Category: nonfiction

Living in exile: Dying in Toronto by Daša Drndić

Toronto consists of enclaves. All right, and parks. Enclaves are areas inhabited by minorities. There are a hundred and five minorities in Toronto, and new ones are being created all the time. Surrounded by invisible lines, walls and wires of separation and by a very visible medley of customs and languages, these minorities are becoming the majority. The little territory left over, in the centre, belongs to the majority that is slowly being transformed into a minority. And in similar circumstances, historically known to us, such a reduced majority may come to regret it.

Daša Drndić’s observations of Toronto in the mid-1990s, informed by history, much of it painfully recent for the new immigrant, is characteristically measured and insightful. And today, thirty years later, the tensions she predicts have found full expression in the anti-immigrant sentiments that have laid bare the multinational myth that we, as Canadians, have long held to. Fresh from the Croatian War of Independence, she had crossed an ocean as a refugee, only to find herself left to fashion some kind of home in a Greek-Chinese-Indian enclave in a sprawling metropolis in the so-called “New World.”

Dying in Toronto, subtitled Or Our Lady of Czestochowa is still shedding tears, originally published in Croatian in 1997, is an extended essay (or series of essays, if you prefer) chronicling her experiences as an immigrant living in Toronto from the summer of 1995 and into 1996. It may be considered as the non-fiction counterpart to 1998’s Canzone di Guerra which was released in English by Istros Books in 2022 (and as Battle Songs by New Directions in 2023). Both books are translated by Celia Hawkesworth, and feature narratives woven with factual commentaries and detailed footnotes, but Canzone has a fictionalized storyline, and a somewhat more experimental feel, especially with the regular asides about pigs. With Dying in Toronto, Drndić does not take on an alter ego for herself and her thirteen year-old daughter. Her focus is more directly on the machinery and indignity of the government system newcomers must navigate, and the adaptations (and sacrifices) they are forced to make. It is a sobering, yet often wry, account.

For her first months in Toronto, Drndić is keen to maintain, in this foreign urban landscape, a current and updated link with life back home. She discovers that an Istrian Croatian newspaper, Glas Istre  (The Voice of Istria) can be obtained if she is patient enough to make a long trek across town to buy it. She maps a route, but then thinks better of it. She decides to stop nostalgizing, and try to integrate amid the visible minorities and the white majority. She visits the library and goes to the cinema, for although her finances are limited, she requires creative stimulation (a luxury to be hidden from her case worker). Likewise, social and cultural contacts are important, so she reaches out to other Croatian and Slavic immigrants most of whom are also living diminished lives, at least relative to their pasts and professional  credentials. As for her daughter Maša, she indulges her with a string of small, short-lived, mostly rodent-related pets. As a single mother, Drndić and her daughter are naturally very close; together they struggle to adapt to the realities of their new existence:

The dichotomy of our life here is interesting. On the one hand a pathetic attempt at getting close to intellectual circles, on the other – identification with socially marginalised groups, partly out of curiosity and the masochistic satisfaction of reducing everyday life to the elementary and partly because of objective material poverty.

Yet, for Maša there is also a distinct kind of adolescent loneliness. She is at a sensitive age to be uprooted, though, with the war, she really has not known any kind of normal settled life since she was a young child. Her mother hopes to make up for this while still ensuring she has a connection to her homeland. It’s a difficult balance.

The portrait Drndić paints of Toronto, and more broadly of Canadians, is sharp, even cutting, but not without a dry sense of humour. To anyone familiar with the city, the history she describes will be familiar, as will its more garish landmarks—the legendary, now closed, Honest Ed’s discount department store and the oddly eccentric Casa Loma. But her diversions extend beyond Toronto, north to the Inuit in the Arctic, and back in time to trace the surprisingly long record of Croatian migration to Canada. As a Canadian reading this book, it is easy to nod with a smile as she points out our idiosyncrasies, because her tone is light. However, when it comes to the immigration and refugee “system” itself, and the perils of those who get caught trying to make their way through it, one can hear a bitter sarcasm come through. And even more unsettling is her response to the 1995 Quebec separation referendum—although it fails by the slimmest of margins, she is certain the province will ultimately secede one day. She also sees clearly the racist forces at play and the disregard of First Nations and Inuit rights. Little has changed. Today we are looking at separatist movements and talk of referenda again, but now it is not only in Quebec. In the west, in Alberta, the province where I live, we will soon go to the polls to decide whether we want to stay in Canada or make plans to vote to leave.

Clear-eyed and ever wise, Dying in Toronto is a work of astute social criticism with a deeply personal element, that not only speaks to a certain era in time, but provides undeniable evidence that the forces that divide us today are not new, nor are they unique to those long standing trouble spots like the Balkans or the Middle East; they were already taking root  decades ago, even in a place that still imagines itself peaceful, welcoming. Like Canada. It is good to have this valuable work finally available in English.

Dying in Toronto by Daša Drndić is translated from the Croatian by Celia Hawkesworth and published by Istros Books.

In it for the money : My Prizes—An Accounting by Thomas Bernhard

In recent weeks, talk, at least in the literary circles I circle, has turned to literary prizes and prize winners, more explicitly to the question of the use of AI to at worst generate complete stories or at best, toss ideas around in the creation of said stories. So, wanting a fresh, pre-artificial intelligence take on the matter of awards honouring writers and artists, I naturally thought of Thomas Bernhard and his short volume My Prizes: An Accounting. An acerbic take on the whole enterprise of prize giving seemed in order. And Bernhard delivers in spades.

With the characteristic venom of any one of his characters, less the intensity of his typical rant-filled nested narratives, Bernhard makes it clear what he thinks of literary prizes in general and more specifically a number that he has been awarded over the years. In each instance, were not for the cash that accompanies the honours, its likely he would decline the prizes. But like most writers, debts pile up and there is always a need for money!

