Essays

Will the Present Suffice? On Disappearance in Fiction

September 21, 2022  |  in Essays  |  by MK Harb

It seems that disappearance creates even more presence, focusing around the individual instead of erasing them.

What is absence—this deeply felt substance that is not made of matter, but lack? In texts across time, writers have given form to vanishing and its metaphorical power, studying its mystery and its abjection, its myth and its experience. In the following essay, MK Harb discusses three cases of disappearance in short stories by Jorge Luis Borges, Alice Munro, and Danial Haghighi, and how the three authors use the duality of presence and absence to explore the psychology of those who go and those who stay, as well as experiences of class, gender, sexuality, and colonialism.

In a curious poem by the name of “Elegy with a Thimbleful of Water in the Cage,” the late Larry Levis created, in words blown with the precision of a glassmaker, a philosophical text on life and desire. Beginning with, “It’s a list of what I cannot touch,” Levis narrates the myth of the Cumaean Sibyl, an ancient Greek priestess who, in her quest to ask the Gods for eternal life, forgot to ask for eternal youth. What ensues is a lesson in cruelty, for as time expands and centuries go by, she shrinks and dwarfs until she becomes as tiny as a thumb, upon which she is placed in a jar to “suffocate without being able to die.” As the years churn on, Sibyl eventually finds herself in a birdcage, placed there by an Athenian shop owner for her protection. She emits small bird-like whispers to Athenian boys, who often rattle her cage to ask: What do you want, Sibyl? To this she responds: death. Her voice goes mute as she witnesses an ever-changing Athens through to the Second World War, all the while continuing to be alive, shriveling and aging, yet somehow disappearing from living. Using Sibyl, Levis creates a melancholic irony in which a desire for a prolonged life leads to disappearance.

When I think of disappearance, I think of Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend and the soul-crushing friendship between Lila and Elena, two intellectual women haunted by the other’s abilities, acting out their insecurities through never-ending disappearances and reappearances within each other’s lives. I think of Hiroshi Teshigahara’s 1960s film Woman in The Dunes, where a depressive Japanese scientist spends the night with a seductive village woman in a remote sand dune. After their affair, the staircase leading outwards—a symbol of return to urbanity—vanishes, and the most Sisyphean struggle ensues. In such works, disappearance is an allegory for life and time, lost and spent.

Disappearance has long been a hallmark of serious prose, a thematic thread throughout literature of all variances. In three short stories set in Canada, India, and Iran, this allegorical device operates at the narratives’ center. The first is Jorge Luis Borges’ “Man on the Threshold,” which follows the tradition of narration through memory, telling us of the writer’s childhood friend, Bioy Casares, who brings with him from London to Buenos Aires a strange dagger. This object triggers another story from a friend sitting with them, Christopher Dewey, who served in the British colonies of India. READ MORE…

Her Turn: The English and Russian Stories of Olga Zilberbourg, AKA Olga Grenets

August 3, 2022  |  in Essays  |  by Ian Ross Singleton

The Russian language, here, gifts its writer a context. . .

When a writer earns a second language, what does it mean to write in the distinct spaces within and between the two? In this essay on Russian writer Olga Zilberbourg, who also goes by Olga Grenets, nonfiction editor Ian Ross Singleton explores the various ways that language can reveal, point to, and emphasize in both originals and translations.

What does another language afford an exophonic writer—one writing in a language other than her native tongue? Olga Zilberbourg, also known as Olga Grenets in her Russian publications, is both translingual and exophonic. The English-language collection, Like Water and Other Stories, was published in 2019 after a trio of Russian books; then, in 2021, many of the stories from Like Water appeared in Russian as Задержи дыхание (Hold Your Breath). The stories of Like Water and its edited, translated successor open up the span of Zilberbourg’s/Grenets’ linguistic experience. The Russian iteration of the tales are not word-for-word translations, and, as with any translation, they present a reflection of the English-language original—no matter how close, even the strictest of translations alters a story. So, while Hold Your Breath may be a closely related work, it nonetheless stands as its own expression of (in this case) Grenets’ work.

Many of the stories in both collections present reflections on an immigrant’s experience. “Plastic Film With a Magnetic Coating” is about mixtapes, and the part they played in childhood romances and gender roles during the Soviet Union and the post-Soviet nineties. It is almost identical in both the English original and Russian translation, but in the English, the last sentence makes a disclaimer: “I’m speaking, of course, of a very different time and place.” What is significant about Zilberbourg’s work is that the two versions of this story span those two different times and places. In the Anglophone literary world, Zilberbourg is allocated under the umbrella of writers born in the Soviet Union, a clear mark of difference; to the audience of Like Water, then, this sentence is clear, intended to describe the exotic content of the story.

However, what might sound foreign to a reader of Like Water may, of course, be more commonplace to a reader of Hold Your Breath. The Russian translation of the story has a completely different ending, omitting this sentence entirely. Such a drastic change make sense; presumably, for the majority of those reading Hold Your Breath, the setting would not be a completely different place, and the narrative time is simply the not-so-distant past. In the English version, Zilberbourg’s narrator belongs to a generation that would recognize the romantic exchange of mixtapes in that time and place, and in the Russian version, the narrator adds a more specific, personal passage to their story, and it’s this reveal that concludes the Russian version of “Plastic Film . . .”

