Freeman's Power E-Book

John Freeman

• Herausgeber: Grove Press UK
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Beschreibung

From the voices of protesters to the encroachment of a new fascism, everywhere we look power is revealed. Spouse to spouse, soldier to citizen, looker to gazed upon, power is never static: it is either demonstrated or deployed. Its hoarding is itself a demonstration. This thought-provoking issue of the acclaimed literary annual Freeman's explores who gets to say what matters in a time of social upheaval. Many of the writers are women. Margaret Atwood posits it is time to update the gender of werewolf narratives. Aminatta Forna shatters the silences which supposedly ensured her safety as a woman of colour walking in public space. Power must often be seized. The narrator of Lan Samantha Chang's short story finally wrenches control of the family's finances from her husband only to make a fatal mistake. Meanwhile the hero of Tahmima Anam's story achieves freedom by selling bull semen. Australian novelist Josephine Rowe recalls a gallery attendee trying to take what was not offered when she worked as a life-drawing model. Violence often results from power imbalances - Booker Prize winner Ben Okri watches power stripped from the residents of Grenfell Tower by ferocious neglect. But not all power must wreak damage. Barry Lopez remembers fourteen glimpses of power, from the moment he hitched a ride on a cargo plan in Korea to the glare he received from a bear traveling with her cubs in the woods, asking - do you plan me harm? Featuring work from brand new writers Nicole Im, Jaime Cortez and Nimmi Gowrinathan, as well as from some of the world's best storytellers, including US poet laureate Tracy K. Smith, Franco-Moroccan writer Leïla Slimani, and Turkish novelist Elif Shafak, Freeman's: Power escapes from the headlines of today and burrows into the heart of the issue.

Leseprobe

Previous Issues

Freeman’s: Arrival

Freeman’s: Family

Freeman’s: Home

Freeman’s: The Future of New Writing

Freeman’s

Power

Est. 2015

Edited by

John Freeman

First published in the United States of America in 2018 by Grove/Atlantic Inc.

First published in Great Britain in 2018 by Grove Press UK, an imprint of Grove/Atlantic Inc.

Copyright © 2018 by John Freeman

Cover image & Nicolai Howalt Design © art direction © www.salu.io

Assistant Editor: Allison Malecha

Managing Editor: Julia Berner-Tobin

Copy Editor: Kirsten Giebutowski

All pieces not included in the list below are copyright © 2018 by the author of the piece. Permission to use any individual piece must be obtained from its author.

“Histories” is excerpted from Aleksandar Hemon’s memoir-in-progress, This Does Not Belong to You: My Histories. “Jamila” is excerpted from Leïla Slimani’s essay collection, Sexe et mensonges, originally published by Les Arènes in 2017 and to be published in English by Penguin Books in the United States and Faber & Faber in the UK. “The Nastybook Wars” is excerpted from Jaime Cortez’s memoir-in-progress. “Update on Werewolves” © Margaret Atwood was originally published on Wattpad in 2012 (as part of the collection Thriller Suite: New Poems). “Glass Cannon” is excerpted from Chris Russell and Patrick Hilsman’s forthcoming graphic essay collection Farewell, Homeland. “When It Comes to This Fleshed Neck” is excerpted from Deborah Landau’s Soft Targets, forthcoming from Copper Canyon Press in 2019.

The moral right of the authors contained herein to be identified as the authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of the book.

Every effort has been made to trace or contact all copyright-holders. The publishers will be pleased to make good any omissions or rectify any mistakes brought to their attention at the earliest opportunity.

First paperback edition published by Grove Press UK, October 2018

Trade paperback ISBN 978-1-61185-499-2

Ebook ISBN 978-1-61185-934-8

Published in collaboration with the MFA in Creative Writing at the New School.

A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library.

Grove Press, UK

Ormond House

26–27 Boswell Street

London WC1N 3JZ

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Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Introduction

John Freeman

Six Shorts

Elif Shafak

Leila Slimani

A Yi

Aleksandar Hemon

Eula Biss

Etgar Keret

The Nastybook Wars

Jaime Cortez

The Pack of Wolves and the Family of Dogs

Tracy K. Smith

Walking

Aminatta Forna

A Note on “Penelope” and “Rereading the Classics”

Julia Alvarez

Captive

Nimmi Gowrinathan

The Cottage

Lan Samantha Chang

On Sharks and Suicide

Nicole Im

Update on Werewolves

Margaret Atwood

Fourteen Aspects of Power

Barry Lopez

Glass Cannon

Patrick Hilsman and Chris Russell

O

Eka Kurniawan

Who Killed My Father?