In each chapter, Berhard recalls the circumstances surrounding one of the many prizes he received during the 1960s and 70s. In the first, on the occasion of the awarding of the Grillparzer Prize of the Academy of Sciences in Vienna, he is faced with the need to acquire something more formal to wear to the ceremony than the grey wool trousers and bright red pullover combination he was inclined to wear absolutely everywhere and, naturally, he leaves the task of purchasing a suit to 9:45am, a mere one hour and fifteen minutes before the event is due to start. In his haste he chooses an outfit that, following lunch with friends and family following the ceremony, he realizes is uncomfortably tight. So he exchanges it for a larger size, a circumstance he can’t help but recognize as absurd.

Winning the Austrian State Prize for Literature in 1967 affords him plenty of opportunity to rail against Austria, an obsessive pastime of many of his fictional protagonists, when it turns out that he is to be awarded the so-called Small State Prize, typically given to young writers in their twenties, rather than the so-called Large State Prize acknowledging a so-called life’s work. (That classic Bernhard qualifier “so-called” is applied generously through this short collection.) Already in his late thirties, the fact that he is merely getting the award normally reserved for youth embarrasses and annoys him and he takes great pains to correct his impressed friends who think “Austrian State Prize” sounds very impressive indeed.

And so what is the Small State Prize? they asked and I replied that the Small State Prize is a so-called Nurturing of Talent and so many people have already won it you can no longer count them, and now I’m one of them, I said, for I’ve been given the Small State Prize as a punishment. Punishment for what? they asked and I couldn’t give them an answer. The Small State Prize, I said is a dirty trick if you’re over thirty and as I’m almost forty it’s a huge dirty trick. But I said I’d sworn to come to terms with this huge dirty trick and I had no thought of declining this huge dirty trick. I’m not willing to give up twenty-five thousand schillings, I said, I’m greedy for money, I have no character, I’m a bastard too. People didn’t give up, they drilled down. They knew exactly where to drill to drive me crazy.

He spends much time defending his feeling of dishonour with the award and his country, and then goes on to channel it all into what turns out to be a rather disastrous acceptance speech. Great fun.

We are also treated to Bernhard’s hilarious accounts of a few of the impulsive purchases he makes with his prize money over the years. He buys a red Triumph Herald in one case, failing to even consider whether the vehicle is a sound investment. In another instance he describes his hasty commitment to a decrepit house—the walls of his own he has longed for. His poor aunt who accompanies him on the viewing tries to talk him out of a rash decision. He signs the paperwork anyhow but then has to wonder whether he has the fortitude to see the house transformed into a liveable domicile.

The perfect antidote to the seemingly endless arts and entertainment award season, this  little volume offers a personal reflection that is at once cynical, funny, and when you least expect it, sentimental. Sometimes Bernhard is almost pleased, even honoured with the acknowledgements he receives. But he rarely lets that colour the speeches he is forced to give in response, many of which are gathered at the end of the book. He tends to the short, if not so sweet, when he gets on stage—after all, a brisk award ceremony is always a welcome one.

My Prizes: An Accounting by Thomas Bernhard is translated from the German by Carol Brown Janeway and published by Knopf, as a stand-alone text and together with his memoirs Gathering Evidence.

Of poets and prophets: Ah!merica by Allen Ginsberg

The latest offering from isolarii, the unique publishing venture that produces small—think palm-sized—“island books” that feature the work of novelists, scientists, artists, theorists, and philosophers and others. But don’t let the small scale fool you, these micro-masterpieces can pack a punch. The latest, their sixteenth title, is Ah!merica by Beat poet Allen Ginsberg, a meditation on the visionary genius of William Blake, his influence on several contemporary American poets, and his enduring relevance for our times.

The text of Ah!merica is adapted from the legendary, discursive lectures Ginsberg delivered about or inspired by Blake’s life and work at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at the Naropa Institute, between the time he co-founded it in 1974 until his death in 1997. On the Allen Ginsberg Project website, editor Sebastian Clark explained their approach to working with such an extensive collection of original material:

We began with a detailed line edit of the collected lectures to ensure coherence, focusing on making Ginsberg’s speech accessible without losing its distinction, spontaneity, or sincerity. Once the text was refined at the sentence level, we shifted to collating the lectures and arranging them thematically. The organizing principle became Ginsberg’s sustained engagement with Blake, particularly the concept of “double vision”- the ability to see, simultaneously, the material world and its deeper, spiritual, dimensions.

Organized into sections or chapters, each headed by a number in Ginsberg’s own handwriting, the resulting 170 page volume is illuminated with an ample selection of Blake’s prints and completed with one of four dust jackets. It’s a delightful work to hold and behold.

He begins by describing the youthful epiphany he experienced at the age of  twenty while reading Blake one night (while masturbating of course). This visionary experience, embodied in the New York facades he could see outside his window, completely transformed his attitude towards poetry. In Blake’s prophetic books in particular, Ginsberg recognized a voice that still spoke to the challenges he was observing 150 years down the line: “He was struggling with the same emotions we all face but specifically about the destruction of idealism and radicalism of his time.”

For Ginsberg, Blake is a poet who was ever attentive to the ordinary surface reality of the world, to the details that many tend to overlook, while remaining  aware of the profound spiritual currents coursing beneath it. He brings his more contemporary American poetic heroes—William Carlos Williams, Walt Whitman, and Charles Reznikoff—into his lectures to examine the way the ability to truly to see is reflected in their work. He also recognizes within Blake’s poetry, parallels to his own life-long exploration of Buddhist thought and tradition. Further, Ginsberg delights in the playfulness that can be seen in Blake’s singular style and his artwork:

We get a lot of intelligence and humor out of Blake’s illustrations of his ideas, just a much as we get from his prophetic books. We can decipher his mind, visually. How much delicacy he put into each illustration! Just as in the prosody, his punctuation, and eccentric capitalization, there’s tremendous wit in the paintings.

