Out of office message

Leaving one job for another can be a bracing experience. I've switched companies many times since hopping on the high tech express train in 1997 -- usually of my own volition, usually for what seemed 'good' reasons (tyrannical supervisor, chapter 11 woes). But the glow of punting one work environment for another distracted me from the fact that the the new destination wasn't, ultimately, much closer to my heart. Nice Jewish ex-medievalists aren't meant to work in a world of Linux wonks and web geeks and hardware junkies, not to mention shifty sales execs, even if it's taken a shockingly long time to own up to that reality, or at least to try and do something about it. Exactly what that something is remains the big question mark for the next many -- hopefully not so many -- months. For now, however, I'm happy simply to be jumping off the technology express once and for all -- my landing cushioned by support from wife, family and friends; by a mass of inquiries, applications and informational interviews at, for and to local colleges and high schools; by nine months of COBRA; and by what I've come into from my parents. If they were alive, I doubt B & G would be so happy helping fund my adventure, but I'll enjoy watching their cranky shades cluck, carp, critique and grudgingly come around as I wave goodbye to the receding cars, pick up my bundle, and Huck Finn wise light out for the territory ahead.

The gifts that keep on giving

With the world economy imploding, newspapers would normally have nothing to distract worried readers except post-Dickensian seasonal miracles - the soup kitchen run by a reformed meth addict and soccer mom, the lost dog who hitched a ride home on a corporate jet. There appears to be an endless supply of such stories at this time of year, and an endless temptation for editors to run them.

But the recent news cycle has provided a better brand of consolation, one more suited to the exceptional times we're living through. Just five days ago the Governor of Illinois Rod Blagojevich was arrested by the FBI for blatant acts of political corruption only matched by the blatancy of his recorded phone conversations. (His wife's were no church picnic either.) Then yesterday came the news of former Nasdaq chairman Bernard Maddoff's unprecedented $50 billion Ponzi scheme, embroiling some of the country's and indeed the world's most prestigious investors, hedge funds and philanthropies. Whereas Blagojevich had been under investigation for years, Maddoff appears to have flown essentially under the official radar until the recent financial crisis made his historic fraud too hard to hide.

Homecoming puppies are adorable but when we're all hurting and confused nothing succeeds like schadenfreude. The stories of these two men provide precious journalistic theater in a time of troubles, holding a mirror up to our current economic and political disasters but reflecting them in a form everyone can enjoy (at least if you weren't investing with Maddoff). Yes Virginia, there is a Santa Claus - just don't ask how he funds his operations.

Casey chases a ball

The madcap trees
in Crocker Park
shake their tops
like Shirley
Maclaine -
redhaired, testy
indefatigable,
declaming
rebirth and
the cycle of life
against all falls

Head of the year

Like the U.S. Congress, I'm on a break today for the Jewish holidays. A damp, overcast but still warmish morning with the scent of fall in the air. I am skipping all religious obligations except for tashlik, tossing stale bread to the gulls off the Marblehead end of Boston Harbor, followed by a celebratory buffet at a friend's house. Gluttony is obviously not a sin I plan to cast away today. Or sloth. Or lust for that matter. But pride, envy, anger and greed are good to go -- the last not something I'm prone to myself, but I'll throw it off vicariously on behalf of all the recently humbled derivative traders out there. (The traditional Catholic Seven Deadlies make a convenient shopping list for sinners, even if they don't map precisely to the more comprehensive, once a year Yom Kippur line up.)

Actually I will spare some anger for everyone, Democrat or Republican, who contributed to not passing the bailout package in the House of Representatives yesterday. And for the ugliness and arrogance and stupidity of John McCain's recent carping against Barack Obama on this subject. Though maybe I should take the longer view. One small bright side of the recent crisis amidst so many dark ones is that Democratic presidential candidates always do better in bad economic times. And McCain's posturing and erratic judgement appears to be eroding his support yet further, to judge by polls in the last few days. The more McCain inflates his own role in the Congressional deliberations, the more he blames the Democrats even while touting bipartisanship, the more he's likely to suffer as partisanship by both sides drags out the process and the pain. Happy thoughts!

I don't know if it's the mental image of being on a beach, reminding me of the opening scenes of the movie "Chariots of Fire", but this song from Blake's Milton, now a popular Anglican hymn, has been playing in my head for the last few minutes. So let's pause the Rosh Hashanah retrospection and move ahead to post Yom Kippur visions (in Blake's crypto-gnostic post-Christian imagery) of the year to come:

And did those feet in ancient time

Walk upon England's mountains green?

And was the holy Lamb of God

On England's pleasant pastures seen?

And did the Countenance Divine

Shine forth upon our clouded hills?

And was Jerusalem builded here

Among these dark Satanic mills?

Bring me my bow of burning gold:

Bring me my arrows of desire:

Bring me my spear: O clouds unfold!

Bring me my chariot of fire.

I will not cease from mental fight,

Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand

Till we have built Jerusalem

In England's green and pleasant land.

That is to say, I will not cease starting tomorrow.

Saturdaze

A deep one hour massage is a good way to start the weekend. I come home all soft, oily and smelling of cinnamon, like a rugelach before going into the oven. I sit at my desk, a little dizzy but also oddly focused, staring into the backyard: it is damp with drizzle and early autumn mist, though the temperature is getting more summery as the morning progresses. Our trees aren't changing colors yet but there were already swaths of red on the maples across from the massage studio. Casey hops down the stairs into the family room, gives me a small look of reproach, sighs, and curls up on the carpet behind my chair.

Naturally my mind drifts to last night's debate, if you can really call it that, between the two presidential candidates -- a strong, steady but emotionally restrained Barack Obama and an at first somewhat disconnected but finally more engaged and even eloquent John McCain. I came home all but giddy with excitement the event would really happen, given McCain's flip-flops on joining Obama at Old Miss. We watched the debate in the darkened family room, sprawled on the floor or on couches, munching gummi bears and chocolate chip cookies -- me, Julie, a single friend and colleague of hers in need of company, Julie's 17-year-old son, and a friend of his whom Eric insisted stay and watch. And Casey, of course, sacked out on the carpet beneath the TV, getting up at intervals to troll for cookie crumbs.

In the end, I felt, the evening was a wash -- not just the performance of the two candidates but the political impact of the event as a whole. There were few surprises and little deviation from already well-known scripts. Each speaker evaded the other's challenges on critical issues (esp. going to war in Iraq and the success of the surge); they rarely confronted each other directly despite the good-humored efforts of Jim Lehrer; and overall they seemed more concerned with controlling media perceptions than risking embarrassing impromptus. Looking back just a few months, the level of energy, combativeness and policy detail was significantly lower than in most of Obama's debates with Hillary Clinton. Even the previous week's economic meltdown and partisan grudge matches over a bailout plan, on which Lehrer pushed them for a good half hour, got no more than high-sounding generalities.

The candidates' irresolution on the greatest financial crisis in most people's memory isn't, after all, that surprising: neither man wanted to risk appearing as a spoiler with so much at stake in the ongoing negotiations, fiddling with party politics while the economy burned. Perhaps the overall feeling of gloom and uncertainty in the week's news explains the very scripted, managed feel of the evening. Or perhaps this is just one more of the infinite variations of politics as usual. A newly posted article on the New York Times website promises "Consensus on Wall Street Rescue Plan Is Said to Be Near". Due to be announced Sunday before the opening of the Asian markets. Hopefully this also means the candidates will be willing to take the gloves off in their next debate, which is explicitly planned to be about the economy.

It's now mid-afternoon, and the morning's drizzles have turned to intermittent heavy downpours. A lovely excuse to stay indoors and snooze and read and eat leftover chili and pick away at household chores - not excluding trying to whip my mushy political prose into shape.

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

The first thing I do when starting to write about Jean-Dominique Bauby's magnificent jewel of a book is to look up the French title (which didn't occur to me while reading it): Le scaphandre et le papillon. The translator's English is close enough, it seems, even capturing in its own way the rhythmic assonance of the original. But then, maybe not so much: my old Langenscheidt pocket French dictionary gives scaphandre as "diving suit" rather than diving bell, and scaphandrier as "deep-sea diver". A different image, of enclosure yes but also of a kind of monstrous mannikin, ringed with masks and tanks and tubes, deprived of normal sensation, like Bauby in his hospital bed in Berck-sur-Mer. Possibly more a sense of exploring the depths too, whatever the dangers and restrictions. I'll have to bug one of my native speaker friends for clarification.

Whatever the sense of the title, there's less of the cold, dark depths than you might imagine in this book, and much more of the butterfly, fluttering half deliberately half impulsively from memory to fancy to sharp, funny and moving observances of himself and the people and things around him. I think only a French writer could create a book like this from a condition, a history like this. Flipping through the narrow volume of short, evocatively or evasively titled chapters, it strikes me that that protean French prose genre the essai has itself come to the diver's rescue. Or rather it becomes the vehicle (submarine? helicopter?) by which he rescues himself, even while his efforts give a whole new meaning to the form.

I page though the book to find the exact wording of one image that had stuck in my mind, celebrating the letters Bauby receives in the hospital from friends, family and colleagues: "I hoard these letters like treasure. One day I hope to fasten them end to end in a half-mile streamer, to float in the wind like a banner raised to the glory of friendship." I remembered these being the last words in the chapter, which they were, except for this one line closing paragraph: "It will keep the vultures at bay". Interesting that I'd remembered the hopeful fancy not the black humor. There's an ever present, ever shifting mix of both moods in the communications Bauby crafted, as he describes, so carefully in his head before conveying them the world through a carefully orchestrated system of winks -- no stranger a mechanism when you come right down to it than tapping on laptop keys or incising wedge-shaped marks on wet clay.

Sweet Thames Run Softly

Late Saturday we drove down to Arlington, to a rolicking birthday party for 13 year old fraternal twin boys -- the sons of Julie's oldest friend and high school musical collaboratrix - the director and lyricist to J's choreographer. After a morning of moping (remember the backache) and a therapeutic walk along the water with Casey, in perfect late summer weather, I had dashed out for a carefully staged shopping expedition -- in our marital division of labor Julie dances and I cook. But parody song lyrics also seem to be in my line, so I came back not just with the ingredients for a traditional Italian salad but a suburban rip off of an old ballad, "Sweet Thames Run Softly", recorded by Cherish the Ladies, which played on WGBH during my drive back:

I took my hybrid to Whole Foods
To buy fresh mozzarella
And organic tomatoes so sweet and good
To make a nice caprese.

Could have done the farmer's market
Flow, sweet Prius, flow
But they have no Ben & Jerry's
Sweet Prius hybrid.

The way home I played NPR
The weekend Celtic Sojourn
Those Cherished Ladies sang a tune
That chilled me in the sunshine.

"Took her sailing on the river
Flow sweet river, flow
London town was mine to give her
Sweet Thames flow softly."

That's about it. The caprese really was delicious, good enough to steal, like those plums William Carlos Williams once wrote a poem about. The song was also genuinely haunting, though I'm not as a rule a lover of Celtic-style music. I will order a CD online, which already seems like a primitive delivery mechanism -- there must be mp3 downloads available somewhere. Should archaic British airs be so much about instant gratification?

Sunday when it's not about an ongoing backache is mostly about footnotes that aren't happening, as I fruitlessly Google how the 400 year old refrain to Spenser's "Prothalamion" -- "Sweet Thames! run softly, till I end my song" -- made its way into a bittersweet 20th century ballad.

Backache

I woke up with what my wife calls, with decisive familiarity, a 'tight' back - she's more prone to aches of all kinds than I am. Hard to roll out of bed, hard to stand up. Probably the result of lying too long in our super supportive, super green foam mattress, including an hour before going to sleep (deliciously dozing between bouts of Rohintan Mistry's engaging first novel) and an hour or so after waking up. No Marblehead farmer's market this morning, just lazy coffee & morning papers, accompanied by a couple of Advil and some intermittent stretching. I'm impatient with Julie's efforts to show me the best ways to roll out the kinks, whether because I'm just a bad patient or because I feel self-conscious and uncoordinated watching her graceful, ex-dancer's movements. I chase her away and give her advice a half hearted try, with no one to watch except the dog. I walk around and sit around, bending and stretching occasionally, not so much therapeutically as to ask the backache, Can I ignore you yet? "Noses run in my family", an old girlfriend of mine used to joke. Denial with regard to physical aches and pains runs in mine. Writing about it puts me in a better mood if not in less discomfort (my stiff Levenger desk chair is great if my back is status quo, not if not). Really, who are you kidding? my back says, sounding like my wife. OK for a change I'll listen.

Kayaking in Marblehead

A weekend itch, a hum, an expectation, when the weather obliges, and many weathers oblige. Though a schlep to start out of course. Haul the boat from the backyard, hose off the dirt thrown up the the rain, flip it onto the SUV rack, strap it down -- a 14 foot Walden Expedition, lobster red. Carry yourself and the kayak down to the sea. With an appetizing crunch push off from the sand. Then, miraculous reversal, the sea and the kayak are carrying you -- out past the splashing families, the boatyards, the bobbing floats beneath which real lobsters scuttle, shrewdly untempted (in my mind) by the locals' traps. Along the islets and shores of this rocky bay, dotted with seaside mansions old and new. I alternately dart and drift, the dripping double-bladed oar in its steady rotation, half push half pull, always reminding me of a dragonfly's wings, or resting comfortably athwart the cockpit, as the boat slides along under its own momentum or simply bobbed by the waves. A little outside the mouth of the bay the wind and the swells pick up and I paddle harder, with more consciousness of having to choose a direction -- northwest round the point to Salem, southeast across the harbor with its forest of masts, and the lighthouse in front of me. Further out, Great Misery island, where more intrepid paddlers in wetsuits habitually venture but I haven't attempted yet, probably never will. An hour and a half floating on the waves with my feet up and a modest, half imagined weekender's sense of the power and pull of the sea is quite enough adventure, right now.

Lehmannaide

I can't ignore the fall of Lehmann Brothers but can't quite grasp it either, or don't want to, so my mind skitters defensively to the company's human namesakes. Nicholas Lehmann, Julie's old Harvard classmate, now dean of the Columbia School of Journalism. Pronounced like 'lemon', not 'lee-mun'. He must be experiencing some onomastic angst of his own. And David Lehman - clever, glum American poet and prolific poetry editor. Glad today to be short one 'n' in his last name.

What's in a name? Or what's in a word, like 'reformer' or 'deregulation'? The presidential candidates are each trying to cash in on Wall Street's woes -- "John McCain casting himself as an outspoken populist outraged at corporate greed and Barack Obama hammering what he called a Republican-led climate of deregulation that McCain championed" (Boston Globe, 9/17). Personally, I worry that more people will embrace the faux-maverick "populist" who channels their visceral fear and resentment than the earnest liberal who asks his audience to pay mind to legislative and economic history.

Conclusion: did Nicholas Lehmann's immigrant ancestors think "lemon" was less Jewish sounding than the alternative?

Monster.gov

One of America's leading journalists, academics, human rights activists, and jump shooters has been laid low -- by, what else, a word, spoken out of turn in front of another journalist. In an unguarded moment during an interview with The Scotsman newspaper, Samantha Power -- Professor of Practice of Global Leadership and Public Policy at Harvard's Kennedy School and Barack Obama's unpaid foreign policy guru -- made the mistake of saying what she really felt about the behavior of Hillary Clinton and her campaign in last Tuesday's primaries. She dutifully fell on her sword -- resigning and apologizing to Mrs. Clinton -- but not before a gaggle of newspaper columnists took her and by proxy Barack Obama to task for their political naivate.

It may seem ironic that a writer who's probed the history of America's policy towards genocide and reported from some of the world's most fearsome and treacherous war zones, from Serbia to Darfur, should be chided for her lack of practical savvy. But I understand what Power's critics mean. Immersion in human misery and a passion for change can get the better of anyone. As can the Clinton campaign, an organization that combines opportunism, dirty tricks, espionage, historical revisionism, and shrill self-righteousness in a way that any third world dictator would envy.

Too bad she'll never be that naive again.

Smug alert

After much soul searching and many test drives I bought a new Prius last week. The soul searching had less to do with environmental impact or hybrid technology than a private fear of change, along with some misgivings about the Prius's split rear window. But after a week of commutes I'm a fully converted hybridoid, and have to resist the temptation to honk at fellow Prius owners. Toyota is smart enough to realize that reduced emissions go better with a comfortable, quiet and well-designed interior, along with plenty of high tech bells and whistles. The Bluetooth is particularly appealing for a long daily commute down the shore from Marblehead to Cambridge, and back again, as is the mp3 player support (though I've only figured out the first so far). And somehow the feeling that I'm reducing my consumption of fossil fuel flatters my sense of connection with other environmental causes, whether saving endangered species (should I get a manatee sticker?) or eating local produce (should I join an urban pickup cooperative?). In the quiet of the electrified Prius interior I can hear the happy hum of my own virtue.

Frost at Midday

Massachusetts got as the locals like to say 'pounded' with snow Friday, starting after 6 a.m. and continuing through early morning Saturday. I worked from home in the third floor guest bedroom, converted into an impromptu office thanks to Comcast broadband and a wireless router. Through a narrow window I could watch the flakes swirling down and around the historic Marblehead rooftops - like a Longfellow poem, updated with telephone wires. Probably something like 10 inches, but cold light flakes and sunny weather made for a relatively painless cleanup Saturday. Today, Sunday, I have a different but equally New Englandy view from my desk in the downstairs family room. Looking out at the backyard, I see the odd succession of elongated holes - like a careful giant's footprints - that Casey made as she galumphed across the deep layer of white. Periodically the wind sends a clumpy dust of snow down from the big pine tree at the end of the yard, bringing to mind Robert Frost's jauntily glum ditty -

The way a crow
Shook down on me
The dust of snow
From a hemlock tree

Has given my heart
A change of mood
And changed some part
Of a day I rued.

