Kötü Kalp by Aslı Tohumcu

Depictions of violence against women is so terrible that in fiction it often requires some sort of conceit to make it bearable. I think of, for example, of Fernanda Melchor’s use of gothic horror and skaz in her novels Hurricane Season and Paradais. Likewise, in Kötü Kalp, Aslı Tohumcu frames her gruesome short stories about pedophiles and womanizers and men abusing their power within the plot of a detective novel. But the quality of a novel that uses this strategy shouldn’t be judged merely by how successfully it is able to sustain a confrontation with violence, but by how the adopted genre form is, in turn, changed by its content.

Kötü Kalp by Aslı Tohumcu | Goodreads

Take, for example, Frankenstein by Baghdad by the Iraqi writer Ahmed Saadawi. Not only does he cleverly use the famous horror story of Frankenstein to depict the horrors of the violence in the wake of the American invasion in 2003, but in the process makes Mary Shelley’s famous monster an allegory for the absurd, undying drives of sectarian violence.  

Unfortunately, while Tohumcu adds a detective story plot to her depictions of violence against women, her novel isn’t carried beyond the simple addition of genre tropes, and doesn’t even make use of a twist or big-reveal (the genres greatest tools!) to say something beyond the simple terrible fact of violence. Simply reversing the usual victim and perpetrator isn’t enough for me!

رواية بيئية بلا تاريخ ولا سياسة ولابيئة

” لا نحتاج إلى الكثير من الفلسفة لنقول إن لا حياة دون ماء، لكن استحضاره روائيا يعد أحد الأوجه الأصيلة للبيئة العربية، فلا يمكن أن تقرأ عملا أدبيا من الخليج تحديدا دون أن تستشعر وجود الماء، وكأنه صفة لصيقة بالأدب الخليجي. وهذا ما يؤكد أن الرواية الأصيلة هي تلك التي تستنطق بيئتها روائيا بما يتناسب وما يريد الأدب قوله”

في مراجعتها للرواية “تغريبة القافر” تدعي سارة سليم ان ” الرواية الأصيلة هي تلك التي تستنطق بيئتها روائيا.” ولكن اذا قامت هذه الرواية باستنطاق فكان برفق شديد. تلهم شأن الأفلاج في عمان عدد لا يحصى من التساؤلات عن التاريخ والسياسة والبيئة ولكن لا تطرح الرواية اي منها بل تلجأ الى وصف العالم الطبيعي لا يتجاوز عمق الأدب الرعوي التافه.

مع اننا لا نعرف بدقة أصل نظام الافلاج العمانية يمكن الاشارة على أدلة مثيرة بالاهتمام من مجال علم الآثار تدعى انها تسبق وصول العرب الى جبال الحجر. من كانت هذه الامبراطوريات العتيقة ذات القادرة الادارية اللازمة لانشاء مثل هذه القنوات، وكيف تبني وصان هؤلاء المهاجرون العرب هذا النظام الزراعي المتطور بدون المعرفة التي تجيء بخبرة بنائها، وهل يستوعب الذكرى الجماعي تراث العجائب مجهول الأصول، سواء بعزوها إلى عملاق ملك سليمان او الاعتراف بلغزها باستخدام الصفة بأنها مجرد “شيء مبهم”؟ يشبه هذا الرابط بين تراث الحضارات العتيقة والريف المعاصر العلاقة بين الماضي والحاضر في رواية “الجبل” بفتحي غانم التي تسرد حكاية سكان قرية في الريف المصري يزرقون من نبش الآثار الفرعونية وبيعها للأجانب بدون ان يفهمون قيمتها التراثية ومحاولات الحكومة المعاصرة لايقافهم وتهجيرهم لقرية “نموذجي” لكي يساهموا في النشاط الاقتصادي الناتج. ولكن لا تتناول رواية “تغريبة القافر” موضوع هذا الرابط إنما تبتكر حكاية ولد منعم عليه بمهارة شبه ساحرة تمكّنه اكتشاف منابع المياه الخفية في الجبال.   بدلاً من “استنطاق” المجتمعات التقليدية وكيف تعتماد على التراث المبهم فيضرب الكاتب كليشيه ال”مختار” مثل ما نشاهد في حرب النجوم وهاري بوتر.

الزراعة في منطقة جبال الحجر التي تستفيد من الأفلاج هو مبنى على نظام الملك الجماعي الموروث من العصر الكلاسيمي، نظام يوفر مصدر ثامر  للحكايات عن الحياة الاجتماعية. يمكن التخييل نسخة عمانية من رواية عبد الرحمان المنيف “التيه” تسرد حكاية مجتمع تقليدي يهدده فرض علاقات رأسمالية للملكية. ولكن بدلاً من هذا فالصراع الاجتماعي الرئيسي بالرواية يركز في نبذ الولد وتشكيك سكان القرية عنه بسبب مهارته الساحر ة في ايجاد المياه تحت الأرض. وبالاضافة الى ذلك يضيف الكاتب حبكة زوجية من أجل تزيين رواية رعوية بقليل من الغرام.

