With so many stellar pieces in the Spring 2024 issue, where to start? Read the blog editors’ top picks.
In a Bethlehem of the future, no one is left. Some undetermined ecological catastrophe, shown only through a black, viscous flood tiding over the narrow alleyways, had sent volcanic streams of smoke up through the minaret and the turreted roofs, obliterating the limestone, the arched windows, the indecipherable urban folds. This is where Larissa Sansour and Søren Lind’s 2019 film, In Vitro, takes place: a world where two of the last remaining survivors of the human race meet in an abandoned nuclear reactor. One of them is dying, and the other seems to be a designed individual, a living archive. In the dialogue that unites the disparate scenes—some archival, some distinctly futuristic, some shimmering with ghosts—the woman lying in the hospital bed says to her visitor: “Your memories are as real as mine.” The younger woman gets up and walks to the other side of the room. “I disagree,” she replies brusquely. “The pain these stories cause are twofold. . . because the loss I feel was never mine.”
Living within an increasingly crowded media landscape, combined with modern technology’s dissolution of physical distance, the significance of these lines from In Vitro do not escape most of us. The theorist Alison Landsberg called it “prosthetic memory”: a phenomenon in which recollections are lifted from a cultural landscape and implanted almost seamlessly within an individual consciousness, culminating in a psychic patchwork that does not distinguish between what has happened to us, and what was simply witnessed. Uban Cristina Ali Farah’s “Three Short Pieces”, in a delicate and tender translation by Brandon Michael Cleverly Breen, sees the Somalian-Italian author picking over such stitches in her own life, examining what has been lived and what has been given; what has been inherited and what has been picked up along the way. Some of the memories she discusses, as in a shared experience of migration, have slowly unwound inside her by way of language, and others, as in the first three years of her life, are echoed into the body through photographs, tastes, trails, stuttering fragments that she pieces together into a portrait of lineage, a half-there origin story.
The essay structure is supple, guided most pivotally by voice, and Ali Farah’s command of this language-tool is intuitive, gentle in the way that fractured pasts require. She rejects the objective role of the investigator, instead choosing to switch between the conductor and the instrument—counting time or manufacturing its passage. What emerges in the three discrete pieces, then, is a figure who trespasses temporal boundaries not out of any obsession to relive or to redefine, but simply to keep company with the emerging shapes and objects: escaping, returning, childhood keepsakes, absent parents, motherhood. Uninterested in psychoanalytic decryption or heavy-handed symbolism, the project of remembrance is, for this writer, to assert memory’s darting attention without prescribing that its subjects be wrung out for any last bits of meaning. Werner Herzog, a man inseparable from enigma, had asserted the necessity of mystery: “If you harshly light every last corner of a house, the house will be uninhabitable. It’s like that with your soul; if you light it up, shadows and darkness and all, people will become ‘uninhabitable’.” There is a similar vein of resistance in Ali Farah’s pieces, which communicate instead the infinite interpretability of memory—considering especially their various origins.
In the very first piece, she comments: “Leaving is often something sudden.” These shocks, which defines the narrative line of these essays, is then transferred to their reminiscence. There are only glimpses. The outlines. Chronology is broken because the journey represents a fracture, and an external chorus must be called in to fill the spaces. It provides a different approach to the contemporary preoccupation with trauma by asserting remembrance as a communal activity, and that the stories can be simultaneously owned by telling, and disowned by disclosing its various sources. That is why the last piece, which addresses the difficulty of assembling the past most directly, ends with a need for conversation. Our memories are less lonely than they might seem.
If Ali Farah’s essays contain the uninhibited network of memory exchange, then Khrystia Vengryniuk’s comic, hyperbolic “Flood” sees a high-stakes version of that: the unleashing of desire. In a brilliantly intuitive, impeccably paced translation by Dmytro Kyyan and Kate Tsurkan, a watchmaker falls in love with a woman, based only on details gleaned from watching her through the repair shop’s window. As the narration continues, the disturbing symptoms of obsession are dulled by how charming the fixations are: the dilation of her pupils is deemed dream-worthy; not knowing what her body looks like under oversized clothes, it is surmised that she is “much smaller”; and “her wine consumption on Saturdays” is slightly perturbing. Vengryniuk perfectly accentuates infatuation’s absurdity while preserving its endearing sincerity, allowing the intensity of adoration to pervade into every corner, every word.