If I were still a literature teacher I would set my students to pondering the fine blend of the playful and the stately in these short rhymed lines, particularly the concussion of 'mood' and 'rued'. Poor Frost - he couldn't even talk about being happy without thinking about regret. As a genuine countryman, however, he was more careful about projecting his moods onto the natural landscape than Coleridge, in 'Frost at Midnight':

The Frost performs its secret ministry,
Unhelped by any wind. The owlet’s cry
Came loud--and hark, again! loud as before.
The inmates of my cottage, all at rest,
Have left me to that solitude, which suits
Abstruser musings: save that at my side
My cradled infant slumbers peacefully.
’Tis calm indeed! so calm, that it disturbs
And vexes meditation with its strange
And extreme silentness. Sea, hill, and wood,
This populous village! Sea, and hill, and wood,
With all the numberless goings-on of life,
Inaudible as dreams! the thin blue flame
Lies on my low-burnt fire, and quivers not;
Only that film, which fluttered on the grate,
Still flutters there, the sole unquiet thing.
Methinks, its motion in this hush of nature
Gives it dim sympathies with me who live,
Making it a companionable form,
Whose puny flaps and freaks the idling Spirit
By its own moods interprets, every where
Echo or mirror seeking of itself,
And makes a toy of Thought.

Sitting inside by fire is obviously more conducive to pathetic fallacy than tromping around in the woods. But Coleridge too discovers a change of mood in his own internalized landscape, blessing the sleeping manchild next to him - as only a citified English Romantic poet can do - with the promise of a daily heaven on earth:

Therefore all seasons shall be sweet to thee,
Whether the summer clothe the general earth
With greenness, or the redbreast sit and sing
Betwixt the tufts of snow on the bare branch
Of mossy apple-tree, while the nigh thatch
Smokes in the sun-thaw; whether the eave-drops fall
Heard only in the trances of the blast,
Or if the secret ministry of frost
Shall hang them up in silent icicles,
Quietly shining to the quiet Moon.

What a turn of phrase - 'the secret ministry of frost'. Enough to give you chills, sitting warmly indoors on a sunny weekend morning. I love Robert Frost but I'm more temperamentally aligned with Coleridge, leaving aside his addictive penchant. Still I'll have to face crusty New England nature a little more directly when I start jogging next week. Nothing secret about the ministry of frost on the roads of the North Shore in February.

iPlod

It's the lead up to Valentine's Day, which means both my usual drivetime companions, WGBH and WBUR, are in the middle of romantically themed pledge drives, offering flowers and chocolate in exchange for a year of guilt-free listening. (You can tell in an instant, and with a sinking heart, it's not Morning Edition.) So I was doubly happy I had downloaded a new audiobook this morning, for what turned into an hour and a half commute. Chekhov short stories, narrated by Kenneth Branagh. Couldn't even remember putting it in my Audible.com wish list, but there it was, five minutes before hitting the road - I needed only three to download the file and sync it with my iPod. Reading and writing in the digital commuter age: the subject of another blog.

If Chekhov had written the tale of my commute, my whimsical self- satisfaction would have been quickly and not so whimsically cut short: I would've forgot myself and rammed a surly marine mechanic in his pickup. Or I would have had to stop to watch someone's aging mother inch her way across the street to 'Our Lady of the Sea' church - putting me in mind of my own mother or my own age. Or I would have simply ignored a sky painted the color of hope as I passed Swampscott harbor. But modern life is not so well-constructed or so true - the sky and the people kept to themselves, and I was able to lose myself in Chekhov's sly, tender and rollicking Russian panoply all the way to Cambridge. The one unexpected twist in the trip, a utility truck fixing a street light near the airport, which backed up traffic to Wonderland, only prolonged the enjoyment. God bless your pointy little beard, Anton Pavlovich!

Return of the non-native

What better time to come back to the blogosphere than in the wake of Super Tuesday and Mitt Romney's withdrawal from the Republican runoff. A time of hope - or at least relief that Mitt's plastic smile will be off the networks and front pages for a while, except perhaps briefly at the grand old party's convention. A soul-searching op-ed piece in the Boston Globe today explored the ambivalence many successful Mormons apparently feel to exposing their religion in public. Romney's experience will probably not help his coreligionists resolve their doubts anytime soon.

Our dog Casey lying in the sun reminds me of John McCain. She is a nine year old Glen of Imaal terrier - in dog years the presumed nominee's junior by almost a decade. But they share the same shaggy eyebrows and truculent, mercurial temperament. Inside the house she is mostly interested in trolling for table scraps, rolling over for belly rubs and digging for badgers under the couch. Outside, when not chasing tennis balls, she sits on the steps barking furiously at any alien dog that passes our gate, or sometimes - to all appearances - at nothing at all. It's her job to patrol the borders and keep the homeland and her family safe. She would definitely stay in Iraq for 100 years, if necessary.

On Super Tuesday Julie and I were riveted to the widescreen TV in the family room, expertly critiquing the talking heads and the production values on CNN, MSNBC and PBS. Today's events in Washington State, Nebraska and Louisiana flew somewhat below my radar. I was more absorbed with with the struggle to choose a new car (Prius..? Matrix..? Jeez, I don't even need a Democratic party bumper sticker...) and another moody Keira Knightly performance at the Danvers Hollywood Hits, this time in the sad, dark, slightly over wrought "Atonement". But at 9 pm I caught up with my Google homepage, which trumpeted the news that Obama won with a margin of nearly 70% in both western states - Louisiana had not yet been called.

This earned approval from the three teenagers in the house, one of whom voted for the first time in Tuesday's primary. They like pretty much all their friends are Obama supporters. Although they may not know much about his platforms he is "the man" - so transparently cool and connected that he might as well be the only candidate in the race.

Telling Stories, Speaking Silences: Edwidge Danticat's Haiti

(Talk at the Cambridge Center for Adult Education, Cambridge, MA, June 5, 2006)

Introduction

Thank you all for coming. My talk today is about the acclaimed Haitian-American writer Edwidge Danticat, particularly her 1995 story collection, Krik? Krak!, and her latest novel, The Dew Breaker, published in 2004. When this lecture was just a proposal I told the Cambridge Center the title would be “Beauty, Terror and Transformation in Edwidge Danticat”. My eventual title -- “Telling stories, speaking silences: Edwidge Danticat’s Haiti” -- is less dramatic but truer to Danticat's motives as a writer. I should say at the outset that I’m not here as an expert on Edwidge Danticat or Haitian literature in general but only as someone drawn to her work by its moral and psychological power and by the sheer beauty of her writing.

The Cambridge Center asked me to give this talk to introduce a course I’m offering next fall, on “World Fiction in English” – stories, that is, originally written in English but by writers outside the traditional geographic and cultural borders of American or British fiction. This fearfully broad label encompasses some of the most important and original writing in English today. It includes writers as diverse as the Afghan novelist Khaled Hosseini, author of the best-selling The Kite Runner; the young Nigerian novelist, Helen Oyeyemi, who tells the haunting, lyrical drama of a mixed-raced child in The Icarus Girl; and Jhumpa Lahiri, whose stories speak for several generations of Indians and Indian-Americans, facing the conflicts of modernity here and in the Indian subcontinent. Such writers bring us news not just of the world outside our borders, but of the many worlds within it, and of a globalized realm where geographic borders increasingly matter less than issues of class, race, family, and ethnic and religious identity -- and of course, issues of language. Most of all they take us into their unique personal worlds as artists, offering in abundance the gifts of mind and heart and imagination we expect from all great fiction.

Danticat stands as an exemplary member of this unclassifiable class of writers. The child of parents who left Haiti soon after the fall of the dictator Papa Doc in 1971, she was raised by relatives and came to the U.S. when she was 12, speaking Haitian Creole and French but little English. Growing up in the Haitian community in Brooklyn, Danticat began writing in English as a high school journalist, and went on to study French in college. Of her own linguistic evolution as a “Haitan-American” author Danticat writes:

I came to English at a time when I was not adept enough at French to write creatively in French and did not know how to write in Creole because it had not been taught to me in school, so my writing in English was as much an act of personal translation as it was an act of creative collaboration with the new place I was in. [“Author Q & A: Breath, Eyes, Memory by Edwidge Danticat”, http://www.randomhouse.com]

Literary success came early to the young émigré. Her first novel, Eyes, Breath, Memory, published in 1994 when she was only 25, became a best seller when it was chosen for Oprah’s Book Club. The novel tells a wrenching, darkly beautiful tale of a Haitian girl caught between her rural Haitian roots and the American dyaspora community where she has come to live. This book was followed in 1995 by Krik? Krak! – a collection of stories that opens with a Haitian exile’s death at sea and ends with a Haitian-American wedding in New York. Danticat’s next book, The Farming of Bones, explored the notorious 1937 massacre of Haitian migrant workers in the Dominican Republic. It won the American Book Award in 1998. In 2004, she published what is widely regarded as her most powerful book, The Dew Breaker, a collection of subtly interconnected stories that explore the brutal legacy of Haiti’s Duvalier era, in the person of one of its escaped torturers.

Writing in an “Epilogue” to Krik? Krak!, as if speaking to her younger self, Danticat reflects on the sources of her storytelling:

You remember thinking while braiding your hair that you look a lot like your mother and her mother before her. It was their whispers that pushed you, their murmurs over pots sizzling in your head. A thousand women urging you to speak through the blunt tip of your pencil. Kitchen poets, you call them. Ghosts like burnished branches on a flame tree. These women, they asked for your voice so they could tell your mother in your place that yes, women like you do speak, even if they speak a tongue that is hard to understand. [Krik? Krak!, 222]

Family and memory, good ghosts and grim ones, displacement and a sense of place – these are themes that pervade Danticat’s fiction and are among the elements of her work I want to discuss today. Most of all I hope to do justice to her unique and powerful voice as an artist, even as she has tried to channel the voices of her countrymen – and especially her countrywomen.

Haitian Background

Before discussing Danticat’s work, I will start with a brief history lesson, to help set the writer and her fiction in a "real world" context. Danticat herself has written, “What I do is neither sociology, nor anthropology, nor history” [“Author Q & A: Breath, Eyes, Memory by Edwidge Danticat”, http://www.randomhouse.com]. But she does not shy away from the complex history of her community, both its beauties and its darker currents. The inextricable mixture of dark and light in Haitian life is, in fact, in many ways the driving theme of Danticat’s fiction. The world’s first black republic, founded in 1804 after a long and bloody revolt of slaves against their French masters, Haiti’s history is a long effort, sometime successful, sometimes not, of political and social self-realization. A country formed of powerfully mingled African and European traditions, rich in literature, art and music, it has also been riven by poverty and political violence. These are in part a product of extreme social divisions within the country, in part of outside political and economic forces. For much of this century Haiti was in fact ruled by the U.S., which remained in effective control of the economy until 1947. A period of military dictatorship ended in 1954 with the election of Francois Duvalier, or “Papa Doc”, as president – later to be named “President for Life”. His 17 year reign is commonly regarded as one of the most oppressive and corrupt dictatorships of modern times – enforced by his feared police, the Tonton Macoutes, named after a voodoo boogeyman.

Many educated upper and middle class Haitians fled Duvalier’s rule and their country in the 1960s, most of them coming to the United States. They were followed in the 1970s and 1980s by a larger emigration of lower middle class and poor Haitians, from both the cities and the countryside. This was the start of the dyaspora community, now numbering half a million souls in the U.S., that fostered the young Danticat, and has provided the backdrop for so much of her writing.

The unsettled character of Haitian history has ensured ever new rounds of immigrants and ever evolving relationships between the dyaspora community and the mother country. Under the rule of Papa Doc’s son, “Baby Doc”, from 1971 to 1986 some of the most vicious aspects of the father’s rule were moderated, but corruption and repression were still the law of the land and the economy and civic life continued to decline. It was at this time that Danticat’s father and mother finally left the country, as did a steady flood of desperate émigrés trying to reach the U.S. by boat. The 1970s and 1980s saw tens of thousands of “boat people” arriving in American waters, many of them forced by the U.S. Coast Guard to turn back. An unknown number perished at sea.

Political oppression and economic and social disorder in Haiti finally led to rebellion, and in 1986 Baby Doc was forced into exile by his own army. In The Dew Breaker, Danticat describes how an excited populace celebrated what felt like the dawn of a free and democratic Haiti, while taking their own gruesome revenge on those who had terrorized them. The mixture of carnival celebration and violence is seen through the eyes of a fatherless adolescent boy – now a grown man living in New York, and sharing his memories with his own unborn son.

There was a different feel to our neighborhood for sure. People were walking around dazed, exchanging bits of information they were gathering from the radio and television and from one another. […] Some of the men were wearing red bandannas around their heads and swinging sticks and tree branches while pouring rum and beer on one another. Others were dancing and performing somersaults but stopping occasionally to yell slogans or phrases they had held too long in their chests: “We are free” or “We will never be prisoners again.” […] From the radio reports that were being broadcast at the loudest possible volume from every house, I gathered that the homes of former government officials and the abandoned mansions of he president and his wife were being ransacked. […] There was a stench of kerosene and burning tires wafting through the air. It was only a matter of time before the rubber smell would be replaced by that of flesh. [The Dew Breaker, 148-9]

That violence breeds violence, that dislocation on one level breeds dislocation on another, is one of the most persistent themes of Danticat’s fiction. What is wonderful and characteristic about her story telling, however, are the individual human victories that she rescues from the heart of mass political violence. The middle-aged New Yorker remembers his best friend, one of the rebels, braving the mobs to find his own father, a member of the hated Tonton Macoutes. He never does – but his love and daring help the younger boy come to terms with the contradictions of his father’s identity, and to fashion a memory of manhood and courage that he can consecrate to his unborn son.

The end of Baby Doc's reign didn’t end Haiti’s troubles. When the Roman Catholic priest Jean Bertrande Aristide came to power with the support of Haiti’s poor and dispossessed, his radical populism all too inevitably inspired the hostility of Haiti’s elites and the Haitian military. The overthrow of Aristide in 1991 began another period of crisis and instability – and another wave of boat people, close to 40,000 of whom were interdicted at sea by the U.S. coast guard and forcibly returned to Haiti. This exodus, perhaps the most vivid image many Americans have of Haiti, is commemorated in one of Danticat’s most powerful stories, the “Children of the Sea”. In 1994, a very Haitian mixture of internal political strife and external economic and political pressure brought the new dictatorship to an end, and a wave of popular support again brought Aristide into power. Unfortunately, ongoing political violence, corruption and economic problems lead to political deadlock and to another rebellion in 2004, driving Aristide once more into exile. Against this challenging backdrop, the successful Haitian presidential elections this February, which brought the populist party of Réné Preval into power and some stability back to the country, are a sign of promise – though deeply rooted social inequalities and both internal and external economic and political issues remain.

As a novelist, Danticat has less to say directly about this most recent decade of Haitian history. The lesson of her fiction, however, is not that these events are unimportant, but that Haitian history is cyclical – that the same stories recur in different times and different places, as one haunted generation becomes the ghost that haunts another. Speaking in Krik? Krak! to the ghost of her younger self, Danticat writes of how urgently these stories possessed her growing up in Haiti and in Brooklyn.

You thought that if you didn’t tell the stories, the sky would fall on your head. […] This fragile sky has terrified you your whole life. Silence terrifies you more than the pounding of a million pieces of steel chopping away at your flesh. Sometimes, you dream of hearing only the beating of your own heart, but this has never been the case. You have never been able to escape the pounding of a thousand other hearts that have outlived yours by thousands of years. And over the years when you have needed us, you have always cried “Krik?” and we have answered “Krak!” and it has shown us that you have not forgotten us. [Krik? Krak!, 223-4]

Krik? Krak!

“Children of the Sea”

I’d like finally to turn to those stories, beginning with the collection Krik? Krak!, published in 1995 when Danticat was 26. The opening story, “Children of the Sea”, was originally written in the early 1990s, a time when a military junta had crushed the hopes of Aristide’s reforms and sent a flood of boat people fleeing Haiti for the United States. The story is told as a dialogue, an exchange of letters written but never sent, between two separated lovers – a boy on a leaky, overcrowded boat, a young rebel fleeing the new generation of Tonton Macoutes; a girl still in Haiti, hiding both from an angry father and from the same ruthless police, but learning her own forms of rebellion and self-realization. Stark as its picture of the raw misery and hopelessness of the time, “Children of the Sea” is above all a romance – both a personal love story and a poignant parable of Danticat’s passion and transforming hope for her people.