Because this text is adapted from lectures, there is a passion that comes through clearly in what is essentially an extended exploration of what we can learn from Blake about reading and writing poetry. From appreciating the inherent musicality of the form to the necessity to compose without fear. Ginsberg encourages young poets to be willing to break with or ignore the “rules” of composition and be open to the messiness within. “The problem is staying with what you were really thinking, rather than what you believe you’re supposed to be thinking”—that is, resist the temptation to ignore the very unappetizing images that arise in the writing process, for that is where the most interesting and authentic aspects of yourself tend to lie. This leads, ultimately, to a final discussion of the difference between “good” and “great” poetry. It’s no secret what Blake has left us.

Ah!merica by Allen Ginsberg is published by isolarii, a series by Common Era Inc.

A fragmented inventory of being: Fourteen Ways of Looking by Erin Vincent

At fourteen I decided I would be as hard as a stone and burn as bright as the sun.

At fourteen. Australian writer Erin Vincent remembers being fourteen with a sucker punch to the gut intensity that has haunted her since that day in 1983 when her parents were hit by a truck. Her mother was killed instantly, her father, badly injured, died one month and one day later. As an age that falls into that uncertain space between childhood and adulthood, fourteen can be difficult, awkward, and confusing for anyone, but for Vincent, the age, her memories associated with it, and, ultimately, the number itself became something larger. An obsession. Fourteen Ways of Looking, her dazzling, fragmented inventory of being, is an attempt to finally exorcise the power that that number, and all it contains, has held over her for decades.

This book is not, in any explicit sense, a memoir. Her earlier work, Grief Girl: My True Story, published in 2007, was an attempt to address the reality of her personal loss for young readers, sharing her story through her own fourteen year-old voice. In Fourteen Ways, that same voice is present, but it emerges in fragmented memories of a life shattered by tragedy. She recalls the strangeness of the experience of the death of her parents and the impact it had on her relationships with her siblings, extended family, teachers, and her adolescent sense of self. But here these pieces exist in relation to her adult reflections and observations, and against a tapestry woven of facts and occurrences that each involve, in some way, the number fourteen.

This all started innocently enough. One day I noticed the word fourteen in a novel I was reading. The next day it happened again, in a newspaper article, then a TV show, a film, then another book. Fourteen. 14. I did not go looking for it. It came to me. Now I can’t look away.

But it’s one thing to notice a number and even to start to gather references to it, quite another to see in this harvesting the possibility of a book. Drawing inspiration from her reading of fragmentary literature together with an introduction to the constraint-driven writings of the Oulipo movement, things began to slowly take shape. In an interview with Cristina Politano for Minor Literature[s], Vincent describes her thinking:

And so, I ended up with these notebooks filled with fourteen facts, and instances of fourteen throughout history. I then started writing memoir fragments about the year my parents died and after a while, I thought, “I should start putting these together. I think there’s something here.” So, I set myself a constraint—every fragment had to have the number fourteen in it. Now, how could I do that without driving the reader crazy? It became like a game. Eventually, I loosened up a bit and decided that the meta-reflections that run through the book did not have to contain the number fourteen, but every other fragment does.

The result is a moving and fascinating kaleidoscope of memory, emotions, information, and quotations. Unobtrusive section breaks separate fragments that are somehow connected thematically. Or to let a single fact or reflection stand alone. This allows for a natural internal coherence to develop in unexpected, often exhilarating ways as an “at fourteen” memory or a “14-related historical or biographical detail triggers a series of associated fragments:

Canto XIV in Dante’s Inferno focuses on those who have sinned against God. Their punishment is to have flakes of fire slowly rained down on them.

At fourteen I still believed in God. I knew He existed because He had punished me. He had heard that voice and decided to make me pay. Later I would drop the capital H.

When she was fourteen Leonora Carrington lifted up her dress and flashed a priest saying, ‘Well, what do you think of that?!’

Fourteen or 14 appears in a wide range of contexts throughout this book—as dates, page numbers, chapters or titles of films or literary works, but it is also linked in some direct or indirect way to a significant number of well-known figures who either lost their own parent or parents young, or experienced a notable life change at age fourteen. And although it would be easy to fall into artificial or seemingly contrived arrangements of facts and reflections, Vincent balances the flow beautifully. As well, the fragmented approach allows her to suspend her memories associated with being fourteen and all the years that have passed since, in the sort of unfinished and uncertain dimension that recollections tend to occupy over time. To let her “truths” hang in the air in a manner that feels entirely unforced and authentic—our own truths belong to us, after all, but their tones and colours change as we change. Add in the occasional meta observations about the project itself and the emotional energy it is exacting, and Fourteen Ways of Looking becomes a living, breathing meditation on loss, grief and rebuilding a life.

Fourteen Ways of Looking by Erin Vincent is published by CB Editions in the UK, Deep Vellum in the US, Strange Light in Canada, and Upswell in Australia.

You are neither silence nor language: The Answer to Lord Chandos by Pascal Quinard

Austrian poet, writer and librettist, Hugo von Hofmannsthal signalled a break with his earlier works when, in 1902, he published the story “A Letter,” also known as “The Lord Chandos Letter.” It is presented as a letter to Francis Bacon, dated August 1604, from his (fictional) friend Philip, Lord Chandos, in which the latter defends his abandonment of the poetic life, and society in general, as a result of his nearly complete loss of the ability to express himself in words.  The sentiment expressed in this communication echoes an abrupt change in Hofmannsthal’s own approach to language and the limits of the word so closely that it has been thought to have had at least some autobiographical grounding. But, it is, in fact reflective of the contemporary emergence of new ideas about thought and expression, especially in Vienna, and the impact that would have on philosophy, science and the arts. Although the exact context has been debated, clearly Hofmannsthal was seeking to express some aspects of his own shifting literary  perspective through the existential crisis of faith in language expressed by his character in his fictional letter.