This passage in question specifies the narrator’s sexuality as one not necessarily falling within heterosexual norms: “Разумеется, когда через кассету я получила признание от девочки, я решила, что сообщение предназначено не мне, и ничего не ответила.” (“Of course, when, by cassette, I received a confession from a girl, I decided that the message wasn’t meant for me and didn’t answer.”) In English, the story can be intuited as relating to heterosexual relationships; in the Russian, there is a potential lesbian romance. In this case, the question of what an attained language can offer might be inverted to ask what a return to one’s primary language can afford. READ MORE…

Abdulla Qahhor: A Master of the Uzbek Short Story

June 29, 2022  |  in Essays  |  by Filip Noubel

Qahhor endeavors to shock the reader through subtle yet evocative detail, rather than declaration and naming.

Though Soviet literature has been studied and discussed on a global scale, the texts of Uzbekistan during that heated, tumultuous era have rarely reached beyond its language. In a new translation by Christopher Fort, however, one of the titans of Soviet Uzbek letters is making his English-language debut. Abdulla Qahhor’s autobiography, Tales from the Past, reveals the particular history of Soviet power in his country, as well as the sometimes tenuous boundary between the self and the Party line. In the following essay, Filip Noubel dives into the times and works of Qahhor, speaking with Fort to elucidate how this classic author should be read today.

In the anglophone world, Central Asia remains somewhat of a terra incognita on the map of literary traditions; thus, whenever a translation from the region does appear in English, it is something to celebrate. Today, there is reason to do so thanks to the efforts of Christopher Fort, a scholar of Uzbek literature and an assistant professor of general education at the American University of Central Asia. Fort has just published a partial translation of Tales from the Past, the literary autobiography of Abdullah Qahhor (1907-1968), arguably the greatest master of the Uzbek short story from the Soviet period. While the full translation will come out later next year, a large excerpt—including the foreword and the first chapter—is available to read online, providing a rare insight into Qahhor’s world and his role as a key public intellectual, navigating the political minefield of the Stalinist period and its aftermath. His other works include two novels: Mirage and The Lanterns of Qo‘shchinor.

Uzbek literature is a rich field encompassing different languages, alphabets, and traditions—one of which is the Soviet Uzbek literature from the 1920s to the 1980s, mostly written in Cyrillic Uzbek and Russian. The beginning and the end of this period can be characterized as times of exciting diversity, unlike its heavily censured middle period. To understand the twenties, it is necessary to go back to the late nineteenth century, when an innovative generation of intellectuals—the Jadids, who took their name from the concept of “usul-i-jadid,” or “the new method”—revolutionized the literary landscape of what was then Tsarist Turkestan, one of Russia’s latest conquests in Central Asia. By the early 1920s, this generation had created a golden age of Uzbek literature, which produced the first novels ever written in Uzbek, experimenting with various form and themes. However, the Stalinist purges of the 1930s, targeting independent intellectuals across the entire Soviet Union, put a brutal end to this period, sending many prominent writers to jail, camps, and eventually to their death.

After the thirties, a new generation of writers emerged in Uzbekistan, having pledged full loyalty to the demands of political correctness and socialist realism—the Moscow-imposed model of writing fiction. Abdulla Qahhor, G‘afur G‘ulom, and Oybek were among the most famous names. However, as Fort himself explains, this generation is more linked with its predecessors than it might appear: “These authors later demonstrate some regret over their participation in Stalin’s purges of their forefathers. While relatively quiet in the 1930s, Qahhor in particular became a major voice of opposition in the Soviet Uzbek literary establishment of the 1950s, advocating for less oversight from the Writers’ Union [the powerful institution that dictated the correct political line for writers in every Soviet Republic]. He also produced the only piece of Uzbek literature, of which I’m aware, written for the drawer. His Earthquake, written in the 1960s but first published in 1987, illustrates some of the terror of the purges and, depending on how one reads it, some guilt for his complicity in them.”   READ MORE…

On Women Who Refuse to Die: Who Will Win the 2022 Booker International?

May 25, 2022  |  in Essays  |  by Barbara Halla

What worlds have we been missing in prohibiting or dismissing women’s writing?

As we countdown to the 2022 Booker International Prize announcement on May 26, the contenders for the award offer new indications and perspectives by which to think about the world of literature and translation. In the following essay, our resident Booker expert Barbara Halla considers the digressive and variegated realm of “women’s writing”—that five out of the six titles on the shortlist were works by women authors is both evidence of the work’s scope and diversity, and also an overwhelming rejection of that old and tired idea: that women’s writing is simply of any gender-specific experience.