Separated by a waste of ocean and a waste of history, the lovers speak in very different voices, but with a sense of intimacy that is only reinforced by the distance between them. We hear the boy first:

They say behind the mountains are more mountains. Now I know it’s true. I also know there are timeless waves, endless seas, and lots of people in this world whose names don’t matter to anyone but themselves. I look up at the sky and I see you there. I see you crying like a crushed snail, the way you cried when I helped you pull out your first loose tooth. Yes, I did love you then. Somehow when I looked at you, I though of fiery red ants. I wanted you to dig your fingernails into my skin and drain out all the blood. [Krik? Krak!, 3]

In the voice of the young activist it is love that seems to matter most – not Haitian politics, not even the prospect of death at sea. The very sails of the boat remind him of the “lost innocence” of the bedsheets where the two of them, little more than children, first made love. Trapped in a very different way back in Haiti, it is the naïve young girl for whom politics now have a greater importance, though at first as a passive witness rather than as a participant. Sounding barely older than the child who lost a tooth, she writes:

haiti est comme tu l’as laissé. yes, just as you left it. bullets day and night. same hole. same everything. i’m tired of the whole mess. i get so cross and irritable. i pass the whole time by chasing roaches around the house. i pound my heel on their heads. they make me so mad. everything makes me mad. […] all the other youth federation members have disappeared. no one has heard from them. i think they may all be in prison. maybe they’re all dead. […] i don’t sketch butterflies anymore because i don’t even like seeing the sun. besides, manman says that butterflies can bring news. the bright ones bring happy news and the black ones warn us of deaths. we have our whole lives ahead of us. you used to say that, remember? but then again things were so very different then. [Krik? Krak!, 4-5]

Against this background – and in defiance of all odds – the remainder of the story enacts the lovers’ parallel journeys not only towards freedom but towards reunion. Even as they grow physically farther apart, their struggles bring them closer to their truest and bravest selves, and thus to each other. On the boat, the voice of the boy begins to contemplate death with a new clarity and resolve:

I am more comfortable now with the idea of dying. Not that I have completely accepted it, but I know that it might happen. Don’t be mistaken. I really do not want to be a martyr. I know I am no good to anybody dead, but if that’s what’s coming, I know I cannot just scream at it and tell it to go away. […]

There are a lot of Protestants on this boat. A lot of them see themselves as Job or the Children of Israel. I think some of them are hoping something will plunge down from the sky and part the sea for us. They say the Lord gives and the Lord takes away. I have never been given very much. What was there to take away? [Krik? Krak!, 6-7]

Again it is the voice of the girl not the student radical that brings us back to Haitian political realities – with a young girl’s immediacy of emotion, dawning on her with the same intensity as love.

if only i could kill them. if i knew some good wanga magic, i would wipe them off the face of the earth. a group of students got shot in front of fort dimanche prison today. […] they want the bodies turned over to the families. this afternoon, the army finally did give some bodies back. they told the families to collect them at the rooms for indigents at the morgue. our neighbor madam roger came home with her son’s head and not much else. honest to god, it was just his head. […] i will never go outside again. not even in the yard to breathe the air. they are always watching you, like vultures. at night i can’t sleep. i count the bullets in the dark. i keep wondering if it is true, did you really get out? […] i will keep writing like we promised to do. i hate it, but i will keep writing to you. you keep writing too, okay? and when we see each other again, it will seem like we lost no time. [Krik? Krak!, 7-8]

Back on the boat, misery progresses to misery, mountain beyond mountain. Yet the boy remains strangely reflective, even whimsical, his viewpoint reduced to the narrow space of the vessel, as if charged with a whole world:

We spent most of yesterday telling stories. Someone says, Krik? You answer, Krak! And they say, I have many stories I could tell you, and then they go on and tell these stories to you, but mostly to themselves. Sometimes it feels like we have been at sea longer than the many years that I have been on this earth. The sun comes up and goes down. That is how you know it has been a whole day. I feel like we are sailing for Africa. Maybe we will go to Guinin, to live with the spirits, to be with everyone who has come and has died before us. […] At times I wonder if there is really land on the other side of the sea. Maybe the sea is endless, like my love for you. [Krik? Krak!, 14-5]

The almost mythical progress of life on the boat, dread as it is, is mocked by the continuing horrors of the girl’s Haiti: brutality, terror, and families living apart so fathers cannot be forced to rape their daughters. A neighbor, Madame Roger, whose son has already fallen victim to the new Tonton Macoutes, is herself beaten to death as the girl and her family listen helplessly in an outhouse.

manman whispers, we cannot just stay here and let them kill her. manman starts moving like she is going out the door. papa grabs her neck and pins her to the latrine wall. tomorrow we are going to ville rose, he says. you will not spoil that for the family. […] you will not get us killed. going out there will be like trying to raise the dead. she is not dead yet, manman says, maybe we can help her. […] they are beating her, pounding on her until you don’t hear anything else. manman tells papa, you cannot let them kill somebody just because you are afraid. papa says, oh yes, you can let them kill somebody because you are afraid. they are the law. it is their right. we are just being good citizens, following the law of the land. it has happened before all over this country and tonight it will happen again and there is nothing we can do. [Krik? Krak!, 16-7]

It’s a difficult scene, and Danticat does nothing to make it easier for the reader. We can readily identify with the pain and anger of the mother, and just as readily see the father as a selfish, grasping coward, almost a passive collaborator, the kind of victim who internalizes the viewpoint of the oppressor. But it is hard to mistake his bitter, satiric fury here, even as he lets the horror proceed. Indeed he understands what is happening in a deeper way than his wife, though her reaction is more immediate – as perhaps is the daughter’s. Only later in the story do we learn that he has sacrificed his entire life and livelihood to buy off the police and save his daughter’s life – a price to him worth more than another’s death and even her hatred. Again and again in her writing, Danticat seeks to dramatize the complex choices faced by the victims, the perpetrators and the witnesses of violence alike – and it is sometimes not easy to determine who is who. On the boat, the boy finds himself in a strangely similar situation: a baby is being born to one of the castaways, and yet he moves away, afraid of his own reaction:

I have moved to the other side of the boat so I will not have to look inside Célianne. […] I am scared to think of what would happen if we had to choose among ourselves who would stay on the boat and who would die. Given the choice to make a decision like that, we would all act like vultures, including me. [Krik? Krak!, 18]

Hope returns for a moment as the baby is born – but born without crying, and we start to think, born dead or dead soon after. And in the girl’s Haiti, a hopeful rumor of Aristide’s return is only the occasion for more fears and more cynicism.

it is not going to turn out well […] manman now says. people are just too hopeful, and sometimes hope is the biggest weapon of all to use against us. people will believe anything. they will claim to see the christ return and march on the cross backwards if there is enough hope. [Krik? Krak!, 18-9]

Meanwhile the boat continues to slowly sink – every spare weight being thrown out, even (soon) the boy’s notebook. Yet his voice reaches out from this elemental setting not with despair, but with a strange mixture of love, wistfulness and grim humor:

I know your father might never approve of me. I was going to try to win him over. He would have to cut out my heart to keep me from loving you. I hope you are writing like you promised. Jésus, Marie, Joseph! Everyone smells so bad. They get into arguments and they say to one another, “It is only my misfortune that would lump me together with an indigent like you.” Think of it. They are fighting about being superior when we all might drown like straw. [Krik? Krak!, 21]

The worst horror comes at us from the recent Haitian past: Célianne, we learn, conceived her baby after being raped by the police. She hypnotically repeats the story over and over, clinging fiercely to the little corpse, refusing to throw it overboard.

Towards the end of “Children of the Sea”, the strange counterpoint of the alternating love letters finally begins to tear itself apart. The girl’s mother explains how the father sold everything he owned – his house and his own father’s land – to bribe the police not to arrest the girl for political activities:

it is something you can never forget, the sacrifice he has made. i cannot bring myself to say thank you. now he is more than my father, he is a man who gave everything he had to save my life. [Krik? Krak!, 24]

In a bittersweet moment, she hears on the radio the news she and her lover hoped would win over the girl’s father: the boy has passed his university exams.

In the boat, the young mother Célianne, the same age as the girl in Haiti, throws her child overboard and then drowns herself. Even in this moment of desperation, however, Danticat finds a shadow of redemption. Célianne's act can be seen as much as a statement of love and acceptance as desperation. The rest of the passengers are not much farther away from drowning. In his last letter, as he tosses his book into the sea, the boy also throws all his passion for the girl and for his lost country into a new myth – a very Haitian myth, mixing African gods and Christian ritual.

I must throw my book out now. It goes down to them, Célianne and her daughter and all those children of the sea who might soon be claiming me.

I go to them now as though it was always meant to be, as though the very day that my mother birthed me, she had chosen me to live the life eternal, among the children of the deep blue sea, those who have escaped the chains of slavery to form a world beneath the heavens and the blood-drenched earth where you live.

Perhaps I was chosen from the beginning of time to live there with Agwé at the bottom of the sea. Maybe this is why I dreamed of the starfish and the mermaids having the Catholic Mass under the sea. Maybe this was my invitation to go. In any case, I know that my memory of you will live even there as I too become a child of the sea. [Krik? Krak!, 27-8]

Death in this myth becomes a return to childhood – but also a consecration of freedom. The boy’s myth of freedom is the ultimate gift he bestows on his lover, who is leaving childhood but will unlike him live into adulthood. She finally not only forgives but thanks her father – a fragile but powerful act of acceptance amidst the news of continued violence. She can’t escape this violence, any more than she can escape the black butterflies of bad news that bring word of her boyfriend’s death. But they also bring echoes of the boy’s earlier words in her closing ones:

today i said thank you. i said thank you, papa, because you saved my life. he groaned and just touched my shoulder, moving his hand quickly away like a butterfly. and then there it was, the black butterfly floating around us. i began to run and run so it wouldn’t land on me, but it had already carried its news. […] tonight i listened to manman’s transistor under the banyan tree. all I hear from the radio is more killing in port-au-prince. […] i don’t know what is going to happen, but i cannot see staying here forever. i am writing to you from the bottom of the banyan tree. manman says that banyan trees are holy and sometimes if we call the gods from beneath them, they will hear our voices clearer. […] last night on the radio, i heard that another boat sank off the coast of the bahamas. i can’t think about you being in there in the waves. my hair shivers. from here, i cannot even see the sea. behind these mountains there are more mountains and more black butterflies still and a sea that is endless like my love for you. [Krik? Krak!, 28-9, emphasis added]

It is an ending that is hard to read without a spine chill and without feeling the need to weep yourself. Danticat’s words combine a young writer’s romance and idealism and an old one’s sense of history’s bitter inevitability. It’s also hard to read the ending of this story without thinking of Danticat’s own love not for a boy but for her distant and troubled native country, separated from her by the gulf of the dyaspora. And yet Danticat is not writing allegory here. To see these children as symbols would be to compromise the fragile yet resilient humanity that is essence of the story. It is the lovers themselves who so poignantly and powerfully shape the symbolism of their own story, as they reach out for meaning in a world trying to destroy it. The reader can only return the favor – which is perhaps what makes the lovers despite everything victorious.

Other Stories in Krik? Krak!

I’ve quoted a lot from “Children of the Sea” in order to give you a flavor of Danticat’s prose and way of telling a story, but this is only one piece in a rich and varied collection, though also a beautifully cohesive one. Themes and images replay and transform themselves across the Haitian landscape of Danticat’s stories, as in a musical counterpoint at once harmonious and discordant: poignant, hopeful, macabre, utterly cruel and profoundly touching stories of aspiration and loss; stories where the past haunts the present in devastating but eerily heroic ways; stories above all of the risks and transforming power of relationships, between lovers, between husbands and wives, sisters and brothers, and most of all between parents and children.

In the second story in Krik? Krak!, entitled “Nineteen Thirty-Seven”, a daughter visits a wretched local prison to see her aging mother, who has been arrested by a superstitious police for the crime of witchcraft, for “flying” by magic. Though she succumbs to a cruel beating at the hands of the police, the mother leaves her daughter a legacy of true magic and courage in the memory of her literal flight to freedom in 1937 from the Dominican Republic, escaping the slaughter of 20,000 Haitian migrant workers by the dictator Trujillo. In “Between the Pool and the Gardenias”, a childless maid in a rich Haitian household adopts the body of an abandoned baby girl, and somehow creates a whole lifetime of love in the few days she is able to keep it – a lifetime she willingly exchanges for the almost certain charge of infanticide. In the story “A Wall of Fire Rising” a young boy defies the poverty of his life by taking part in a school play, struggling to learn the half understood words of a long dead Haitian revolutionary. The play never goes on, but the words become the boy’s way to mourn to the strange, crazed death of his father, who has taken his own macabre flight to freedom – leaping from the carriage of a stolen hot air balloon. Finally, in “Night Women”, a prostitute, hating the night but dependent on it, weaves an enchanted world of goddesses, ghosts, and angels around the young son who shares her house, opening a brief space for love and a more innocent vision of life.

Describing these stories in brief, you might think Danticat was trying to give Edgar Allen Poe a run for his money. Yet as we saw in “Children of the Sea”, even the grimmest moments in her stories are intended for something more than creepy dramatic effect. Not all the young artist’s efforts work equally well, to be sure: sometimes her marginal, traumatized protagonists can seem close to caricature, the plots contrived, the mixture of conflicting elements too strained and deliberate. What saves even Danticat’s most extravagant stories is the uncanny immediacy and almost revelatory power of the emotions they evoke, whatever road the writer has taken to get there. We can see this vividly in one of the richest and most powerful stories in Krik? Krak!, “The Missing Peace”, where a young peasant girl, orphaned at birth, befriends a visiting Haitian journalist trying to find her dead mother, a victim of the dictatorship’s violence. The girl confronts the older woman’s passionate idealism with an orphan’s mixture of tough realism and need for love. Finally she saves them both from death, thanks to her schoolyard flirtation with a local solder, hardly more than a child himself. Danticat’s Haitian countryside is both a beautiful and a terrible world, commonplace and strange, innocent and horribly experienced – a world where a girl can chase butterflies, walk daily past a mass grave, and face down a soldier who spares her thanks to nothing more noble than shy boyish lust. It is a world where an older woman helps an orphaned girl win back the memory of her mother and her identity, and the girl not just saves the journalist’s life but teaches the older woman how to live it, and how to confront her grief for her own mother’s death.

Not all the stories in Krik? Krak! are so difficult or so darkly wrought, particularly those that are set in the United States. The last story in the book, “Caroline’s Wedding”, takes place in modern Brooklyn, as the older daughter in a family of three – two daughters and their widowed mother – prepares to leave home for marriage. The story’s fifty pages compress a novel’s worth of generational tension, ethnic identity crises, life tragedy and domestic comedy, all told with a humor, sensitivity and sly art that place it squarely in the canon of American second generation fiction, from Philip Roth to Jhumpa Lahiri. What makes this story most distinctly Danticat’s is the presence of a fourth character, the girl’s father – a long dead victim of Haiti’s political violence, who haunts his daughters’ dreams but is somehow the most loving and down to earth presence in the story. He comes as a bearer of folk tales and wise folk riddles, the dark humor of an oppressed people, where symbol and memory live together. As the younger daughter, who narrates the story, says:

These were our bedtime stories. Tales that haunted our parents and made them laugh at the same time. We never understood them until we were fully grown and they became our only inheritance. [Krik? Krak!, 180]

The girls’ dreams also embody a wish to cling too much to childhood and a lost Haitian past, something their mother is guilty of as well. Families being what they are, this common nostalgia becomes a source of tension between the generations rather than a bond. Ironically, it is through the very force of conventional Haitian “family values” that mother and daughters finally reconcile their differences, when the mother helps her older daughter get over pre-wedding jitters by sharing the story of her own courtship and wedding. Through this renewed intimacy between mother and daughters, the haunting father is exorcised from the daughters’ dreams. And yet we can still feel his presence and his earthy wisdom in the voice of the living, loving mother. A marriage can take place, the story can end, and life go on, as the mother stands in the Brooklyn kitchen with her younger, unmarried daughter stirring a pot of peasant “bone soup”. They have become the “kitchen poets” as Danticat calls the women of Haiti, retelling the old stories of Haitian life that feed the writer’s own fiction.

The Dew Breaker

Almost a decade stands between the publication of Krik? Krak! and The Dew Breaker, which came out in 2004. The novel that Danticat wrote between them, The Farming of Bones, published in 1998, tries to explore and bring to light a part of Haitian history only alluded to in the earlier collection. This is the 1937 massacre – indeed the ethnic cleansing – of Haitian migrant workers in the Dominican Republic by the dictator Rafael Trujillo. The Dew Breaker returns to the events of a later time, during and after the brutal and corrupt reign of a native dictator, “Papa Doc” Duvalier. The book’s title is Danticat’s rendering of a Haitian Creole expression, choukèt laroze, “stomper” or “breaker” of the dew, referring to regional magnates and police chiefs, those who arrive at dawn to arrest their victims, literally “breaking the dew” on the grass. This book is woven around the life of one of those brutal police chiefs – who along with some of his victims has escaped Haiti and joined the dyaspora community. Here he has become a successful, if reclusive, owner of a barbershop, as well as a husband and a father.

The Dew Breaker has created some controversy, not just over the novel’s subject but over whether it is a novel at all. The torturer’s story is told not as a coherent narrative but through a collection of short stories, disparate in time, style, and perspective, many of which appear to have no relation to the dew breaker or his family. Danticat has written that:

I wanted the book to open up, as you read it, that is, with each new character, each new situation, I wanted to add layers upon layers to the central figure, the dew breaker. I wanted the reader to be introduced to the dew breaker from different angles, and for those who love him, and even for him, to see himself from various perspectives. [“Author Q & A: The Dew Breaker by Edwidge Danticat.” www.randomhouse.com]

It’s only slowly that we begin see the stories and characters interweave and cycle back on themselves and tell a larger story, though a story that remains fragmented, in a way that reflects the shattered past and uncertain future underlying it.

In addition to the dew breaker himself, the novel’s main characters include his daughter, his wife, and finally his victims, direct and indirect, dead and alive, some in the United States and some still in Haiti. Like all of Danticat’s books, The Dew Breaker is an exploration of the power of memory, of the interpenetration of past and present, and the compromises and self-reinventions people make with regard to the past and themselves. In this most recent work, the author show us these tensions in their most chilling and difficult form, through a protagonist who is both a product of Haiti’s political violence and one of its exemplary perpetrators. What is most chilling is how the dew breaker’s story entangles the rest of the book’s actors – not just as witnesses to one man’s evil, or as that man’s victims, but as perpetuators in their own way of a legacy of violence, trauma and deception that implicates all of them.

“The Book of the Dead”

Despite the book’s slow pace of revelation, The Dew Breaker isn’t a mystery in the familiar sense: we learn about the quiet barber’s past in the very first story, “The Book of the Dead”, and from his own mouth. The title of this story invokes the treatise read by ancient Egyptians to guide them through the trials of the afterlife, where sins and virtues are weighed as souls pass into eternity. It is told in the voice of the dew breaker’s daughter, a school art teacher and aspiring sculptor, who is traveling with her father from New York to Florida to deliver her latest work – a sculpture of her father himself – to a wealthy Haitian collector. The father who accompanies her is a mild-mannered, distant man, his most distinguishing feature a long, disfiguring scar on his face he received in prison – as a prisoner, his daughter always understood. Shortly after they reach Florida and settle into their hotel, the father disappears for an entire day, along with the sculpture. Waiting anxiously for him to return, the daughter’s thoughts reach back over their life and her father’s possible death.