كل التغطية الصادرة من عمان تخبر ان يتوجه تراثها الثقافية الفريدة من نوعها ازمة وجودية بسبب الاسراف والتلوث واسلوب الاستهلاكية المعاصر غير المستدام.  تصف مقالة محزنة للغاية كيف نظام الافلاج الذي قد استمر لمدة قرون الأن على حد الانهيار التام بسبب الضخ غير المنظم للمياه الذي يكاد استنفاد طبقات المياه الجوفية وبذلك جفاف الافلاج المنتظر. ولكن لا تتناول “تغريبة القافر” شأن السياسة ولا البيئة كما لا تتناول التاريخ. بدلاً من استخدام الرواية الرمزية لكي تعالج مأساة استغلال الإنسان للعالم الطبيعي الذي يزرقه، يقدم الكاتب في عرض ثالث من روايته تطور مفاجئ صعب التصديق حيث الماء هو تهديد حرفي.

سارة سليم على حق عندما تقول انه غير ممكن أن تقرأ عملا أدبيا من الخليج تحديدا دون أن تستشعر وجود الماء، وهذه الرواية ليست استثناء. بالصراحة تستشعر الماء خليجياً، يعني تتجنب القول بأي شيء تحليلي او نقدي بل تعوذ بالكليشيهات الرعوي المطمئنة وبساطة أخلاقية القصص الخرافية

https://www.alquds.co.uk/%D8%AA%D8%BA%D8%B1%D9%8A%D8%A8%D8%A9-%D8%A7%D9%84%D9%82%D8%A7%D9%81%D8%B1-%D8%B1%D9%88%D8%A7%D9%8A%D8%A9-%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%B9%D9%85%D8%A7%D9%86%D9%8A-%D8%B2%D9%87%D8%B1%D8%A7%D9%86-%D8%A7/

https://www.google.com/books/edition/Production_and_the_Exploitation_of_Resou/4WFqEAAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=oman+water+divining&pg=PA285&printsec=frontcover

https://e360.yale.edu/features/oasis_at_risk_omans_ancient_water_channels_are_drying_up

الخصوصية المُترجَمة

ومن هنا بدأنا نشهد نصوصاً نقدية لم تُكتَب إلا لخدمة ماكينة سوق الكتاب الاستهلاكية الهائلة، تروِّج للكتب كما تروَّج منتجات الألبان والأجبان وصندويشات الهامبرغر ووجبات الكنتاكي. ولا عجب من ذلك فصناعة النشر صناعة مرابحها عالية، ولذلك كانت بحاجة إلى أرباب دعاية ومروّجين.

من مقالة من الناقد إلى المُراجِع: تحولات في النقد الأدبي المعاصر المنشورة في موقع الجمهورية لمحمد أمير ناشر النعم

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فإذا قلت لهم إن هذه هي الكتب التي كانت تُقايَض بعد ترجمتها بالذهب داخل بيت الحكمة في بغداد، فحتماً سيلهفون عليها، ولا أدري حقيقة هل هذه الكتب حقاً التي كانت تقايض وريقاتها بالذهب في دار الحكمة أم لا، أو لربما نسخ منها؟ فما أنا إلا محض تاجر، يحق لي استجلاب بعض الأكاذيب الصغيرة أثناء تسويق بضاعتي كالأكاذيب التي ساقها الأعرابي عندما باعني شبرا.

من رواية مسرى الغرانيق في مدن العقيق لأميمة الخميس

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انتهيتُ مؤخراً من قراءة رواية مسرى الغرانيق في مدن العقيق للكاتبة السعودية أميمة الخميس، رواية طويلة متقنة تتناول رحلات بائع كتب يسافر في جميع أنحاء العالم العربي خلال العصر الذهبي. تمثل قراءة مثل هذه الروايات الطويلة والتاريخية فُسحةً من التغيير في ثقافةٍ تتميز بنقص الانتباه والذاكرة. كما أن قراءة الكتب بعد سنواتٍ من خفوت الضجيج المرافق لنشرها – فازت الرواية بجائزة نجيب محفوظ عام 2018 -، يبدو وكأنه تحدٍ في عصر تتشكّل فيه الآراء والأذواق بتأثيرٍ من النقاد الأدبيين المهنيين والنقاد الشعبيين على السوشيل ميديا. لكن، وعلى الرغم من سعيي لتجاوز الذائقة العالمية المسيطرة على سوق القراءة، مُحاوِلاً البحث عن كتب فريدة، لم أستطع تجنب التفكير في نقاش النقد وأذواق جمهور القراءة العالمي أثناء القراءة، وخصوصاً الفكرة التي خطرت ببالي على نحوٍ مفاجئ وأنا أقرأ مسرى الغرانيق، وهي أن الميزة الأسلوبية للرواية هي بالذات ما قد يمنعها من الحصول على شهرة عالمية.

