismail looked straight at me. His eyes were steady. He wasn’t pussyfooting. He was unwavering, direct.
“Did anyone die in your family?” he said finally, plucking up the courage.
“Yes,” I said and concentrated on a thread that was dangling from my shirt, trying to buy some time. For a moment I could feel a ripple of annoyance running under my skin, the same irritation I felt when I got an email inviting me to share something unutterable on a day of reflection on the atrocities of the past century.
I looked at Ismail and it was clear to me that this is not what he wanted. He had his hands in his pockets, and was standing with his shoulders hunched as if he were waiting to be punched in the stomach. His eyes were big and round, a roundness that seemed to reflect and return the desolation and beauty of worlds that I didn’t know and that I could see peeking from the corners of his eyes.
“My father and my uncle.”
A black crow lifted off the ground and onto a garbage bin. My breath caught in my throat, like when you race down a hill too quickly, but when I started breathing again, with it came a wave of emotion.
“And did you bury them?”
In my memory, a white, milky sky stretched over the Memorial, a white tombstone stood among thousands of others. The last time I saw him, my brother told me the Muslim tombstones were left to sink into the ground, to disappear completely in time, so they would leave no trace of what had come to pass. My uncle’s, we noticed, had already sunk a good number of centimeters.
“My uncle was. That’s how I know it’s better when they’re buried.”
Ismail was waiting for something, and I was asking myself if I could hold on until the rain stopped. So I racked my brains for something to say about immigration, anything that could take my mind from where we had come. He was looking at me the same way he would probably have looked at a chimp in Mali. He took a step in my direction, and with a timorous movement of his arm, patted my shoulder. It was enough to push my fragility over the edge, and I started to cry.
A couple with a stroller with a little girl inside, all three of them soaking wet, was charging across the street towards the entrance where we were standing; but as soon as they saw us there, a man and a woman, arms dangling at their sides, a crying woman and a black man, they stopped, confused. Should they just walk away like cowards? Should they ask the woman if everything was OK? Should they act like racists or be indifferent? Or do none of the above, and just take cover in the entranceway? We greeted each other with nods and tight smiles.
“I’m sorry,” said Ismail.
“Don’t worry about it, somebody had to cry. What the heck kind of story on immigration would it be if nobody cried?”
“And what’s more, it was the white woman who cried, not the black man. That can’t be right!” he said, and smiled softly, a softness he always kept at bay. It wasn’t pouring as hard anymore. Timid rays of sun were filtering through the mist. Against the light, the raindrops looked like millions of snowflakes. I was overcome with emotion again and I thought about flamingos: the first time I saw them fly through the sky in Cagliari there were about twenty of them. They had lifted off the salt pan, their pink bodies set against the evening light. They advanced slowly, the formation changing from time to time. It was a sort of natural choreography over the colorful city skyline. Seeing them standing in the pond, poised on one leg, they looked too big to fly, not suited for flight. I used to watch documentaries on flamingos with my father. For people like us, given our climate and latitude, they looked phantasmagoric; and as I child I had always dreamed of taking a trip to verify their existence.
That day in Cagliari, my encounter with those incredible birds made me think differently of my father and his disappearance: the incident belonged to us alone; it was intimate, removed from the socio-geopolitical situation. He wasn’t able to see the flamingos in the thirty-four years he had lived, and this brevity, this absence, the abnormality of being a daughter who is older than her father, the conclusiveness with which all his experiences had come to a halt, while mine continued still, the impossibility of establishing the where and when of his passing made it so that he was never actually in the past. He was present like a subtle longing is kept alive by an imaginary dialogue, and this made his death something intimate, an unanswered question which meant emotional summersaults and contortions, animated and heated explanations, and yet escaped me, unraveling in tens of veins of my life, impossible to condense into one story, because it was a part of infinite stories.
¹ Garden, Ashes, 1975; translation by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich
Translated from the Italian by Matilda Colarossi.
Elvira Mujčić is an Italo-Bosnian born in Serbia in 1980. She has lived in Bosnia, Croatia, and Italy. She has a degree in foreign languages. She has translated works by Slavenka Drakulić, Robert Perišić, and Vladimir Tasić into Italian. She edited the translation of the animated documentary Draw Not War (2014), and La periferia del nulla di Zijad Ibrahimović (Ventura Film, 2016). She has published numerous novels, including Al di là del Caos: Cosa rimane dopo Srebrenica (2007), E se Fuad avesse avuto la dinamite (2009), and La lingua di Ana (2012) with Infinito edizioni; and Dieci prugne ai fascisti (2016) with Elliot edizioni.
Matilda Colarossi is a translator, blogger, and teacher. Her translated books include Fiamma by Dana Neri, and Leonardo da Vinci, Fables and Legends (MutatuM Publishing, 2018). Her work can be found in Asymptote, Lunch Ticket, Ilanot Review, Sakura Review, and Poetry International Rotterdam; her translations of poems by Marta Lo Brano are forthcoming in AzonaL. She blogs at paralleltexts.blog.
*****