More than a century later, French author Pascal Quinard is not content to leave this influential “letter” as a one-sided communication. So he has picked up the pen of Lord Bacon to respond to Chandos (and presumably his creator) with The Answer to Lord Chandos. In his introduction, Jean-Luc Nancy suggests Quinard may have a wider perspective in mind:

Literature began to distrust itself at the dawn of the twentieth century, beginning with Nietzsche and Mauthner (much read by Hofmannsthal). At the beginning of the twenty-first century, we doubt instead if literature still takes place. Hofmannsthal’s recoil before words responds to the wear and tear of a certain grandiloquence  and literary profusion of the nineteenth century. The vibrant defense of those same words, in Quinard, responds to a banalization and informanization of language ushered in by the twentieth century.

The result is a moving defense of the vital importance of language and poetry that arises from decades of Quinard’s personal contemplation of the original story.

He opens this essay with an imaginative consideration of two artists who preferred to pull themselves away from the world, more comfortable with limited contact with others, but who continued to have faith in their art. He writes about how Emily Bronte’s time in Brussels in 1842, and the necessary social engagement required of her there, only deepened her need for solitude. Her beloved moorlands, which she wandered with her dog and pet bird of prey, served as her inspirational wellspring. Society was not essential for Bronte or for German-born English composer, George Handel. In 1710, Handel travelled to London where he would remain for the rest of his life, becoming in 1718, the director of music to the current duke of Chandos (hmm…) before becoming involved in opera and theatre. But as Quinard describes him, he preferred to live and compose in relative isolation:

Inside Handel’s small living room—according to the inventory made after his death—there was a large secretary made of walnut, a water bowl, a full-length mirror ringed with brass, and two striking wooden heads on which his wigs were placed. Two big heads without eyes or mouth, so that the wigs, reeking with sweat and smoke, could dry out when the evenings were over. So that the smell of society and its solicitations, its judgments, its resentments, its heartbreaks, were not brought any further into the house.

Ultimately, Quinard’s thoughts turn to “A Letter” and its author. Acknowledging that Hofmanthal had suffered a nervous breakdown right as the century turned, fueled by personal matters, Quinard, himself falling under the darkness of depression in 1978, fashioned a response to his fictional young letter writer.

Lord Chandos’ letter to Lord Bacon begins with an apology for taking two years responding to his friend’s last missive inquiring about his well-being. He then goes on to express his conviction that the inspired poet he once was is no more, and explain how he has lost his faith in language and the ability to express himself in any meaningful way. At the age of twenty-six he has abandoned a promising literary career and intends to retreat further from the society in which he was previously engaged. Quinard’s Lord Bacon  opens his own answer to Lord Chandos with a similar apology for taking yet another two years to reply. But his explanation is initially simple—he strongly disagrees with his friend’s argument and has needed time to formulate an answer.

The response is relatively long and passionate, likely longer than the story that inspired it. But it serves as a moving defense of the power of poetry. Bacon’s argument carries an intensity that is sensual, pointed, and persistent. He is intent on chastising and encouraging his friend to pull him out of the abyss into which he has let himself fall and advise him to hold fast to his pen no matter what:

Remember that words only abandon those who have hollowed them out and somewhat devitalized them. And if words resist those who are in the middle of speaking: never do they resist those who write. Those who write have nothing but time for them, nothing but time to go back over their sentence, nothing but time to crack open their lexicons, their chronologies, their dictionaries, nothing but time to seek the help of their old, quite incomplete grammar manual which dates to the end of childhood, nothing but time to revisit, to revive, to re-etymologize, to revise to correct, to surprise. Do not resort to stupor.

Reading the original story before reading this treatise will enhance the experience of Quinard’s response, but it is not essential. This slight volume is a celebration of the expressive force and intrinsic value of literature that will speak to anyone who loves language.

The Answer to Lord Chandos by Pascal Quinard is translated from the French by Stéphanie Boulard and Timothy Lavenz, with an Introduction by Jean-Luc Nancy and published by Wakefield Press.

People look so human: Becoming Animal by Teresa Präauer

Just exactly where can we draw the line between human and animal, man and beast, and exactly how fuzzy (or furry?) is that line? How has our understanding of movement across that line changed over time? And what about those beings, those creatures that have been understood, or imagined to stand somewhere in between? These are the kinds of questions that Austrian writer and visual artist, Teresa Präauer, entertains in her charming, yet focused philosophical and cultural essay, Becoming Animal. The terrain she explores is one populated by a host of liminal creatures—hybrids, monsters, and chimeras— the sort of beings that have continued to inspire both our scientific and artistic imaginations from Antiquity through to the present.

Präauer begins with the harpy, one of the most distinctive figures to appear time and again in early efforts to catalogue all known living beings—factual, mythological, and “exotic” alike—that occupied artists and thinkers from the Medieval era on into the Age of Discovery.

In the Historia naturalis animalism, a seventeenth-century treatise on natural history by John Johnston, there is a bird-like creature with a human head. This ‘Harpyie’ or ‘Harpyia’ has a sceptical, not unfriendly face and long, flowing locks that are gently tucked behind one ear and extend halfway down her body—a bird’s body, of course—the plumage growing thicker and darker towards the back. Compact like a small chicken, the harpy sits atop a pair of enormous talons that could just as easily support a bird of prey.