Édouard Louis

Grenfell Tower, June 2017

Ben Okri

Mother’s Milk

Tahmima Anam

Ways of Being Seen

Josephine Rowe

Bangour Village Hospital (or) Edinburgh District Asylum

Jenni Fagan

Repeats

David Mitchell

When It Comes to This Fleshed Neck

Deborah Landau

Burn

Kanako Nishi

Contributor Notes

About the Editor

Back Cover

Introduction

JOHN FREEMAN

When I was a child, I had an obsession with speedometers. I rode around on my bike peering in one driver-side window after another, noting the top speed of all the neighbors’ cars. This was the late 1970s during the gasoline crisis, so a lot of dials topped out at 75 or 85 mph. Even the font used for these numbers seemed apologetic, and serious, like it was actually saying, You really shouldn’t be going this fast. Older and foreign cars provided more thrills. I still feel the shock of looking into a 1955 Chevy and seeing “120” on the gauge. I tooled home for dinner, that miraculous number turning in my head.

Back then my own top speed was around 14 mph, so these numbers were more than trivia. They were a kind of imagined agency. Every single thing I loved back then had some form of locomotive agency. It pierced the earth’s atmosphere or burned a stripe of rubber at the drag strip or unzippered a lake’s calm. I moved significantly only when an adult decided I should. I didn’t envy the drivers of fast and powerful things, I envied the vehicles themselves. My dream was to be a truck driver. How wonderful it would be, I thought, to have a strapping friend to explore the world in, sleep in at night, talk to as miles peeled by.

Eventually, I got my chance. In 1984, my family moved to California. A trucking van not much smaller than our house parked outside and men shoved all our worldly belongings into its mouth. We set off in our tiny brown station wagon across the country, and “Kool”—as the stenciled door of his big rig announced him—followed behind. The plan was to stop every 800 miles or so with a friend or family member, see the country. My father was forty-five years old that year, older than I am as I type this. I try to imagine what it would be like to start my life over with three children and nothing but the anchor of a new job that could go badly, and I marvel.

We arrived in Sacramento a day before Kool, who parked his truck beneath our enormous new palm tree. I climbed into his cab as my grandfather, uncle, and father talked. I was bewildered by the big rig’s gauges, amazed by the height of its ride, and confused by how the truck seemed to be floating, almost going backward. In fact, it was: I’d depressed an air brake, and four tons of moving van had begun rolling toward the men unloading it. Kool hopped up into the truck in a single bound, and shoved me aside. Look out man, he shouted, you’re going to kill someone. My uncle, who had always spoken to me as if I were an equal, took me aside afterward, knelt down, and said the same. This could have been a terrible day.

Those words haunted me upon our arrival in California. Partly because I knew, in some obscure fashion, that I was drawn into that truck by a feeling of powerlessness. I’d spent three weeks trapped in our family car, carted across the country, not much freer than the family dog, watching as people freer than me went about their adventures. I wanted power like theirs. I was tired of imagining it; the time had come for me to have some for myself. I didn’t think I was actually going to drive away in Kool’s rig, but I wanted to know what it’d feel like. Sort of like holding an unloaded gun.

In light of the possible consequences, this desire seemed suddenly to me like a form of greed. It made me ashamed, and it would later dawn on me that all around forked other forms of power. The power of my imagination, to envision the horror scene Kool had very barely averted; the power of my father’s forgiveness, which washed over me days later like the cool of a cloud stepping in front of the sun; the power of the sun itself, bolting down on us in Sacramento, even in the fall, erasing in all its yellow light the past just like that; and the power of love, which I felt from my grandmother whom we’d left behind. I could see her sitting at her writing desk, the lake we used to visit behind her. To feel her warmth from such a distance merely from her letters? That was a power. Everything that was, I discovered, was enacted by power. Having power meant nothing—it was valuable depending on how you deployed it.

It says something that in our current political context, an issue of Freeman’s themed to power may come trailed by an expectation that this will be an issue about the flagrant and breathtaking abuses of power ongoing right now across the globe. I thought of doing this. We are indeed living in a time of power grabbing, of economic sadism, which is to say violence. And there has been precious little leadership from people who possess the greatest power. At the time of this writing, the president of the United States is not unlike a little boy who has climbed up into a huge truck he’s always wanted to possess. And already he has run over people. He doesn’t even care.