Since 2019, I have been relentlessly punished by the memory of this essay by an Albanian critic who argued in favor of the inherent superiority of men’s writing. His reasoning went like this: men write to triumph over life, whereas women write to survive. And for that very reason, the author claimed, men’s literature has universal appeal, as men are able to overcome the limitations of their own lived experiences and perspectives, while women’s writing focuses only on their painfully limited (i.e., domestic) existence.

My frustration with this article was compounded by finding its logic replicated elsewhere, in other books about the history of women in literature, and even during a conversation with another Albanian male writer a few months after reading that article. In the ensuing Q&A, the writer in question issued a complacent mea culpa about his lack of interest in women writers—he simply found their writing too limited and introspective. Of course, this is understandable. After all, it is easier to relate to Tolstoy’s Prince Andrei or Goethe’s Faust when one spends their days in the battlefield before making a deal with the devil and are whisked away for a night of debauchery with witches. After all, this is what “real” life is actually about, and it’s not like men ever write about minor concerns like marriage or childcare.

I’m being facetious, but this understanding of literature is pernicious—this desire to determine artistic value along essentialist gender lines. It also seeks to explain the existence of global and local literary canons as meritocratic, rather than the result of conscious policy decisions that have contributed to the erasure and devaluing of women’s writing. I was wondering about this argument as I made my way through the six books shortlisted for the Booker International 2022—five of which were written by women and published in the past fifteen years in South Korea, India, Poland, and Argentina. To be straightforward to the point of being trite: these five books undermine the notion that there is anything akin to a universal “women’s writing.” READ MORE…

Multilingualism in Adagio: On Switzerland and Its Languages

May 9, 2022  |  in Essays  |  by Katy Derbyshire and Zorka Ciklaminy

They are—there is no other way to put it—blank spots on the literary map of Switzerland.

Switzerland’s multilingualism has long been an inextricable part of its national identity, but how is this amalgam really implemented in everyday life—and how is it reflected in the country’s literature? Ahead of the Swiss Special Feature in our Summer 2022 issue (by the way, translators of this country’s literature are invited to submit work—and stand to receive an honorarium of USD80 if their work is accepted—by June 1), Swiss translator Zorka Ciklaminy sheds a light on the reality of living within this complex intersection of speaking, living, reading, and writing. The Berlin-based writer and translator Katy Derbyshire translated the following piece from the original German. 

The Swiss Language Landscape

Switzerland is a country coloured by multilingualism; German, French, Italian and Rhaeto-Romansh all have equal standing as official national languages. Yet, this presumed quadrilingualism does not unilaterally apply to all those living in Switzerland, since it is not the case that the entire population speaks all four languages; the country instead consists largely of monolingual regions, with little dialogue between them. Along the language boundaries, and in the multilingual cantons (Bern, Fribourg, Graubünden and Wallis), however, many people are bi- or multilingual, and in areas such as German-speaking Switzerland, we see a varying bilingual phenomenon: High German may be the official language, but in everyday life people speak Swiss German—a collective term for various Alemannic dialects.

How is this multilingualism lived on an individual and societal level, and used in everyday communication? As one might suspect, the answer is not entirely clear or logical at first glance. Though the country’s everyday multilingualism does not differ essentially from that of its neighbouring countries. It must be emphasized that dialogue between the linguistic communities is actively promoted by the Swiss government, with a language law stipulating, among other things, that Italian and Rhaeto-Romansh—underrepresented languages compared to German and French—are to be maintained and promoted as national languages. However, it is obvious that when we speak of a multilingual Switzerland in this age of globalization, and of English as a rising lingua franca, our focus cannot possibly remain solely on the official national languages—which would not reflect Switzerland’s linguistic diversity, excluding a large part of the country’s residents. Instead, one should be attentive to what are still frequently referred to in Switzerland using the rather infelicitous term “fifth national languages”.

In a country of immigrants, like Switzerland, migration-led linguistic diversity plays an emphatic role in formation of new language communities. After the end of the Second World War, the 1950s and 1960s saw the arrival of political refugees from Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Tibet, along with a larger group of labour migrants—known as Saisoniers—from Italy. During the 1980s and 1990s, migrants came mainly from southern and south-eastern Europe (Spain, Portugal, the former Yugoslavia and Turkey) and Sri Lanka. Following the 1999 Treaty on the Free Movement of Persons between Switzerland and the EU, further immigration occurred from central and eastern European states. This development prompted numerous languages to spread in Switzerland over the decades, forming a linguistic potpourri. In more specific terms, this migratory multilingualism means that these migration languages combined are spoken by more people in Switzerland than Italian and Rhaeto-Romansh together. For many years, the fact that this has led to new literatures in Switzerland was neglected or even ignored. READ MORE…

It Is Wonderful to Survive: On the Literature of China’s One-Child Policy

April 27, 2022  |  in Essays  |  by Xiao Yue Shan

The literature of witness is not the act, but that journey upon the very long landscape of a single because.

The population control policies of China have been a long, treacherous trial of the invasion of nationhood into the most private corners of personhood. In the following essay, Xiao Yue Shan discusses the literature written under this continual interrogation, the performance of autobiography, and how the intensely personal can come to elucidate the immense.

