There are as many literatures of exile as there are individual experiences of it, but all of them are infused with the memory of an elsewhere, glimpses of a former life that slip into focus in strangely kaleidoscopic ways. The nature and force of this memory always vary, while the significance of exile will often depend on whether writers are immigrants themselves or second- or third-
generation children of their adopted country. How they transmute this raw material from the past into personal narratives or fictional stories is the essence of this chapter on the United States as a land of exile.
André Aciman
“Exile is to inhabit a world of shadows.
Shadows of memory, of thoughts, of cities, of selves.”
—aciman, Village Voice reading, November 5, 2010.
Few authors have captured the dual aspect of exile as André Aciman has: a life experienced as a reality shifting between two worlds—the here and there, the now and then—suddenly perturbed by fragments of memories that cling to you like slivered “shadows.”
André Aciman, the New York–based writer, son of French-speaking Sephardic Jews, was born in Alexandria, the Greek city of ancient Egypt and a place of exile.* Its founder, Alexander the Great of Macedon, a foreigner who had crossed several lands to conquer this kingdom, had also envisioned his port of call, his namesake Alexandria, as a city open to travelers, passersby, and would-be settlers. During his reign, the memories of these wanderers were carefully consigned and thus kept alive in thousands of papyrus scrolls amassed in its Great Library, the other visionary dream of Alexander, eventually fully realized by his followers.
It is said that his city was burnt down but remained a symbol of Hellenic knowledge and literary treasures in the ancient world, even during its decline. Yet in the middle of the twentieth century, the happy medley of civilizations, cultures, and religions was to vanish.
In 1966, along with his parents, the fifteen-year-old Aciman was forced to leave his home there, the place to which “his mind would always turn.” In his essay “Alexandria: The Capital of Memory,” Aciman revisits his native land thirty-five years later, but he remains resolutely attached to the Alexandria of his youth, claiming “I’ll always end up there, even if I never come back,” an echo of the great Alexandrian poet C. P. Cavafy‘s poem on exile: “For you won’t find a new country, won’t find a new shore, the city will always pursue you, / and no ship will ever take you away from yourself.”1
André Aciman was at the Village Voice on November 5, 2010, to speak about his new novel Eight White Nights.2 The French music critic and producer Renaud Machart introduced him, referring to his friend’s complicated relationship with Paris, describing his novel as a Proustian musical piece.
In fact, the two had met at a Proust evening in one of New York City’s reputed concert halls. To Machart’s surprise, the place was bursting at the seams. On the stage were several notable speakers, including the composer and diarist Ned Rorem who had invited him as the French translator of his memoir The Paris Diary (1966).
There was also a man who spoke French the way a native would. Intrigued, Machart rushed out to buy a book by this author, as yet unknown to him. Moved by Aciman’s False Papers: Essays on Exile and Memory,3 Machart immediately arranged an interview with him for the French daily Le Monde. They were to meet at Straus Park on the Upper West Side, a favorite place of the mysterious writer and often featured in various essays and even on the jacket of his recent novel.
Machart set the scene for us: “It was raining and cold, there was snow and homeless men were lying on benches, and, all around, drug dealers and police cars. It was miserable, and my first words to Aciman when he arrived was, ‘I now know what literature is all about: it’s about transfiguration.’”4
This word “transfiguration” captures the essence of the author’s Eight White Nights and its surreal atmosphere. Aciman read a passage from it in which his two protagonists, the unnamed narrator and Clara, meet for the first time at a crowded Christmas party in a fashionable Upper West Side apartment. They have come outside onto the terrace and, standing there in the cold, they look in silence at the enchanting view of snow-topped Manhattan with the “lights speckling the New Jersey shoreline . . . From (their) high perch, the silver-purple city looked aerial and distant and superterrestrial, a beguiling kingdom . . .”5
“It is a moment of transformation, the beginning of a romance,” the writer commented. “Time is suspended and the narrator and Clara are in a magical sphere,” leading to a mesmerizing vision:
“Bellagio,” he said.
“What about Bellagio?” Clara asks.
“On special evenings, Bellagio is almost a fingertip away, an illuminated paradise. . . . On other nights, it seems . . . a lifetime away, unattainable. This right now is a Bellagio moment.”
“What is a Bellagio moment?” Clara wonders. [. . .]