One of the degradations of the recent period, though, is how abuses of power can reduce our definition of power itself. The abiding fantasy of so many, after all, myself included, is to expose corrupt leaders and this current president. To bring them lower than they’ve brought people they abused. This is a fantasy like jumping into the truck, though. There are so many other vectors of power slicing through life, from the power of generosity to the power of taking over one’s story, and it is this enlarged sense of what power is—not just the power to take, or to dominate—wherein lies our salvation.

In this sense, the issue of Freeman’s you hold in your hand is an attempt to look at how power operates in the world. And I hope it simultaneously recalibrates the balance of power through that observation. I see you, many of these pieces say; I see you seeing me, and here’s what you’re missing. In her ferocious essay, Aminatta Forna describes all the ways being a woman of color on the street requires constant vigilance regarding how power is being used to frame her. She speaks back. She looks back. She’s tired of having to assess when those actions are dangerous.

Violence lurks within the frame of every single one of these pieces. Growing up in Israel, Etgar Keret learns that the willingness to inflict harm is a great form of power—something the hero of Eka Kurniawan’s story grapples with, too. In her startling essay on suicide, Nicole Im turns to the behavior of sharks to meditate on how a willingness to stop pain by turning it on oneself does not necessarily mean freedom. In her poem, “Update on Werewolves,” Margaret Atwood sees a need to update the horror genre for a world in which women have more power than before, and that danger exists when any power runs amok.

Power that is projected does not always see itself as power—this is one of the many necessary adjustments Me Too has been making, pointing out such entitlements. For too long, at the receiving end of power, women have become doctorates of power negotiations, and several pieces here describe how this happens in the domestic setting. In Lan Samantha Chang’s short story, a Chinese immigrant’s resentment over her husband’s power to say no leads her to take a staggering financial gamble. Meantime, across the world in Bangladesh, Tahmima Anam imagines a woman resurrecting her family’s well-being by selling bull semen. In her short essay, Eula Biss contemplates the way burlesquing domination and subjugation does not always happen in performances: it can accidentally happen at home.

Telling stories about power can too easily be seen as a form of empowerment, a word many writers here distrust. In her essay on working as a life drawing model, Josephine Rowe describes how standing nude before a group of painters taught her the value of interior life, not of any kind of love of her body. Writing on the so-called Stockholm syndrome, Nimmi Gowrinathan notes how discomfiting anger can be. Édouard Louis’s father spent a life working in factories, and in telling that story Louis finds himself becoming an investigator of an economic homicide. He wants to find out who is to blame. In retrospect, watching Grenfell Tower burn, Ben Okri has a sense of why mass murder has happened there: “In this age of austerity/The poor die for others’ prosperity,” he writes.

It requires love to see the wreck we’ve made of the world and not wrap ourselves in despair. This means breaking down the conception of sight as knowledge, when it in fact is so often just another form of power. Leïla Slimani speaks to Moroccan women whose sexuality is shrouded in secrecy and finds that out of this burden of silence they form stronger bonds with each other for protection. After all, most of them live at the whims of men. In their reportage from Syria, Chris Russell and Patrick Hilsman talk to a young man who explains the way the Assad regime used the dispersal of truth on the Internet to crack down on resistance. No one knew what to believe. All of this has led many people closer and closer to their own families.

Modern technology, as seen through many of these pieces, does little to create a public space of equality—let alone redistribute power fairly. In a short riff about a peasant being filmed in China, A Yi notes the man’s confusion and fear as he suddenly has to decide how to perform himself for a group that isn’t even there. That’s the power of the media. A related form of doubling comes to haunt the narrator of David Mitchell’s story, who starts to notice that a man is following him across key moments of his life.

The ultimate maze is language itself, and several writers here turn their gaze on what it teaches them as they learn to use it. Aleksandar Hemon reveals how so much history lurks in the words Bosnians use, where they come from, and what they occlude. Growing up in the garlic fields of Central California, decades later, Jaime Cortez learns something similar when he and his siblings stumble on a collection of pornography. Riding across a post-9/11 New York of bomb threats and amber alerts, Deborah Landau unpeels the way language of terror velvets its participants in irrational, sexualized fear. The heroine of Kanako Nishi’s story feels how language slides so easily into control: watching a man burn items from his home behind her house, she asks him keenly, “Can you burn words?”