It’s not her first appearance in natural histories, she has been depicted and evolving for a century. From our scientifically “sophisticated” vantage point today though, such a creature and many of her companions depicted in such volumes seem fanciful, but were they any more so than the angels and demons that also figured in many hierarchical systems? And early Modern scholars often had to work from accounts and drawings made by those with direct experience of the animals in question, as well as reports from travellers often carried second or third hand over time or distance, as they strived to catalogue and categorize all forms of life—mineral, vegetable, animal, and magical. Many of these life forms sat on the edge of classifiably, “pretty monsters” like the harpy and, as time went on and naturalists became more rigorous in their efforts, the fanciful creatures began to be weeded out, but others, like humans with hirsutism, found themselves defined as distinct from their hairless brethren, but like all humans, still very different from other primates. Yet, now, with the ability to study DNA, we know we share 99% of our genes with chimps and bonobos and suddenly the need to once again draw a clear boundary between ourselves and animals has become more important—and more difficult to maintain.

A relatively brief work, only 96 pages long, Becoming Animal is not a chronological survey of the development of taxonomical conventions—although Linnaeus makes more than one appearance—but rather a varied account that moves back and forth, from Michelangelo to contemporary literary theorists, from prehistoric cave paintings to “furries.” It is an engaging flow of ideas that pulls in scientific elements along with literary sources such as Ovid, Kafka, Nabokov, and Inger Christensen to explore the many facets of our connection with and within the natural world. It is the kind of entertaining exercise that can’t quite be pinned down, but Präauer’s primary interest ultimately lies in the space between human and animal, a space that can be approached from either direction. It is a space of movement. She notes that French theorists Deleuze and Guattari, when speaking of “becoming-animal,” perceived it as one of many forms of being, as a “demand for a mode of writing that moves within transitions and liminalities,” however:

Becoming is a verb, a doing that does not mean being. I write ‘becoming animal’ as two separate words, not joined by a hyphen. Animal is noun, and becoming is a verb. When I am becoming animal, I am not an animal. I am in transition. An animal that is becoming human is also in such a transition, albeit in a different way.

This thoughtful essay ends, as it opened, with the author observing the myriad forms of life visible from her window, leaving her reader with much to contemplate about this world in which we are just one element of a much larger whole.

Becoming Animal by Teresa Präauer is translated from the German by Kári Driscoll and published by Seagull Books.

No, it’s not complicated at all: Recognizing the Stranger by Isabella Hammad and One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This by Omar Al Akkad

Nine days before October 7, 2023, British-Palestinian writer Isabella Hammad delivered the Edward W. Said Memorial Lecture at Columbia University. Eighteen days after October 7, on October 25, 2023, Egyptian-born Canadian-American novelist and journalist Omar Al Akkad sent a tweet out on Twitter (X) that read: “One day, when it’s safe, when there’s no personal downside to calling a thing what it is, when it’s too late to hold anyone accountable, everyone will have always been against this.” Hammad’s lecture along with an Afterword penned in the early weeks of 2024 and Al Akkad’s “heartsick breakup letter with the West,” inspired, not by his social media post per se, but by his growing frustration and anger at the daily barrage of images of a people under siege, are two recent releases that present powerful, critical responses to the ongoing violence in Gaza and the West Bank. To genocide. Both address the failure of the West to respond to the humanity of the Palestinian people and the all too common tendency to look away, to plug one’s ears, or worse, to celebrate the destruction we’ve seen live streamed to the world.

Hammad’s Recognizing the Stranger: On Palestine and Narrative is a smaller, more focused work, given the context of its origin. Her primary interest is in the telling of stories. She speaks of literary devices, especially the moment of recognition, in the character and/or the reader, in which a certain understanding arises. Drawing on literary sources, she explores this technique, then suggests that the same kind of recognition can shake firmly held beliefs about real life political realities too. Humanize the perceived enemy. Ideally, Palestinians writing about their history and circumstances should spark a chord in their audience, but, although they have been telling their stories through poetry, fiction and nonfiction for decades now, too many still refuse to acknowledge the conditions of the occupation or their right to their land and culture.

We are at a moment when elementary democratic values the world over have eroded and in some places almost completely disappeared. I feel it as a kind of fracturing of intention. The big emancipatory dreams of progressive and anti-colonial movements of the previous century seem to be in pieces, and some are trying to make something with these pieces, taking language from here and from there to keep our movements going.

There is a measure of optimism in Hammad’s lecture, a sense that “(o)pen declarations of racism and fascism by the Israeli government, while no means new, are becoming audible to Western ears.” Of course, as we read this, we know her hope that the plight of the Palestinians is reaching a wider receptive audience is about to be dramatically undone. She addresses the terrifying fallout in Gaza in her Afterword. This small volume, then, bridges the time before and after the Hamas attack, reminding those who need it, that the circumstances the Palestinians have suffered are long standing and long ignored. History did not begin on October 7.

Recognizing the Stranger is very much of the moment, especially in the sense that it records a lecture given at a pivotal time, but it is framed within the framework of literary critique with a political and historical background. Omar Al Akkad’s work is likewise immediate and direct, urged on by the atrocities that he sees every morning when he turns on his computer. But he is addressing not only the genocide in Gaza as it is happening, but viewing it within a broader personal, professional and global framework. He is writing as an Arab man, born in Egypt and raised in Qatar; as an immigrant, first to Canada and then to the US; as a journalist with a decade’s worth of reporting on acts of terrorism, war, and unlawful confinement; and, perhaps most powerfully, as the father of young children. He repeatedly returns to the endless stream of images of children torn to pieces which weighs on him as a heavy anchor of pain and disbelief.

But this is not an account of that carnage, though it must in its own way address it, if only to uphold the most pathetic, necessary function of this work: witness. This is an account of something else, something that, for an entire generation of not just Arabs or Muslims or Brown people but rather all manner of human beings from all parts of the world, fundamentally changed during this season of completely preventable horror. This is an account of a fracture, a breaking away from the notion that the polite, Western liberal ever stood for anything at all.