Halfway through Nanfu Wang’s documentary, One Child Nation, the scale of China’s family planning policies begins to hint towards their true proportions—violence that moves past the triangulation of parent, child, and state, towards a vast chaos of capital and globalism. Following a series of tender but unequivocal interviews—in which the director confronts her own family’s trauma of child abandonment and death—Wang addresses the sensational story of a family who had made a living out of selling found children to orphanages, before being convicted and imprisoned for human trafficking. In an interview with the household’s late matriarch, she speaks without hesitation; the amount received for the first child she handed over was 700 RMB—about 115 USD. The camera, both attentive to and suspicious of her watery gaze, makes few observations of guilt or sorrow. She has that same discrepant, hard youth of many rural Chinese women, an aura of won stoicism and fearlessness, even as she relays the brutal details: “I was inconsolable . . . and the orphanage director [said]: ‘You found her? Her own family abandoned her. Why the fuck are you crying?’”

More Than One Child, a memoir by Shen Yang of “China’s Invisible Generation,” opens with an assertation of presence: “I have to say . . . how we lived. Otherwise, our entire generation really will be buried in the abyss of history.” This mythos of selfhood, in which one rises amongst many to speak as if chosen, is defined by the threat of absence. For a country that has perfected its weaponization of silence, even the sheer presence of an individual voice can be radical. Such is how the book makes its statement, a cover unignorably red in the hands, marking itself as necessary by underlining our fear of silence.

Born second to parents that would eventually go on to have four daughters in total, Shen Yang’s invisibility was a chronological certainty. Neither preciously firstborn nor the only excess child of her family, she recalls being first shuffled to the guardianship of doting grandparents, before the arrival of younger and younger sisters inevitably pushed her to the margins. In the tempestuous years of childhood, she moved through the households of extended family and through the dejections of neglect, ostracization, and loneliness. These trials, described in detail, are what compose the majority of her memoirs—episodes threaded with rage, resentment, and yearning scattered against the artless landscape of rural Henan.

It’s difficult to address Shen Yang’s memoir as a simple work of literature. The writing follows the natural misalignments of raw emotion, wavering with indignance and brashness; it feels much like looking at the mirror-image of oneself as a teenager, enraged by worldly injustices as refracted through the prism of selfhood. The aggrieved consciousness of a recklessly emerging identity pervades each recounting of hand-me-down clothing, schoolyard bullying, and corporal punishment. Explosive tantrums—on the part of both children and adults—populate the accounts, balanced out only by equally acrimonious memories of seething, silent hatred. All the players in this vicious game of attachments are intricated in the tenuous balance-game of reluctant, mutual reliances: heartless, cruel, and ugly. Even Shen Yang herself, fragile and explosive, is cast in a dejected shadow. Yet—how can it be otherwise? The text never proclaimed anything other than testimony. I have to say how we lived. The directive of truth-saying, of the voice as a passageway by which history travels, was there from its very beginning. The witness needs not be graceful—only believable. The truth is not the work of poets alone. READ MORE…

The International Booker Comes Home

April 4, 2022  |  in Essays  |  by Barbara Halla

There is much to be said about the (fleeting) feeling of accomplishment in seeing a favorite longlisted.

With the upcoming announcement of the Booker International shortlist on April 7, our in-house Booker expert is here to take you through the impressive longlist, discuss the intersection between closed-door judging and fervent public online discourses, and the increased visibility of the translator in bringing these vital titles into the English-language sphere, Read on to find out more!

The International Booker Prize, like a number of other British literary prizes, has become a unifying topic amidst a very active online community. Twitter is the kind of place where bubbles of connections and affinities naturally form, but participating in this nexus simultaneously fosters a detached sense of irony that makes any earnest acknowledgment to it a touch mortifying. I am willing to take the risk of too much earnestness today because, for the sake of honesty, my relationship to the International Booker would not be the same without this community.

I became a regular follower of the prize after attending a meeting with the judges at Shakespeare and Company in Paris back in 2016 (a discussion I left certain in the knowledge that Han Kang’s The Vegetarian, translated by Deborah Smith, was going to win, as it did). But it was entering in conversation with other readers and translators through Twitter that made the International Booker an event that I await impatiently every March. We make a friendly race out of reading the entire longlist, and debates about the merits of each selection get unreasonably heated, as we work to change the minds of others about the books we love—or even loath at times. Not to mention that I would be very happy not to have the “what constitutes nonfiction” debate again in my lifetime, which was in full swing both last year, with the longlisting of In Memory of Memory and The War of the Poor, and in 2019 when The Years was shortlisted.