When she finally comes in to the shop, seeking to get a watch fixed, tensions are at an all-time high. “I was calm and composed, as this very state was my ultimate state of hysteria,” the narrator admits. Nothing about her is unveiled by this mundane encounter, of course, but it does lead to an intimate episode in which the watchmaker undresses the watch. Vengryniuk’s prose is delightful, precisely coordinated in its balance of guilelessness and silliness (one could almost see a Jacques Tati-esque interpretation of the tale unfolding), and the duo of Kyyhan and Tsurkan must be commended, as translating humour is no small feat. In “Flood”, this funniness comes through most often in disclosures that are totally unhinged by love, but keep pulling back in some pale imitation of sanity: “The next day, she came wearing an enormous navy blue sweater with a huge collar and no sleeves. It was beautiful because I could see her arms. They were too thin.”
All throughout the story, there is a weather event that will lead to the titular disaster, which ultimately allows a full immersion in the story’s strangeness. It would be easy to equate the flood of water with the flood of love (and there is some sense here that our besotted watchmaker is somehow the cause, with an increasingly agitated narration raising the stakes of the relationship as it may raise the sea levels), but to remix the metaphor, “Flood” appears to be more in tune with the gradual drowning that obsession incurs—an inexhaustible generator of self-renewal that swallows everything, surging on and on, paying only the slightest attention to the city swimming at its feet. There is a limit to our scope of vision, Vengryniuk hints, established by our own hierarchy of needs, and it is very seldom that we think to look beyond it. At the end of the story, our narrator looks for his beloved, of whom we still know so little, and of the dead and dying he only says: “The screams and tears deny me any peace. . .”
—Xiao Yue Shan
Reading Asymptote’s Spring 2024 issue, tagged #midnightgarden, we find ourselves in atmospheric worlds that bleed between the true and the imagined. Dreams permeate the issue as characters grapple with their reality, drawn to the comforts and horrors of self-created, vignetted other-worlds. William Heinesen’s “A Cure for Evil Spirits“ (translated by D. E. Hurford) is like a memory, a glimpse of what it was like to be a young child learning the world for the first time, where “it seems hard to distinguish dream and reality, living a life among phantoms”. Read as a whole, this edition is haunted by the dreamy, horrific, ambiguous nature of the night—the materiality of words giving way to the fecund depths of thought, emotion, and nature.
Josep M. Miró Coromina’s The Nicest Body Ever Seen Around These Parts, in translation from the Catalan by Sharon G. Feldman, is a tragedy in denial. Written as a one-person monologue, the drama begins in the head of an absent-minded adolescent boy, Albert, as he lies alone in a hay field, unaware of, or unable to accept, his own gruesome death. Fragmented, lucid memories float through his mind—his “happiest memory” before his father left his life, his resentment of his mother, the evocative engraved ring on his finger—as his body is gnawed on by a neighbour’s dog. Another side of the story brings Albert’s mother, Antonia, into focus. In production, the myriad voices of the story (the boy, his mother, the townspeople) share a single voice, as a single actor inhabits both the grieving and the grieved—asking the audience if there truly is a difference.
In poetry, an excerpt from Fire Coral by Anna Malan Jógvansdóttir, in translation from the Faroese by Matthew Landrum and Luciano Dutra, is a breathless plunge down the screen. Precise language accompanies the speaker’s suicide and ensuing descent to a slow decay at the ocean floor, with short lines bringing pause to a harrowing death. Humanity and the natural world, oft said to part of a single whole, are put at odds, the speaker deceived by the being to which they gave themself:
drowning
is the calmest of all deaths
the sea told me
*
it
was
a lie
The sea, merciless and powerful, draws the speaker to the seabed, where they are decomposed by whelks and crabs. In death, the speaker’s humanity bends to the sea: where they once wore clothes still folded neatly at the top of the cliff, they are now a lump of wet, “slimy skin” held together by the “spiraling shell” of their skeleton. In this is a transformation—no longer human, the speaker finds themself a piece of geography on the seabed, inhabited by other wet, slimy creatures.
Finally, if there is any piece to encapsulate this collection’s obsession with the materiality of words—and the various truths lying around them—it is Colin Leemarshall’s introduction to his translation of Lee Sumyeong’s Just Like. Built on wordplay and translation, the words of Just Like are not blocks of finite meaning, but rather branching pathways to an unending wealth of possibilities—like mirrors bouncing back at each other. As the translator, Colin’s task was to find another mirror, and warp the image further.
Throughout the Spring 2024 issue, “true” meaning (what is understood but cannot be said) lies just out of reach. Through ghosts, sleepless nights, and the moments suspended before and after death, this collection hovers between (ir)realities and indiscernible truths; like the flame outside the cave, these words cast shadows—blurred at the edges and ever-shifting.
—Bella Creel
*****
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