“Life on the other bank, life as it’s meant to be, not as we end up living it. Bellagio, not New Jersey. Byzantium.”6
Thousands of miles and just as many years separate Manhattan and Bellagio, but, in that brief interval of suspended time, the present and the past coexist together. Surely “a Proustian moment.”
“How would you describe such a ‘Proustian moment’? As a reverie?” someone in the audience asked.
Aciman: “The narrator is not daydreaming, nor fantasizing; he is more likely thinking in a temporal space which is not inhabited by the present, but which, as in Proust, constantly slips into the present. He is in an ‘in-between’ or better yet . . . everything is in transit towards something.”
Q: “You were introduced by your friend as someone having a complicated relationship with Paris. Does it have to do with nostalgia?”
Aciman: “Just before the reading, I had a conversation with a friend who is sitting on the staircase tonight” (the bookstore was packed) “and I was telling him that coming to Paris is troubling to me because it’s coming back to a place which should have been home and never was. Coming back is to revive the feeling of a ‘rendez-vous manqué.’ Every time I come to Paris, it’s like being home and it’s not home.”
Q: “Is Paris one of the ‘shadow cities’ of your essays?”
Aciman: “There is not only the shadow city; there is the shadow person, the shadow memory, the shadow self. You inherit a life of shadows which is as concrete as the life you live in.”
Q: “Does your title allude in any way to Dostoevsky’s novella White Nights?
Aciman: “The echo I wanted in my novel was James Joyce’s ‘The Dead,’ probably the most beautiful prose piece of the twentieth century.”
Amy Tan
“The language of my novel is typically
the language of my mother. “
—tan, Village Voice reading, June 2, 2005.
Amy Tan is the author of the bestseller The Joy Luck Club,7 a semi-fictional contemporary novel that plays with the many differences between two generations of Chinese women, those who have come to America as immigrants, and their daughters, born in the States and Americans above all.
Odile and Amy Tan, Village Voice reading, June 2, 2005. © Flavio Toma
The writer was at the Village Voice on June 2, 2005, to talk about her memoir The Opposite of Fate: Memories of a Writing Life.8 Dressed in a stylish silk outfit, with her two cute Yorkshires pressed against her, Tan introduced her work by objecting to being classified as an author of “ethnic literature”: “Some critics have written that I wish to capture the immigrant experience and demystify Chinese culture; the truth is that I write for myself. I write because I enjoy stories and make-believe. . . . I write about secrets, lies, and contradictions. I write stories about life. . . . To be sure, it’s a Chinese American life, and it’s the only one I’ve got so far.”
After entrusting her little darlings to her husband in the audience, she read an excerpt from the first chapter describing the process by which, as a child and adolescent, born and schooled in the States, she began to perceive everything her mother was not, and all that she herself was, i.e., an American.
“My linguistic style is from California where I was raised. It is my voice, especially in this memoir where there is so much of me growing up in America. Nevertheless, what I try to do here is to look at the language I grew up with. I call it my mother’s tongue which is a different kind of English. Her language was full of imaginary, and, I should say, amazing imagery that created a profusion of pictures for me. The language of my characters is typically my mother’s voice.”
Q: “If your voice is Californian, how can it be that your language is your mother’s voice?”
Tan: “My mother was inhabited by anxiety and fears. She believed in the invisible and fateful powers acting upon our lives: How does everything happen? Is it by faith, is it by a curse, is it by your own will or by the action of other people? How does the world happen? The voice is, in a way, the person being in the world.”
Insisting on the importance of language in her work, Tan said that one of the reasons she had become a writer was her fascination for it and how it works in so many different ways. Acknowledging the richness of her mother’s original, imaginative expressions, the Californian writer Amy Tan told us how she felt lucky to have been raised “in two different forms of language and imagery”—the very core of her writing style. “After my mother’s death, as I was starting to work on my new novel, I heard her voice that reassured me with her comforting words: ‘I can be your narrator. I do not have to be your mother anymore.’”
Jamaica Kincaid
“It is writing that saved me.”
—kincaid, Village Voice reading, January 14, 2000.
In 1966, Jamaica Kincaid, a young Antiguan woman, immigrated from the West Indies to New York. She was seventeen when she turned her back on her native island, abandoning her family and the Creole tongue she hastened to forget, even inventing a name that suited her new self. For twenty years she would not visit her island, that “small place,”9 fraught with poverty, humiliation, and feelings of jealousy towards her three brothers, all favorites of her mother. As a young girl assigned to look after the youngest of them, she had ignored her task and, instead, immersed herself in a world of books. “In anger, my mother gathered all my books, poured spirits over them and then burned them.”10
This dramatic turning point led her to choose exile, cutting off all connections with her past and the family that had literally reduced her dream of alternative lives imagined from her readings to ashes.