The tone which rings clear in this quote from early in Al Akkad’s text, carries through to the end. He is blunt, he is angry, but he is not surprised. As he talks about his childhood in Qatar under a regime that censored and controlled everything coming in from the West and his family’s move to Canada when he was sixteen, there is the promise and the disillusion, perhaps in equal measure, that accompanies such a journey. As he brings in the sobering experience of reporting from front lines, prisons and other points of confrontation, he calls attention to the dehumanization of those that West see as disposable, even when, as in the case of Afghan soldiers, for example, they are supposed to be fighting beside the American forces. Of course, governments and news media never address any of this directly, rather they employ passive language and unmake meanings and outright restrict the use of certain words and phrases in the determination of who are the real victims, who are the aggressors (the “terrorists”), and who are acceptable collateral damage. In such a linguistic landscape, calling a thing what it really is becomes something that is not only undesirable or inconvenient, but as we have seen very clearly over the last eighteen months, it can cost individuals opportunities, jobs, degrees, and even their right to live or study in a country where they have legal status.

Al Akkad is well aware of the consequences of speaking out. He knows that his own career is at risk if not already irrevocably damaged. But he is unable to remain silent and his book is, as he says above, primarily directed at the myth of Western liberal values. He claims that in a world invested in the unmaking of meaning, the writer cannot be expected to turn away from the political, to only focus on the sublime. That is a luxury he cannot afford and, although he acknowledges that for some the cost of speaking out may be too great, there are many established writers and artists and intellectuals who have remained silent. Or have claimed that it is all too complicated.

One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This is an intensely personal essay, an exceptionally well-written plea for human compassion in a polarized and uncertain world. Al Akkad, although he is now an American citizen living and raising a family in Oregon, has a unique perspective to bring to this assessment of the current political dynamics, their development in a post-9/11 world, and what we, if anything, as individuals can do. It’s an empowering  if sadly realistic work that will speak loudly to those of us who have likewise been devastated by the brutal destruction of Gaza and the death and injury of so many children and their families. We need to hear articulate and passionate voices like his to know we are not alone, and trust that others who may have relied solely on Western mainstream media, if that, may also be inclined to listen.

At this moment in time, Hammad’s and Al Akkad’s books both stand in an unusual, disconcerting light. They address something that is still happening, that is not yet safely in that distant rear-view mirror if, in fact, it ever will be. And since they have been published, the tectonic plates that underlie the Western world have shifted in new and frightening ways that have not only exacerbated the ongoing  violence in the Middle East, but are rapidly revealing new fracture lines within former global alliances. New military concerns are emerging and censorship is more even more insidious, especially in the US. How it will play out is far from clear, but we cannot afford to let the new threats to peace and trade overshadow continuing genocide in Palestine, or, for that matter, in other ongoing conflicts in Ukraine and in the Global South. More than anything, we cannot afford to be silent.

Recognizing the Stranger: On Palestine and Narrative by Isabella Hammad is published by Alfred A. Knopf in Canada, Grove/Black Cat in the US and Fern Press in the UK. One Day Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This by Omar Al Akkad is published by McClelland & Stewart in Canada and Alfred A. Knopf.

An inexhaustible landscape of words: The Condition of Secrecy by Inger Christensen

Writing poems is just as much a mysterious miracle. Not that there’s anything mystical or ceremonial about it. Or anything religious. It’s a neutral miracle, so to speak, granted in advance, because in the process of writing we need to use language in its whole, indissoluble connection with reality. It’s that connection with reality that’s a mysterious miracle. And that’s what poetry has to enter into.

It is clear from the essays collected in The Condition of Secrecy, that Danish poet, novelist, and essayist Inger Christensen (1935–2009) was not only in love with words, but that she understood language—and the way we seek to give meaning to the world—as part of the dynamic process of nature. For those who are already familiar with the experimental writer’s poetry and fiction, this collection offers insight into her view of the world, which was heavily influenced by a lifelong interest in science, mathematics, and linguistic theory, and the questions she was inclined to ask about her own engagement with language. For those who are new to her work, myself included, her philosophical musings and poetic investigations are no less interesting, and may well serve as an invitation to explore her work further—and fortunately there is a good selection currently available in English translation with more forthcoming this year.

What is most immediate in this compilation of essays, originally published across four decades, from the 1960s through the 1990s, and arranged intentionally rather than chronologically, is the sheer force of Christensen’s intellectual curiosity. At its most basic, it is a book about writing and meaning, but a book by an original inventive poet trained in German, mathematics, and medicine, who read six modern and two ancient languages. And, as a child of the Second World War, social and political concerns are never far from her mind. The Cold War and the fear of nuclear annihilation casts a clear shadow on a number of pieces. So, although this volume only numbers 138 pages, Christensen encourages her reader’s close engagement with ideas as she herself works her way through her own questions about the world and the way we find meaning in it through language.

Words are, of course, essential and she has a wonderful way of employing them. Her opening sentences are often quite special. “Interplay,” an essay about coming to understand time and one’s place in history as a child in Denmark at the end of World War II, begins:

When I was nine years old, the world, too, was nine years old. At least, there was no difference between us, no opposition, no distance. We just tumbled around from sunrise to sunset, body and earth as alike as two pennies.

Another piece, one of several more explicitly about words, meaning, and form, especially in the art of poetry, “Silk, the Universe, Language, the Heart,” opens:

Silk is a noun. All nouns are very lonely. They’re like crystals, each enclosing its own little piece of our knowledge about the world.

This playful essay, in conversation with the Ars Poetica or Wen Fu of Chinese poet Lu Chi (261–303 AD), examines the personalities of nouns, adjectives, adverbs, and verbs, along with the ever important prepositions that hold them in relation to one another.

Another essay that explores the interconnectedness of words, meaning, and writing poems, “It’s All Words,” moves from an analysis of what it means to say: “The word creates what it names” with all its Biblical overtones, through an existential (and anthropological) notion of naming the world into existence, to try to answer the question of why poetry is not a common practice when it requires no special tools beyond a paper and pen.