My father loves museums. When he’s not working at his barbershop, he’s often at the Brooklyn Museum. The Ancient Egyptian rooms are his favorites.

“The Egyptians, they was like us,” he likes to say. The Egyptians worshipped their gods in many forms, fought among themselves, and were often ruled by foreigners. The pharaohs were like the dictators he had fled, and their queens were as beautiful as Gabrielle Fonteneau. But what he admires most about the Ancient Egyptians is the way they mourn their dead.

“They know how to grieve,” he’d say, marveling at the mummification process that went on for weeks but resulted in corpses that survived thousands of years.

My whole adult life, I have struggled to find the proper manner of sculpting my father, a quiet and distant man, who only came alive while standing with me most of the Saturday mornings of my childhood, mesmerized by the golden masks, the shawabtis, and the schist tablets, Isis, Nefertiti, and Osiris, the jackal-headed ruler of the underworld.

The sun is setting and my mother has called more than a dozen times when my father finally appears in the hotel room doorway. He looks like a much younger man and appears calm and rested, as if bronzed after a long day at the beach. [The Dew Breaker, 12-3]

The young artist has spent a frantic day of searching, fearing the worst for the father whom she has always seen as a victim of Haiti’s violence – someone she and her mother had to indulge and protect. When he finally returns, as if from the dead but also reborn, it is to tell her he has thrown her statue of him in the lake, unrecoverable. Through a haze of anger and her own long repressed doubts about her family’s reclusive life, the daughter finally learns the truth, or at least the father’s version of it:

“Ka, I don’t deserve a statue,” he says again, this time much more slowly, “not a whole one, at least. You see, Ka, your father was the hunter, he was not the prey. [The Dew Breaker, 20]

His terrible scar, we now learn, came not from a torturer but from someone the dew breaker himself tortured:

“This man who cut my face,” he continues, “I shot and killed him, like I killed many people.” [The Dew Breaker, 22]

From here daughter’s narrative moves in a kind of horrified slow motion, as another kind of statue breaks down – her complex idealization of her father and indeed her family’s entire life. What did her mother know? she wonders. What burdens of concealment had this man’s wife taken up? How had her mother implicated both of them, wife and innocent child, in the crimes and lies of the father?

And just so I will be absolutely certain of what I’d heard, I ask my father, “And those nightmares that you were always having, what were they?”
“Of what I, your father,” he says, “did to others.” [The Dew Breaker, 22]

As we soon learn, and as we may be horribly unsurprised to know, the mother does already know the truth – and is all too ready to share with her daughter her own long-crafted defenses. “Manman, how do you love him?” the daughter asks on the phone from her hotel. “What he told you he want to tell you for a long time,” her mother says. “You, his good angel”. His good angel, his “Ka” – in other words, both the daughter’s name and the name the Egyptians gave to the protective spirits who guided the souls of the dead.

“I don’t know, Ka.” My mother is whispering now, as though there’s a chance she might also be overheard by my father. “You and me, we save him. When I meet him, it made him stop hurt the people. This is how I see it. He’s a seed thrown in rock. You, me, we make him take root.” [The Dew Breaker, 25]

The wife’s banalities are almost painful to hear – only later will we see how literally true they are.

Shockingly but somehow inevitably the routines of daily life and social obligations take over. Even as she struggles to face an almost incomprehensible reality, the daughter begins to accept and reinforce what has been, after all, the unwitting pattern of her entire life. She survives a humiliating lunch with the collector – a light-skinned, upper class Haitian actress, whose stunning collection of Haitian art both idealizes Haiti and ironically confirms her place among the agents of oppression and deception. As they drive start the long drive home the daughter confesses to herself the sad family legacy of many children of terror, regardless of which side they were on.

I had always thought that my father's only ordeal was that he'd left his country and moved to a place where everything from the climate to the language was so unlike his own, a place where he never quite seemed to fit in, never appeared to belong. The only thing I can grasp now, as I drive way beyond the speed limit down yet another highway, is why the unfamiliar might have been so comforting, rather than distressing, to my father. And why he has never wanted the person he was, is, permanently documented in any way. He taught himself to appreciate the enormous weight of permanent markers by learning about the Ancient Egyptians. He had gotten to know them, through their crypts and monuments, in a way that he wanted no one to know him, no one except my mother and me, we, who are now his kas, his good angels, his masks against his own face. [The Dew Breaker, 33-4]

The masks against his face, we begin to see, the mother and daughter also hold against their own.

Other Stories in The Dew Breaker

Of all Danticat’s works, The Dew Breaker is perhaps the darkest and most sorrowful – not just in the brutal actions of the "dew breaker" but in how the violence and the moral compromises of one man's story implicate everyone in the book, villains and victims alike. In Krik? Krak! it was possible to see all the stories ending in a kind of victory. Flawed as the characters might be, broken as their lives were, their stories leave us with moments of beauty and love, struggle and growth, triumph and reconnection, even if only in dreams or in death or at the cost of madness. By contrast, almost no one in The Dew Breaker’s stories seems immune from self-deception and complicity in violence, if only to themselves. The dew breaker – we never in fact learn his name – is only the most extreme example.

The Dew Breaker has little room for any kind of heroism. In its place, the book gives us a shock of recognition, we might even call it revelation – not the revelation of truth, but of truth’s terrible price. The stories that follow “The Book of the Dead” initially seem disconnected from the central narrative. But we recognize a strangely similar pattern in the very next story, “Seven”, where a newly reunited immigrant couple must deal with the burden of their own compromises and infidelities. Reunited after seven years, they learn to accept each other only by burying a part of their private pasts. In a spooky surprise, we eventually learn they are renting a room in the dew breaker’s house. In “Water Child”, a reclusive Haitian nurse struggles to come to terms with her shame and isolation after losing an illegitimate child, finding her deepest sense of connection with one of her patients, a voiceless victim of throat cancer. Each subsequent story brings us both a step closer to the dew breaker’s history and a step further into the larger landscape of Haitian life. In “The Book of Miracles”, we see his small family – father, mother and adult daughter – on their way to Christmas mass in New York city. Told from the mother’s perspective, we glimpse her guilt and her evasions beneath the obsessive pursuit of an ideal Christmas and a desperate love of tabloid miracle stories. Her sad struggle is further undermined by the father and daughter’s cynical partnership in mocking the gaudy seasonal decorations.

Later stories bring us closer to contemporary Haiti and the dew breaker’s Haitian past. In “Night Talkers”, a young Haitian-American travels back to his native countryside to find his aging aunt, his only relative. The aunt saved him when he was a child from a fire that killed his parents, a fire we learn was set by the dew breaker. The young man has made a long, exhausting journey to tell his aunt he has discovered his parents’ murderer living in New York. In fact, he has become one of the dew breaker’s tenants. The tight web of Haitian history and the Haitian dyaspora binds Danticat’s narratives with a network of coincidences that are not really coincidences. The aunt dies in her sleep before learning the full story, but only after she, a “night talker”, replays the horrors of the fire in a waking dream. In the next story, “The Bridal Seamstress”, we meet another survivor of violence, a retired dressmaker, famous in her little Brooklyn community. She has escaped to New York to sew wedding dresses for the daughters of well-off Haitian Americans, yet is pursued everywhere by visions of her Haitian torturer, perhaps the dew breaker, perhaps one of many others. As you might expect from Danticat, ghosts haunt every chapter of the book.

“The Dew Breaker”

In this world of brutality and survival, coincidence and intention, evasion and revelation, the most extreme contradictions are left to the last story, which bears the same title as the book. It is a long, strange tale, at once shocking and moving, that brings us into the dark heart of Duvalier’s torture chambers. Here we also meet the light in that heart – a Protestant radio preacher who dares to mock the dictator and preach freedom to his flock. While he is a hero, indeed a saint to his followers, Danticat shows us a more complex reality – a man too in love with the vision of his own martyrdom and driven by private guilt for a beloved wife’s death. He lives alone, his only close relative an epileptic step sister – a devotee of miracles and spirits, whose private obsessions parody her brother’s theology of liberation.

In this story we finally meet the younger dew breaker, in all his swaggering glory. Here too Danticat show us not a symbol, not a Kafkaesque icon of evil, but something more essentially human and thus more frightening. The dew breaker we meet is a corrupt visionary, almost an entrepreneur of torture. Climbing the social ladder of dictatorship, he is haunted by a broken family and jaded by his own power; he is now ready to flee his country. His final triumph, the arrest and detention of the popular preacher, turns out to be the dew breaker’s greatest failure. Told by his superiors to release the man of god, the dew breaker instead kills him in a fit of rage. The preacher of peace, seeking martyrdom but terrified of the prospect of torture, also comes to a very different end than he imagined. There is no opening of the heavens, no freedom for his people. But before he dies he tears the face of the dew breaker with a broken piece of wood – dooming at least one torturer to a scarred life of lies.

That could be the end of the story, but Danticat has one more awful twist in store. Racing wounded from his own prison, the dew breaker crashes into the preacher’s half-crazed epileptic sister, who is running towards the prison in a futile effort to save her brother. She takes the wounded, bleeding dew breaker for another victim of the Macoutes. He readily embraces the role, desperate for her help but also for her pity. In a bizarre way, the victim and his killer are indeed now soul mates. Abandoning hope of entering the prison, the sister accepts her brother’s murderer as a substitute for her lost brother. The pair flee Haiti together in a kind of brutal haze, bound by their intersecting needs and their intersecting denials. Of course they finally wed and have a daughter – a school teacher and a sculptor. The end of the book belongs to Anne, the dew breaker’s wife, and the story of the strange life and even stranger love that brought her a marriage, a new identity and a child – Ka, the good angel. The child learns very late that she has born the burden of a conspiracy of silence, a life of looking the other way. Yet one thing she doesn’t learn, and one thing the husband and wife cannot confess even to each other, though they know it in their secret hearts: that the dew breaker’s last victim was also Anne’s preacher brother.

Unlike so many of the mother-daughter pairs we meet in Danticat’s writings, this mother does not reconnect with her child, any more than she was able to find her brother. At the close of The Dew Breaker, back where the book began, Anne clings to the phone after her daughter hangs up, listening to the recorded message: “Please hang up and try again”. Let me read one more passage, the last words of the novel.

She wished she had someone with her now, to get her past the silence that would follow the trying again. She was no longer used to this particular type of loneliness, this feeling that you could be alive or dead and no one would know. […]

There was no way to escape this dread anymore, this pendulum between regret and forgiveness, this fright that the most important relationships of her life were always on the verge of being severed or lost, that the people closest to her were always disappearing. The spirits had long since stopped coming through her body via her mysterious spells, which she now knew had a longish name with a series of nearly redundant syllables. These spirits, they’d left her for good the morning that the news was broadcast on the radio that her brother had set his body on fire in the prison yard at dawn, leaving behind no corpse to bury, no trace of himself at all. [The Dew Breaker, 242]

It is almost impossible to unravel the wonder and the terror of this final lie, and how it has shaped the life of Anne and her husband and daughter. It is the most destructive lie of all, perhaps – the beautiful lie that we are afraid to challenge. But the spirits know and so do we as readers – though for a moment, this image of holy sacrifice compels us as well. Danticat’s ability to bring us to moments like this, tearing our hearts and minds but also moving them with poignancy and terrible beauty, is what marks her essential achievement as a writer and her importance as a voice bearing witness for generations of Haiti’s voiceless.

Works Cited

Edwidge Danticat. Breath, Eyes, Memory. New York, NY: Random House, Inc., 1994. [Originally published by Soho Press, Inc., 1994]

____________. Krik? Krak!. New York, NY: Random House, Inc., 1996. [Originally published by Soho Press, Inc., 1995]

____________. The Farming of Bones. New York, NY: Penguin Books, 1999. [Originally published by Soho Press, Inc.,1998]

____________. The Dew Breaker. New York, NY: Random House, Inc., 2004. [Originally published by Alfred A Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., 2004]

____________. “Author Q & A. Breath, Eyes, Memory by Edwidge Danticat.” New York, NY: Random House, Inc. [http://www.randomhouse.com/catalog/display.pperl?isbn=9780375705045&view=auqa] (May 15, 2006).

____________. “Author Q & A. The Dew Breaker by Edwidge Danticat.” New York, NY: Random House, Inc. [http://www.randomhouse.com/catalog/display.pperl?isbn=9781400034291&view=auga] (May 15, 2006).

Khaled Hosseini. The Kite Runner. New York, NY: Riverhead, 2003

Jhumpa Lahiri. The Interpreter of Maladies. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1999.

____________. The Namesake. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Company (Mariner Books), 2003.

Helen Oyeyemi. The Icarus Girl. New York, NY: Random House, Inc., 2005.

A modest defense of plagiarism

A response to “A Star is Shorn”, the Boston Globe’s editorial on Kaavya Viswanathan, 4/30/06)

Shakespeare did it. Dante did it. Chaucer did it too – in spades. I know, I wrote my Harvard doctoral dissertation on him. Finding your own artistic voice by pilfering from beloved predecessors has been the bread and butter of writers since before there were writers. It's only in the last 200 years or so that "originality" and "authenticity" have become the most prized words on jacket copy. Now that Kaavya Viswanathan's novel has been removed from bookstore shelves, it's a hard to do a critical "source study" of how she may have creatively rewritten and recontextualized the words of writer Megan McCafferty. But the examples quoted in newspapers don't look that much different from what the author of The Canterbury Tales did when he turned Canto 33 of Dante's Inferno into part of "The Monk's Tale".

Of course, Chaucer didn't have a profit-hungry publisher and book packager crafting his stories into commercially viable chick lit, while at the same time touting the "freshness of the voice" (to quote a publicity letter cited by Ann Hulbert in Slate). As the Globe and commentators like Hulbert have pointed out, both publisher and packager share some blame for the pressures that led Viswanathan to echo thirty or more passages from one of her favorite novelists. Yet we as readers are at fault as well, demanding books that are "fresh" and "innovative" but also sound just like the other books we like – as long as it's not in a way that's legally actionable. While contestants on American Idol can aspire to be "original" artists by copying famous songs and singers, fiction writers and more importantly fiction publishers must keep the reality of literary imitation a guilty secret.

It's been suggested that Viswanathan's handlers subtly changed her original ideas to make her story more saleable. But we should not take the alleged plagiarism itself as a betrayal of artistic integrity. Ironically, it may be that in echoing and transforming words that inspired to become a creative writer, Viswanathan has most authentically proved herself to be one. She and her handlers just forgot the rest of the modern equation – being creative in covering your tracks.

The “Man of Letters” in Dante's Purgatorio, Canto XII - Three Translations

[Draft of contribution to Electronic Bulletin of Dante Society of North America]

Canto XII of Purgatorio inhabits the terrace of the Proud, where Dante the Pilgrim purges what might be Dante the Poet’s chief sin. Like the rest of Purgatorio, the events of this Canto interweave outer symbolic spectacle and inner spiritual drama. The center of the spectacle in Canto XII is a striking series of images hewn into the very stones of the Purgatorial mount, combining Classical and Biblical stories in a powerful symbolic narrative of superbia – Pride – the first of the seven cardinal sins. Dante famously uses an acrostic, a popular device of medieval Latin and vernacular poetry, to link these images of pride together so as to spell out V-O-M, short for uomo – “Man” in Italian – embodying in the most literal way the stories’ moral symbolism and this most characteristically human of sins. I will look here at Dante’s study of pride in Canto XII and how his acrostic of Man is rendered in English verse by three translators – Ciardi, Mandelbaum and Esolin.

Since we are in Purgatory, of course, sin punished is also sin transcended and redeemed. Dante’s Purgatorial symbolism shows us how the aspirations of human pride parody and corrupt the deepest and most truly human of aspirations – for God. In Dante’s late medieval Christian theology, such aspirations lead from the grave of the earthly Man, Adam, to the perfected and redeemed Man embodied in the risen Christ, whose story pervades the Easter-time setting of Purgatorio.

The Canto opens with Dante and the shade of Oderisi of Gubbio plodding side by side, “like oxen at the plow.” Virgil, always a step ahead of his companion, psychologically at least, abruptly tells Dante to lift up his head and move forward. The “sweet teacher” now tells his pupil, in Esolin’s pointed rendering, to:

“Come and leave the man 4

For here it's well that each should speed his boat

With wings and oars as quickly as he can.”

Instead, Virgil urges him to:

“Come, turn your eyes and look upon the road. 13

It will be well for you to soothe the way,

Seeing the bed on which you plant your soles.”

It’s a strange bed, and a strange kind of soothing. But Virgil is not being ironic: this is the paradoxical truth of Purgatory, where struggle soothes and painful truths brings rest. The tragedy of all of human history now unrolls before Dante, from the fall of Satan to the fall of Troy: the history not just of men but Man. Each of the first four tercets begins with Vedea (“I saw”); each of the second four start with the interjection O; each of the third four with Mostrava (“It showed”). Together those capital letters spell out VOM, or UOM, short for uomo, “man.” The last tercet repeats the pattern of the previous twelve, its first line beginning with Vedea, its second with O, and its third with Mostrava.

The significance of having the word UOM or “Man” woven into very verbal fabric of a narrative on human pride is profound. While to modern tastes acrostics may seem a mechanical device, they are found in the most serious medieval poetry, providing both a source of structural invention and a hidden key to unlock a work’s meaning. The word “Man” running through these tercets is like a half-obscured title on a statue, declaring: This is where man’s pride can lead. But also (since we are in Purgatory): This is an aspect of fallen man that must be overcome for true, spiritual humanity to appear. As Pontius Pilate says of the mocked and scourged Jesus in his crown of thorns: Ecce Homo – “Behold the Man”.