Nonetheless, “at once familiar and hostile,” both island and family would relentlessly capture her imagination, haunting her in book after book as the irreplaceable source of literary inspiration.
A stately woman with an aura of mystery about her, Jamaica Kincaid was at the Village Voice on January 14, 2000, to present My Brother,11 the companion book to her previous narrative The Autobiography of My Mother,12 both nonfictional portrayals of her mother and her younger brother. In it she examines in depth the complex and tormented feelings she has towards each one of them.
She read the passage from My Brother that depicts her transit at a Miami airport after leaving Antigua where she has just had the heart-wrenching experience of sitting at the bedside of her thirty-three-year-old brother dying of AIDS “in lonely squalor.” Now she is on her way to her beloved snowy garden in Vermont, the home where her husband and children are waiting for her.
Torn between two worlds, Kincaid is tormented by the ambivalence of her memories and conflicting emotions: “I love the people I’m from, and I do not love the people I’m from,” she admitted, stating that only through writing could she unravel such contradictions. “I couldn’t have become a writer while there among the people I knew best . . . I couldn’t have become myself, yet I was one of them, from them. I became a writer out of desperation.”
In the late 1970s, her luminous writing talent won her the support of William Shawn, the editor of The New Yorker. “M. Shawn,” as Kincaid addressed him, was her ideal reader. “I wrote for him, and whether he liked it or not, it was not important. I just wanted to imagine him reading it. I kept writing for him.”13
Given this persistence, in her adopted country she grew into a recognizable writer with a unique style, often cited as equally magical and real and yet resisting all canons. A staff member of The New Yorker, Kincaid was in charge of its “Talk of the Town” for nine years. In 1996, four years after William Shawn’s death, she resigned. For her, as for Mavis Gallant, another self-exiled woman and lifetime contributor to this famous weekly, his disappearance marked the end of an era as they had known it.
Dinaw Mengestu
“We have all those stories that flutter on, part of the construction of our identity.”
—mengestu,
Village Voice reading, February 2, 2011.
Dinaw Mengestu was born in Ethiopia during a time of political repression, and only two years old when his family was reunited in the United States. He lived in Paris during the early 2000s, but with the dispersion of the Third Wave of American expatriates, the city had lost its attraction to writers and artists. “The rest of the world turned into Paris, and Paris became more like everywhere else,” he despondently wrote in an article for the Wall Street Journal14 in 2008.
Mengestu was at the Village Voice on February 10, 2011, to launch his recent novel How to Read the Air,15 a title as poetic and enigmatic as that of his debut fiction The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears,16 both critically acclaimed. The novel he presented that night was a story about immigrant lives, but not your usual one: “I find disturbing the ethnic immigration pattern,” he stated at his reading. “We become numb to the immigrant narratives; they are known, the journey has already been told.”
His next admission was even more surprising: “a couple’s narrative,” he said, “is another story that needs to be told over and over again.” He had in mind the two couples in his new fiction, and particularly the parents of his protagonist Jonas, Ethiopian immigrants who had survived two different perilous journeys to reach America. Aliens in their host country, floating between two languages, they progressively become strangers to each other.
Facing a disintegrating marriage himself with a woman named Angela, Jonas is anxious to understand why and how the marriage of his own parents had dissolved. He remembers “the bursts of violence of his father, his mother, a lost soul, and their lingering, stifling silence” that poisoned his childhood. He recalls the trip they all took to Nashville in an attempt to better know the country where they now live. This, too, turns into a fiasco that marks the end of their marriage. “To understand who they were,” Mengestu explained, “could only be done by trying to reconstruct their journey and recreate their lives, a task their son Jonas can only accomplish as a work of imagination he sees as an act of active love toward his parents.”
Q: “Why this choice of Nashville?”
Mengestu: “By taking this trip to Nashville, the emblematic place of American folk music, they had wanted to get to the heart of deep America, its history and its popular cultures, so as to strengthen their connection with the US. Instead, it was the irreversible point of non-return of their marriage.”
Q: “We never know exactly if we are in a real story or an invented one.”