Of course you can’t, but you can shine a light on ways power has always emerged from places one assumes to be powerless. Julia Alvarez writes of how she grew up reading books without the heroines she wanted—and part of her life was created by that longing. Elif Shafak fondly remembers time with her grandmother, and muses on how she was raised by a woman with an old form of knowledge and power, while her mother attended a university and acquired for herself a more modern way of accessing power. In her beautiful poem Jenni Fagan creates an odyssey of sorts for people who never left home, revealing that to name a person—a friend—is a powerful act of self-preservation.

We are born into this world nameless and feral, and our lives can be seen as a long attempt to undo these conditions. In her prose poem, the US poet laureate Tracy K. Smith uncovers a loss in this domestication, an impeding subtraction that makes children at a certain age all the more feral. Once they have been civilized out of us these early instincts are hard to restore. Certain leaders in the political sphere often appeal, in essence, to the feeling that what we gave up mattered.

Traveling the world in the last five decades, Barry Lopez has made it his calling never to forget our animal nature. But rather than interpret it as brute force, time and again he remembers how—when stripped of our collective power, or a gun—humans are very small things. In his luminescent essay, “Fourteen Aspects of Power,” Lopez gently reminds us that power is juxtapositional, and there is a moral responsibility in that comparison. In his eyes, we must keep tilting the world to see it anew—that is in essence the best of what humans can be. Students of comparison. Not always jumping into the truck, but thinking about who is behind it.

Six Shorts

KNOWING

One of my earliest memories is of Grandma melting pieces of lead in a tiny pot and then pouring the ash-grey liquid into a bowl of salted water. A sizzling sound. A strong smell. I held my breath, waiting without knowing for what, overwhelmed by both excitement and fear.

Each time she did this the melted lead would assume a different shape. Grandma would study its form in silence, her face pure concentration.

“Grandma …”

“Hmmm?”

“What do you see in there?” I asked. “Tell me, what’s happening?”

“Shush. You’re scaring it.”

I was scaring what exactly? The water? The molten metal? Someone’s destiny? Or an invisible djinni hopping and dancing around us in the room? Grandma did not care to answer. Then, a bit later, seeing my puzzled face, she called me.

I sat on her lap, inhaling the scent of rose water, crushed cinnamon and toasted sesame that emanated from her clothes. Cautiously, I squinted into the bowl, just as I had seen her do a hundred times. I tried to get a good view of the mysteries bubbling and swirling in there. I saw nothing.

I had started school that same autumn, and although I already knew how to read, it soon became obvious that writing would be a massive challenge. There was a problem: I was left-handed. Our teacher had told me—in front of all the other children—that if I wanted to get a red velvet ribbon like everyone else, I’d better send my left hand into exile. I had never heard that word before, “exile.” Where was this place? How could I go there? And, more important, how was I to send a part of me into exile while keeping the remaining part here? Little did I know that it was possible to be torn, to be fragmented, to be divided like that, and to become an insider-outsider, to feel like a stranger in your own motherland.

At the time all of that was unknown to me. Sending my left hand into exile meant keeping it under the desk all day long, and relying on my right hand for everything—writing, holding a book, putting my hand up. The left hand was reserved for dirty things, the teacher had explained. Since time immemorial, the left hand was for sinners and for sinning.

As a result, I started using my right hand and I ended up hating my own handwriting—a feeling that still continues. I did not want to hold a pencil and whenever I had to do so, I would squeeze it so hard between my fingers that it would break into two. What a strange feeling it was having so many things to say but being unable to put them into writing.

So now, as I pointed at the bowl, I made sure to do so with my right hand. “Grandma, what do those holes mean?”

“Those”—she paused, her sea-green eyes lighting up—”Those holes mean if you don’t eat your vegetables, and keep rejecting my stewed okra, there’s no way you can grow up!”

We were very close, my Grandma and I.

I was born in Strasbourg, France, though both my parents are Turkish. My father, a dedicated academic, was completing his PhD at a French university. My mother, however, had dropped out of university and followed him, thinking love would be enough. But the marriage would not last long and a few years later my mother and I would take a one-way train to Turkey.

One morning we arrived at Grandma’s house in Ankara. Only later would I come to understand this was a very conservative, patriarchal, middle-class Muslim neighbourhood.

Having made the terrible mistake of getting married at the tender age of nineteen, my mother had now become a young divorcée. She had no diploma, no money, no career. Immediately our prying neighbours began looking around for a suitable husband for her. But my Grandma intervened. “I believe my daughter should go back to university,” she said. “She should have a diploma, a career. She should have choices.”

