Dive into our latest issue through the eyes of our blog editors, who take a close reading of the pieces that most moved them. In confronting shame and invisibilization, tracking the recurrent tides of grief, rending the mysterious forces of music and literature into poetry, and reimagining the painful, final moments of a migrant’s journey—these translations offer us avenues into wonderment, connection, and understanding.
When I was young, I developed a compulsion to count my fingers, pinky to thumb and back again, to fifteen, whenever I found myself in a situation I didn’t understand, or when I felt ashamed or guilty. The repetitive, reliable action was my way of putting a cork in my anxiety, to stem the building pressure that threatened to well up, and reorient myself in the world around me. No one else I knew had the same need—at least, not that I could see—and realizing this put a box around the world, shut by lock and key, depriving me of any access. In Ornela Vorpsi’s Offworld, in translation from the Italian by Antonella Lettieri, the main character Tamar feels similarly severed from the rest of the world. Where I experienced it like a dam ready to burst, Tamar feels a “fissure,” as if from an earthquake, splitting her brain and setting her apart from other people; where I had a box, Tamar views the world through a window, from which she observes the comings and goings of her neighbors and their visitors. Tamar’s fissure is fueled by an inexplicable wanting, a sense of shame and lust that she cannot put into words: “I could not tell my mother nor anyone else what was happening because I did not know either. I was brutally suspended in fear, under its control.”
From her window, Tamar watches the many sons of her neighbor Maria, entranced by their indulgence and languid masculinity, their bodies cast in light and smoke reminiscent of a Caravaggio. A Virgin Mary watches over the boys’ room, holding a baby Jesus—a reminder that God is always watching, and a source of the religious paranoia that haunts Tamar throughout her life. The religious undertones to her shame are in part what prevent her from recognizing what it is that she wants, even though she knows she lusts for something:
I too, Tamar, felt that I desired something uncatchable, even if I could not give it a name. It took many shapes, my desire, I only sensed that it was sly, that it deceived me, slipping like an eel from between my fingers, from between my thighs.
The prevailing guilt and anxiety lead her offworld, a dissociative state from where she watches the actions of herself and others, observant and obsessive; this is the place she believes she belongs. “I, Tamar, would always be a spectator . . . We are born and everything is already decided, the roles are already cast,” she remarks. Cemented in her role, Tamar resigns herself to her spot beside the window, always looking through.
Of all the people she watches, Tamar is most enthralled by Maria’s son Dolfi, a young man whose role she perceives as beauty. Dolfi is barraged by hopeful lovers, women who wait outside of his door for a chance, it seems, to share the same air as him. Tamar is not immune to his beauty—far from it—but she makes a distinction between herself and the pitiful women standing in the street: “. . . we were similar despite a great difference—she was in love with Dolfi, I wasn’t, I loved looking at Dolfi.” Tamar’s disassociation, her offworldliness, prevents her from connecting the “desire . . . slipping from [her] thighs” to the way her eyes travel down Dolfi’s frame, lingering on his “glorious strip of white teeth [that] breaks you in half and makes you feel defeated . . . his marvel-green eyes, with his mole on the cheek, with the thick hair, with the dark down that clothed his skin in preciousness.” Tamar is not in love with Dolfi, she insists, and she does not want to break the barrier between the senses, to touch him. She only wants to look. To touch would mean to be seen, and to be seen, for Tamar, is not something she considers possible.
It’s in this way that Tamar reinforces her position as an outsider; convinced there are roles that we are born into, that we cannot control, she attributes her wanting for more to her otherness: “The fact that I . . . did not love my role, wanted to change it, especially the fact that I wanted to change it, had something to do with the affliction and the shiver in my skull.” Going offworld, being other, allows Tamar to muffle the pain of wanting to be seen as someone she is not; it allows her to rationalize why no one seems to yearn for her in the way they do for others.
People went by me, went through me, they did not see me, I am see-through.
And yet, Tamar is endlessly searching for a reflection of herself, a sign that she is there. To the people around her, she asks, How are you? Do you need anything?, and she pries open their reactions, the words they choose, their body language, hoping to find it: their want—their “fissure.” This conflict, the tension between the obstinate acceptance of her own otherness and the overwhelming desire to find kinship in another, is the core of the story. Tamar’s fear of being seen, together with her want to be seen, is what is so compelling in Offworld, for all of us who recognize that which sets us apart, us who recognize who we are and how different that person is from who we want to be. Us, who through distanced observation and analysis yearn to understand how people can exist so easily inside of the world. Us, who are searching, in quiet hope and secrecy, for an inkling that the people walking by feel just as other as we do.
—Bella Creel
“Roll on, rivers; raise your hands, / cities! I, a faithful son of the black earth, shall return to the black earth.” So wrote Czesław Miłosz in a poem that looks towards comings and goings. Rivers, in their defiant perusal towards their own ends, are majestic to us in their motions. Their currents pass us and leave; their force shrinking distance into one fluid section; like time, they appear to be insistent only in a singular direction. They are the world at its most transitory, a reminder that for us, stillness does not exist. One is always in the midst of passage. So when a river appears within a text, we must read it through its dynamics: how should we define the moment, as surrounded by change?
