Not sure where to start with our tremendous fiftieth issue? Our blog editors talk their favourites.
In its overarching theme of “Coexistence,” Asymptote’s monumental 50th issue draws together the quiet, the forgotten, and the unseen, allowing us to inhabit worlds that are not our own. From the bright unease of Elena Garro’s “The Week of Colors” (tr. Christine Legros), to the serene, dynamic stanzas of Eva Ribich’s Along the Border (tr. Julian Anderson), to the dedicated love in Almayrah A. Tiburon’s “Keyboard and Breastfeed” (tr. Bernard Capinpin), Asymptote’s Winter 2024 Issue examines the relationships we have with each other, with the world, and with ourselves.
Dark and unflinching, Maria Grazia Calandrone’s Your Little Matter delves into the ambiguous history of the author’s mother Lucia, her parents’ joint suicide in Rome, and all that was left behind. Central to the piece are physical mementos—two old photographs of Lucia, a list of items left in a suitcase, clippings from a newspaper—from which Calandrone pieces together the story of her parents’ lives, revealing aspects of a woman her daughter barely knew. Alongside the photos come memories passed down and memories created, as Calandrone pieces together the life of a young woman who was nearly forgotten.
Translated by Antonella Lettieri, Your Little Matter is a work of empathy—of putting on a parent’s shoes, of imagining the pain and the love of the life that led to yours. The lives of our parents are distant, disconnected from our own. Even for those who knew their parents, the question of who they were before we existed can be haunting. What did you lose when you had me? What did you gain? It can be a self-centered venture, as relationships with parents often are, and Your Little Matter simultaneously veers away from and embraces this selfishness. Who were you? Why did you have to leave? I want to remember you; I want you to be remembered. Calandrone’s condemnation of the society that killed her parents; the somber moments spent amidst photographs, imagining; the love she holds for someone who can only be known retroactively—these elements draw you into Lucia’s life, her story, unforgettable.
Further into the hidden is Ayako Satō’s depiction of Japan’s countryside in excerpts from The Unseen Kyoto, in translation by Corey Wakeling, Hiromitsu Koiso, and Satō herself. A monumental figure in the scene of modern, genre-blending Japanese poetry, Satō draws heavily on the mundane details one’s eyes might glaze over. The city of Kyoto, both overseas and at home, is famous as a cultural center, the place of some of Japan’s most famous sites, complete with hordes of foreign tourists and students on school trips. The streets are narrow and trafficked, with vendors selling culture lining the historic streets. This is the Kyoto we see. Satō, however, reminds us of the Kyoto—a prefecture spanning far more than the famed city—we have forgotten.
The Japanese collection is titled どこでもない都—in a less poetic and less apt translation, the capital that is nowhere. Kyoto was the capital of Japan for over one thousand years, the home of the Emperor, and the center of the country’s growth. It wasn’t until the late 1800s that the capital shifted to Edo, now Tokyo. Within the country’s long history, in this old capital, are lifetimes upon lifetimes of people who call Kyoto home, from students trudging to school, to the elderly perpetually bent over from a lifetime of rice farming and garden upkeep. Carved by rivers of rivers, the unseen capital is quiet and beautiful in its mundanity, and Satō’s pensive recollections of her autumn in Kyoto—a creaking maple tree, a wind turning cold, slime coating a stream—are the work of someone whose eyes are open.
The tagline of this issue is “Me | You | Us.” We live in a world divided, from each other and from ourselves. The tunnel-vision of social media, the death of journalism, the genocide of Palestinians, the despair—it has become difficult to find something we can understand within ourselves, let alone our surroundings, or our fellow people. Difficult, yet possible. With the theme of coexistence, Asymptote’s 50th issue asks the reader to take in our shared world, to experience both its pain and its beauty, and from the lives of others, to find something in ourselves.
—Bella Creel
We were made to live in a crowded world. In David Abram’s The Spell of the Sensuous, the author posits that every single physical tool by which human beings use to understand and interpret—from eyes to nostrils—is a method of forming relationships, to navigate one’s surroundings and create connections (lasting or not) with the bodies (living or not) that exist alongside us. To be born is to immediately enter into this complex interchange of subconscious communiqués and constant reciprocities, because everything that reaches our senses is turned into a message, and every action we make is also a response. Mutuality is what constitute our minds, our experiences; we are human, he says, “only in contact”.
This fear of the familiar might be why Elena Garro’s haunting, exquisite short story, “The Week of Colors”, translated with poetic sensitivity by Christine Legros, seemed especially powerful to me in this issue. From the very first line, Garro’s insistence on reconstruction and defamiliarization is apparent: “Don Flor hit Sunday until it bled, and Friday also came out bruised in the beating.” She goes on to unfurl a vividly synaesthetic, utterly unpredictable line-up of our tired calendar, disregarding both the order and function of nomenclature, and casting time in its true role of a wily and slippery thing—something that will never quite fit into the boxes we’ve created for it. Though the illusory waymaking of two little girls, Eva and Leli, the reader is thrown into a mystical world where days are fragmented, or have colour and shape, or cast some sort of on the people who enter them, or last much longer than they’re supposed to:
Tuesdays were skinny and transparent. If they died on a Tuesday, they would see the other days through tissue-paper walls: the days ahead and the days behind. If they died on a Thursday, they would stay stuck in a golden disk spinning like the horses on a merry-go-round and would see the days from afar.
The sinister tone that Garro masterfully braids into the lyricism is a way of entering into the reality that backgrounds the fantasy. When even the days begin shifting and changing on you, how are you meant to function inside them? By undermining the integrity of our day-to-day infrastructure, the story reveals the easy malleability of modern life: how power, imagination, and interaction all ripple across the tenets of “fact”. In “The Week of Colors”, Don Flor keeps the days in rooms and, for a certain price, he’ll let the asker “show them the disorder of the days and the disorder of man.” It is a world where the days we dread are punished, beaten so that they’re weak when we face them. It is a world where the week is at the helm of someone else’s will.
This issue’s theme of “coexistence” is as vital as it has always been, but feels particularly contemporary and difficult when one considers how one’s participation in the world is gradually shifting from one of exchange to seclusion. We live in spaces of our own making, engage with information that is curated for us, and surround ourselves with like-minded thinkers. All of this can make for a comfortable, even encouraging life—but one that is separate from the world—and ultimately, hostile to it. In this experientially uniform vista, the relationships that we form require less focus, less curiosity, and less active engagement. We are encouraged avoid difference in the name of avoiding conflict, and in doing so we lose too much of the joy and complexity that our world has to offer. Garro’s piece is only one in this astounding, various issue that offers us a chance to rethink the quotidian, reminding us of the remarkable, variable ways the world presents itself to us, and our extraordinary ability to reach back. A connection.
—Xiao Yue Shan
*****
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