When the same neighbours reminded Grandma that my mother had a toddler to take care of and could therefore not become a student, Grandma said with a shrug, “I’ll raise my grandchild. Meanwhile my daughter is free to do as she pleases. She’s young. She can build her life anew.”

Thus, my mother went back to university to finish her degree and then to build a career.

As for me, I was raised by Grandma, whom I sometimes called “Annemim” (my Mama-ma). And my own mother I usually called “Abla” (big sister). The logic behind this labelling was a bit confusing to everyone else, but somehow crystal clear to me.

Every morning after breakfast Grandma would prepare a cup of bitter coffee for herself and a glass of honeyed milk for me. When she finished her drink, she would turn the cup upside down, wait until it cooled and then peer inside. She didn’t watch the news, she didn’t read the newspapers; she read coffee grounds instead.

Around midday neighbours and strangers would knock on our door, asking for help. They would all be served tea, a constant tinkling of silver spoons against glass echoing in the house. People with skin diseases, mood disorders, chronic fatigue or depression were among Grandma’s regular visitors.

For she was a healer, my Grandma. There were things she could do, and things she couldn’t. She was a healer specialized in certain fields.

Should anyone try to make a payment or offer a gift, she would refuse it firmly. When I asked her about this, she said you were given knowledge so that you could pass it on to others. How could you demand money for something you did not own in the first place? Nobody owned knowledge.

It was the late 1970s. Inside the house there were rose thorns, crushed dried chickpeas, evil eye beads, amber rosaries … Outside the house there were strikes, gunshots, suicide bombs and demonstrations … People died. People disappeared. Far-right were fighting far-left, Kurdish nationalists were fighting Turkish nationalists, even supporters of the same ideology were fighting among themselves.

I remember sitting by the window, looking outside at the turbulent world where my mother was studying, working, struggling to find her way and her freedom. I would worry endlessly about the bombs and the conflicts and the violence. Meanwhile, another part of me would listen to the murmurs in the house, my Grandma’s soothing voice.

How could these opposite forces inhabit the same world—my world, that is? The political and the surreal, the public and the deeply personal, my mother’s resistance and my grandmother’s acceptance …

On Sunday mornings, the only days I would see them spend free time together, they would place large, round trays on the table and start making dolma, stuffing spoonfuls of rice and meat and wild herbs inside little green peppers. They didn’t talk much, their movements deft and practiced. But their silence was a peaceful one. A harmonious one. A mutual recognition of their different personalities, a sisterhood of sorts. I would prick my ears trying to catch what went unsaid, and open my eyes trying to observe what remained invisible, obsessed with solving the puzzle that they were to me. I was certain they were full of secrets, these two women. What exactly were they hiding from me?

And when the dolmas were ready my Grandma would say, playfully, “Stop watching us as if we were TV. Whatever you see in us is present in you. One day, you’ll know. But now, come and eat, sweetheart. Come and eat.”

—Elif Shafak

JAMILA “IN THE INTEREST OF MEN”

I had never in my life talked with my childhood nanny about sex. I would have found it unthinkable to raise the subject with this woman, even though she has been living under our roof for more than twenty years. We represent, the two of us, completely opposite types of women. Fifty years old, she has never married, and if we take seriously the importance she accords to morality and religion, she is a virgin. She lives and works in our home. She supports many members of her family, who turn readily to her whenever there is a problem yet treat her with little consideration: because she is a woman, and because she has no husband. A devout person, she is—I know this—shocked by the way I live. I smoke, I drink, I go out whenever I want. I have as many boys for friends as I do girls. I realize that when I was a teenager, she must have been dumbfounded to see the parties we used to throw, where girls and boys would slow-dance dreamily together.

So I have a rather clear image of my nanny: she’s a conservative, and she doubtless judges me without ever saying anything. When my novel came out, I had a chance to form a wholly different picture of her. One evening when we were alone in the kitchen, she remarked, with a naughty look in her eye: “By the way, I know what your book is about.” I smiled, a bit flustered by the subject she’d brought up. I was also afraid that she might lecture me. “You’re talking about sex maniacs, right?” she continued. “Because you know, in Morocco, there are lots of them. In my neighborhood, many women tell me about this.”

First news flash: my so prudish and so moralizing nanny talks about sex with the local women. I’m speechless!

“I have a friend who lives near my old home. She told me that her husband wanted to make love three or four times a day. He doesn’t ask what she thinks. You see what I mean?” she adds. Yes, I see, he rapes her. I realize that I don’t know how to say “rape” in Arabic, but my nanny and I have understood each other.