Perhaps more importantly, being part of this community has shaped the approach I take the reading (and reviewing) the list. Thanks to it, I am constantly aware of the labor that goes into each book, not merely the translation but the efforts by the translators themselves, often acting as both agent and publicist. For instance, when Olga Tokarczuk’s Flights won the International Booker in 2018, Jennifer Croft had spent a decade advocating for it to be published. Furthermore, participating even somewhat actively in the discussion happening on places like Twitter is to be aware of the uneven dynamics of the publishing world. Much has rightfully been said about the International Booker’s Eurocentrism (which this year’s longlist provides a refreshing break from), but at the same time, as an online participant in these communities, you see in real time that the Booker is probably replicating trends that exist within publishing at large. READ MORE…

Bercer un poème: On Nursing Poetry in the Showcase Ù Ơ | SUO: A Poetic Exchange

March 28, 2022  |  in Essays, Reviews  |  by Phuong Anh

Sound, she argued, is the space in which an utterance bears meaning.

“What is language if it is not sound?”—Trần Thị NgH

Speaking of translation in one of the pre-recorded sessions of the poetic showcase Ù Ơ | SUO, writer Trần Thị NgH reminded the audience of the importance of sound in language. Sound, she argued, is the space in which an utterance bears meaning.

This focus on sound and other sensory aspects of poetry permeated the week-long Ù Ơ | SUO, which brought together poems in translation and multilingual works mixing Welsh, English, and Vietnamese, as well as panel discussions and visual and performative responses. This collaborative work was the result of a three-month residency for Welsh and Vietnamese women and non-binary writers.

Ù Ơ | SUO’s point of departure, according to Nhã Thuyên’s introduction, was the “familiar sounds of lullabies” and how they might serve as a clue to the “origins of poetic language and the role of women in transmission of language and memory within families.” The title of the showcase, which refers to the act of singing a lullaby, inspired me to experience this showcase through the dialectal metaphor of “bercer un poème“: cradling a poem as a mother would a crying child. The reader is also important to the “growth” of the piece: reading is how we cradle a poem. Nous sommes bercés par le poème, et nous berçons le poème—we are cradled by the poem, and we cradle the poem.

As I viewed the exhibition, Piaget’s theory of cognitive development came to mind. His theory deals with the nature of knowledge: how a child comes to acquire it, build it, and use it. According to Piaget’s framework, children go from experiencing the world through actions, to learning how to represent it through words, to expanding their logical thinking and reasoning. It isn’t that children know less, Piaget argued; they just think differently. This thinking “differently” is then a space where creative potential can emerge.

READ MORE…

Free Fleas: Self-Publishing and Storytelling in Japan

March 7, 2022  |  in Essays  |  by Laurel Taylor

The roots of contemporary dōjinshi are firmly planted in the fertile soil of Japan’s post-revolution literary circles.

Goethe had a famously tumultuous relationship with publishing, expressing that to “exchange [my work] for money seemed hateful to me.” The relationship between creation and distribution is always fraught with the masked workings of industry, further complicated in a world expedited and reconstituted by advancing technologies. Today, a text can go from the mind to the press in a matter of hours, via the mechanics of a profligate self-publishing industry; how does this implicate and transform our urge—and instinct—for storytelling? In this following essay, Assistant Editor Laurel Taylor looks into the culture of dōjinshi, the creation and dissemination of self-published works in Japan, examining our relationship to our creative endeavors, the promises and pitfalls of profit, and the paths our words take as they make their way into the world.

I think there are very few shared universalities across human histories and societies, but those that exist are tied up, I would argue, in the act of creation. The earliest remnants we have of our ancestors include inventions of the practical variety—tools for hunting, gathering, and protecting—but they also include artistic creations, the purposes of which are far more abstract. The traces of our past include cave paintings and sculptures, bone flutes and drums, but also less tangible things: Ainu yukar, Homeric epics, Indigenous Australian storytelling traditions, tales and chronicles performed orally long before they were written down. The far-ranging history of our urge to communicate, to express, and to entertain seems to ultimately serve the same desire: all of us want to tell stories.

In the modern age, storytelling has, for the layperson, taken on narrower and narrower definitions. Despite the oral legacy of narrative, the stories commanding large audiences are usually associated with the written word; even when such texts are transferred into drama, film, television, or song, it first begins on the page. This, of course, narrows the notion of who gets to tell stories. What once was the work of humanity has become the work of the writer, and the road to claiming “writer” as profession is a daunting one, which few people are ultimately able to take. Though we all still share an impulse toward creation, those impulses are restricted by educational demands, job demands, relationship demands, publisher demands, market demands. We live in a world of exigencies, where storytelling is overwhelmed by societal pressures. As such, the act of writing was, for many centuries, dominated by the wealthy, educated, and idle—and our literary canons demonstrate as much.

However, with the advent of mass production and the internet age, writing has been bolstered by more universalized education, increased access to tools, and growing networks of supportive writing communities. The gap between layperson and writer has been further shortened by bustling self-publishing economies, most evident in Japan through the culture of dōjinshi. Those familiar with Japanese popular culture may already be aware of this term in relation to comics and graphic novels, but it has a much broader definition. Written 同人誌, dōjinshi are broadly defined as “document[s] by like-minded people.” They can be made by anyone for any purpose: cooking, gardening, stamp-collecting, train-watching, and yes, storytelling. The closest kindred term in English might be “zine,” but in the Japanese context, dōjinshi lack that same underground punk aesthetic; it’s not uncommon for students to participate in after-school dōjinshi clubs or for retirees to print dōjinshi about their hobbies. Many of these publications are intended to apprise communities of municipal matters or to attract new members, but narratively inspired dōjinshi reproduce the stories of our day-to-day: those told around the dinner table, fanfiction, original children’s tales. They echo the narrative traditions of long ago, told in amphitheaters or sung around campfires or chanted to the churning of the plow, producing local community-based connections rather than mass market commodities. READ MORE…

Yes, and It Sometimes Is Like That, You Embrace Your Existence

March 3, 2022  |  in Essays  |  by Ivana Hostová

A computer-generated collection of poetry in Slovak wins a national prize for poetry.