As it is right now, when the world has existed for so long, words come from everywhere, and they’re never there for the first time. Not only that. Although there may not be an infinite number of them, nor an infinite number of combinations, nevertheless there is an inexhaustible landscape of words, there are more than any one individual could manage to travel through. This is where it ends and where it begins, if a person is going to write poems: in the imagined concept of this mysterious landscape. For poems are created exclusively from words.

What makes this piece especially intriguing is that it leads into a discussion of the creation of one Christensen’s most inventive book-length poems, Alphabet. She began collecting words and then, in her gathering, she happened to come across Fibonacci numbers, a formula of increasing numbers that describe a pattern present in the growth principles of many plants. By employing this structure, she had a framework upon which her poem could eventually grow and bloom.

Most of the essays in this volume are short, some are only a few pages long, but midway through, the longest piece, coming in just shy of 30 pages, marks a turn of focus to more philosophical and political themes—not without abandoning talk of writing poetry and fiction, mind you. “The Regulating Effect of Chance” is an extended discussion of the role that chance plays in the world—fundamental, as she sees it, in accord with Jacques Monod’s Chance & Necessity—and in our experience of the world, our tendency to assign a notion of fate or destiny, and our understanding of art, creativity, imagination and much more. The later essays turn their attention to subjects such as the nature of truth, the depiction of night and, in a futuristic and somewhat fatalistic effort, “Snow,” the idea of the inevitability of nuclear winter.

This collection is one that I have owned for a number of years, without any previous experience of Christensen’s poetry or prose. Several times I pulled it from the shelf, but it did not seem that the time was right. Now I am especially keen to read her poetry. There are four volumes available in English, all translated, like The Condition of Secrecy, by Susanna Nied who enjoyed a close collaborative relationship with Christensen when working on her poetry. So, all things in good time; the words will be waiting.

The Condition of Secrecy: Selected Essays by Inger Christensen is translated from the Danish by Susanna Nied and published by New Directions.

“I do not live in a place. I live in a time.” I Saw Ramallah by Mourid Barghouti

When his name is finally called after waiting for hours, he grabs his small bag and steps on to the Allenby Bridge to cross, for “the first time in thirty summers,” from Jordan to the West Bank:

Is this a political moment? Or an emotional one? Or social? A practical moment? A surreal one? A moment of the body? Or of the mind? The wood creaks. What has passed of life is shrouded in a mist that both hides and reveals. Why do I wish I could get rid of this bag? There is very little water under the bridge. Water without water. As though the water apologized for its presence on this boundary between two histories, two faiths, two tragedies. The scene is of rock. Chalk. Military. Desert. Painful as a toothache.

Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti’s thoughts are flooded with questions as crosses into the land he has been barred from entering for three decades. The year is 1996. His account of his visit, one that necessarily looks back on his many years of exile and the changes to his homeland that confront him on his return, is vividly captured in his memoir I Saw Ramallah. First published in Arabic in 1997 (and three years later in Ahdaf Soueif’s English translation), this is a work that speaks passionately and unapologetically to the reality of existence of the Palestinian people today, of their displacement and their lives under the Occupation.

Barghouti does not enter the West Bank alone. He carries the weight of the memory of the long years of exile, of family and friends scattered near and far. And he’s haunted by the ghosts of all of those who are buried in distant lands, those who never managed to return, either as a visitor or as a resident, especially his older brother Mounif:

After how many more thirty years will the ones who never came back return? What does my return, or the return of any other individual mean? It is their return, the return of the millions, that is the true return. Our dead are still in the cemeteries of others. Our living are still clinging to foreign borders. On the bridge, that strange border unmatched on any of the world’s five continents, you are overwhelmed by your memories of standing at the borders of others.

As he takes in the altered landscape, the ever expanding Israeli settlements, and the once familiar hills, now alien, the connection and disconnection is profound. He stays with a family member, explores the city, and visits his birthplace, Deir Ghassanah, where he reads poetry to an assemblage of villagers unfamiliar with poetry readings but responding to his words and images nonetheless.

But, of course, thirty years does not vanish just in the act of returning. As much as Palestine and her people have changed and are continuing to be changed under the forces of Occupation, Barghouti’s life has been impacted by his identity no matter where he has lived. Nor is it his first return from exile, so to speak.  In the 1970s, his involvement in earlier student protests against Sadat in Cairo led to his forced separation from his wife and infant son when all non-Egyptian participants were deemed to be infiltrators and removed from the country. The prohibition lasted seventeen years, his family-time suddenly telescoped into winter and summer holiday breaks wherever he was living at the time. By the time he was able to return to live in Egypt, his child was long out of diapers and ready to start shaving! And when that exile within exile came to an end he realized:

You do not arrive unchanged at the moment of joy dreamt of for so long across the years. The years are on your shoulders. They do their slow work on you without ringing any bells for you.

Now, one of his primary goals during his time in Ramallah is to obtain the necessary permit to allow his son Tamim to finally see the land of his ancestors.

Moving, poetic, and beautifully written, this is, nonetheless, a narrative dotted with question marks. Barghouti regularly questions the descriptions, the emotions, and the meanings that he grasps at as he tries to articulate the strange in between state in which has found himself over and over throughout his life—in Occupied Palestine, Cairo, Budapest, Amman and elsewhere. So many places, so many pillows beneath his head:

My relationship with place is in truth a relationship with time. I move in patches of time, some I have lost and some I possess for a while and then I lose because I am without a place.  I try to regain a personal time that has passed. Nothing that is absent ever comes back complete. Nothing is recaptured as it was.