“Many men are like that,” she goes on. “The women, they work, they raise the children, they keep house. And on top of that, they have to do everything monsieur wants and they keep getting pregnant. Fortunately, some men prefer to see other girls in the neighborhood and they leave their wives alone.” Other girls? I ask her if she’s talking about prostitutes.

“Sure, of course. There are lots of them. Very young ones. You know, even the Saudis come here for the prostitutes. In Rabat, they’ve had a huge house built for them where they receive really young girls. These girls have to strip stark naked and dance in front of them. After a while, the men throw paper money down and tell them: ‘Roll in that, and if you’ve sweated hard, you can keep all the bills that stick to you.’“

I don’t know if this story is entirely true and I have no real way to verify it. Still, it’s public knowledge that rich men from the Gulf come regularly to Morocco to take advantage of our unfortunately legendary prostitution. In fact, they find it so palatable that many girls have “exported” themselves to the Gulf region. A migration that isn’t to everyone’s taste.

“Prostitution means ruin for the women,” my nanny continues, clearly determined to tell me everything. “In the neighborhood, you know, there’s that girl who has AIDS. She concealed it for a long time, but finally everyone found out. The guy who’d stuck her with it dropped her and disappeared. Now she’s completely abandoned. It’s sad, everything that happens. In many families, you see girls getting pregnant by their uncle or even their father. The girls don’t talk about it. Either they get hidden away, or they kill themselves.” I point out to her that all these situations stem from massive hypocrisy and that no one dares to denounce crimes committed under the pretext of warding off dishonor. I try to explain to her that a society in which women had more freedom would not necessarily be contrary to religion, yet would permit better protection for women. To my great surprise, she agrees. “All this,” she tells me, “does not serve the cause of Islam. It is solely in the interest of men.”

—Leïla Slimani Translated from the French by Linda Coverdale

HUMBLE HAND

There’s a peasant on the TV again. He’s thin, with prominent cheekbones, the skin on his face tight and shiny. His eyes are mousy, bright, and darting, always evasive. Evading what? Evading the TV camera.

It was like this the first time he was photographed, and now it’s the same the first time he’s being filmed. He’s come into contact with this high-tech stuff only a few times in his life; it does not fit with his experience, and he only partially understands it. Partial understanding leads to reverence, and the fear that he’s somehow doing it wrong. Meanwhile officials of a certain grade are adept at making these machines their handmaidens. Before the bright black glass of the lens they dip and preen; even their clothing exudes a powerful confidence. They take the peasant’s hand, no discussion brooked, gripping it powerfully, shaking it powerfully, and then they commence to summon language from their minds. The words come haltingly at first, and they ease themselves through with auxiliary noises like um and ah. Later, as the words start to surge and flood, they disengage their hands and, like orchestra conductors, begin to conduct the crowd.

At these times, I’m left watching the peasant’s hand in horror. He doesn’t know whether to allow his fingers to curl naturally, or to keep them extended. It seems foolish to keep his thumb and forefinger spread wide before the camera, but what if he lets his fingers fold up and then the officials double back for another squeeze? Wouldn’t that be a breach of etiquette? After due consideration, he decides to leave his hand stuck stiffly in the air—better safe than sorry.

And there it stays, as if paralyzed, dangled absurdly into the torrent of words. Not until the lens turns to follow the departing officials does the hand retract and curl, and tug at his clothes.

As far as the peasant himself is concerned, what matters isn’t whether he’s one of the neglected elderly, or a victim of the recent hailstorm, or whether nothing’s happened at all and he’s simply there as backdrop. What matters is that he has survived this moment.