تتبعُ الرواية بائعَ الكتب مزيد بن عبد الله الحنفي في زياراته إلى عواصم العالم العربي، مثل بغداد والقدس والقاهرة وقرطبة، متورطاً خلال هذه الزيارات في أجواء السياسة والنضال الديني والبُعد الرومانسي لكل مدينة.  تجيد الرواية تصوير خصائص البيئة المتنوعة بثروتها المعمارية والثقافية والحيوانية والدينية. أكثر ما يميز الكتاب هو اهتمامه بالتفاصيل. تُكرِّسُ المؤلِّفة وقتاً كافياً لوصف كل شيء، بدءاً من الطيور المحلية في منطقة دجلة والفرات ومسار هجرتها، وطرق زراعة البرتقال في بلاد الشام، والمنافسة الجغرافيّة/السياسيّة بين الفسطاط ومدينة المعز  قبل قرون من اندماجهما في مدينة القاهرة الوحيدة. لا تتوانى المؤلفة عن شرح الخصوصية الإقليمية والتاريخية المرافقة لأحداث الرواية، بما يشي بثقةٍ منها بنضج قرائها وبقدرتهم على التعلم عن الماضي، كواقع منفصل بحد ذاته لا كمسرحٍ للمعرفة الفورية وكأنه مدينة ملاهٍ. الحياة الفكرية خلال ما يسمى بالعصور الوسطى كانت غنية بما يكفي لتنشأ حروبها الثقافية الخاصة بها، إلى جانب الحركات الدينية والمُشاحنات المحلية الأصغر نطاقاً. العديد من الصراعات الدينية التي تصفها  الرواية لم نسمع بها، كقراء من خارج الثقافة العربية من قَبل، فكانت الرواية فرصة مفيدة لنتعرف عليها لأول مرة: المذهب الحنبلي، النسطورية، والشيعية المصرية. في حين أن القضايا التي قد نفترض أنها شغلت عقول الناس في ذلك العصر لم تكد تُذكر حتى. وخير مثال على ذلك هو ما يسمى بالحروب الصليبية. الإشارة الوحيدة للحروب الصليبية في الرواية بأكملها تأتي على الغلاف الخلفي لترجمتها الإنكليزية. بحسب ما ترى مؤرخة الفن الإسلامي ستيفاني مولدر (Stephennie Mulder)، فإن مصطلح «الحملة الصليبية» هو أقرب إلى أن يكون مفارقة تاريخية – طريقة للنظر إلى الوراء في الحركات المعقدة، والمفصولة في كثير من الأحيان عن مجموعة واسعة من الدوافع والعضوية والتكتيكات والنتائج، وتنظيمها في لاهوت أو هوية واحدة متماسكة. في حالة النسخة الإنكليزية من الرواية، يبدو استخدام المصطلح كإشارة تم صوغها لصالح القرّاء الإنكليز. ولكن الكتاب نفسه ليس مُصاغاً من أجل القراء الإنكليز، بل هو نص يحاور التاريخ والأدب العربي ويحمل تناصّاً معه. اللغة العربية قادرة على أن تتحاور مع أصوات الماضي، مثل الجاحظ أو المعري أو المعتزلة دون عبء أن يبدو الأمر وكأنه جلسة لاستحضار الأرواح!

كل هذا التعقيد والدقة في تصوير الأماكن يذكرني بمقولة لإل بي هارتلي: «الماضي وطن أجنبي،  يقومون بفعل الأشياء على نحوٍ مختلف هناك». هذا هو الانطباع الذي نتوقع أن يتركه لدينا الخيال التاريخي الناجح، الحفاظ على مساحةٍ من الغربة مع التاريخ البعيد وشعوبه. كثيراً ما نتوقع أن تستخدم الرواية الرمزيةَ السرديةَ لخلق رابط بيننا وبين الماضي، ولذلك تصبح كل حكاية مجرد انعكاس ضمني للحاضر. ولكن في حالة الرواية العربية، تُؤمِّنُ اللغة نفسها إمكانية الترابط لأنها العنصر المشترك بين عصرين. بهذا المعنى، تُعتبر الروايات التاريخية باللغة العربية فريدة جداً، على الأقل مقارنة باللغة الإنكليزية، التي لا يمكن فهمها عن مسافة قرون قليلة. ولكن ربما كانت الميزة الأبرز للغة العربية — المتمثلة في تحقيقها الانسجام عبر القرون والثقافات بفضل شموليتها— مهددةً  بالتلاشى لدى ترجمتها إلى لغة عالمية أخرى. لا أنتقد هنا مترجمي الرواية، الذين قاوموا في مواضع مختلفة إغراء تبسيط النص لصالح القارئ الأجنبي، لكنّ سبب التلاشي المحتمل هو اللغة الإنكليزية نفسها، وهي لغة أكثر تحديداً على المستويين التاريخي والجغرافي. على ذكر موضوع اللغات المهيمنة وخصائصها، سبق وأن ذكر أستاذ الأدب العربي مايكل كوبرسون، عن تجربته في ترجمة مقامات الحريري، أنه لجأ إلى «خمسين لغة إنكليزية مختلفة». بالمختصر- كل من العربية والإنكليزية لغتان عالميتان، ولكن الطبعَ المُهيمنَ لكلٍ منهما مختلف في جوهره عن الآخر.

