Good evening. I’d like to welcome you all to the third installment of our speaker series, “Transnational Trauma: Displacement, Migration, and Exile in the Contemporary World.” Tonight we’re so lucky to have with us the mother of Hector, Paris, Troilus, Polydorus, and Polyxena, among others. Hecuba has witnessed and endured the unimaginable, and I’ll let her put those to you in her words. I’ll be serving as interpreter for tonight’s talk, and, as always, will do my best to create a bridge between her language and ours. Welcome, Hecuba. Thanks for being with us tonight. Let’s begin.
“My name is Hecuba,” she says. “I am not from here.
“This you know already. You can tell by the color of my skin, and the shape of my eyes, and the launch no the rise of the bones in my cheek, and you can tell by the scarves I windmill or spin sorry wrap, the scarves I wrap around me. You can hear it in the way my mouth shapes the words I speak, in the spread of the vowels, the—the slipperiness of certain consonants. You have an idea of where I belong. The way you—the way you—look at me, you see only a representation of a place, a kind, a certain breed that you aren’t sure you want here. I am ‘one of them.’ If only I could make you know what it is to be rubbed out or no erased by people’s eyes.
“What do you see when you look at me? Do you see a dog? Is a dog what you see? Some scabby chewed-up mongrel? I see the way you look at me.
“You who belong here, you who were born on this land, you cannot know comprehend this experience of—this experience of exile. Or or exile or—this is me speaking as interpreter now, the more literal translation is is is dislocation. The actual words she used are ‘the experience of being pulled out of the socket of your life.’ She says, ‘This is a state of existing beyond borders.’
“I am not from here and my homeland as I knew it no longer gives up to me offers an embrace. But this is not just a matter of geography, this goes far beyond notions of geography, of the simple act of crossing invisible borderlines that separate here from there. Those boundaries are an irrelevance to me at this time now. The only borders that matter to me are those to be found at the edges of fear and the edges of dreams, the lines to be found at the limits of hate and of love.
“The War took everything. It took my husband. It took my sons. It took my daughter who was torn from my arms and her throat slit in front of me. Do you want me to to to describe the sound her body made when it landed on the floor? Or the sound in her throat as she gulped no swallowed sorry choked choked on her own blood? Or how the light from the window hit the blood on the floor and turned one band of it white like milk? Do you want me to tell you the look of the sight orb no eye of the man machine sorry soldier who did it? The deadness in his eyes? The nothing in his eyes? Do you want to hear how loud I screamed? I did not know I had so much voice inside me. I put my body on top of her body. My hands, my face, jacketed sorry coated no covered covered in her blood.
“And while I wept, a sick sort of relief came over me—there can be no suffering deeper than this. There is a vault or rather basement sorry the literal words soul basement sorry bottom. There is a bottom and I have found my way to it.
“But, you see, I had not. There was lower still. There is a place past grief I hope none of you have to see in the complete span of your hours.
“I went down to the shore to collect ocean water in an urn to cleanse the wounds of my dead daughter. If there is a boundary between here and gone, this is when I crossed it. There on the sand, a body. A gray swollen body being rolled by the push and pull of the waves. Limp gray swollen, with wounds that yawned no gaped around the chest and ribs. I did not want to look closer, but something drew me. I was pulled by a physical maternal force that is a mystery. This is where I crossed over. The face. The face. My son. My final child. He was the one who was supposed to be safe.
“I looked up at the sky. In that moment, I was gone. I myself became absence. I had no bones, no brain, no blood. I was lesser than a kite. In that moment, I was the sky. I was spread without end.
“There are no boundaries to an absence.
“Here you see the very interpreter himself has rain of the—cries. He cries. You, you who belong here, you hear this story and some of you cry, too.
“My whole life, my whole self feels like a foreign country I’ve arrived in. In this place, the streets are made of phantoms no or ghosts. Gray shifts of movement, fogs in human shapes. I move through them as a ghost myself. Moments of memory, familiarity, of some sense of recognition, they happen and dissolve sooner than I know what it is that’s appeared. A glimpse of a fruit tree in the yard of my childhood, the smell of char on beef, a shape of a face, my sister? my friend? my husband? my child? These apparitions of what was, there and gone too soon for me to feel anything but their their their inexistence.