Like Dante’s other symbolic uses of poetic technique, such as his terza rima, this acrostic has posed a challenge to translators, and most have avoided rendering it directly. John Ciardi (in his 1957 version) was the first English translator to attempt this – deftly transposing Dante’s U-O-M to the three letter English equivalent, M-A-N. Here’s his version of the opening tercet in the series, describing the fall of Lucifer.

Mark there, on one side, him who had been given 25

A nobler form than any other creature.

He plunged like lightning from the peak of Heaven.

For comparison, here is Singleton’s 1973 prose translation:

“I saw, on the one side, him who was created nobler than any other creature fall as lightning from heaven.”

Dante’s first person past tense, “I saw” or vedea, is rendered by Ciardi as the imperative verb “Mark”. Dante’s three O’s become three “Ah”s (“Ah mad Arachne!”), and “it showed” or Mostrava, becomes “Now see” (“Now see Alcmaeon, there on the hard pavement”).

Ciardi’s syntactic shift from the first person past of “I saw” to the imperative of “Mark” is not just a random grammatical choice. It radically changes how we relate to the poetry. Instead of our viewing the scene through the narrator’s eyes, the narrator – sounding more like Virgil than Dante – commands us to note the image and the lesson it bears. Ciardi might well cite Dante’s own freedom in rendering Virgil and other Latin poets as a model for his bold gesture here. But while his changed wording lends dramatic immediacy, Ciardi sacrifices a haunting quality of the original -- the sense that Dante is not just looking at a picture, but watching the events of history unroll before his eyes.

Dante’s sequence of images ends powerfully with a tercet that incorporates all three letters and all three words of the acrostic, describing the greatest historical example of human pride, the fall of Troy:

Mark Troy there in its ashes overthrown. 61

Ah Ilion! how lovely and how lost!

Now see your hollow shell upon that stone.

Ciardi the poet is at engagingly work here, but his lyricism obscures the blunt mixture of sorrow and divine contempt in the original Italian. To quote Singleton’s prose version again:

I saw Troy in ashes and in caverns: O Ilion, how cast down and vile it showed you—the sculpture of which is there discerned!

Allan Mandelbaum, a more recent translator (1983) is also a poet like Ciardi, and also works inventively to preserve some of Dante’s poetic structure. His approach focuses less on the rigid Italian rhyme scheme and more on Dante’s play of formal and vernacular diction and line to line syntactic flow. Mandelbaum for his part doesn’t try to reproduce Dante’s acrostic in Canto XII, translating the tercets more literally with “I saw”, “O”, and “It showed”. Looking again at the first and the last tercets in Dante’s parade of Pride, we can see how – while lacking some of Ciardi’s music – he better approximates Dante’s stately sentence flow from line to line of verse

I saw, to one side of the path, one who 25

had been created nobler than all other

beings, falling lightning-like from Heaven.

The description of the fall of Troy’s cleverly captures Dante’s play of near rhyme and alliteration and the dramatic inversion of regular word order:

I saw Troy turned to caverns and to ashes; 61

O Ilium, your effigy in stone-

it showed you there so squalid, so cast down!

Mandelbaum shows us proud Troy transformed into a city of “caverns and ashes” – a reality almost as stony and dead as its sculpted image. No acrostic UOM here, but the symbolic image of MAN that underlies Dante’s use of this device – man cast down, but able to rise from his own grave – is more powerfully evident than in Ciardi’s version, as is the dramatic trajectory of Dante’s wording: the personal “I saw” , followed by the empathic “O”, and ending with the stark, objective “It showed.”

The Purgatorio’s most recent translator, Esolin, returns to Ciardi’s formalism while preserving some of the rhythmic fidelity of Mandelbaum. He also renders the acrostic with M-A-N, though with a slight change of wording, translating Vedea again as “Mark…”, the exclamatory O as “Alas” (vs. Ciardi’s “Ah”), and the Mostrava lines starting with “Now…” but with more varied phrasing than Ciardi’s. As Esolin notes in his “Introduction”, he avoids Ciardi’s strict rhyme scheme, favoring rhyme or near rhyme only when available without too much strain – such as in the opening tercet of this passage:

Mark, on this side, the one whom the Most High 25

Created as the noblest of his creatures—

And see him fall like lightning from the sky.

Having embraced the imperative mood in the first line, he continues it in the final one (“see him fall like lightning from the sky”), preserving the sense of history passing before our eyes that Ciardi lost. Here, as in many other instances, Esolin does better than either predecessor in conveying not just the literal sense but the poetry and the pathos of Dante’s stony anthology of sin.

He is not always so felicitous, however. In his rendering of the fall of Troy, Esolin pushes the balance between a translator’s ingenuity and risk of distorting Dante’s original meaning:

Mark Troy, in gutted palaces and ash. 61

Alas, Ilion, the signs for all to see

Now show you for a thing of scorn, and trash!

Vivid though it is, the image of “gutted palaces” is symbolically less powerful than the hellish “caverns” evoked by Dante. Esolin’s Troy – a “thing of scorn, and trash” – seems as much a Victorian fallen woman as a humbled city, showing a tone of moral contempt interesting to contrast with Ciardi’s equally Victorian but more sentimental “lovely and lost”. Readers can decide for themselves which image better renders the sense of Dante’s “cast down and vile” (basso e vile) – or whether Mandelbaum’s “squalid and cast down” better splits the difference between Esolin’s scorn and Ciardi’s regret.

Ultimately, of course, both translators and readers of Dante are in the same boat as Dante himself, as he tries to convey in human language the more than human realities of spiritual life. Whether reading in English or in Italian, we have to lift our vision to grasp symbols and meanings that are beyond any “master of pen or stylus”, as Dante describes this walk of sculpted images. Even in Dante’s Italian, the acrostic of UOM is partially hidden, a kind of riddle that has to be glimpsed and deciphered by the attentive reader. In the Commedia, one must always look beyond the images of the otherworld, even beyond their function as metaphor, to grasp their real significance – as the poet now goes on to illustrate. The Canto ends the way it began, with Virgil telling Dante to turn away from the sights of sin, and “lift up your head./ The time is past for walking so intent” (77). Compared to the start, Dante is now more able to see and understand for himself, but his mind and vision are not yet completely free:

More of the mountain had we gone about 73

and far more of the sun’s race was now spent

than could my mind believe, all bound in thought,

Feeling humbled, but unexpectedly rewarded for his piety, Dante looks up to see an angel rushing towards him and his companion – rather their having to move towards it. Virgil tells Dante:

“With reverence dress your face and bearing now, 82

that he may please to let us climb beyond—

and think, this day may never dawn again”

We might say that what Virgil asks Dante to present, in his own “face and bearing”, is the authentic image of a humbled, redeemed humanity – not Man in history as we’ve seen sculpted on stone, or the title MAN inscribed in a poet’s ingenious acrostic, but mere man facing himself and the prospect of salvation. Which is not to say the Purgatorio is beyond wordplay even here. We see this vividly at the end of the Canto, when the same angel beats its wings over Dante’s forehead, removing the first of the seven P’s (for peccati, “sins”) that both scar and adorn the poet’s face, like another crown of thorns. Dante, it turns out, is nothing less than a living acrostic himself.

A small difference of opinion

The Iraqi parliament voted Monday to extend by a week the deadline for completing the country's new constitution. The main areas that remained unsettled are, reportly, how to address issues of regional sovereignty and the role of Sharia law. It's hard to think of more fundamental questions for a country (you almost want to put this word in quotes) like Iraq. Makes you wonder how the parliament has been spending its time for the last six months.

Journalists and politicians have been referring to the Iraqi negotiators as "Framers", a term that evokes the creators of the American constitution. Rhetorical flourishes aside, there are interesting historical analogies with the process by which our founding document was drafted and the United States came into being. This isn't an academic point, since it's our own democratic institutions, or the myths surrounding them, that are being used to frame the process of Iraqi nation-building. The tenor of debate there hasn't risen to level of the Federalist papers, but surely Madison, Hamilton and Jefferson -- and those less well-known folk on the other side -- would recognize the importance of the questions besetting the Iraqi parliament. Unresolved differences around regional divisions of power were what led, in part, to our Civil War sixty years after ratification -- though it's unlikely the factions in Iraq will wait that long. And we're still debating the implications of the Establishment clause.

Of course, the historical contrasts are even more obvious, starting with the character of the "Iraqi revolution" and the real sources of political and military power in the region. The American states could reasonably claim to have freed themselves, though with a lot of help from France. The Iraqis were freed by, well, the United States. To make a legitimate comparison, you have to imagine a North America circa 1795 where the French, having whipped George III by themselves, remain the main military power on the continent, while ceding the name of sovereignty to the locals. Locals who include, in this instance, a vast and angry population of former slaves, eager to claim majority rights in the south, along with control of the critical economic resources they used to pick for their ex-masters. And in the north well-armed and organized Indians, demanding their own autonomous region.

You have to wonder whether the French would have been so ready to keep their troops and warships posted half-way around the world, especially with political distractions at home. And you have to wonder whether the Madisons, Hamiltons and Jeffersons would've stayed inside the early American "green zone" arguing high constitutional principles, or stood on the outside, keeping their powder dry for a fight that in many ways had barely begun.

The Nice Jewish Girl's Guide to Old English Poetry

[Written for my wife to explain graduate school in medieval studies]

I.

Let’s start with what we don’t know about Old English poetry.

First, we don’t know for sure when most of the surviving Old English poetry was composed. Datings by scholars vary widely, from the early 11th centry back to the start of the 9th, and possibly earlier. We do know that the manuscripts containing the bulk of the poetry were set down in the early to mid-11th Century. This was a time when Britain – though still troubled by invasions and dynastic struggles – had already become a centralized and efficiently administered European kingdom. The realities of daily life would have been quite different from the images of tribal violence and romantic exile in poems like Beowulf or “The Seafarer”. While scholars used to see these poems as direct expressions of “heroic” Anglo-Saxon cultural values, it’s just as likely – as more recent critics argue – that they represent a form of literary nostalgia, as romantic and tendentious in its view of the past as Shakespeare’s plays about late medieval English kings – or modern movie versions of the same era. In the absence of clearer chronological facts, however, any speculation about dates remains just that. Only works based on historical events, like the “Battle of Maldon” or the “Battle of Brunanburh,” can be dated with any certainty (around 991 and 937 respectively).

The second thing we don’t know much about is the medium of Old English verse itself. Apart from a stray name or monkish legend, we have scant information about who composed this poetry, or how, or for what kind of audience. We don’t know whether the works in the surviving manuscripts were written or remembered, read or sung. Religious poems based on Scripture or Latin models (“Dream of the Rood”, “Christ I”, “Phoenix”) were clearly composed by highly literate poets – very likely monks – for a devout and relatively learned audience. Martial and heroic works like “Maldon” and Beowulf, or romantic elegies like “The Wife’s Lament” and “Wulf and Eadwacer”, suggest by contrast a class of courtly story-tellers entertaining a more mixed and secular-minded group of aficionados. For all their differences, to be sure, these poems show common elements of style and tone that point to a widely shared, deeply engrained literary culture. But how this culture developed and was transmitted, and how this very richness of elements came about, is something on which scholars disagree.

Finally, because of problems in scribal transmission, holes in linguistic history, and often holes in the manuscripts themselves, we don’t always know for sure what the words in Old English poems mean. Scholarly readings of key passages vary sharply, as does the way translators render such passages in modern English. E.g., when the hero Beowulf, the smoke of his funeral pyre rising to heaven, is eulogized in the last word of the epic as lofgeornest – literally, “most eager for praise” – is the poet telling us Beowulf sought a warrior’s glory or credit for kingly generosity? There is linguistic and literary evidence for both possibilities. Such apparently minor nuances have can have major implications for how we understand Beowulf's motivations and the meaning of the poem as a whole.

The many things we don’t know about Anglo-Saxon poetry are balanced by one thing most readers do agree on, whatever their historical viewpoint – how spine-tinglingly moving and beautiful it can be. The mysteries and scholarly doubts surrounding Old English poetry are in fact part of its appeal, not the least because doubt, loss, hope, and the ravages of time are central themes in the poems themselves. In pieces like “The Ruin” (describing a once great, now abandoned city) or “Deor’s Lament” (where a displaced court poet grimly waits out time’s passing), Old English poetry seems almost to celebrate its own condition. Perhaps the best example of these qualities is the passage at the start of Beowulf describing the ship funeral of the legendary Danish king Scyld Scyfing. Scyld’s entry into life as an orphaned exile is linked with his departure from this life – either back into exile, or finally returning home, we don’t know which:

There, at the landing-place, stood the ring-prowed ship
hung with ice, ready for sea, the prince’s vessel.
Then they laid their beloved king,
giver of rings, in the ship’s bosom,
the famous one by the mast. There were many treasures,
many ornaments, brought from far away;
I have not heard of a ship more fairly fitted out
with battle-weapons and battle-garments,
swords and mailshirts; in his lap lay
many treasures, which were to go with him
into the sea’s embrace, far away.
Not at all did they bestow on him lesser gifts,
kingly treasures, than did those
who, at the beginning, sent him out,
alone over the waves, when he was a child.
Then they also set for him a golden banner
high over his head. They let the flood carry him,
gave him to the ocean; their heart was sad,
their spirit mournful. Men cannot
say truly, the wisest of counselors
or heroes beneath the skies, who unshipped that cargo.

II.

Burton Raffel’s renderings of Anglo-Saxon verse in Poems and Prose from the Old English (1998) are relatively free but they read well and Raffel the poet comes to the aid of Raffel the translator in preserving the spirit of the originals. My beginner’s recommendations are:

• “Caedmon’s Hymn” (the earliest known OE poem, composed the story goes by an angelically inspired, illiterate shepherd)
• “The Battle of Brunanburh” (Celebrating an Anglo-Saxon victory over invading Viking & Irish army)
• “The Ruin”
• Riddle #29: “The Moon and the Sun” (The riddles have no answers in the manuscript. The titles here and below are scholars’ guesses – and they don’t all agree)
• “The Seafarer” (The one that reminds me of Derek Walcott)
• Riddle #8: “A Jay’s Spring Song”
• “A Woman’s Message”
• “The Dream of the Rood” (“Rood” is an old-fashioned word for “cross”)
• “The Battle of Maldon” (Celebrating an Anglo-Saxon defeat by invading Vikings but a victory for Anglo-Saxon heroic virtue)
• “Deor” (A displaced court poet recounts his poet’s store of tragic legends, ostensibly to stoke his patience but, you have to think, secretly wishing his rival a similar fate)
• “The Wanderer”
• “Wulf and Eadwacer”
• “Christ I”: Sections 1, 3, 5, 8
• Riddle #7: “Swan”
• Riddle #47: “Bookworm”
• Riddle #66: “Creation”
• “Charm for Bewitched Land”

Maybe since Poems and Prose from the Old English came out in the early ‘60s Raffel doesn’t translate any of the obscene or “double-entendre” Anglo-Saxon riddles. Here’s my stab at two of the best – or worst. Watch as sardonic warrior poetry morphs into a Dark Age version of locker-room humor. While pretty poor as either wit or erotica, it’s refreshing to know the honored dead can be as lame as the living when it comes to sex. The two riddles occur one after the other in Exeter Book manuscript: some monastic copyist must’ve been on a post-Lenten jag.

Riddle #42: “A Key”

Wonderfully it hangs by a man’s thigh,
under a fellow’s garments. It is pierced in front.
It’s stiff and hard, and stands in a good place.
Then the man pulls his tunic
up over his knee. That familiar hole
he’ll greet with the head of his hanging thing,
which he often filled before, just as deeply.

Riddle #43: “Dough Rising”

I heard of something growing in the corner,
swelling and standing, raising its cover.
The bride grasped that boneless one
with heart-proud hands. With her dress,
she covered the swelling thing,
the king’s daughter.

III.

Next, two works by modern American poets, to tune your ear to what ancient Anglo-Saxons might have heard when their poetry was chanted or sung.

