In our Fall 2022 issue, we are presenting work ranging across thirty-two countries and nineteen languages, moving and shifting the demarcations of nation and language with the fluidity and imaginative capacities of language. Here, blog editor Xiao Yue Shan presents a roadmap through some of the most moving, exciting content encased within this latest release, including a text from our feature on Armenian literature, an essay on the “job” of writing from Catalan writer Montserrat Roig, and a Indonesian fiction of human distances—colonial, geographical, and carnal.
In every country there is a river, along the banks of every river there are people, and within the minds of each person there persists a single heartbeat of a mind that begins, as they situate themselves along the river, to pulse with that river’s inimitable current, to infiltrate that moment of flow with a different rhythm, that which they have carried with them and now relieve into the waters, and the water does what it does—it merges. In Aram Pachyan’s fluid, lyrical excerpt from P/F, translated sensitively from the Armenian by Nazareth Seferian, this instance of communion is fortified with the author’s masterful command of oratory and soliloquial language, iterating a return to faith “. . . like the prodigal son, sitting on your rib seeing my salvation in your murky waters, my peace in your obscurity, the lymph of life still gurgling in your grime.” The excerpt demonstrates not only the immense living intelligence of inhuman bodies, but also their pivotal and profound point of contact with human emotion—grief, loneliness, resolution, and hope. P/F is described as a text that swims in memory, and even in this brief extract we are afforded a wide-ranging glimpse at memory’s infinitely mutable potentials, of the seeds of experience which exponentiate into monuments of time, equally deceptive as it is formative, equally polluted as it is seeking of purity, and ever-changing even as it attempts to convince us of its sameness. In long, ranging lines melding concrete situation with poetic abstractions, Pachyan begins to tells us of this river:
This is not the Euphrates, nor the Tigris; not the Seine, the Thames, the Danube, nor the Po. The Getar has no bloodline in common with the daughter of the ocean, the Styx that flows in the land of Hades. The gods have not taken any oaths on its waters. There are no emphatic proverbs about it, no books or odes. It is left out of all possible discussions, it is off the planet’s axis.
And still it flows, merging what is cast in with what is hidden in its depths, and it is this movement that reminds us of the eternal sanctuary, in cities and villages alike, where one can stand and watch one thing become another, to watch time become memory and memory urge back to feed once again into time, and find in this merging some solace.
How often human beings have attempted to learn this seamlessness from water; how often we have failed. In “The Tale of Mukaburung,” Laksmi Pamuntjak’s tale of land, desire, and nativity, a group of Javanese exiles arrive on Buru, and are met with the traditions and wisdoms of the local indigenes. Along Annie Tucker’s elegant translation from the Indonesian, what follows this collision of ways and worlds are the conflicts of puzzlement, of strangeness, of ardor and carnality. Between uncertain distances—the vast ones of land, yes, but also those insurmountable ones that grow even when two bodies are pressed against one another—a Buru woman and a Javanese workman begin an almost wordless affair, incarnated in sublime moments of sensuality:
. . . the rhythm, like a slowing heartbeat: lift, dip, lift, dip, while waiting for his last breath. He felt as if he was being rocked between life and death, as if he was floating in the ocean, far in the distance; from there, it was as if he could see the flickering lights on the terrace of his parents’ house on the beach, the drops of sweat on the nape of his mother’s neck shining as she recited her prayers.
But the story of Mukaburung—the woman who initiates this “ritual,” and whose husband will come to exact an unsparing vengeance against her—is not one of love, but of force, and the brutalities that difference encourages us to take against one another. At the base of this vivid and seemingly timeless story is the basis of what unites, which more often than common understanding is common enmity, and how exile is not simply a physical condition but an enduring psychological warfare, perpetrated amidst the closest of intimacies, the most minute of differences.
In this issue’s Brave New World Literature feature, Catalan writer Montserrat Roig’s “From Me to Us” is a sonorous dissection of the writer’s perpetual adolescence: “solitary and narcissistic, and every once in a while, they say something painful but true.” The egoism and all-consuming conviction of feelings, most potent in teenagerhood, is amongst what fuels literature and entitles emotion to language, but in this essay, translated into a wondrously melodious English by Eva Dunsky, Roig laments the prestige given to what is perceived as the writer’s inextricable romance with annihilation and suffering: “These disheveled romantics rely on feeling offended and humiliated to write; they forget that writing is a job like any other, and to think otherwise is to denigrate the work. They believe themselves inspired by an abusive divine conscience.” To assume that the power of literature must be catalysed by a dramatic, immense terror undermines what is profound and fecund in the daily matters of life, the terrors and tragedies and wonders of a more discrete, but equally worldly reverberation. It is a vital reminder that though what happens in the physical world may be comparable and measurable, what occurs in the spiritual and in the sphere of intelligence is not. The bold overcome of adolescence may be frivolous or temporary, but immense as they are happening.
In this, the writer ends on a question that subverts expectation and presupposed moralities of writing, echoing the cogent urgency of Hélène Cixous. Instead of peeling away all the societal infrastructure and duties of the creative act, in some attempt to get at the oblique centre of its impetus—the question is not why one writes but simply, why not?
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