“We all of us have scaffolding off of which we hang our understanding of ourselves. I was a woman, a mother, a Trojan, a queen. What happens when every piece of that scaffolding collapses? Where do we find our borderlines? What happens when they dissolve? I tell you.
“I looked at my son on the beach. But I did not see my son. I ate with my eyes his wounds alone, the places on his body where he had been opened. I ate with my eyes the inside of him. There I saw infinity. I saw infinity the way you see infinity in the eyes of the infant, the universe that you see when you look into the eyes of the infant. That is what I saw when I looked into the body of my son. And it was inside this universe that I made my decision.
“Perhaps you wonder why I do not cry as I tell you this. As I said, this is a place past grief I hope none of you ever one time have to visit.
“I knew who did this to my son and I went to this man and I appealed to his greed so he would meet with me and what I did was—”
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What’s she saying? Why’d you stop? What is she saying?
“I’m sorry. Please. I’m sorry. I apologize.”
Go on! Don’t silence her! Keep going!
“I say it again: I met with this man who murdered my son and I looked in his eyes. Inside his eyes I saw nothing. This is not the same as infinity. Not the same as galaxies. His eyes they held the most dangerous thing, they held the the top of the sins. Indifference. Indifference. A vacancy where human care should be. I saw that he saw me for the money I might give him. I was nothing. Sub. A dog. Does this sound familiar? What do you see when you see me?
“In his eyes, a vacancy of care. And then what I did—”
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Don’t stop! It’s not your job to protect us! Hey! Just tell us the words that she’s saying!
“I grabbed his face with my hands and I placed my thumbs and my thumbnails into his eyes not placed I pressed my thumbs into his eyes which held all of the cruelty and all the indifference. With my thumbs I pressed and pressed and pressed and pressed. I felt the wet of his eyeballs. For a moment my boundaries were back. In one flash sorry blast detonation of time, all of the borders returned.
“When my thumbs were all the way in, as deep in as they could go, I—
“I popped out his eyeballs. His eyes were not blue, not gray, not brown, not green, not orange, not yellow, not violet. His eyes were the color, oh dear. They were the color of the shit of a baby. And once they were out, each one, the blood drooled from his eyes and women helped me hold him down. And with my hands I reached into the hollows no sorry holes er sockets his sockets those sockets. And I—oh dear, oh god—I plucked oh god I picked out his flesh. I reached into the sockets and I plucked his flesh. It was warm. He screamed. I knew I could scream louder. Here is when—”
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Say it!
“I can’t.”
What does she say? Say it! Go on!
“I can’t. It’s too much.”
Say the words! We came here to know! Say them!
“He screamed. I felt each small bite no morsel sorry bit just bit between my fingers. Here is when I became what you see before you. Here is when I was born a dog. What happens when the boundaries dissolve? Your borders mean nothing. What lives at the limits of loss? Of hate? What terrible place is that? Look at me. I have been. I know. Do not come to this place where everything is fanged and singed and whimpering.
“The border of love. That’s a place, too. I have set my feet there. It can be as frightening. Phantoms live there, too. And boundaries dissolve in a different way, a way that joins you with the widening or or sorry the whole, a way that joins you with the whole. That place is there and it is yours to know. And I say to you with these words, you who belong to this place, you who understand what it is to live in this world, go there. Travel to that place. No one deserves the horror that has washed itself over my life. I do not matter. This country does not matter, not to me, not in this hour. Keep indifference out of your eyes, you who belong to this place. You will—”
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Speak!
“You will hear my yowls in the night, I who am a dog. When the darkness hoards the day, you will hear my yowls and you will remember this sadness. This sadness without boundary, born from loss, born from the dissolving of all the borderlines that made a world make sense. My howls, the howls of this dog you see before you, they will penetrate the soft edges of your brain while you sleep, and for a moment, as your dream turns sideways, we will not be separate. We will be as one.”