First, Ezra Pound’s highly interpretive rendering of the “Seafarer”, as it happens the first translation of an Old English poem I ever read. As a piece of 20^th Century poetry, it marks an interesting point of transition between Pound’s archly Edwardian early style and the more gnarled and difficult modernism of his mature work. As a translation, while incomplete and often inaccurate, it also gives a real sense of the alliterative swing, compact diction and line-by-line flow of Anglo-Saxon verse:

May I for my own self song’s truth reckon,
Journey’s jargon, how I in harsh days
Hardship endured oft.
Bitter breast-cares have I abided,
Known on my keel many a care’s hold,
And dire sea-surge, and there I oft spent
Narrow nightwatch nigh the ship’s head
While she tossed close to cliffs. Coldly afflicted,
My feet were by frost benumbed.
Chill its chains are; chafing sighs
Hew my heart round and hunger begot
Mere-weary mood. Lest man know not
That he on dry land loveliest liveth,
List how I, care-wretched, on ice-cold sea,
Weathered the winter, wretched outcast
Deprived of my kinsmen;
Hung with hard ice-flakes, where hail-scur flew,
There I heard naught save the harsh sea
And ice-cold wave, at whiles the swan cries,
Did for my games the gannet’s clamour,
Sea-fowls, loudness was for me laughter,
The mews’ singing all my mead-drink.
Storms, on the stone-cliffs beaten, fell on the stern
In icy feathers; full oft the eagle screamed
With spray on his pinion.
Not any protector
May make merry man faring needy.
This he little believes, who aye in winsome life
Abides ‘mid burghers some heavy business,
Wealthy and wine-flushed, how I weary oft
Must bide above brine.
Neareth nightshade, snoweth from north,
Frost froze the land, hail fell on earth then
Corn of the coldest. Nathless there knocketh now
The heart’s thought that I on high streams
The salt-wavy tumult traverse alone.
Moaneth alway my mind’s lust
That I fare forth, that I afar hence
Seek out a foreign fastness.
For this there’s no mood-lofty man over earth’s midst,
Not though he be given his good, but will have in his youth greed;
Nor his deed to the daring, nor his king to the faithful
But shall have his sorrow for sea-fare
Whatever his lord will.
He hath not heart for harping, nor in ring-having
Nor winsomeness to wife, nor world’s delight
Nor any whit else save the wave’s slash,
Yet longing comes upon him to fare forth on the water.
Bosque taketh blossom, cometh beauty of berries,
Fields to fairness, land fares brisker,
All this admonisheth man eager of mood,
The heart turns to travel so that he then thinks
On flood-ways to be far departing.
Cuckoo calleth with gloomy crying,
He singeth summerward, bodeth sorrow,
The bitter heart’s blood. Burgher knows not--
He the prosperous man - what some perform
Where wandering them widest draweth.
So that but now my heart burst from my breast-lock,
My mood ‘mid the mere-flood,
Over the whale’s acre, would wander wide.
On earth’s shelter cometh oft to me,
Eager and ready, the crying lone-flyer,
Whets for the whale-path the heart irresistibly,
O’er tracks of ocean; seeing that anyhow
My lord deems to me this dead life
On loan and on land, I believe not
That any earth-weal eternal standeth
Save there be somewhat calamitous
That, ere a man’s tide go, turn it to twain.
Disease or oldness or sword-hate
Beats out the breath from doom-gripped body.
And for this, every earl whatever, for those speaking after--
Laud of the living, boasteth some last word,
That he will work ere he pass onward,
Frame on the fair earth ‘gainst foes his malice,
Daring ado, ...
So that all men shall honour him after
And his laud beyond them remain ‘mid the English,
Aye, for ever, a lasting life’s-blast,
Delight mid the doughty.
Days little durable,
And all arrogance of earthen riches,
There come now no kings nor Cæsars
Nor gold-giving lords like those gone.
Howe’er in mirth most magnified,
Whoe’er lived in life most lordliest,
Drear all this excellence, delights undurable!
Waneth the watch, but the world holdeth.
Tomb hideth trouble. The blade is layed low.
Earthly glory ageth and seareth.
No man at all going the earth’s gait,
But age fares against him, his face paleth,
Grey-haired he groaneth, knows gone companions,
Lordly men are to earth o’ergiven,
Nor may he then the flesh-cover, whose life ceaseth,
Nor eat the sweet nor feel the sorry,
Nor stir hand nor think in mid heart,
And though he strew the grave with gold,
His born brothers, their buried bodies
Be an unlikely treasure hoard.

Second, here’s Richard Wilbur’s loving and remarkably adroit parody, “Junk”, faithfully following the alliterative meter that binds each half line of Anglo-Saxon verse to the next (emphasis and spacing are mine):

An axe angles xxfrom my neighbor’s ashcan;
It is hell’s handiwork, xxthe wood not hickory,
The flow of the grain xnot faithfully followed.
The shivered shaft xxrises from a shellheap
Of plastic playthings, xxpaper plates,
And the sheer shards xxof shattered tumblers
That were not annealed xxfor the time needful.

It continues:

At the same curbside, xxa cast-off cabinet
Of wavily warped xxunseasoned wood
Waits to be trundled xxin the trashman’s truck.
Haul them off! Hide them! xxthe heart winces
For junk and gimcrack, xxfor jerrybuilt things
And the men who make them xxfor a little money,
Bartering pride xxlike the bought boxer
Who pulls his punches, xxor the paid-off jockey
Who in the home-stretch xxholds in his horse.
Yet the things themselves xxin thoughtless honor
Have kept composure xxlike captives who would not
Talk under torture. xxTossed from a tailgate
Where the dump displays xxits random dolmens,
Its black barrows xxand blazing valleys,
They shall waste in the weather xxtoward what they were,
The sun shall glory xxin the glitter of glass-chips,
Foreseeing the salvage xxof the prisoned sand,
And the blistering paint xxpeel off in patches,
That the good grain xxbe discovered again.
Then burnt, bulldozed, xxthey shall all be buried
To the depths of diamonds, xxin the making dark
Where halt Hephaestus xxkeeps his hammer
And Wayland’s work xxis worn away.

IV.

Finally some show and tell: Here’s what the first page of the Beowulf manuscript looks like, after narrowly escaping a fire in a 17th century collector’s library. It’s a reminder of how much of this literature is, in all certainty, completely lost to us, if not to fire then to rot, recycling and linguistic and cultural changes that made Old English poetry and its audience obsolete.

Outsourcing

Well, you can't expect America to bring democracy to the rest of the world, and still be good at everything else. Chinese factories are busy making our sneakers and cut-price chinos. Operators in Hyderabad and Manilla are servicing our consumer complaints. Millions of hard-working Japanese salarymen lay down savings so Japanese banks can continue to fund the US's massive and growing deficit. And we're now starting to learn how much our allies in the Middle East -- and even some erstwhile enemies -- are doing to take up the slack in America's torture needs.

Jane Mayer's article in the current New Yorker looks at the practice of 'extraordinary rendition', where US intelligence agents, mostly from the CIA, collect terrorist suspects around the globe, hustle them into a waiting unmarked jet, and wing them off to the gentle care of police interrogators in Jordan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, or even Syria. The practice began under the Clinton administration, when Richard Clarke was anti-terrorism czar, but has increased vastly since 9/11, under the auspices of "War on Terror" aided by the creative jurisprudence of the Bush's Justice Department.

On a day when the author of much of that jurisprudence is being confirmed as the US Attorney General, there's occasion to celebrate another milestone in American moral values, and another great examplar of the American democratic process in action.

Blue fingers

I'm very moved watching the election news from Iraq this evening, esp. the proud camaraderie of all those blue-inked fingers, which just yesterday seemed like they'd risk drawing attack. Events and people can surprise you sometimes. This doesn't make me feel any different about US policy, but in purely human terms it says a lot about what happens when the fear of losing your life gives way to a prospect larger than yourself alone (I guess this can be for the good or the bad, depending on whether you're a voter or a jihadist.). Even in Falluja, where turnout was expected to be in the 100s at best, out of the 20,000 people who returned to the town after the U.S. invasion (25% of the population) some 8000 or 40% reportedly voted. One video clip in particular made me almost want to cry, a Kurdish woman wiping away tears as she talked about her father, who had been killed under Saddam Hussein. The reporter asked what the voting had meant to her. "Freedom" she said after a short pause. "Happiness. Victory."

Of course it's not particularly fun to see George Bush so pumped up about the apparent vindication of his policies. He's so inhumanly smug about it, however, that I can feel perfectly justified in still hating him while letting him have his moment. If I feel irritation at any politician it's John Kerry, who appeared on Meet the Press this morning with a dyspeptic, shell shocked look on his face, like he'd eaten a bad clam. When asked by Tim Russert if voting had turned out differently than he expected, Kerry responded baldfacedly "It's turned out exactly as I expected," and then jumped on the issue of continued troop presence, pausing not even a moment to acknowledge the remarkable human spectacle unfolding in Iraq. Another example, actually, of the woodenness and lack of emotional immediacy that helped lose him the election.

Iraqi election countdown - 6-5-4-3-2-1...

Yes it's cheating. But why should the Bush administration be the only one to play games with numbers?

There've just been too many stories and too many possibilities to write about this past week. Not all of them have been about "insurgents" or Kafkaesque electoral logistics. I've felt moved if not hopeful reading the words of expectant Iraqi voters; I've been more disgusted than ever at the bluster and denial coming from the White House; and I've been shocked into doubtful silence at the increasing violence and viciousness threatening Iraqis in their "sovereign" homeland, and the threat of more. (This includes the thousands of civilian victims of American military actions, whom the Iraqi government is finally officially accounting for). In the end, all I can think of is that tomorrow those possibilities will narrow down to more bodies, more smoking ruins, and more screaming survivors. For the outside world, if not for the Iraqis themselves, the success or failure of these elections may depend on a run-off of media images: will the pictures of living voters, bravely exercising their right to self-determination, outweigh those of Iraqis who never lived to see the result of their vote, or to vote at all.

One thing that's nagged at me this week is how much these "ordinary" Iraqis, living and the dead, will be the victims of forces that have nothing to do with Iraqi interests and Iraqi hopes, whether of democratic accountability or ethnic supremacy. The decision to fix the date of voting on January 30, and accept all the risks that go with it, had vastly more to with the American presidential elections, and returning the Republicans to the White House, than what was best for Iraqis, of whatever political or ethnic affiliation. I have to agree the fierce logic of the Sunnis who argue that voting in this election represents collaboration with the interests of an occupying power. The Iraqis who die hoping to bring representative government to their country will, in a very real sense, have sacrificed their lives for two elections, their own and ours.

I found myself thinking yesterday of the words of Bush’s presidential opponent, John Kerry, after he’d returned from an earlier failed adventure in American values: “How do you ask someone to be the last man to die for an idea?” At least in Vietnam, we were only asking that question of our own people. And the idea, hollow as it was, was something more than four more years of George Bush.

Iraqi election countdown - 7

Aljazeera's coverage of the Iraqi election news today is little more than a litany of attacks around the country. But maybe this gives a better image of the atmosphere in Iraq -- and the random, relentless pattern of violence -- than more analytical articles. One hit after another, unpredictable, shocking and numbing at the same time, and with no end in sight.

Iraqi election countdown - 8

Reuters reports today that "U.S. and Iraqi officials believe most of the country is secure enough for elections except Baghdad and three mostly Sunni Arab provinces - Anbar, Ninevah and Salaheddin." Only four provinces out of eighteen -- sounds almost encouraging. However, these four regions contain more than 40% of the population of Iraq, including the majority of Iraqi Sunnis.

The election security in those parts of the country, from what's reported, could make polling stations resemble armed camps. A cordon of police at the polling places will be surrounded by a larger circle of Iraqi security forces, with U.S. forces rapid-reaction forces standing ready if needed. Voters will in effect be walking in the doors of military bases, and military targets. Reuters, not surprisingly, suggests that "insurgent attacks and intimidation may produce a disappointing turnout."

Any voters in these regions who do show up will likely be overwhelmingly Shia, despite the majority Sunni population. Attacks and intimidation aren't the only problem. The leading Sunni political parties have withdrawn from the elections, citing the security situation; and Sunni clerics are preaching the opposite message from their Shi'ite counterparts: stay away from the polls.

A New York Times article today cites some illuminating if unscientific numbers: in a survey of 50 to 60 Iraqis, mostly from Baghdad and adjacent regions, every Shi'ite interviewed said they planned to vote. Every Sunni except one said they'd stay away from the polls. Equally illuminating are the reasons cited for non-participation. It seems clear, for instance, that the extreme measures taken by the U.S. military to secure regions like Anbar and Salaheddin have also alienated many ordinary voters, and reinforced the image of a country under foreign occupation. Under these conditions, taking part in a U.S. sponsored election seems like voting for the enemy. The enthusiastic participation of the Shia population, on the other hand, must only reinforce Sunni fears of disenfranchisement. To say this is a self-fulfilling prophecy doesn't lessen its force.

The more realistic official voices, Iraqi and U.S., will admit the risks of keeping the January 30 date, but argue the costs of delay would be even worse. There are probably good arguments on both sides. What is certain is that, in many ways, the efforts to unite the country under a legitimate, democratically-elected government are also strengthening the forces that could tear it bloodily apart, once that election is over.

Iraqi election countdown - 9

Looking for reliable "in-country" Iraqi news sources on the web, I found instead several thoughtful, heartfelt and sometimes darkly funny blogs by ordinary and not so ordinary Iraqis. "Healing Iraq" (http://healingiraq.blogspot.com) by an Iraqi Shi'ite dentist -- sectarian identity is never far from the surface -- is a good example. The inside perspective on the main political parties' electioneering styles (too long to quote here) is particularly illuminating: an Iraq blessed with party politics will also need its own Jimmy Breslin soon. Reassuring somehow.

From a posting today:

"One week to elections day and the general atmosphere in the capital is eerie, yet strikingly familiar. I suspect the streets of Baghdad will look as if a war is looming this week. There is no doubt that many Iraqis regard the date of 30 January as a day of renewed hope, one they have been awaiting all their lives, but at the same time, many others are already dreading it."

"Several candidates were assassinated and targeted these last two weeks, others have been forced under threats to withdraw and to follow the example of the Islamic party. Sectarian tensions are at their highest since April, 2004, with Sunni insurgents now openly attacking Husseiniyas and Shia mosques."

"Ahmed Al-Chalabi and defense minister Hazim Al-Sha'lan have been engaging in shrill public attacks over the media. Chalabi describing Sha'lan as a "Ba'athist" and a "former double agent for Saddam and the CIA", while Sha'lan dismisses Chalabi as a "thief" and an "Iranian stooge who longs for his own origins by defending Iran". One remark made by Sha'lan on Al-Arabiya TV, that he couldn't say more about Chalabi because he would embarrass himself and the viewers almost made me roll on the floor. It was an extremely amusing episode, watching Chalabi looking smug and amused, contrasted with Sha'lan, all serious and barely keeping himself from swearing. Fistfights, please."

"The only hope now is that, following the elections, the National Assembly would offer the hand of peace and reconciliation to the dissenting parties. I would suggest going for tribal Sheikhs rather than clerics, since they have the upper hand in their areas and can effectively root out any Ba'athists in their midst in return for a promise of sharing power and authority. Many of these Sheikhs have been disenfranchised and abused over the last two years."

"Many Iraqis, including conservative and religious Iraqis, are surprisingly rooting for the Iraqi Communist party, probably in an attempt to counter the influence of Islamists in the forthcoming National Assembly. The Communist party has the largest number of registered party members in the country and can be considered as the oldest popular political party in Iraq. Its support base is much larger than what it seems."

"I believe national reconciliation to be the only path forward to a new Iraq. The Shia cannot live without the Sunnis, and vice versa. Both have shared this country for the last 14 centuries and there is no possible way that one can live without the other. Even partition is not a possibility, there are no clear borders between the two."

Iraqi election countdown - 10

Enough of what I think about the Iraqi elections. What does newly inaugurated second-termer GW think about the Iraqi elections:

"We are led, by events and common sense, to one conclusion: the survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands. The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world."

If true, this does not bode well for the survival of liberty in the U.S. Of course, the fact that we even have a second Bush inaugural is not the best news on that front either.

Meanwhile, back at Iraq, the insurgent leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi today issued his own, maybe not coincidentally timed message:

"The fruits of jihad come after much patience and a lengthy stay in the battlefield ... which could last months and years. In the fight against the arrogant American tyrant who carries the flag of the cross, we find that despite its military might, it is being crushed emotionally and morally. Our battle with the enemy is a battle of streets and towns and has many tactical, defensive and offensive methods. Fierce wars are not decided in days or week."

Which sadly speaks to my point in the last posting: the elections are a mere blip in this apocalyptic view of history.

Apocalyptic or not, there is more truth in Zarqawi's rants at "the arrogant American tyrant who carries the flag of the cross" than in the dishonest, pseudo-ecumenical homilies that closed Bush's inaugural address: "Self-government relies, in the end, on the governing of the self. That edifice of our character is built in families, supported by communities with standards, and sustained in our national life by the truths of Sinai, the Sermon on the Mount, the words of the Koran."

Is it just me, or does this last half sentence sound mainly like the start of a good joke: "Ariel Sharon, George Bush, and Osama Bin Laden walked into a bar in the West Bank..."

Iraqi election countdown - 11

Most newspapers lead today with the multiple car bombings in Baghdad, which killed a total of 26 according to the U.S. military. It's said that these attacks are part of "an intensified campaign of violence apparently meant to disrupt nationwide elections planned for Jan. 30", as the New York Times puts it. Time gets shorter, violence grows -- it's by now a familiar equation. But I've gotten a little impatient with this catchall explanation, which plays so conveniently to the skepticism and gloom of the media, on the one hand, and the self-righteousness of the White House on the other. No one's asked them, but you have to figure that the martyrs and mujahidin who are now blowing themselves, their countrymen, and heavily armed tourists to holy smithereens in so many ways, and in so many different parts of the country, are doing so for a quite a range of motives, not all of which fit into journalists' or Republicans' neat narratives.

Of course, disrupting election-related activities and scaring potential voters must be a big piece of the puzzle, but this doesn't explain what insurgents were doing back in September (when the rate of attacks came close to what it is now, roughly 80 a day) or help us predict what will certainly continue to happen in the weeks after January 30, whether the elections happen or not. This explanation also assumes that the majority of insurgents understand enough of what "elections" mean to have a clear sense what it means to disrupt them -- something one could reasonably doubt, if they're as informed on this subject as the majority of Iraqis (see previous post). The disruptions, in any case, are only a means to an end, an "end" where targets, my instincts tell me, have more to do with basic categories like "Shi'ite" or "Sunni" or "U.S. soldier" or "Iraqi collaborator with U.S. soldiers" than with the abstract goals of democratic institution building.

A more deeply alarming, if less dramatic, piece of election-related news (reported in today's New York Times) is the new American intelligence estimate claiming that "[t]he Iraqi government that emerges from elections on Jan. 30 will almost certainly ask the United States to set a specific timetable for withdrawing its troops." The report at the same time warns that "the elections will be followed by more violence, including an increased likelihood of clashes between Shiites and Sunnis, possibly even leading to civil war." Scary as it is to think of an Iraq full of U.S. soldiers who are a continuing provocation to terrorist violence, it's scarier to think of a still unstable Iraq without an American buffer, and nothing to keep opposing groups from each other's throats. But that seems to be what Iraqi leaders (at least Shi'ite leaders) want, and despite the American hems and haws reported in the same article, what the U.S. will have to accept -- with a secret sigh of relief in the White House, no doubt. (And after all, that will free up troops for an invasion of Iran. Second time's a charm...)

Iraqi election countdown - 12

Only 12 shooting days until Democracy.