A memoir recounting the return to one’s homeland after thirty years, is necessarily a story of exile, of the Diaspora, and of the way the Occupation has closed in on the land and claimed the freedom of the Palestinian people. Focused as he is on the present moment, that of his precious time in Ramallah, Barghouti is also continually looking back—to the Nakba, to the 1967 War, to the Intifada. Yet to read this book in 2024, one cannot but look ahead through further wars to the escalating incursions into the Occupied West Bank, to the conflict in Gaza. To genocide. For a book first published twenty-seven years ago, it reads like it could have been written yesterday. Netanyahu was prime minister then, he is still prime minister now.

After the popular Intifada on the land of Palestine we went to Oslo. We are always adapting to the condition of the enemy. Since ’67 we have been adapting. And here is Benyamin Netanyahu, prime minister of Israel, calming America’s fears for the current agreement by saying that the Arabs will in the end adapt to his harshness because they always adapt to whatever they have to.

And what if they refuse to adapt? When speaking to the spirit and resilience of his people, Barghouti often calls attention to the Palestinian inclination to seek the comic in the tragic, but he is keenly aware that for the generation after his—those who grew up in the aftermath of the 1967 war—the tone has shifted, something he witnesses in the appeal of resistance movements: Fatah, Communism, the Front, and Hamas. This is the legacy of the Occupation itself.

I Saw Ramallah is not exactly a work infused with nostalgia. It is searching and existential in nature, a memoir tinged with sadness and a measure of grief. And as he nears the end of his account, he refuses to hold his anger at bay. He is blunt in his assessment of his people’s circumstances and the history that has been thrust upon them, as a man born four years before the Nakba who, now in his fifties, is determined to ensure his son’s right to a space in a land that now carries two conflicting and interconnected stories:

But I cannot accept any talk of two equal rights to the land, for I do not accept a divinity in the heights running political life on this earth. Despite all this, I was never particularly interested in the theoretical discussions around who has the right to Palestine, because we did not lose Palestine in a debate, we lost it to force. When we were Palestine, we were not afraid of the Jews. We did not hate them, we did not make an enemy of them. Europe of the Middle Ages hated them, but not us. Ferdinand and Isabella hated them, but not us. Hitler hated them, but not us. But when they took our entire space and exiled us from it they put both us and themselves outside the law of equality. They became an enemy, they became strong; we became displaced and weak. They took the space with the power of the sacred and with the sacredness of power, with the imagination, and with geography.

This is an important, affecting, and highly readable memoir for anyone who wishes to have a clearer understanding of the situation in the Middle East. But, if you have read other Palestinian literature, it may sound eerily familiar. These stories are not new; they have been expressed in literary works—poetry, fiction, nonfiction—for many decades now and, as we have seen, Palestinian voices continue to refuse to be silenced.

I Saw Ramallah by Mourid Barghouti  with a Foreword by Edward Said, is translated from the Arabic by Ahdaf Soueif  and published by Anchor Books. In the UK, a new edition is forthcoming from Daunt Books in August 2024.

At last, the final volume of Michel Leiris’ The Rules of the Game is available in English—a few (well, more than a few) words about it and a link to my review at Minor Literature[s]

As a reader, I do not tend to be a completest, collecting and diligently making my way through the complete works and associated letters and journals of a particular writer, but if I have made one exception, it is for French poet, novelist, essayist, ethnographer, and critic Michel Leiris. However, as English language Leiris enthusiasts will know, his most important work—the four-volume autobiographical essay to which he devoted thirty-five years of his writing life, The Rules of the Game—was not yet translated in full. That is, until now. This spring, Yale University Press released the final volume, Frail Riffs in Richard Sieburth’s translation.

Sieburth, who translated the book that served as my introduction to Leiris, his 1961 dream diary, Nights as Days, Days as Nights, takes over the Rules of the Game translation enterprise from Lydia Davis, who translated the first three parts of the project, plus Leiris’ novel Manhood. But, if there is any stylistic shift, it is not an issue because Frail Riffs itself marks a sharp shift in approach and style from the dense, labyrinthine prose that characterizes the first volume, Scratches, Scraps and Fibrils toward the fragmented, eclectic form of Leiris’ late work which will be familiar to readers of The Ribbon at Olympia’s Throat (which I wrote about at length for The Critical Flame).

Leiris was, throughout his long life which spanned most of the twentieth century, deeply engaged with the political, intellectual and artistic culture of Paris. Yet, his influential autobiographical endeavour was self-focused, scrupulous and often obsessive and critical. It’s not an accounting of his life, per se, but rather of episodes that strike him as important or interesting, against which he can analyze or dissect himself. A love of language and a concern about truthfulness and discretion in the autobiographical exercise are critical. He draws on, among many things, his childhood experiences, travel (as an ethnographer or as part of political or artistic delegations) and, in a particularly vulnerable section of the third volume of Rules, on his suicide attempt, the affair that triggered it and his difficult recovery.

Frail Riffs continues in this vein, but in a more open manner, with short essays and observations, typically grouped thematically, and interspersed with poems, lists, and passages of word play. One of the aspects of Leiris’ character that becomes more apparent in this book and again in Olympia, is his deep despair with the ongoing state of war and violence in the world. He is, as he ages, increasingly confirmed in his anti-colonial and anti-racist convictions. He knows he is too afraid of pain and death to be a true “revolutionary” but as students take to the streets of Paris in 1968, he watches from his well-placed apartment with admiration and offers what refuge he can (the irony of his own bourgeois contradictions never lost on him). I’ve thought about his observations a lot in recent weeks. He would, were he here now, still be in despair.

Anyhow, this long introduction stands as an invitation to follow up with my review of The Rules of the Game Volume 4: Frail Riffs, which has been published at Minor Literature[s]. Thank you to everyone for welcoming my work back to this great literary journal .

The Rules of the Game Volume 4: Frail Riffs is translated from the French by Richard Sieburth and published by Yale University Press.