—A Yi Translated from the Chinese by Eric Abrahamsen

ON RUNNING

I ran, often. I was chased, often, by other boys who wanted to beat me, sometimes by random adults angry at me, mainly for being a child—grown-ups typically hate all children except their own. Sometimes I was chased by strangers. Once, I remember, a postman pursued me, aiming to hurt me, which he did when he caught me, because the world sends out its agents to harm you; they linger out there until such time arrives. There is a pale man in a wool coat and hat across the street looking up this way as we speak, believe me. So I remember myself as a child running toward Kino Arena, along the row of garages; I don’t remember who was chasing me. What I do remember was a presence of danger at my heels, and my running as fast as I could, all the while growing aware that I couldn’t run any faster. I wanted to accelerate, I willed a greater speed, but the will didn’t reach anywhere below my waist, and my legs just couldn’t. Whoever was chasing me caught me and beat me; this was how I learned about my limits, about the existence of limits. My will hit the ceiling of my being like a distraught moth. Beyond the ceiling was who knows what, or just plain nothing, solidified into a sky. The details are sketchy and may have come from another moment in my life: at some other time, I must have also been running toward Kino Arena. I ran along that stretch between my building and the movie theater every day of my boyhood—the recollection can’t be that specific, so that when I remember the running, my body doesn’t respond. But when I remember the chase and my failed attempt to will acceleration, my body responds—it remembers its inability to transcend itself, it swells with sadness; it hurts. It becomes what it’s always been: a slow, dying body, ever unable to restore itself, in recollection, or in any other way. It will eventually run out of itself, out of myself. Kino Arena was shelled in the war, and then razed in peacetime. Now, it’s a gravel parking lot. When I was a boy, I wanted to be a historian.

ON READING

I once spent three days in a coal shack reading old comic books. I was eight or so; we were visiting my uncle Bogdan in Bijeljina. In World War Two, he fought for freedom with Tito’s partisans and received a bullet in his lungs. He had six kids, all of them older than me, my favorite, his daughter Ljilja. His oldest son was already in college; before he left he’d stored away stacks of his old comic books, tied with a rope like ancient manuscripts. They lay in the shack untouched until I discovered and untied them to spend hours on a pile of coal, reading, my parents occasionally ordering me to come out and spend time with living human beings. And I’d come out, pouting, and be with the living human beings until they forgot about me, whereupon I’d sneak back into the coal shack to read more. Fortunately, it rained a bit, so they couldn’t force me to come out and play. I don’t remember any light in there. I recall reading in complete darkness, as if with X-ray eyes. The eternal life belongs to those who live in the present. The only comic I clearly remember was set in medieval Croatia, at the time of Matija Gubec, the leader of a peasant uprising. The main hero, a young man, fought for freedom in his own special way: he prowled at night scaring the feudal oppressors, dressed in a body suit that made him look like a living skeleton. I didn’t know it then, but it’s clear to me now that the exhilarating pleasure of reading in the coal shack was related to the darkness that surrounded me. I licked my coal-flavored fingers to turn the pages slowly. Death is not an event in life, but it was reading over my shoulder. I could hear the living call my name.

ON SEARCHING

I’d lock myself in the bathroom and create mixtures of nail polish, aftershave, shampoo, hand cream, and baby powder. I’d light the concoction to see if it’d explode, burn, or at least produce fumes. Or I’d bunch up newspapers and set them on fire in the tub and pour the hopefully explosive mix onto it. Nothing would happen except that the flakes of incinerated paper would float up to the ceiling to get stuck there like dark clouds. There were no fire alarms in our apartment; we lived happily in a firetrap, armed only with common sense, which I frequently suspended to pursue dangerous knowledge. I sought the perfect mix of ingredients, the exact proportions, assuming that the perfection would become evident in the flames or the explosion; it took me a long while to discover that shampoo doesn’t burn, and that hand cream is chemically inert. And it wasn’t just bathroom alchemy I was interested in. I also stuck nails into sockets and bare copper wires into electric heaters, daring our apartment, our life, the universe, to either kill me, hurt me, or allow me, at least, to discover what would happen. Nothing ever happened, but I didn’t care. You go where the inquiry takes you; you follow the path of knowledge. A new possibility cannot be discovered later. I stuck needles under the skin on my palms, knelt on corn kernels until my knees were bruised and tears ran down my cheeks. I devised recipes for a dish that had never been cooked before, requiring ingredients that could not be found, and I’d prepare it for no one, sometimes starting an oil fire in a pan, and no one would eat it; it was as if I was performing a Black Mass. Later, I searched my parents’ closets because I didn’t know what their lives were like, who they really were, other than being the people who made me and raised me. I came up with names for things that didn’t exist until I discovered they existed. The world is made of strangers, of odd parts and simple objects that strive to be in a space, to be gathered into a whole, like words, like sentences.