In 2020, the Slovak poet and intermedia artist Zuzana Husárová and the Slovak sound artist and software developer collaborated with Liza Gennart, a neural network they programmed, to write the poetry collection, Outcomes of Origin (2020, VLNA / Drewo a srd). To the surprise of many, the work won a major Slovak national award for poetry. In this essay, the second part of our coverage on Liza Gennart, the critic and scholar Ivana Hostová contextualizes the project within the rapidly developing field of electronic poetry, examines Liza Gennart’s subversive, unsettling poems, and explores their implications for our relationships with humanized machines. The following excerpts from Gennart’s collection were translated by Hostová.

Miscellanea 4.

Do you enter this world?
There is nothing to do. Not even in the bedroom, such misfortune, you leave it soak
in the brain and perhaps you also do it for my sake. But for my sake.

* late afternoon

* because it doesn’t sound like a reproach

* but you agree: it resembles a colourless key

* because wet words float out the window

Liza Gennart: Outcomes of Origin (Výsledky vzniku, 2020, VLNA / Drewo a srd), created by Zuzana Husárová and Ľubomír Panák, excerpt translated by Ivana Hostová.

In a recent ambitious attempt to comprehensively account for the lyric experience and practice in Western culture, Jonathan Culler in his Theory of the Lyric (2015) names the ritualistic as one of the defining features of what a poem has been over the centuries. Although Culler mostly excludes experimental writing including electronic poetry from his discussions and therefore restricts the scope of his analysis, the feeling of a ritual is surely present upon a readerly encounter with a book of poetry generated by one of our current Others—computers, neural networks, and machines. These, to our horror and admiration, have now absorbed the entire textual world produced during the whole history of humankind. We cannot help but wonder how much of what remains hidden from us they know and to what use they might put it. Instructing a neural network to write poetry provides an uncanny glimpse of such depths and shallow waters, reflecting the surfaces and masks of humanity.

Poetry generated by artificial intelligence, as research into readers’s responses shows, tends to be most interesting when it involves cooperation between human and non-human actors. One such project, Es Devlin’s Poem Pavilion at Expo 2020 in Dubai, creates poems—in English and Arabic—using words submitted by visitors which are then processed by an advanced machine learning algorithm. The creative possibilities of recent developments in natural language processing have inspired artists and poets all over the world and have given rise to poems, novels, and plays in languages with limited diffusion—including Slovak. The creative duo composed of poet and intermedia artist Zuzana Husárová and the sound artist and software developer Ľubomír Panák collaborated with a neural network Liza Gennart to create the collection Outcomes of Origin (2020, VLNA / Drewo a srd). The book—to the great shock of many—won the national prize for poetry, “Golden Wave,” in 2021.

READ MORE…

What’s Going On in Myanmar?

February 23, 2022  |  in Dispatches, Essays  |  by Lucas Stewart

In their attempts to control this narrative, the illegal regime has made use of tactics old and new.

On February 1, 2021, the military forces of Myanmar deposed the democratically elected members of the National League for Democracy, which had won 83% of the country’s parliamentary seats in the previous election. Protests erupted across the country in response to the coup, and what started out as peaceful resistance quickly turned violent as the junta worked to suppress the demonstrations. In this following essay and dispatch, Asymptote correspondent Lucas Stewart provides a delineation of what has happened in the year since, and examines the place of literature during such times of suppression. In conversations with Yu Ya, whose prolific writing career follows that of her father’s and uncle’s (both of whom were writers imprisoned under the former regime), this following piece puts a finger to human pulse of political unrest. Yu Ya’s quotations were co-translated by Stewart and Eaindra Ko Ko.

My balcony in Yangon had overlooked Sule Pagoda, an ancient stupa that once lay beyond the limits of the old city of Dagon, but now lights up the heart of Myanmar’s largest metropolis. From there, on the sixth day of the coup—a Saturday afternoon—we saw some of the first public outpourings of anger. Security forces, which had secured the City Hall opposite us and other strategic buildings in the early days of conflict, tumbled out; grey-uniformed, some with riot shields, those without a step behind them, they fanned from one side of the road to the other. An officer spoke into a radio, pointed one way north and then south and then back north again, before eventually settling on the east side of the pagoda, closest to the City Hall’s main entrance. There was a stand-off but no carnage that day, nor for the first two weeks. In that time, what had been a hundred protestors grew to hundreds of thousands, many coming from elsewhere, but always heading towards Sule Pagoda, the symbolic crux of protest. Some describe it like a carnival—which was true, I guess, at first. Music blasted out from overloaded speakers strapped to trucks. Sellers sold whatever, food, drink, National League for Democracy (NLD) merchandise. Volunteers picked up the debris left behind as the crowd moved on. Cars bashed their horns as they passed City Hall, knowing the soldiers within could hear their disgust. A neighbour, who remembered the midnight of 1988 when perhaps 300 or more protestors were shot at Sule Pagoda, told me this time if felt different. But that was in the early days.