 بينما تقتبس الخميس وشخصياتُها بسهولة من التراث العربي في روايتها، يجاهد الناطقون بالإنكليزية كلغةٍ أم لفهم إنكليزية شكسبير، ولن يفهموا إنكليزية تشوسر دون قاموس تاريخي. يُفسد مظهر السفر عبر الزمن في ترجمة رواية الخميس، مثلاً، بسماع بائع كتبٍ في العصور الوسطى يستخدم كلمة (strumpet) وهي كلمة قديمة بشكل  مفرط وفاقع في السياق الإنكليزي، ولكن قديمة كأن تُنطق على لسان أوسكار وايلد أو جون ميلتون، لا ككلمة قد تخرج من فم شاعر بيوولف. بل إن هناك عدداً كبيراً من ترجمات ملحمة بيوولف – التي يعود تاريخ مخطوطتها المعروفة حتى اليوم إلى القرن العاشر –  إلى الإنكليزية نفسها، أنجزها كتابٌ معروفون مثل جي آر آر توكين وشيموس هيني. عندما يتوخى كاتب إنكليزي الدقة التاريخية في صياغته اللغوية، يلجأ أحياناً إلى ما يشبه اختراعاً أسلوبياً – خلق لهجة متخيلة من الإنكليزية لكي يستغربها القارئ الإنكليزي مثلما فعل الكاتب بول كينغسنورث  في رواية الاستيقاظ.  تدور أحداث هذه الرواية تقريباً في الفترة الزمنية نفسها لمدن العقيق، ولكن يتم سردها باستخدام شكل مبتكر من اللغة الإنكليزية، يُقصَد به إعادة خلق «الصوت» القديم. بسبب هذا الحل الإبداعي، احتلت الرواية مركزاً لها في القائمة الطويلة لجائزة البوكر.

حصلت رواية الخميس مدن العقيق على جائزة نجيب محفوظ، وهي من بين أفضل الجوائز التي يتوقعها المؤلفون العرب. لا فائدة من حبس الأنفاس في انتظار إصدار قبّعة تحمل عنوان رواية مدن العقيق مطبوعاً عليها، على نحوٍ شبيه بما فعلته الكاتبة  سالي روني، ولكن ومع المضي قدماً في قراءة كتاب مثل رواية الخميس، لا يستطيع المرء دفع مشاعر الضيق وخيبة الأمل لأن الكتاب لم يلقَ سوى القليل من الترحيب عند نشر ترجمته إلى اللغة الإنكليزية. في هذه الحالة، لا بدّ من تَذكُّر  المقالة الأخيرة من منى كريم عن الترجمات الغربية بعنوان «الشعراء الغربيون يختطفون قصائدكم ويسمّونها ترجمات»:

اعتبارُ  الترجمة خدمةً لشاعر العالم الثالث، تسهيلاً لدخوله في حيّز في اللغة الاستعمارية أو احتفاءاً، أو اكتشافاً، ببساطة، هو أمر لا ينبغي التسامح معه. يعكس مشهد الترجمة إلى اللغة الإنكليزية اليوم عقلية عامة يشترك الكتاب الغربيون أنفسهم  فيها- الفكرة بأنهم يعرفون كل شيء، وأنهم قد شاهدوا كل شيء، والشيء الوحيد المتبقي لهم هو أن يأخذونا تحت أجنحتهم.