Of course, 20% of the country won't be represented -- or is voting, as they say, with their feet, if not with guns. And this is only part of the surreal election cycle in a country at war. Where no one knows either the names of most of the candidates or their platforms. When 60% of the electorate thinks the election is for a new president, rather than a 275 member national assembly to write a new constitution. Where they haven't even published the locations of many polling places yet -- and those that are known are targets for insurgent mortar shells. Where the same travel restrictions meant to hamper the insurgents may hamper voters equally. But then never having known even the shadow of a free election for decades, perhaps Iraqis are proof against such ironies.

Under these conditions, you have to admire the determination of the powers in charge. The chief UN Election advisor, Carlos Valenzuela, announced today that only "a sustained onslaught by insurgents or the mass resignation of electoral workers will prevent this month's national elections from going ahead". Though he also "acknowledged that intimidation of electoral workers by guerrillas seeking to derail the balloting is 'high and very serious'.'' The inventiveness of the Iraqi electoral commission, as it tries to deal with such risks, puts Florida election officials to shame. Voters from the troubled provinces of Nineveh and Anwar will be allowed to register and vote on the same day. And in Mosul, where reports last week (contested by Valenzuela) were that virtually all election workers had resigned, "voters will be allowed to cast ballots in safer parts the city or elsewhere in the province." Other schemes seem more dubiously conceived, e.g. the plan to post lists of voters at offices throughout the country, to let names be either added or challenged, to prevent fraud. If I were an Iraqi terrorist, why wouldn't I thank the commission for this handy way to shop for potential victims?

Fraud is a serious concern of course, although the "ordinary" kind of electoral problem that's simultaneously dwarfed and exacerbated in Iraq by security issues. Indeed, by comparison to blowing up election officials, fraud might be considered a vote of confidence in the system. Look at it this way: you can't rig the vote, if you don't have the vote. And the truth is massive electoral fraud offers the best chance of at least numerically legitimate representation in Sunni areas. Though this also almost guarantees a post-electoral challenge by some in the certain-to-be-victorious Shi'ite factions. But then as George Bush might say, this election is only a beginning not an end. Except to American involvement in Iraq (see next post).

Trouble in the Temple

It seems almost too predictable to be called ironic: a play about violence and repression in an ethnic community sparks violence and repression by members of that same community. This is the short version of what happened to Behzti (Dishonour), by the British Sikh playwright Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti, which opened at the Birmingham Repertory Theatre in the UK on Dec. 9. I know all about this thanks to surfing British news web sites -- originally for a perspective on events in the US, but in turn getting a window into what's happening in the UK. In the case of Behzti, I've been hypnotized by another nation's conflicts over free speech and religious values. Maybe it's just the relief from focusing on America's problems. Or maybe it's just schadenfreude, like watching a train wreck from a distance. In any event, the crashing clearly hasn't finished yet.

The story of Behzti involves a gruesome incident of rape and murder in a Sikh temple or gurdwara, accompanied by the airing of other community dirty linen. The Sikh community's objections started before the play opened. The deepest anger seems to have been less about the portrayal of events themselves than the setting where they take place. Exposing sacred religious symbols in this way, as a Sikh website states, was the equivalent of "burning a cross onstage". A proposed compromise of moving the offending scenes to a "community centre" was rejected by the play's producers. Days of protest after the play opened climaxed in a full scale riot on December 18, when a crowd of 400 protestors stormed the theater, calling out scores of police and requiring the evacuation of 800 theatergoers. The play closed to avoid further confrontations, and the author is reportedly in hiding as a result of death threats.

The fallout from these events -- reported both in the British press and on Sikh websites -- has also been rather predictable. Comparisons have been made to the fatwa against Salman Rushdie. Accusations of extremism and demagoguery have flown from both sides, along with an orgy of defensiveness and institutional soul-searching by artists, politicians and religious leaders. In a peculiarly British twist, the government agencies charged with arts and minority relations plan to broker discussions among the warring parties. For now the excitement has quieted down, in the news at least, in part no doubt because of the holiday season in Britain, in part because horrific natural events have overwhelmed any other concerns in this South Asian community. But the controversy and publicity the play has provoked, and a widening interest in reviving the production, almost guarantee more ethnic, religious and political drama waiting in the wings for 2005.

My first reaction to this story was a sense of shock and disgust at the behavior of the Sikh rioters. But I've grown less interested in conflicts of artistic vs. religious values than in the religious as well as ethnic side of the equation. With all the analysis in the British press, you can still sense puzzlement as to why people were so ready to get so angry in the first place. It's worth noting, for example, how little the British Sikh community fits ready-made stereotypes of a disadvantaged minority group yielding to religious fundamentalism, to express social frustrations or reinforce its sense of identity. Though a relatively small and (thanks to the male dress) conspicuous part of Britain's South Asian population, Sikh's have gained a notable degree of economic success and political empowerment. In some ways, their situation seems similar to that of ultra-orthodox Jews in the United States and Britain as well. Unlike the extremes of Orthodox Judaism, however, Sikh social and religious values appear tolerant and even liberal, with an equal role (in principle at least) granted to women as spiritual and community leaders. And although both Bezhti and Bhatti's earlier play, Behsharam (Shameless) -- a black comedy about a dysfunctional Anglo-Asian family -- testify to serious social strains between first and second-generation Sikh/Punjabi Brits, internal community strife doesn't seem a likely source of the anger on display in the English midlands before Christmas. Neither is a sense of grievance, however painfully justified, born of attacks on turbaned Sikhs by anti-Muslim bigots.

My quite irrelevant personal theory -- triggered by an offhand side trip to a Sikh website -- is that it's the experience of Sikhs in India not in the UK that explains the anger and violence that erupted in their transplanted homeland, at even the symbolic "desecration" of a gurdwara. The last 20 years and more of Sikh history in India has been a complex, evolving nightmare of nationalist aspirations, terrorism, brutal repression, broken agreements, inter-ethnic violence, and ongoing human rights violations. At the center of this history -- and the symbolic narrative on which much of modern Sikh identity is founded -- is the Indian Army's attack in 1984 on the Golden Temple or Darbar Sahib, the holiest shrine of Sikhism, in Amritsar, Punjab. Aimed at dislodging members of an militant sectarian group that had terrorized the Punjab, the army's assault killed hundred of Sikhs, including many ordinary worshippers, and caused heavy damage to temple buildings. The revenge killing of Indira Gandhi 1984 by members of her own Sikh bodyguard was followed by riots in Delhi and elsewhere where thousands of Sikhs were killed by furious Hindu mobs. Territorial accommodations and political changes over more than a decade, including the election of India's first Sikh president in 2002, seem to have dampened the extremes of feeling to a degree. But India's Sikhs still wait for a full judicial accounting for hundreds of prisoners "disappeared" in police custody as well as constitutional action on the promise of a sovereign Punjabi state. And the violation of the Golden Temple still stirs deep, painful and sometimes violent emotions -- if one can believe the evidence of Sikh-oriented websites, and not just of the nationalist variety.

It's obviously a leap, of faith so to speak, to directly link this fraught history with an isolated moment in the life of the Sikh diaspora in Britain. Yet if the modern experience of other diasporas (Jewish, Irish, Armenian, Palestinian) proves anything, it's that the burdens of memory can get heavier the further they travel, in time and space. I'm not sure what diasporic undercurrents of my own are at work here, but I'm fascinated by the pathos of one act of destruction inspiring -- almost unconsciously, and at such a real and symbolic distance -- another, aimed at revenging and redeeming the original act. I wonder how you say "Never again!" in Punjabi.

This suggests a lot, frankly, about how history lives and gets transformed, for good or ill, in all of us. The whole idea deserves a play in its own right.

Anglo-Saxon Attitudes

I need a palatte-cleansing slurp of medieval scholarship after chewing out David Brooks.

An odd quote has been rattling around in my head, as I read about plans for the upcoming Iraqi elections: "It is easy to tear apart what was never joined -- our song together!" Something from a rant by a Kurdish opposition leader? Or maybe a rejected draft of a Kerry concession speech? In fact, this eloquent tidbit comes from a 1000 year-old Anglo-Saxon lyric known as "Wulf and Eadwacer", one of the shortest and saddest poems to survive the wreck of the Norman invasion. It's your basic girl-falls-for-wrong-boy-lovers-
separated-by-forced-marriage-boy-kidnaps-couple's-son-girl-
laments-fate's-savage-contradictions kind of story. Aeschylus couldn't have crafted a more intense tragic monologue. A modern Arab reader would probably grasp the predicament immediately. Makes you wonder (OK, makes me wonder) why certain quarters of the U.S. government, on the other hand, can't admit that reality isn't always what you want it to be.

Here's my free rendering of the full poem:

My people behave like Christmas came early --
Will they take him if he comes to rescue me?
Our ways are parted...

Wulf is on an island, I'm on another.
Closely guarded is that island, ringed by swamps,
Full of cruel warriors.
Will they take him if he comes to rescue me?
Our ways are parted...

With hope I endured Wulf's exile,
When the rain poured down, as did my tears.
Then my battle-fierce husband took me in his arms.
Pleasure it gave me, but pain as well.

Wulf, my Wulf -- it was hopes of you
That made me heartsick,
Your absence that made me mourn,
Not hunger for food.

Do you hear, my lord Eadwacer?
Wulf has stolen to the wood with our wretched infant.
It is easy to tear apart what was never was joined:
our song together.

I'm not up on current Wulf and Eadwacer scholarship, but it wouldn't surprise me if Christian-minded critics had interpreted the poem as an allegory of the Church's exile from Christ. Reading it as an object lesson for U.S. foreign policy doesn't seem that much more far-fetched.

[Note: Here's a somewhat more literal translation, with notes on the Old English text. The drama of the closing line is hard to capture in modern English: þæt mon eaþe tosliteð þætte næfre gesomnad wæs, uncer giedd geador. to-slitan = wound, rend, tear asunder, destroy.]

Reason or treason

David Brooks is an intelligent man and wants to appear an honest one. But his column in Monday's New York Times betrays both intelligence and honesty by its rush to praise George Bush'"judgments" on the Israeli-Palestinian issue. Brooks wouldn't be the first columnist and would-be political pundit -- even on the Times' Op-Ed pages -- who gave up the boring job of speaking truth to power and climbed up on power's shoulders, only to patronize his colleagues still toiling in the murk of uncertainty and critical thinking. But Brooks does one better than writers like Tom Friedman, the Times' resident Mideast expert, who came out in support of the Iraq war only to grudgingly backpedal as the disaster unfolded. Brooks doesn't just invent reasons for agreeing with the White House's views. He invents out of whole cloth the very view that he wants to agree with, in turn giving the White House and himself credit for a seasoned realism above the grasp of other commentators.

As in the following: "[George Bush's] judgments now look correct. Bush deduced that Sharon could grasp the demographic reality and lead Israel toward a two-state solution; that Arafat would never make peace, but was a retardant to peace; that Israel has a right to fight terrorism; and that Sharon would never feel safe enough to take risks unless the U.S. supported him when he fought back." Does anyone who's watched George Bush in action believe he'd have had the reasoning power or regional knowledge to concoct even this cartoonish policy argument? Does anyone imagine the Bush administration's reflexive support of Israel's stubborn and disingenuous policies had anything to do with a real stake in a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, as opposed to a knee-jerk response to its own "anti-terrorist" war cry, and a spineless readiness to be manipulated by Sharon's masterful mixture of bluff and ruthlessness (now there's a political realist for you)?

The answer is, I'm sure there are people who do believe this. But I don't think Brooks in his heart is among them. In this column, as frankly in so much else he writes and says these days, Brooks appears dedicated to using intelligence against itself, outsmarting his fellow smartypants, and proving himself dumb and self-deluded enough to join the crew guilty of some of the most destructive policy mistakes in recent American history. The news these days from the very worst of those mistakes, the Iraq war, being hard even for Bush himself to whitewash, Brooks slyly shifts the camera to a scene where the president's tough guy image has, he seems to think, more sticking power. But I doubt even the President would be convinced by Brooks' story-telling here, and certainly most readers won't be. The snide and and manipulative way the whole piece is written only further undermines his credibility.

I've never thought much, truth to say, of Brooks' writing or his politics, and the work of a single opinion-monger wouldn't normally be worth the effort of a protest -- especially when he shares an Op-Ed page with William Safire. But Brooks' subordination of truth-telling to political truckling is really just one, though a particularly sleazy, example of a syndrome that has infected American reporting and commentary from the first rumblings of the Iraq war, if not before. It takes a wide range of forms, from a refusal to risk any critique that might compromise "support for the troops" to the blatant advocacy of the Fox Channel. A review article by Chris Hedges in the recent New York Review of Books explores this issue with compelling eloquence, trying to come to terms with the failure of American journalists and American news outlets to tell the full truth about the war, especially its awful impact on Iraqi civilians. He concludes "If we do not confront our hubris and the lies told to justify the killing and mask the destruction carried out in our name in Iraq, if we do not grasp the moral corrosiveness of empire and occupation, if we continue to allow force and violence to be our primary form of communication, we will not so much defeat dictators like Saddam Hussein as become them."

This conclusion obviously reaches beyond the work of the journalists who are Hedges' main subject. And Hedges risks being carried away by the force of his own rhetoric, even as he fights with other people's. His readiness to see the dictator in the mirror, however, should remind contemporary writers that the "treason of the intellectuals" -- an expression first applied to apologists for Fascism and later to justifiers of Stalinism -- isn't just a bygone sin. Whether or not the two great analysts of how politics corrupts language, George Orwell and Czeslaw Milosz, would see the true aura of totaltarianism in George Bush may be debated. But they would certainly recognize in the self-serving fabrications of David Brooks, and that of many another modern pundit, the creativity of the "captive mind" daubing pictures of Big Brother, or Big Dubbya, on the walls of its own prison cell.

[12/25: For comic relief, see David Brooks' Christmas present to his readers on today's Times Op-Ed page -- the first installment of his "Hookie" awards, named (sort of) for the controversial neo-conservative philosopher Sidney Hook. The award purportedly recognizes essays for the educated reader that explore "the nature and destiny of man," but the focus of most of them speaks for itself. The first three listed are: "When Islam Breaks Down," by Theodore Dalrymple, a British M.D. who critiques a Radical Islam at odds with modern science and itself; "The Other Sixties," by Bruce Bawer, on late 1950's hipsters like Jack Paar and Sammy Davis Jr adrift in the era of flower power (I see a would-be autobiographical slant here on Brooks' part); and "Faculty Clubs and Church Pews," by William J. Stuntz, a Harvard Law professor who also belongs to an evangelical church (can you dig it?). You don't know whether to be annoyed by Brooks' pretense or to laugh at his transparency. I doubt whether Hook -- a one-time Marxist and a man of great intellectual depth and conviction, despite the polemic extremes of some of his later writings -- would feel honored by this suave attempt to hijack his name and reputation.]

George and Benito and Bert

Was my gruff but kindly Jewish grandfather a fan, as a young man, of Mussolini? Did this conservative, worldly-wise businessman, with his love of good living and good jokes, once enjoy a friendship with a notorious psychic and spirit medium?

Not the kinds of questions most people need to ask about their relatives.

But then most people's family archives don't contain a letter like the one we found in grandpa's papers after he died in 1986. It's still in the original envelope, addressed in a bold, spiky hand to

Marchese Paulucci De Calboli, Baron
Privat Secretary of Mr Mussolini
Rome

The engraved return address on the envelope is of a "Prof. Bert Reese", of 230 W. 99th Street, New York. The enclosed letter, also on the professor's letterhead, and in the same dramatic handwriting, reads as follows:

May 29th [19]25

My Dear Baron

The Bearer of this is a large Real Estate Man, and a very good friend of mine, Mr. Gross. He wishes to shake hand of Mr Mussoline, please dow anything you can for him while in Rome thanking you in advance for any Curtese you show him Iam with best regards to you and Mr Spavini [?] please if Mr Spavini from Napilo is in Rome at present show him this letter and he also can ad to this Gentleman who is accompanied by his wife my best wishes to Mr Mussolini and yourself I am yours

Very truly
Prof Bert Reese

Since we found this letter only after he died, I never got to ask grandpa whether he and grandma ever did meet Mussolini and if so what kind of handshake the dictator had. (George Gross's handshake, at least in later years, was firm and insistent, punctuated by "How are ya, how are ya, how are ya".) No one in the family had heard stories of what happened on this trip or knew anything about the Prof. Reese who tried to serve as go-between.

We'll likely never know whether or not the handshake took place. But I wonder about George's interest in meeting Il Duce in the first place. While in 1925 Mussolini's alliance with Hitler was more than a decade away, it had been three years since the Blackshirt's "March on Rome" brought Mussolini into power as Italy's Prime Minister. He was hailed as a statesman of genius, the savior of Italy -- even as he forged a corrupt and brutal one-party police state. In May of 1924, a year before George's visit, the assassination of a Socialist leader by Fascist thugs triggered a crisis that almost brought down Mussolini's government. In 1925, however, he was re-elected as Prime Minister, in a fraudulent election that confirmed his grip on power, as well as his loyal support by Italian oligarchs and much of the middle class.

I like to think George, a conservative but big-hearted man, saw the historical writing on the wall before shaking the hand of the writer. But it's not so shocking, after all, that a rising American real estate mogul should want to brush acquaintance with one of Europe's biggest bigshots. As something of a self-made man, George respected success in every walk of life, and had many friends in high places in local and national government. He could've been one of the millions in the 1920's, including many intellectuals, who sincerely admired the charismatic strongman who rebuilt his country, made the trains run on times, and drove back the rising tide of Socialism -- even at the cost of some lost liberties and a few broken heads. Real estate too was a world where you had to be smart and tough. Or perhaps young George was drawn to the sheer power of celebrity, and the chance to enjoy the fruits of his own hard work and high connections.

