Getting to Nina Cassian isn't that simple.
I took the ferry.
It was evening. Men and women in suits and sneakers got off the boat and walked home.
One street, a promenade. Gulliver would have just lifted a leg and crossed over from this bank to the Manhattan bank on the other side.
The photograph on the back-cover of the poetry book was very bad. And here I was approached by a tall and upright woman. The more she talked, the more beautiful she seemed to me.
She said the place is very safe, "It's an island here, there's nowhere to run."
But at the entrance to the building there was a doorman, and a closed-circuit television system.
Right away she offered me some cigarettes, whiskey. I said, "No, thanks," and her face dropped when she heard that the cigarette smoke bothers me. She'll have to take smoking breaks.
What language did we speak? Ostensibly English, but that was only a cover for the real language -- Romanian.
As if I had lifted a leg and crossed over to Romania which is an island inside me, the real island on which Nina lives as well.
When we parted I said what I sincerely felt, that she was a beautiful woman.
She hugged me.
A few weeks ago I read that she got married. Love is the magician of beauty. It's great that it has come back to watch over Nina.
Nina recommended that I take the cable tram back to Manhattan. The cable tram moves very slowly, tottering high above the dark water as if it's about to fall any minute between the dwindling lights of the island and the splendor of Manhattan. Apart from me there were only two boys in the car, and they didn't seem bothered at all by the fact that no one had equipped us with parachutes and lifebelts.
All my life I've been like that, hovering between the Romania slumbering inside me and the present. It was a miracle we survived. If we had stayed there after Ceausescu came to power, who knows were I would have been now.
Showing posts with label Intimate Landscapes. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Intimate Landscapes. Show all posts
Saturday, January 10, 2009
Saturday, September 17, 2005
"I write, my wife does everything else."
What Mario Vargas Llosa found here is no news to me.
Yet there was one sentence in this interview with Mario Vargas Llosa:
"I write - my wife does everything else."
I do everything, writing included.
True, nowadays, with children grown up and on their own, I have, in theory, the freedom to do just the writing.
Except that - how can one write when hungry.
I get up and do the cooking.
How can one cook, when the kitchen is empty.
I go out and do the shopping, bills have to be paid and settled on time, money has to be raised - to buy food and cover the bills, too much dust is bad for your lungs, the floors must be washed...
I can stop all activities for a whole month - I cannot stop the sense of heavy burden.
Dacia Maraini, whom I've visited with in Italy for my "Noffey Haneffesh" (Once She Was a Child), does have a secretary, agents, help. Yet she did the cooking for the fourteen guests at the party in the evening.
Even before a woman takes a pen in her hand, she's, most of the time, handycapped.
The only place where a measure of freedom exists, or rather responsibility is for a while lifted - is at the artists' colony. It's called a retreat, only that one finds it hard to retreat while surrounded by twenty or fifty energetic writers and artists day and night.
No doubt - having a wife to do "everything else", is a good idea.
I won't exchange my full freedom for anything else.
The sense of responsibility feels like a great burden only in memory. It shouldn't be that terrible when one is responsible only for one's own life.
Like a freed slave, the greatest task is to erase the imprint left by years of slaving to responsibilities.
This book I've been writing since December 2000, am still working on - my fifth - brings new revelations daily.
Writing is such an irresponsible adventure!
Yet there was one sentence in this interview with Mario Vargas Llosa:
"I write - my wife does everything else."
I do everything, writing included.
True, nowadays, with children grown up and on their own, I have, in theory, the freedom to do just the writing.
Except that - how can one write when hungry.
I get up and do the cooking.
How can one cook, when the kitchen is empty.
I go out and do the shopping, bills have to be paid and settled on time, money has to be raised - to buy food and cover the bills, too much dust is bad for your lungs, the floors must be washed...
I can stop all activities for a whole month - I cannot stop the sense of heavy burden.
Dacia Maraini, whom I've visited with in Italy for my "Noffey Haneffesh" (Once She Was a Child), does have a secretary, agents, help. Yet she did the cooking for the fourteen guests at the party in the evening.
Even before a woman takes a pen in her hand, she's, most of the time, handycapped.
The only place where a measure of freedom exists, or rather responsibility is for a while lifted - is at the artists' colony. It's called a retreat, only that one finds it hard to retreat while surrounded by twenty or fifty energetic writers and artists day and night.
No doubt - having a wife to do "everything else", is a good idea.
I won't exchange my full freedom for anything else.
The sense of responsibility feels like a great burden only in memory. It shouldn't be that terrible when one is responsible only for one's own life.
Like a freed slave, the greatest task is to erase the imprint left by years of slaving to responsibilities.
This book I've been writing since December 2000, am still working on - my fifth - brings new revelations daily.
Writing is such an irresponsible adventure!
Sunday, August 28, 2005
Niam el Baz, Cairo, Egypt
27.5.94 FridayNiam is a big woman. Stood up to greet us in sandals on thin heals, and immediately sat down, freed herself from the sandals and touched the floor with her bare feet, taking pleasure.