Among the millions of people who woke up alongside me on February 1 to a blacked out and disconnected country was Yu Ya: prominent young short story writer, and friend of several years since we worked together on Hidden Words, Hidden Worlds, an anthology bringing short stories from Myanmar’s censored ethnic nationality languages to light for the first time. She later worked for BBC Media Action as a scriptwriter, contributing to inclusive, working-class voices radio programmes such as The Teacup Diaries.

Like many in Myanmar, she is no stranger to military coups, nor to the violence and oppression that follows the ascent to illegal power. Min Lu, Yu Ya’s father as well as a leading poet and author, was jailed in the aftermath of the 1988 revolution for penning ‘What’s Going On?’—a satirical, sarcastic poem attacking the then-illegal regime’s murders and maladministration. The poem witnessed a revival in the weeks following the 2021 coup. So now, what is going on in Myanmar? READ MORE…

Rosa Chávez: “Poetry is my spine.”

February 9, 2022  |  in Essays, Profile  |  by José García Escobar

"Poetry has always moved me, but I’ve also been moved by history, by my people’s history."

Rosa Chávez is La Poeta here, but she defies definition. The Mayan artist and writer has walked a variegation of paths and left her indelible mark on scores of people and places, ensuring that her legacy will be a monument to curiosity, surprise, and multiplicity. In the following profile, Editor-at-Large José García Escobar speaks to the Guatemalan La Poeta and her ever-widening world of poetics, which trespass the page—and language—to take on other numinous forms.

La Poeta walks towards a small table. She lays a sonaja, a tiny drum, some colorful ronrones, and a few whistles made of clay upon it, as the electric sounds of a turntable fill the room. Soon, from the speakers, the voice of Berta Cáceres comes: “We are fighting to protect the rights of indigenous people,” and her speech echoes across the small room of a school in rural El Salvador. “We have struggled for more than five hundred years,” Berta goes on. “We have always lived as a community,” steps in the voice of the indigenous leader Lolita Chávez, “and our community includes mankind, but also plants, birds, fish too, and all the animals.” Wearing a shirt and a pair of small glasses, the DJ turns the knobs to move the musical landscape, which carries the activists’ voices.

“I remember that children had decorated the classroom using bits of paper, mimicking the lush fields outside, the green mountains,” says Rosa Chávez, La Poeta.

La Poeta takes then the microphone.

“Pick it up. Take what’s yours,” she says, she recites, she conjures. “Take it. It’s yours. Don’t let them take it from you. Pick it up. Leave it under the sun. Let it dry. Pick the weevils off it,” La Poeta says, and a tiny whistle and a pair of soft cymbals hiss across the room. “One by one, remove the kernels. Look how it shines: red, yellow, white, black. Undo its body. Grind its body. Cook its body. Don’t toss it aside, though. Don’t give it a bad look. Never forget to grow more.”

That’s how one of Selva y Cerror’s first shows occurred—August of 2017, during the Festival Mundial de Poesía Cien Voces, in El Salvador; the song I’m describing is called La Abuela y el Maíz. Selva y Cerro is a Guatemalan musical duo consisting of DJ and producer Teko (Andrés Azmitia)—best known as Sonido Quilete—and Rosa Chávez. It is also the latest project of Chávez, out of her wide-ranging roles as poet, mother, performer, actress, teacher, artisan, cultural manager, screenwriter, filmmaker, bisexual, Maya K’iche’-Kaqchikel.

Rosa contains multitudes. She insists, however, that she’s a poet—an interesting fact considering that she never sought publication. She says that even today when she writes, she’s not thinking of “putting together a book,” despite having published five. Urges move her, motivate her. The multitudes inside Rosa talk to each other. Poetry took her to performance. Performance to the theatre. Theatre to community work and human rights. Poetry is the thread that weaved, and still today weaves, the urges of Rosa’s career. For Rosa Chávez, poetry has no end.

READ MORE…

Salvation Written Elsewhere: Mohamed Choukri and Abdellah Taïa at the Limits of World Literature

January 13, 2022  |  in Essays  |  by Alex Tan

[T]he works of Mohamed Choukri and Abdellah Taïa narrate points of silence to enact the difficulty of speaking as oneself.

In the first part of this essay, Alex Tan discussed Arab texts that anticipate their own reception in translation or as world literature, and how Mohamed Choukri and Abdellah Taïa—in For Bread Alone and Salvation Army—desacralise the languages of Classical Arabic and French respectively. Here, the discreet elements of these two “autobiographical” works are further analysed, in order to understand how a self can be written into existence amidst erasure, shame, and even the savagery of love.