ON WORDS

Here we have to enter a linguistic field where we’re likely to get lost: while the English word marble is a fine one for a glass ball with which children play, the value of kliker is far greater to someone like me, whoever he may be. For one thing, the Bosnian word comes from the German Klicker, which refers to the sound of the glass balls colliding. I find that beautiful: I hear that sound right now. This suggests that the migration that eventually brought a kliker to me started with the Austro-Hungarian occupation force that entered Bosnia in 1878. This is how history works: everything begins far away and long ago, with armies moving, burning cities scalding the sky, children orphaned; everything ends in my body, with my writing about it. But the vocabulary I recall being deployed during the games I played is hard to source, resembling no particular foreign language, having no other application in Bosnian, working only while I was playing with klikers, meaningless otherwise:

roša (the hole in the ground where you wanted to put your kliker so as to have the power to eliminate others);

ponte (used when you are demanding from the other players that they throw their klikers toward the roša, where yours is sitting, empowered, waiting to eliminate them);

hopa (the last player who throws his kliker toward the roša at the beginning of each game);

predhopa (the player before the last one to throw);

slipci (dropping two klikers together to resolve a situation in which two klikers find themselves in the roša, though this maneuver has to be agreed upon before the game).

There is more, but the list is beginning to look pathetic in its obscure nostalgia. I have reasons to believe that this particular vocabulary made sense only within my neighborhood in Sarajevo, and would’ve been entirely foreign beyond it. The game is now forgotten, as is the vocabulary, as we all will and must be. I haven’t played the game in decades, nor have I seen children playing it, in Sarajevo or anywhere else, at least not since before the war. Here and there, I run into people who can recall and recite the vocabulary, like an ancient poem in a lost language. The word kliker is still around, but at present it has no value, because its referent world is obsolete. What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence. Yet I remember being close to the ground, focused on my kliker, lost in a universe of grass and twigs; and I remember the smell and texture of the dirt, its softness perfect for the rolling movement, and the shards of glass like diamonds and pebbles, and the determined earthworms dying in the dry soil, here and there a trail of ants moving toward some horizon apparent only to them. It all used to make sense, which I cannot retrieve now. My friends, some of whom are now dead, followed their own orbits around the roša, as if none of them could ever end.

—Aleksandar Hemon

WORK

John, just home from work, asks me how my day was and I say that it was okay but that I didn’t do any of my work because I was busy doing housework. Whose work is that? he asks, slyly.

I have just read an article in the Times about a white composer who is reaching new heights of productivity since embracing a dominant-submissive relationship with a black woman. He is the dominant partner, but his domination is not primarily sexual. His wife, who finds submission satisfying, attends to all his needs while he works at composing for fourteen hours a day.

At first, I don’t understand why it is news that a man who has a woman doing all his housework is finding himself productive. But then I think: Maybe this is progress. Maybe what is news is that now we are calling this domination, when we used to just call it marriage.

John has never cleaned a toilet in our house, of this I am fairly certain. But I never take out the trash. We both wash dishes. The floors are an unclaimed territory, a no-man’s-land. Neither of us cleans them for months at a time. Sometimes we hire a Polish woman to sweep and mop for us.

Molly doesn’t think this is a good solution. You’re just outsourcing the oppression, she tells me. She seems to be suggesting that the only ethical way to deal with housework is for all of us to clean up after ourselves. Or live in our own messes.

If you pay well and tip generously, Daryl argues, what’s wrong with having someone else do the work? Isn’t housecleaning, she asks, just like any other work? It seems not to be. The phrase “cleaning toilets” is shorthand for being demeaned. I know of a couple who hire a woman to clean their house, but not the bathrooms, because they think it’s wrong to have someone else clean up their shit. Daryl and I are talking about this because our friend the immigration lawyer, who works fourteen-hour days, wants to hire a cleaning woman but her husband the public defender is against it on principle.

Well, then, cleaning their house should be his job, I suggest. But if a woman is going to do housecleaning, isn’t it better for her to be paid than for her to do it free? Later, I rethink this. I could also say that prostitution is better than everyday bad sex, in that a woman is getting paid for something many women endure unpaid. But money is part of what makes sex work dangerous for women who don’t want to be selling sex but have no other choice.

Which makes me wonder: does the woman who cleans my house sometimes, who doesn’t speak English well and is trying to put a child through college, feel that she has any other choice? I’ve never asked her. The composer’s wife does have a choice, this much I know. She once made her living as an administrative assistant in a bank, and she also founded a theater company. Her situation is feminist, she tells the Times, because she has chosen it freely, for her own pleasure.

I wonder if she thinks of what she is doing as work.

SERVICE

“It’s a struggle to say, ‘This is genuinely who I am,’“ the composer’s wife tells the Times. But, “To say I can’t play out my personal psychodrama just because I’m black, that’s racist.”