Natascha Wodin’s ruminative, steadfast “The River and the Sea,” translated deftly by Mandy Wight, unites the seemingly disparate movements of comings and goings in one cyclical understanding. Through the sobering folding of past and present, the quiet swells and recessions of the water give a constant to the scatter of loss, displacement, chaos, and bitter peace. Wodin’s mother had grown up in the coastal town of Mariupol, Ukraine, facing “the shallowest sea in the world.” After the tumult of World War II carried the family as forced laborers to Germany, mother and child found themselves at the shores of the Regnitz river in Franconia, and it was there that the matriarch finally succumbed to her own sadness, or fear, or exhaustion: “For so long she’d been saying she couldn’t go on living, that she wanted to go into the Regnitz.”
Wodin is not seeking any resolution to her mother’s death, which is recounted like so many of the tragedies that braid into the century’s fabric, but inquiring into our dissonant present, where change can look so much like recurrence, where time continually gives back the same repetitive horrors. The devastation of Mariupol by the German army is being reiterated in the time of Putin’s outrageous invasions, and new ruins surge up in old grief. We are told that we cannot step into the same river twice, yet Wodin complicates this old adage by widening the scope from the single body to the vaster system of water; it is the same river, only taking a bit of time before coming back to us—the same motion deceiving us into thinking that we’re making our way into a future anew, the same cleansing flow also unearthing what has barely been buried.
“The River and the Sea” effectively balances the concrete and the symbolic, maintaining a measured stoicism that runs along its author’s confrontation of the unbearable. Hamoud Saud, on the other hand, is looking at sensuality, absolution, and depth of feeling in his essays, and to do so he dives into a resplendent, glittering poeticism, guiding the objects of his contemplation—music, literature, and solitude—to unexpected and beautiful incarnations and signifiers. Translated with tremendous lyric sensitivity by Zia Ahmed, the emotive resonance of these pieces is held aloft by ecstatically reverent lines: “Sometimes, music is a deadly arrow in the heart of time, life and ideology that forbids joy, burying it or hanging it on the gallows of illusion, or else it’s a knife that banishes the darkness of speech.” Yet, this fantastic wonderment is still tethered to a profound philosophical centre by their immediately accessible truths. The most powerful metaphors hit upon a duality: they seem both surprisingly novel and eternally real, diverting from and then inviting us back into our own conceptualizations. The arrow, the heart of time, the knife—these are familiar symbols, but Saud powerfully illustrates the ability of a storyteller to expand upon knowledge and meaning with vision; to describe a new paradigm for these rich and ancient referents to illustrate. It is one of the utmost rewards of reading to receive the gift of other memories, other sensations, other mysteries. And as Saud so aptly illustrates, these gifts are also what takes one back to writing: “. . . a field we till every morning with dreams, words, and ideas. . .”
Dreams, words, and ideas. As much as they drive our thoughts, they also propel the physical body—in minute gestures and tremendous acts. In the excerpt from Khalid Lyamlahy’s novel, Venice Requiem, expertly rendered into English by the acclaimed Ros Schwartz, the reader is plunged into an intimate portrait of migrancy and the cruelty of (inter)national, (infra)structural carelessness—which, like all stories of loss, also keeps a dream in mind: “The word luck like a sweet dream fleeing the shores of this walled off, high-and mighty Europe. A taunting mirage from the banks of the River Gambia.” Diagnosing Venice as a city overwhelmed by contradictions, Lyamlahy gives a painful elegy for Pateh Sabally, a Gambian refugee who drowned in the city’s Grand Canal nearly eight years ago. He imagines the young man’s first impressions of the cacophonic station, the journey from Milan to Venice, the sense of alienation and helplessness arising in the face of hostile rejections—yet the text continuously returns to the utter unknowability of Pateh’s thoughts, his motivations, or his last moments: “It’s a parlous attempt to corral a hypothesis, to try to give you back a little dignity.” In this, he mirrors the despairing uncertainty of the migrant status: “But there are too many maybes. Too many what-ifs. A howling lack of certainty in the face of the inevitable.”
Much of our failure in approaching migrancy is that faceless, nameless data consistently overwhelms the fact of individual humanity, and Lyamlahy similarly struggles with the concept of picking one story out of the many singular lives that remain held in flux: “How many brothers who left before you drowned in the insatiable whirlwind of the news?” As written here, Pateh’s life is invoked as a thought experiment in empathy, projecting individuality onto the unknown so that one does not become desensitized to the anonymized anguish amidst us. But what Lyamlahy ultimately demonstrates with this text is that comprehensive knowledge is not necessary to act in solidarity or support—a concept that is in direct opposition to most contemporary migration codes, which demand that any applicant provide a detailed and sufficient reason behind their intentions. The forthright idea running behind this enthralling use of the hypothetical is that the contents of the story don’t matter so much as the fact that they’re attached to human lives, and that the moral application of our creative faculties is to be in service of care: imagine whatever you need to in order to do the right thing. To encourage and locate a vivid human presence, or to turn your back and annul it. It’s telling that the excerpt ends on a modal of lost opportunity—a “could have,” reminding us that when a life is diminished, the whole world loses a possibility.
—Xiao Yue Shan
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