أولئك الأدباء العالميون هم الأشخاص نفسهم الذين يحتاجون حاشية لمعرفة من هو أبو نواس! أيُّ عالمية هذه؟ بسبب الديناميكيات السياسية واختلال توازن القوة، تعترف منى بأن عقدة النقص قد وصلت إلى درجة أن بعض الكتاب العرب يفضلون نشر أعمالهم باللغة الإنكليزية أولاً، قبل نشرها باللغة العربية الأصلية. كي تعلنه الغارديان كأفضل كاتب عربي.غالباً ما يتم اعتبار إرضاء حاجات القارئ الإنكليزي باستخدام أحداث «تاريخية» مثل الحروب الصليبية والحاشية المفصلة، كأنه إهانة للكتاب والشعراء العرب. لكن ربما ما يبدو أسوأ من هذه الإهانة الشخصية، هو إسقاط عناصر التنوع والخصوصية التي تميز رواية مثل مدن العقيق. السفر عبر الأدب الكوزموبوليتي في عالمنا الحديث هو عبارة عن زيارة نفس المدن المتطابقة، الجلوس في نفس المقاهي الهبسترية وقراءة نفس الأعمال الأدبية متوسطة الجودة. تستخدم رواية أميمة الخميس هذا النوع من السفر عبر الزمن الحاضر في أعمالٍ من الأدب العربي، الذي يذكرنا بعصر كان فيه السفر بين المدن العربية المختلفة بمثابة رحلة الى عوالم جديدة، حيث لعبت اللغة دور جواز السفر. ربما من الأوفق أن يُوفّر الأدب فرصة للإضاءة على الاختلاف، عوضاً عن أن يلعب دور «القاسم المشترك الأدنى» بين ثقافاتٍ عالمية يمكن بالكاد التمييز بينها.

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Review: Wûf by Kemal Varol

Do we really believe that the human imagination can sustain itself without being startled by other shapes of sentience?

-David Abram

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There is a scene early on in Kemal Varol’s novel Wûf in which an old, injured dog gets the watchman at a kennel to give him a cigarette. The dog, nicknamed Grandad, had been brought in after being found blood-soaked and with his back legs amputated up in the mountains. His fur is matted and his belly is covered in stitches, and in place of his legs are two wheels, attached to each stump. Unable to directly speak a human language, he communicates through barking.

For the first time since the day he was brought to the shelter, Grandad let out a woof, not to frighten or threaten, just to communicate. But the watchman didn’t understand…

“You want bread?” he asked. 

Grandad barked.

“Those wheels bothering you?” 

Granddad barked even louder. 

“You want food?”

The watchman finally catches on that it is might be the cigarette that Grandad is after, and asks him to bark three times if he’s right. Grandad does so, and so the watchman places a freshly lit cigarette into his saliva-coated mouth.

There is something off about the scene when you first read it, even despite the fact that we have already been introduced to a whole cast of speaking dogs at the kennel. Off because stories with talking animals, regardless of how whimsical, are still expected to set their own fantastical ground rules early on, and then stick to them lest the illusion gets its wires crossed. We’re willing to believe in the proverbs and poetry of Watership Down as long as its characters continue hopping around like rabbits. On the other hand, we can accept the fact of Roger being framed for murder and canoodling with Jessica Rabbit as long as he doesn’t try to hop around like one. But the talking dogs of Wûf seem to renegotiate their relationship with humans throughout the whole book. With their foul-mouthed vernacular and colorful nicknames—“forknose”, “Mikrob”, “Gunsmoke” —the dogs initially seem to share some sort of insular gang subculture, like a canine version of The Warriors. At other points, they seem fully integrated into the human world as working dogs, understanding not only that they are being trained but what they are being trained for. At some points, like in the cigarette scene, dogs can communicate with humans, and are apparently entire cognizant of the human world and its simple vices. At others, dogs and humans stare back at one another in incomprehension. The dogs of Wûf are fully capable of expressing the range of classic dramatic emotions, from jealousy to heartsickness, but still lick each other’s faces and shit on the ground.

This is especially true of the novel’s many tie-ins to the regional conflict taking place in the early 1990s in the south of Turkey where the book is set. The main character Mikasa (named for a type of Turkish soccer ball) is being trained by the Turkish military as a mine-sniffing dog, and the novel is full of references to political rallies, coups, and violent confrontations with guerillas. But never once in the original book is the word “Kurd” or “Kurdish” ever used. Instead, Mikasa and the other dogs refer to the conflict as one between Northerners and Southerners. The logos and flags of Kurdish parties are described by the dogs without a clear sense of their exact political meaning. The dogs know that the bombs they are sniffing out have been left by guerillas, but they don’t know exactly why. Strangely, at one point Mikasa even mentions that the papers declare the death of twelve of them, implying briefly that beyond their ability to speak, dogs in the universe of Wûf might be able to read.

Which would all be cause for worry if the novel was in fact written as a neat political allegory of the Kurdish conflict. We could then easily guess which role the oppressed and unheard animals were supposed to be playing. From what we know of Varol–whether his obscure poetry or his eschewal of declarative forms of politics– it seems out of character to be trying to write an Anatolian Animal Farm. Politics in the novel function as a backdrop; the rugged scenery of what is at its base a simple, tragic love story. And rugged is an understatement. In his quest to be joined with his love Melsa, the dog Mikasa is cursed, kicked, muzzled, starved, shot at, and blown up by mines. The details of Grandad’s injuries as he tries to heal are terrible and vivid.