Niam:
When I was born there were already two sons, and a daughter. My parents wanted another daughter, so my sister had a friend - so when I came, my mother and
father were very glad. But my grandfather was very unhappy, so my father said, "Girls are Niam, the good things that Allah sends us. I will call this girl Niam."
I come from the delta, near the forking of the Nile, in the north, so I love the Nile very much. I've put it in my eye. We are not peasants, but in my childhood I was
simply glued to a family of peasants there. I look for the peasant's bread everywhere and I can't find it.
I used to go down and play with the children of the peasants who worked for us. My parents didn't want me to play with them, they would pull me by the hand like this
back home. I would take off my shoes and walk barefooted.
Until now, everywhere, if I'm around plants and grass, right away I take off my shoes. I can feel belonging only if I'm walking barefoot on the ground.
I really loved playing with their children. So much so that if they were having a joint meal, because they are poor there so each would bring with him to work some pita and onion, I would bring a plate full of rice and vegetables and meat and share with them. I would gather them around me and tell them what I had seen in the
cinema, it is a very distant thing for peasants' kids.
We would wash every day. Not like the peasants' children, who would maybe go down to the Nile every now and then.
Not because of the mother's neglect, it's just that the mother would go out to work in the field.
The children in the village itself would wash before holidays, one after the other, in the public baths, pour some water and a little soap. I would say to my mum, You
wash me, it takes you an hour, and there -- hundreds of children are being washed in an hour.
I want to ask you if you have any stories from childhood, something special like that.
I like listening to yours.
Atidaal: (to Niam) Let her enjoy your stories.
Niam:
It interests me very much. About Romania. When you were a girl, did they ask you whether to come to Israel or not?
OK. I have a memory that I am three years old --
Niam:
These are the signs of writers. Not everybody can remember.
Monday, February 21, 2005
Human Anguish in a Manly World / Ma'ariv, September 3, 2004
"I was thinking: So many books, so many women writers, Who are they?" asks Corinna in her words on the back cover of Noffey Haneffesh ("Intimate Landscapes").
Noffey Haneffesh (Once She Was A Child), written as in answer to this question, is a collection of intimate conversations with women writers, linked by the author's journal and responses as she follows their tales with her own.
"Women Writers". Is there an unifying element to help us define "Female Writing"? Had Corinna meant to describe here an entity of "Female Experience"?
The writers whose life story fragments are disclosed to us are so different, almost all over. In "Once She Was A Child" you'll find Barbara Frishmuth from Austria; Amelie Nothomb - A Belgian born and raised up in several Asian countries; Leila Sebbar - born in Alger to an Algerian father and a French mother; the Israeli Karen Alkalay-Gut, the Dutch Marion Bloom, Leena Lander in Finland, Venus Khoury-Ghata, Amina Said and Michelle Grangaud in France and Hanne Marie Svendson in Denmark. They mostly relay the story of their childhood, yet do talk also about their youth and adult life.
Those are memories' glimpses of women who on the surface seem to have nothing in common - and yet they share so many similar facets.
The most prominent one is Absence - an experience of emptiness, of want. Many times this experience appears linked to a father's disappearance: Barbara Frishmuth's father was killed in the 2nd World War - she remembers nothing of him; Svetlana Vasilenko's father (Russia) never married her mother - he comes and goes, leaving behind him a trail made of big holes.
Sometimes the origin of the spatial emptiness is different, as in the death of a child, Dacia Maraini's (Italy) - whose death is mentioned in passing, in just one sentence, almost unsaid.
Many things are left unsaid. They are absent from the book's pages, yet exist in-between the lines, in the space the writing itself opens - paralleling life's story.
In total apposition appear and reappear in the book experiences of brutal intrusions and invasions. Such is the breaking into Anisa Darwish's house at Ramallah 2002 and the doubled helplessness she feels while facing the Israeli governing powers as well as while facing her Israeli friends, to whom she cannot describe her lot in their language - the language of occupation; or the helplessness expressed in the story of the penetration into Karen Alkalay Gut's body, doubled by the inability to talk about rape in a Men's World and in a language whose meanings and borders are defined by a male's worldview.
Other themes, such as the relation to one's name or to one's native place, resurge throughout the book, linking the diverse stories - as if hinting to us in Corinna's name: These are the matters which being female build.
All throughout the stories the book links strongly to the Israeli existence. Two major Israeli narratives correspond with each other: One is the Holocaust, which keeps popping up in the first part of the book - the voyage to Europe and the conversations with European writers. Yet in the second part of the book, that of writers from the Arab world, where the Holocaust seemingly disappears entirely, the Holocaust is present in it's denial and oblivion. When this denial becomes outspoken (in the Egyptian Niam El Baz's narrative), Corinna, via her travel journal, brings us back in time, to her childhood in Romania of the 2nd World War.
As if she meant to say: It really happened.