Mengestu: “The boundaries of fiction are incredibly expansive. I want the reader to struggle with the notion of reality. What’s reality and what’s not? Once you’re deeply invested in the story, it becomes the reality, as true to me as any daily experience.”
Q: “The scene of the couple’s heavy silences, repressed screams, and car honking points to an issue of communication in couples rather than immigrants.”
Mengestu: “Right, this novel is about the failing of language in both couples: the parents are not Americans, but immigrants who live between two languages while the young couple, Jonas and his wife, are Americans. The latter have access to knowledge, but they don’t have the language to say what and how they feel.
In my novels, I’m not so much concerned with the plot as with the emotional depth of the characters. In both cases, there is an empty space between the characters, one that needs to be occupied by a narrative. Even if they are hard and difficult at times, narratives are vital. Whether true or invented, whether they challenge us or disappoint us, without them we are less formed, less complete. The American model of narrative is the road trip. This one about immigrants is an American book, even if it is an Ethiopian driving.”
Junot Díaz
“A culture reveals itself in the narratives
nobody ascribes importance to.”
—junot díaz,
Village Voice reading, February 2, 2009.
The globalizing world and its migratory movements have changed the nature of languages, mixing native and foreign words to suit the needs and circumstances of daily life, but generally speaking, hybrid language is considered “impure” and limited to colloquial expression.
Then came The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao,17 the novel by the Dominican American Junot Díaz. It marked a turning point in the reader’s acceptance of such a literary work, boasting no fewer than two hundred and fifty different Spanish words popping up here and there. He was not the first writer to use Spanglish, the vernacular spoken by Latino people in the States, but this narrative was the first of its kind to be honored with two of the most prestigious American literary awards in 2008, the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
Told again and again that “timely jokes quickly become outdated and footnotes slow down the reading, and furthermore, that there were characters nobody cared about,” Díaz did not give up. He told us that “I was desperate to tell this story of a Latino in New Jersey and part of its subculture. I stuck to it.”
On the dark, freezing evening of February 2, 2009, our guest writer arrived at the Village Voice after a transatlantic flight delayed by a snow storm. Díaz was exhausted, but opened the event with a few jokes. Evelyn Ch’ien, the author of Weird English,18 then introduced him, describing his novel as a literary portrayal of the Latino diaspora in America. “His prose,” she informed the public, “is representative of cross-cultures, part of our global world. A book like this one can be appreciated only in this time of the global village.”
Young and handsome, at once concentrated and exuberant, Díaz read an excerpt from his work after briefly describing the context: its protagonist, Oscar Wao, dead at the beginning of the novel, is remembered by his friends, part of the Dominican diaspora of Paterson, New Jersey. They lament the loss of the fat, lonely boy who, feeling he doesn’t belong anywhere, took refuge in his own world of sci-fi and nerd culture.
Ch’ien: “You’ve just read a passage from the chapter starting with the word ‘change,’ a key word in your novel. Could you tell us what you mean by it?”
Díaz: “Dynamism is part of the world’s happening today. It is in its irrepressible course ahead bent on change, driven by the irrevocable, dynamic march of life. But writers and literature are not part of that map of today’s dynamism. My book mostly wrestles with the ’80s and feels already outdated. Writers and critics piece together events that have already happened. Where I live, I hear far more complicated language, far more nuanced and cooler than anything I cover. It’s far more advanced.”
Ch’ien: “What about this ‘far more advanced’ language? Do you find it at MIT where you teach, or in the Latino diaspora of New Jersey?”
Díaz: “I’m just emphasizing this time gap to explain how Spanish and English are working in my novel. I’ll give you an example. If you really want to understand the US at this moment, right now, the biggest mistake you would make would be to read literary fiction. All the weird shit of America is left out of the page. A culture reveals itself in the narratives nobody ascribes importance to.”
Ch’ien: “What are those narratives we seem to ignore?”
Díaz: “At school, we had lessons about America, but once home, we would turn on the TV set and a really stupid movie such as The Planet of the Apes would appear. Immediately, we would point to the screen [gestures]: This is the America we know, we said to ourselves. This is what gets erased from all the great American novels. I don’t think that The Great Gatsby can fuck with X-Men. . . . For me, junk narratives are probably the most important lens to view the culture and not to forget where we come from, giving access to the American self through throwaway narratives which are not valued, but ask to be watched.”
Ch’ien: “Your novel with hybrid language is a challenge to translators, and since we have one in the room, we could ask her to let us hear how your novel language sounds in French.”