His stump, which had dragged on the ground, slowly regained its range of motion until it finally pounded the dirt and twitched side to side. The stitches on his belly came out on their own, the cuts on his back scabbed over, and his bloodstained coat began to shine anew. The only thing left were the bandages on his legs. The harness always got in the way of his attempts to gnaw them off.

This description would be familiar to many in Turkey, who have themselves been witness to acts of cruelty and extermination carried the country’s large stray dog population. Varol’s hometown of Ergani, a city in the Diyarbakir province in the south, has seen its own stray dog problems along with political violence stemming from the Kurdish conflict. The media often has stories about dogs that have been poisoned en masse, CCTV footage of dogs being indiscriminately beaten, and conversations about how to forcibly remove them from the city. A July, 2019 report on NTV claimed that the forests around Istanbul are home to more than 8 thousand stray dogs that have been shipped out from the city center, showing surreal footage of them wandering around in large groups on a deserted rural road. One resident of a nearby village claims that the city is under attack every night by roving gangs of dogs, while another details the efforts taken to bring out leftover food to the dogs in the woods. These simultaneous reactions of dread and sympathy towards dogs is a feature of daily life. The lighthearted tribute to cats seen in the recent film Kedi could easily be remade as a tragedy called Köpek.

Which is to say, as a novel offering perspective on Turkey, it would be enough for Wûf to actually just be a book about the experience and perspective of dogs. Paying attention to dogs and their lives would at the same time be paying attention to an important aspect of modern Turkish life. Whether the lady carrying bags of cat food to the alley behind her house, the New Age office worker always posting about shelter animals on her Facebook, or the pharmacist caught on camera fixing up a dog’s paw, Turkey is filled with those who have abided through the long stretch of national chauvinism and the cult of the AVM shopping mall through an ethics of care and maintenance turned towards animals. Whereas Americans treat dogs like their own pampered, unconditionally loving children, a Turkish person can see a dog in the street, living independently in the liminal space between nature and domesticity and help them without the urge to become their exclusive owner. It would make sense that they could also imagine dogs as having their own culture which only liminally fit into their own.

This alternative approach to animal empathy is a good lesson for a foreign book to make to an American reader. I admit that when I first read the book, I went looking for a definitive taxonomy of talking animals out of frustration with the cigarette scene. From classic fables to non-human sidekick movies, talking animals usually do follow one of many clearly defined tropes. But rather than taking things so literally (or figuratively, I suppose), Wûf asks us to think about the experience of dogs on their own terms. This is especially true in terms of the violence we see throughout the book. With its smoking, mine-sweeping, lusting and fighting dogs, Wûf reminds us that in their own bodies, animals are unique and remarkable, and don’t need to be analogized to humans in order to be given permission to feel. In their partial and overlapping homologies with humans, they confound our efforts to either wholly relate or wholly reject their proximity to us. Rather, the dogs of Wûf present us with a better source for empathy, an aesthetics of what Anat Pick calls the ‘creaturely’—the material, the temporal, and the vulnerable. This is an approach to animals in literature that creates connections with animals “via the bodily vulnerability –the creatureliness – we share with other animals” (Pick, 2011, p. 10). What we share is not a commensurate consciousness, but an elemental ability to feel. Thought about this way, Varol’s novel no longer seems like a strange, unsorted allegory. It comes off instead like a story trying its best to show us that dogs too have it rough, that their experience of hunger and injury is not different than ours, that they’re so alike in their feeling bodies that it wouldn’t be outrageous to think that they too might just want a smoke to take the edge off.

*

Matthew Chovanec is the English translator of Gavur Mahallesi by Mıdırgıç Margosyan and of Sinek Isırıklarının Müellifi by Barış Bıçakçı. Chovanec also recently obtained his PhD in Turkish and Arabic literature from the University of Texas at Austin.  

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Turkish Dude Lit Has a “Dad Rock” Moment: Barış Bıçakçı’s The Mosquito Bite Author

https://www.asymptotejournal.com/blog/by/matthew-chovanec/

[A] stream of academic writing still holds up these dudes and their self-pity as emblematic of national identity.

Turkish dude lit is much like dude lit elsewhere: it deals with the trials of privileged man-boys. Unlike some of the genre’s more vilified geographic variants, though, it has yet to be carefully examined. While grateful for the chance to indulge in it freely, former Asymptote contributor Matthew Chovanec has his qualms; in particular, he argues, pinning Turkey’s Volksgeist on its male antiheroes actually does them (and their readers) a disservice. Enter The Mosquito Bite Author, in Chovanec’s own recent translation: might acclaimed writer Barış Bıçakçı’s subtle parody of the vain male figure pave the way to its survival?