But maybe she wants to create a link to that other Israeli narrative - our relations with the Palestinians, the "Peace" and, mainly, the war. When the memories from Romania emerge - military governing, soldiers entering home at midnight to search for her fugitive father, the home confiscation , the wire barbed camp of imprisoned refugees in Cyprus - there echo pictures as if taken from Anisa Darwish's story of her life in Ramallah. There is no explicit statement on the relation between the two narratives, but the way they engage and disengage opens to the reader a new vista enabling re-consideration of the various links between them.
Slowly the book has invaded me. So much strength it contains. Women's strength to confront traditions, religion, Man's World Laws - and yet, so much pain and anguish. Female anguish and human one as well. Not always I am able to discern between the two, between what might constitute a human experience and what is unique to women's life in a world run according to Men's Laws.
This pain cuts through especially when it surfaces repeatedly in attempts to find happy memories. It's just then, when it steals its way through the back door, stubbornly re-affirming its presence in the lives of those women, it is then that it presents itself, eternal, compelling with the utmost power.
Hagar Kotef-Sekund
The Literary Supplement, Maariv 3.9.04
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
read it in Polish...in Hungarian...
Noffey Haneffesh (Once She Was A Child), written as in answer to this question, is a collection of intimate conversations with women writers, linked by the author's journal and responses as she follows their tales with her own.
"Women Writers". Is there an unifying element to help us define "Female Writing"? Had Corinna meant to describe here an entity of "Female Experience"?
The writers whose life story fragments are disclosed to us are so different, almost all over. In "Once She Was A Child" you'll find Barbara Frishmuth from Austria; Amelie Nothomb - A Belgian born and raised up in several Asian countries; Leila Sebbar - born in Alger to an Algerian father and a French mother; the Israeli Karen Alkalay-Gut, the Dutch Marion Bloom, Leena Lander in Finland, Venus Khoury-Ghata, Amina Said and Michelle Grangaud in France and Hanne Marie Svendson in Denmark. They mostly relay the story of their childhood, yet do talk also about their youth and adult life.
Those are memories' glimpses of women who on the surface seem to have nothing in common - and yet they share so many similar facets.
The most prominent one is Absence - an experience of emptiness, of want. Many times this experience appears linked to a father's disappearance: Barbara Frishmuth's father was killed in the 2nd World War - she remembers nothing of him; Svetlana Vasilenko's father (Russia) never married her mother - he comes and goes, leaving behind him a trail made of big holes.
Sometimes the origin of the spatial emptiness is different, as in the death of a child, Dacia Maraini's (Italy) - whose death is mentioned in passing, in just one sentence, almost unsaid.
Many things are left unsaid. They are absent from the book's pages, yet exist in-between the lines, in the space the writing itself opens - paralleling life's story.
In total apposition appear and reappear in the book experiences of brutal intrusions and invasions. Such is the breaking into Anisa Darwish's house at Ramallah 2002 and the doubled helplessness she feels while facing the Israeli governing powers as well as while facing her Israeli friends, to whom she cannot describe her lot in their language - the language of occupation; or the helplessness expressed in the story of the penetration into Karen Alkalay Gut's body, doubled by the inability to talk about rape in a Men's World and in a language whose meanings and borders are defined by a male's worldview.
Other themes, such as the relation to one's name or to one's native place, resurge throughout the book, linking the diverse stories - as if hinting to us in Corinna's name: These are the matters which being female build.
All throughout the stories the book links strongly to the Israeli existence. Two major Israeli narratives correspond with each other: One is the Holocaust, which keeps popping up in the first part of the book - the voyage to Europe and the conversations with European writers. Yet in the second part of the book, that of writers from the Arab world, where the Holocaust seemingly disappears entirely, the Holocaust is present in it's denial and oblivion. When this denial becomes outspoken (in the Egyptian Niam El Baz's narrative), Corinna, via her travel journal, brings us back in time, to her childhood in Romania of the 2nd World War.
As if she meant to say: It really happened.
But maybe she wants to create a link to that other Israeli narrative - our relations with the Palestinians, the "Peace" and, mainly, the war. When the memories from Romania emerge - military governing, soldiers entering home at midnight to search for her fugitive father, the home confiscation , the wire barbed camp of imprisoned refugees in Cyprus - there echo pictures as if taken from Anisa Darwish's story of her life in Ramallah. There is no explicit statement on the relation between the two narratives, but the way they engage and disengage opens to the reader a new vista enabling re-consideration of the various links between them.
Slowly the book has invaded me. So much strength it contains. Women's strength to confront traditions, religion, Man's World Laws - and yet, so much pain and anguish. Female anguish and human one as well. Not always I am able to discern between the two, between what might constitute a human experience and what is unique to women's life in a world run according to Men's Laws.
This pain cuts through especially when it surfaces repeatedly in attempts to find happy memories. It's just then, when it steals its way through the back door, stubbornly re-affirming its presence in the lives of those women, it is then that it presents itself, eternal, compelling with the utmost power.
Hagar Kotef-Sekund
The Literary Supplement, Maariv 3.9.04
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
read it in Polish...in Hungarian...
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