“All of us already wanted to forget our past, forget last night,
forget the troubles that brought us here and couldn’t be shared no matter who asked.”

—Abdellah Taïa, Salvation Army (tr. Frank Stock)

“And So I Felt Ashamed”: An Affective Education

Caught in between Arabic and Western autobiographical conventions, the works of Mohamed Choukri and Abdellah Taïa narrate points of silence to enact the difficulty of speaking as oneself. Whereas the Arabic tradition is associated with a concealment of the shameful and a preference for collective voices, the Western takes pride in confessing the abject and centering the individual’s coming-of-age. In negotiating one’s place within the collective, the self-portraits in Choukri’s and Taïa’s work inevitably confronts a culture that, to secure deference to authority, forbids people from thinking as individuals.

Both texts are abundantly punctuated with moments of non-verbal expression amidst Moroccan society’s conspiracies of silence. In Salvation Army, the parents of Taïa’s narrator—also named Abdellah—have a “preferred language” of “sex”; here, the father’s silence conveys his desire. Less benignly, Choukri’s surrogate, Mohamed, in For Bread Alone ironises his father’s draconian assertions by addressing him “without speaking”: “O Khalifa of Allah on earth.” Left unelaborated, this phrase evokes the quiet imaginative gestures that the author performs as a mode of survival—as it is known only to himself. It mirrors the larger vocabulary of violence that saturates the book, such as when his father speaks “only in shouts and slaps,” a dialogue of abuse which forms their exclusive mode of interaction.

The narrator grows to be adept at reading signification into embodied cues, like those of Yasmina and an unknown young man whose “eyes tell me” he “wanted something”—the language remaining vague as if to re-enact the man’s reticence. A European woman, catching Mohamed “staring” at her handbag, similarly communicates with “her eyes.” They “seemed to be saying: Aren’t you ashamed? And so I felt ashamed.” The woman’s eloquent silence performs an affective education: Mohamed learns how a white person views someone of his class and race, and realises where and when he should feel shame. Yet in giving language to these moments, Choukri displaces the locus of shame from the personal to the systemic. READ MORE…

Languages of Silence: Mohamed Choukri and Abdellah Taïa Desacralising Adab and Isnad

January 12, 2022  |  in Essays  |  by Alex Tan

Nothing about a translated novel—or anything that has warranted the fraught label of “world literature”—can be taken for granted.

Mohamed Choukri and Abdellah Taïa have been celebrated by the literary world as writers defying tradition in their transgressive tellings of migration, sexuality, and selfhood; yet, in the Anglophone sphere, their works have also been exoticised and misappropriated in Orientalist contexts, filtered through the othering perspectives of a western literary hierarchy. In this following essay, Assistant Editor Alex Tan delineates a reading of these two Moroccan writers that situates them in the vehicles of their own language and cultural context, with the unique ways their writing interrogates the borders of being. This essay is part one of two, the second of which can be read here.

 “The Maghrebin is always elsewhere. That’s where he makes himself come true.”

— Habib Tengour, Exile is My Trade (tr. Pierre Joris)

1998, Cairo. Midway through her Modern Arabic literature class at the American University in Cairo (AUC), Professor Samia Mehrez receives urgent missives from the university administration. Though she does not yet suspect the storm to come, she is compelled to cease the lecture and dismiss the students. Walking over to the administrative office, she is greeted with the news that several parents have complained about the inclusion of “pornography” on her syllabus, sufficiently blasphemous to “corrupt an entire generation.”

What text could claim such power? At the heart of the controversy was Moroccan writer Mohamed Choukri’s Al-Khubz Al-Hafi (translated by Paul Bowles into English as For Bread Alone), which would soon precipitate the eruption of a nation-wide culture war over the uses of literature in the classroom.

Fast forward to 2012—El Jadida in Morocco, six years after Abdellah Taïa comes out as gay in the magazine Tel Quel and is hailed as the first Arab writer to be open about his homosexuality. Certain Islamist groups, anxious about moral taint, are clamouring for the outlawing of his oeuvre. Taïa had been invited to speak at a university about his latest work to be translated from French into Arabic; unfortunately, before it could happen, professors and students organised a protest to shut down the event. Slogans such as “don’t spread homosexuality on campus” were intoned.

It has become, by now, somewhat commonplace for the West to fetishize Arab writers and intellectuals who suffer widespread condemnation in their countries of origin—particularly from Islamist quarters—before enshrining them in the exclusive club of world literature. One thinks of works like Sonallah Ibrahim’s That Smell, banned immediately upon its 1966 publication in Egypt, or Haidar Haidar’s A Banquet of Seaweed, which induced accusations of heresy from Al-Azhar clerics and protests by university students against its inclusion on syllabi. At times, it almost seems as if censorship, political oppression, and exile are a rite of passage for international renown—a disturbing reality that signals to us what Anglophone literary markets value in a work from the Arab world. READ MORE…