I really enjoy Turkish novels about men wasting away in their comfortable, petty-bourgeois lives. I can’t get enough of them. I love following along, a vicarious flaneur, as the protagonists stroll through my favorite Istanbul streets. I’m charmed by their ability to take just the right line of surrealist poetry from the Ikinci Yeni movement and make it fit as an oracular judgment on their own personal haplessness. I even like reading about them sitting at home, staring at their bookshelves and resenting their wives. Something about them has me consuming these titles with the faithfulness of a reader of policiers or harlequin novels, and Turkey keeps producing them with almost pulp-like regularity. Every decade, it seems, brings its own antihero, yawning at modernist art exhibits, slinking away from military coups, scorning the superficiality that comes with economic liberalization, or trying out the latest fashions in postmodern soliloquy.

While I myself am a voracious reader of highly literate accounts of sociopathy, I appreciate that they aren’t for everyone. As an American, I can also admit that I’ve basically taken a circuitous linguistic route to enjoying works that would face derision back home, reveling as I am in another country’s “Dude Lit.” Laura Fraser describes the genre as one whose “books generally propel a confused, often drug-addled or alcoholic, narcissistic, philandering male protagonist to, well, not self-discovery, but some semblance of adult behavior.” Her description could just as easily apply to the protagonists of Turkish novels like Yusuf Atılgan’s Aylak Adam, Oğuz Atay’s Tutunamayanlar, Vedat Türkali’s Bir Gün Tek Basına, or Ayhan Gecgin’s Gençlik Düşü; they, in turn, make frequent reference to the Slacker International, inhabiting the same fictional universe as Seymour Glass or John Shade.

Despite teeming with such men, these novels have not yet been roped off as Dude Lit. The garish, totemic look of Tutunamayanlar on a bookshelf evokes that of Infinite Jest, but owning the former somehow doesn’t come with the same level of chauvinist insistence. Although the Turkish language already has a fantastic translation for the term “mansplaining,” and scholars like Çimen Günay-Erkol have begun to problematize overt forms of hegemonic masculinity in Turkish fiction, a stream of academic writing still holds up these dudes and their self-pity as emblematic of national identity. I, however, would love to have the pressure taken off of the Turkish male literary canon and the niche tastes of those who, like me, continue to canonize it. I have been eagerly waiting for the Turkish Dude Novel to have its “Dad Rock” moment:

One important thing that happened in the 2010s was that rock music (especially the kind made by white, dad-aged men) drifted to the edges of mainstream popular culture. And though this shift has not yet made up for decades of erasure of more diverse voices, streaming has widened the array of easily accessible artists and perspectives.

The catch is that this has not spelled its irrelevance—quite the contrary. Maybe the gently teasing term “dad rock” cut this music appropriately down to size, removed its albatross of “greatness” and rendered it ripe for rediscovery by the sort of people who might have initially balked at its patriarchal omnipresence.

With a similar recognition of the specificity of the male narcissist experience, perhaps I and others like me might enjoy Turkish petty-bourgeois narcissist novels in peace, without them having to speak for anything more than themselves.

That is why I was thrilled to first read (and now translate) The Mosquito Bite Author (UT Press) by the acclaimed Barış Bıçakçı. The novel follows the daily life of aspiring writer Cemil in the months after he submits his own novel manuscript to a publisher in Istanbul. Living in an anonymous apartment complex in the outskirts of Ankara, Cemil spends his days going on walks, cooking for his wife, repairing leaks in his neighbor’s bathroom, and having elaborate imaginary conversations with his potential editor about the meaning of life and art. Uncertain of whether his manuscript will be accepted or not, Cemil lets his mind wander: he shifts from thoughtful meditations on the origin of the universe and the trajectory of political literature in Turkey, for instance, to panic over his own worth as a writer or incredulity towards the objects that make up his quiet suburban world.

The Mosquito Bite Author follows in the great tradition of the “Turkish Oblomov” by focusing on someone who initially seems to be an undeserving protagonist—much like the titular character in Ivan Goncharov’s work. Borrowing from the narcissistic, petty-bourgeois male novels before it, it relishes in the mundane and the self-absorbed. Cemil stares wistfully at jars of jam, yells at soccer matches, and mopes around the apartment until his wife Nazlı gets home. He has written a manuscript, yes, but as we wait along with him to hear back from the publisher, we aren’t sure whether or not it will end up justifying the attention we’ve given him. If it’s a work of genius, then all of Cemil’s aphorisms and insights will prove to have been profound and poetic. If it is rejected, then we will have spent 150 pages following another one of those failed writer characters we so often get from authors who “don’t have the emotional depth needed to write normal characters,” as Cemil himself notes.