Laurence Viallet read a passage from her translation and was praised for her audacious and inventive language.
“Where were these strange French words coming from?” someone asked her.
Viallet: “I turned to a diversity of sources: street language, Verlan, hip-hop, rhythms, rap. . . . We have a very rich and diverse subculture in France, and I just tapped into it.”
Concluding his talk, Díaz thanked the audience with these memorable words: “In the US where I spend most of my life, this kind of community is a dying tradition. The presence of an artist in a community is an excuse for the community to celebrate itself.”
Azar Nafisi
“I left Iran, but Iran never left me.”
—nafisi, Village Voice reading, November 20, 2009.
In 1997, Azar Nafisi came to stay in the United States as an adult, leaving her native Iran for the promised freedom of expression. An elegant woman in a fuchsia suit, her wavy auburn hair framing an open, lively face, Nafisi walked into the Village Voice on November 20, 2009, accompanied by her French publisher, Ivan Nabokov. She was the bestselling author of Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books,19 in which she recounts the experience of secretly teaching her female university students the great works of Western literature censored in Iran.
That evening, another Iranian writer, Goli Taraghi, author of a collection of short stories on exile and now living in France,20 introduced her. Nafisi was to present her recent book Things I’ve Been Silent About: Memories,21 a family memoir set in the Tehran of her youth. In fact, her talk would not so much be about the place itself as about books and their significance in her life.
Nafisi opened her reading by placing it under the aegis of Vladimir Nabokov, the Russian American author of Lolita whose irrevocable principle was that “readers are born free, and they ought to remain free.” With some passion, she too announced that “freedom of expression is constantly on my mind. If it is taken away from a writer, they may continue to write as a protest, but what about the millions and millions of readers in my country and other places who don’t have the right to read the kind of books they want to read or to create a space where to debate on them and give rise to exchanges? Books die if they are not read and discussed. This is the very question that has been haunting me for twenty-five years.”
Her love of books had started with her father reading her bedside stories from Persian and Iranian epics as well as from all around the world. “Like him,” she recognized, “I was very ‘promiscuous’ when it came to authors and never asked myself where they came from. Over the years and through circumstances, they became my home and that home was in my mind.”
Q: “There are many kinds of books. What is the first thing you’re looking for in a book?”
Nafisi: “The best achievement of man is to exalt what is unique in us and to join the ‘society of mankind,’ as Primo Levi remarked. America’s values start with Huckleberry Finn who refuses to abandon and give away his friend Jim, the runaway slave. He faces hell and knows it, but he chooses hell rather than separate from his friend.”
Q: “What’s happening in Iran has no equivalent in the US, but what is your take on the politically correct current in America?”
Nafisi: “There are things in America that are very troubling these days. Everything is so politicized that there is no space anymore for discussions and exchanges. Nowadays, it would seem to me that literature ought to be guided by the respect of conventions, but these are reduced to ‘don’t’: Don’t touch this—women—don’t touch that—Muslims—and when you hear here in the US some people in the academic world calling Austen, Nabokov, or Fitzgerald reactionaries, you know that they do not understand what fiction is about. It’s not about moral diktats; it’s about curiosity.”
Q: “The word ‘curiosity’ is vague. Could you give us a few examples?”
Nafisi: “What moves us, writers and readers, is curiosity: I do not know, but I want to know. The very first book I always use in my literary discussions is Alice in Wonderland, which is all about learning from wanting to go further to discover what’s beyond. . . . Literature is the exact opposite of political correctness; it is irreverent, playful, and questioning. It’s a protest against cruelty that comes from blindness, the very essence of Austen’s and Fielding’s novels. The worst people are people who do not see it and do not want to know.”
Hoping to corroborate Nafisi’s remarks, a man in the room provided this anecdote: “In 1963, William Shirer, the renowned author of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, was asked in an interview, ‘Could America become fascist?’ ‘Yes, of course,’ he replied, ‘but it would be done democratically.’”
After a pause and with some thought, Nafisi confessed, “It’s a question I often ask myself.”
In conclusion, she added this word of caution: “At a time of great loneliness, when we go through dark times, we should remember the values of great literature and how fragile they are. If we don’t pay attention and care, they will wither and die. When Czesław Miłosz, Arthur Miller, Saul Bellow, and Susan Sontag died, what did we do? We should have gone out on the streets, met in libraries, and celebrated them by rereading them and discussing them.”