Which brings us to Prof. Reese. Who was this "good friend" of my grandfather's, with his florid handwriting and colorful foreigner's English -- and a close acquaintance with one of Europe's leading dictators? Unlike Il Duce, history has almost forgotton Bert Reese. In his day, however, the Polish born "Professor" (1851-1926) was a world-famous psychic and "mentalist" -- hailed by audiences, studied by Thomas Edison and European psychic researchers, debunked by Houdini, and the subject of at least one lawsuit for "disorderly conduct" related to his act (which he won). Reese's most famous trick was "reading" the contents of notes scribbled either by audience members or his assistants, and then shuffled or passed around so that no one could recognize them.

I could use some of that talent now! Thanks to the post-modern magic of Google, however, I have at least been able to piece together some of Reese's story, including his residence for much of his life in New York City. And, thanks to my grandfather's letter, we also know about Reese's association with another of history's great showmen -- the father of facismo. Perhaps Mussolini shared the same fascination with the occult as Hitler and many another paranoid, delusional dictator. Unlike Mussolini, the professor managed to weather the ups and downs of notariety and die a natural death, to all appearances at the top of his game. His achievements have been honored posthumously by many professional magicians, for whom the name "Bert Reese" still conjures up one of the field's most ingenious illusions.

In many ways, the idea of a friendship between my grandfather and a figure like Reese is even odder than grandpa's wanting to meet Mussolini, courtesy of the professor. It's here though that the family historian is stumped by want of data, beyond this single, almost too suggestive item. Perhaps further digging in the collective Gross family memories -- or the private papers of Mussolini -- might yield some fruit. In the meantime, the following modest venture into historical fiction brings us, I feel sure, very close to truth. Here goes (with apologies to the Da Vinci Code):

George was somber on the long limousine ride back from the West Side. He watched the sun set blood red over the streets of New York, and thought about his meeting with The Professor.

The old man's strong German accent and awkward English had been almost comical at first. But the rising tone of urgency riveted George's attention.

"Ze Italian musst be shhtopped. He was vith us vunz. But zay haf betrayed ze sacred vision of ze Brotherhood."

The professor looked around his drawing room, smirking ruefully at the trappings of the professional spiritualist. "I haf made of myself a clown to the world, to protect our mission. My life comes now to an end. But I can help you get close to him -- and see his evil deshtroyed, before I close my eyes for ever."

He held out the small envelope, addressed with his familiar jagged scrawl. George slipped it into a side pocket, his gaze never leaving the face of the old man -- now lit up with a strange, stricken look of hope.

"We can never meet again, my friend," said the professor, his trembling hand resting heavily on George's shoulder for a moment. "Got be vith you, and all of us."

George's mind was reeling as the door of the old brownstone closed behind him. A gust of wind blew unexpectedly cold through the May afternoon. He buttoned his jacket and and bundled himself hurriedly into his waiting limousine. He never noticed the white rectangle flicker from his pocket and under the deeply upholstered seats.

It was years before the envelope turned up again...






env_reese1

Bereshith

Creationism has been on my mind a lot, along with its evil twin (well, more evil twin) Intelligent Design.

I recently watched a news clip of a Georgia school board hearing where the creationist contingent won their case to have science textbooks teaching evolution marked with a warning label, like a pack of cigarettes. The pro-label crowd -- mostly women as far as I could see -- yelled and clapped and waved their arms like soccer moms cheering little Jesse's goal. The leader of the group stood there with a proud, defiant and at the same time humble look on her face. It was the look of someone who had challenged a powerful, impersonal establishment on behalf of the underdog, and won.

Erin Brokovich, meet the Scopes Monkey Trial.

The comparison isn't entirely absurd. Williams Jennings Bryan, who argued the anti-Darwin case on behalf of the state of Tennessee, made his political career as a fierce populist, fighting big business, big government, and what he viewed as their corrupt connivance with one another. (He also opposed the jingoist expansionism of the Spanish-American war, one of the few American politicians to do so.) And although some people see "creationists" as agents of an over-reaching Republican agenda, they may view themselves more as victims of a different kind of elitist power base, represented by liberal school boards, the Supreme Court, and the godless, immoral media who control the movies and television programming they and their families watch. Go figure.

However, given the pervasive anti-intellectualism of American life, it's not enough to simply rail at creationists for ignoring the superior logic of science, as opposed to the faith of the local pastor or their own hometown instincts. As our low world-wide ranking in test scores attests, many Americans are not only ignorant of science but actively disinterested in it, however important it may be to their cell phones and satellite dishes and Viagra prescriptions. And let's be honest: of the 45% (45%!) of Americans who do believe in evolution, how many could give a coherent summary of the evidence and arguments? So righteous indignation alone won't win the day (though I'm all for ridicule, e.g. cartoons showing baboons cheerfully endorsing Jerry Falwell's claim of no family relationship whatsoever). We need to pinch our noses and take a hard look at how the cunningly evolved brains of the creationists are working for their herd's survival.

It's not a monolithic field. The woman in the Georgia school gymnasium, who declared her faith in a literal six day creation, some 4000 years B.C., at least had the virtue of consistency and the courage of her convictions. The advocates of "Intelligent Design," by contrast, are a much more sleazy and intellectually dishonest crowd. This quasi-scientific "re-interpretation" of the evidence of biological history seems to have two primary motives. First, to skirt the church-state issue involved in the Supreme Court's 1987 prohibition on teaching creationism in public schools. Second, to provide cover for those who want to dupe the public or themselves into thinking that that truly open-minded schools should teach a range of "scientific" viewpoints. A recent story on the National Center for Science Education website shows how tricky but also how transparent the advocates of this movement can be.

Alas, neither the work of high-minded science educators or ACLU-sponsored lawsuits seem sufficient in the face of a growing popular viewpoint and zealous and well-organized interest groups that have the support of the Republican power base, on the state level at least:

http://www.theocracywatch.org/texas_gop.htm
http://www.pfaw.org/pfaw/general/default.aspx?oid=7139
http://www.religioustolerance.org/ev_id5.htm

Hopefully the significant minority of Americans who believe in the evolutionary struggle for survival will take Darwin's lessons more to heart, and voters, educational groups, and politicians will organize themselves to effectively challenge today's Neanderthals -- in the schools, in the courts, and in public opinion. As the great British evolutionary scientist Richard Dawkins has pointed out, this is not just a fight for good science: an electorate ready to swallow one set of carefully crafted half-truths can always be led to embrace others.


["Bereshith" = "In the beginning", the first word of the Hebrew Bible]

[12/6: See Tom Friedman's column this morning in the NYT, deploring the cut in the National Science Foundation funding by the Republican-led Congress' . He calls it supremely irresponsible; others would just call it "chipping away at the opposition."]

[1/1: A bracing last word from Stephen Jay Gould in the New York Review of Books, 6/12/97: "The very phenomena that traditional views cite as proof of benevolence and intentional order—the good design of organisms and the harmony of ecosystems—arise by Darwin's process of natural selection only as side consequences of a singular causal principle of apparently opposite meaning: organisms struggling for themselves alone. (Good design becomes one pathway to reproductive success, while the harmony of ecosystems records a competitive balance among victors.) Darwin's system should be viewed as morally liberating, not cosmically depressing. The answers to moral questions cannot be found in nature's factuality in any case, so why not take the "cold bath" of recognizing nature as nonmoral, and not constructed to match our hopes? After all, life existed on earth for 3.5 billion years before we arrived; why should life's causal ways match our prescriptions for human meaning or decency?" The article is also interesting for its critique of a scientific "fundamentalism" in the intepretation of Darwin's ideas among "strict adaptationist" thinkers, including Richard Dawkins.]

[1/13: Well, looks like there is a God, though a God who obviously believes in Darwin not himself: the AP reports a federal judge in Georgia ordered that Atlanta school system to remove stickers from biology texts calling evolution "a theory, not a fact", arguing that "the disclaimers are an unconstitutional endorsement of religion". Score one for the ACLU sponsored lawsuits after all!!!]

The Big Sieve

Frankly, I was relieved by the headline:

"I-93 Tunnel to Need Constant Attention"

I had been worried since the Red Sox won the pennant -- against the arch-fiend Yankees no less. With the curse broken -- and the Patriots on their way to a possible third championship -- what would Boston, a city with such long and hard won experience in moaning, groaning and second guessing, have to complain about? Sudden withdrawal can be a dangerous thing. Sure, many fans have bought timeshare vacation condos in Chicago, to be able to root for the Cubs. And speaking personally, I'm still holding out for a winning sports season where at least one student doesn't get run over by a car or shot by the police during after-game celebrations. But the majority of Red Sox nation was out of luck.

Until now. Yes, I know we've been whining about the Big Dig for years -- the traffic hassles, the endless delays and cost over-runs, and mismanagement by the MBTA and Bechtel contractors. Bostonians' complaints about the massive construction project in our city have been second only to laments about the fate of the hometown baseball team. But unlike the Sox's chances of the pennant, the Dig seemed to be making visible progress, however slowly and painfully. When the Central Artery southbound tunnel was opened recently, it appeared completion -- and a new and improved commute -- was almost within our grasp.

But fate has smiled her crooked smile upon the city. As a friend suggested, maybe the Bambino hasn't really dropped his curse, he's just shifted to another venue. Maybe he was the one swatting holes in the concrete with a ghostly bat, or kicking dirt into the slurry walls, while his fans at Bechtel weren't looking. It'll take some time for the dust, or the mud, to settle: who's paying for what (Bechtel said today they'd cover their 'fair share'); what the impact will be on traffic; what the impact will be on city government; how many young Bostonians will grow up with nightmares of dying in underground floods. Take comfort kids -- the Boston Harbor water leaking in is much cleaner than it would have been some decades ago, when the Dig started.

Meanwhile, I think the best way to keep the spirit of futile resentment running high is for the federal government -- who have been paying for a lot of this mess -- to lend Boston the banner that George Bush flew on the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln in April of 2003: "Mission Accomplished!" The north end of the Zakim bridge would be good place for it -- the last thing southbound commuters will see before they plunge into the Central Artery tunnel. And remember, that won't be a ghostly car wash attendant you see standing and waving at the entryway. It'll be the Babe, still with us -- and not likely to be leaving real soon.

Fall reading

My modest binge of quasi-academic thrillers (or academic quasi-thrillers) has come to an end. There was nothing pre-planned about the sequence of books, three in total -- different things turned me onto each one. But in retrospect the underlying continuity is interesting to think about, if only to note the discontinuities.

First up, a true modern masterpiece, The Shadow of the Wind, an exquisitely written first novel by the Spaniard Carlos Ruiz Zafón. Set in Barcelona in the latter days of Franco, Zafón's story of readerly and romantic passions (almost no difference here!) has the immediacy of a children's book mixed up with convolutions of a Gothic romance. It is at once macabre and witty, sinister and innocent, provincial and cosmopolitan. The setting is nominally a 'historical' one, but like all great fiction the novel creates a world completely unto itself, despite or because of the Kafkaesque, decadent atmosphere of post-war Spain under a shadowy dictator. (This might lead one to think 'magic realism' but the style and tone is more reminiscent of Edwardian novelists like Ronald Firbank, the main 'Latin' note being a Borgesian tendency for books to be the real 'reality').

Next, The Dante Club by Matthew Pearl -- also a first novel. Maybe not quite as magical as Shadow of the Wind. but you can't argue with the verve and intellectual authority of this book by a 20-something winner of the Dante Society Prize and graduate of Yale Law School. It's a special writer who can craft such a rich, entertaining and (for the most part) convincing book from the unlikely pretext of four aging Boston intellectuals tracking down an Inferno-inspired murderer, himself the victim of the Civil War and a 19th-century case of post-traumatic stress disorder. Pearl's publisher must have been banking a lot, to be sure, on readers drawn by the current vogue for "mystery" or crime novels with a historical setting and historical characters. But unlike many of these books -- where either the history is a crude prop for the mystery, or the mystery a hook for clichéd history -- The Dante Club gives us both vivid historical re-imagining and compelling intrique, as well as a genuinely engaging novel of manners, morals, and psychological plotting. Not to mention, along the way, an eloquent and sustained piece of literary criticism. At times it can seem a bit of a balancing act, but watching Pearl keep this mixed assortment of novelistic impulses in the air at once is among the more enjoyable aspects of reading the book.

Last but also really and truly least in merit and interest (if not revenues) is The Da Vinci Code. My first impression, after just two pages, was of a literary version of professional wrestling, with all the chest-beating, florid decor and fake melodrama of the WWF. Like fans of the WWF, who enjoy matches they know are staged (and partly for that reason), I gave myself up to Brown's overheated intrigue of Harvard 'symbologist' (oy) and a sexy French cryptographer caught in the conflict between two secret societies, pulled alternately into and out of trouble by a dead scholar's always more convoluted clues. But even while this side of the book kept me turning pages, I became increasingly irritated with Brown's trite and tendentious historical fantasy about suppressed mother goddess worship, and the book's contempt for truth even as it trumpeted the revelation of truth. Blaming a novelist for making things up is, of course, absurd, but then pandering is not the same as creativity. Not that Brown's responsible for the people -- and there are many apparently -- who take this side of the book seriously. (Or is he? See Brown's interview with makers of a National Geographic special, as reported by Laura Miller in a Salon article. )

Protagonists who are more than overwrought clichés might kept my stomach from growling even as I gobbled down this clever whopper of a story -- but then this is a book where the most humanly interesting character is a homicidal albino monk. Fortunately, the monk and one or two other intriguing figures -- e.g., a crass, ambitious and ruthlessly conniving French police inspector, who just might be the arch-villain -- hung around till almost the end of the narrative, which had enough clever twists to hold me to the final smackdown and even through the treacly epilogue (guess who fall for each other after nearly getting killed together?), which is more a shrewd setup for a sequel (guess what secret society hasn't been crushed?) than sentimental flourish.

Conclusion? I just started blogging, but I already know that one of its advantages is that conclusions are highly optional. If you want to know the truth, I think I just needed an excuse to get that World Wrestling Federation image on the record. Now that's literary criticism!

hot air?

My Internet-savvy nephew, a Freshman at American University, has popped the balloon on this if-it's-too-good-to-be-true-it-probably-isn't story I was emailed by an irate and witty Democratic friend -- under the Subject line, "If only we could get them all to do this":

http://web2.iadfw.net/~elo/news/rapture.html

Alas, just another Internet hoax -- though one so funny I almost lost a lung. Pious, donut-thumping women with big hair are not leaping out of SUV's at the sight of floating sex-dolls, mistaking their helium-induced ascent for the Rapture. The Bible belt is not so conveniently gullible, at least not to fibs at their own expense rather than against godless liberals -- the joke's on us godless liberals (as is true of the election). I admit I got suspicious of this story after a few days, and the absence of confirming postings from other friends, on blogs, or in the Olympian musings of Op-ed-dom, who must have legions of Internet fact-checkers tracking down every rumor these days (after Rather-gate). Perhaps Frank Rich's and Maureen Dowd's jaded radar would've seen through this immediately.

The real lesson of this compelling bit of fantasy concerns not what triggers fatal leaps of faith in religious nuts but why nuts of all stripes (and let's face it, my Blue state friends, we too are feeling a bit over the edge after November 2) find it so easy to believe anything that plays to their deepest fears and fondest hopes. If that sounds a bit sanctimonious, let's consider the more immediate and painful truth that it's the loony Republicans not the rational Democrats who best understand this fact, and made the best use of political fantasy to win votes in the election. No wonder several floundering Democrats I've spoken too in the last few weeks seem to have lost what lingering faith they had in the wisdom of the masses, and fantasize about a candidate who can craft a 'big lie' just good enough to beat the Republicans next time around. But let's not give into that temptation, girls and boys. For one thing, the party of George Bush, Tom DeLay, and Bill Frist has just too much talent and experience in that area. For another, remember the history of second-term presidents, Republican and Democrat. This almost guarantees that over the next four years the White House's lack of competence in real governance will reveal itself all too patently, like a cresting hump-backed whale, over the waves of deceit and spin -- even if it is at the expense of thousands more Americans and tens of thousands more Sunnis, Shi'ites, Kurds and Christians dead in Iraq, a gutted social security system, and decades of Clarence Thomas at the head of one of history's greatest judicial institutions. Now there's a 'banner with a strange device' we can follow to victory in 2008!

Footnote: thanks to http://www.truthorfiction.com/, the origins of this story can be traced to a site called "Religion in the News" (http://web2.airmail.net/~elo/news/), whose author, Elroy Willis, likes to float non-denominationally absurd religious stories, some of which are true and some of which he invents himself. Who said the great tradition of American literature is dead? The Mark Twain of Innocents Abroad and the Melville of The Confidence Man would find a fellow spirit here. As would that unprickable avatar of American blarney P.T. Barnum, who was mayor of East Bridgeport, Connecticut before becoming a co-owner of 'The Greatest Show on Earth'.

We have met the enemy, and he is...

My first cartoon epiphany of the 2nd Bush term. Came to me a week ago tomorrow. What's left right now (no pun intended) except satire? At least there will plenty of opportunities for that.

We see the same truculent-looking white guy looking out from each panel:

1) "People just don't feel safe any more..."
2) "We need a president who'll protect us!"
3) "Who'll do everything he can to keep my family secure..."
4) "From abortionists, same-sex marriage, and godless science!"
5) [A speech bubble with spiky borders emerges from behind his back, suggesting secret mind-controlling radio transmisson, with the words "and support a constitutional amendment giving Halliburton one third of everything'] "And support a constitutional amendment giving Halliburton one third of everything."

Maybe he should be smiling in the last panel? Or have a look of teary-eyed hope?

Any real comic would tell you that analysis kills the comedy, but my inner deconstructionist catches obvious echoes of Gary Trudeau and Jules Feiffer. Title courtesy of Walt Kelly of course.

Well, here is one New Yorker who knows who the enemy is: http://www.dailykos.com/story/2004/11/9/20524/0049