This self-aware literary framing is not lost on Bıçakçı, who gives so many knowing winks to his own writing that we lose track of how many levels of irony we’ve read through. A particularly important strand targets the vain male artist. Bıçakçı’s male characters are subtle parodies, apprehensive idealists whose inane romanticism gets called out by the very women they thought would idolize them in silence. Throughout the novel, Cemil’s artistic project isn’t undermined by deep existential questions, but by the sexist entitlement lying at its core. It becomes increasingly clear that his pretention towards becoming a writer is being wholly underwritten by Nazlı, who supports him financially. He himself admits as much when, at the beginning of the novel, he tells a manager at the publishing house: “‘To tell the truth, my wife is taking care of me now . . . and she’s a doctor so she’s pretty good at it too.’” This caretaking extends to emotional labor as well. In a critical moment towards the end of the novel,  as Cemil deals with disappointing news, Nazlı tells him to go read his favorite J.D. Salinger story (“‘I think if you listen to Seymour’s story about Bananafish you’ll feel better’”). Her comment is unintentionally infantilizing—she offers her husband a great book to calm him down, as one might a baby pacifier—and it tears Cemil out “by the roots.” It also lays bare the cultural diminutiveness of the literary canon that he holds in such high regards. But it is precisely this kind of irony which ultimately assures a future for protagonists like him. Rather than pinning the fate of the Turkish soul on the male antihero, The Mosquito Bite Author takes the pressure off him by revealing his idiosyncracies as just one particular lived experience.

Paradoxically, once Cemil’s stream of consciousness and intertextual psychodrama cease to be read as allegories of national identity, they offer a vivid portrait of contemporary life in Turkey. A few chapters of the novel, for example, relate the construction of his nondescript apartment bloc back in the 1980s, treating us to a fascinating, understated account of urbanization and the overwhelming influence of the construction sector on Turkish politics. Remembering his college days, Cemil unwittingly dramatizes the awkward process of student depoliticization in the years after Turkey’s harsh post-coup crackdown. When he takes the bus to do errands, we get to sit in traffic and look at the absurdly built landscape which defines the real lived experience of most Turks. Bıçakçı uses the breathing room provided by his bumbling, introspective protagonist to create just enough distance for the political and the historical to come into focus.

Decentering the male petty-bourgeois narcissist not only comes as a relief for niche readers like me; in addition, it can free other social groups in Turkey from the burden of providing anthropological insight to foreign readers. Books that center on the experience of the country’s marginalized often perpetuate an exoticized vision of a foreign land in well-meaning liberal audiences. The Turkish author Ayfer Tunç says she resents the international publishing market for this “new orientalist” perspective, expecting “exotic novels full of elements below their standards.” Token subalternity, I can only imagine, must feel like an albatross too. That is why I hope that Turkish Dude Lit can channel the power of universally recognizable slackers, helping readers from other countries have both less titillating expectations and higher standards regarding Turkish culture at large. Ironically, a novel about a typical, boring, self-centered Turkish dude might end up providing just such a widely shared experience, offering literature that rather than exotic is simply niche.

Image credit: Teymur Ağalıoğlu

 

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Bioregional Imaginings in Two Recent Mesopotamian Novels

https://www.jadaliyya.com/Details/42094/Bioregional-Imaginings-in-Two-Recent-Mesopotamian-Novels-42094

Image via Pixabay.

In a recent interview with Jadaliyya, the journalist and researcher Khalid Suleiman talks about his new book on the looming threats of drought and climate change in Iraq and explains the special role that art and culture can play in raising environmental awareness in the country. Suleiman makes special note of science fiction works that imagine future worlds of ecological catastrophe: ones in which the ice sheets have melted and Basra has drowned in seawater, or where climate change has made the surface of the country too hot for human habitation. The article gives the example of the story Graffiti 2042 by Muhammad Khudair in which residents are driven by extreme temperatures to build a “subterranean” city. During a brief excursion above ground the story’s main character sees a friend of his painting a mural painted with the words:

Woe to the prophecies which described what would be our ugly distorted lives

تعساً للنبوءات التي رسَمت حياتَنا الشوهاء

Unfortunately, while environmental catastrophe has already begun to unfold in Iraq, Suleiman claims that practically nobody but fiction writers are thinking seriously about these threats. The prophecies, it seems, are not being heeded.      

Not only has recent fiction in Iraq envisioned future environmental dystopia, but it has also worked to retrieve historical landscapes, and to reimagine the natural environment of Iraq as it exists today. While works like those by Muhammad Khudair work through the conventions of science fiction, other genres have used what Tom Lynch et al. refer to as the bioregional imagination.”[1] Bioregionalism is a way of thinking about place that is grounded in the natural environment and people’s relationship to it. The term originated as part of the environmental movement referring to efforts to move past arbitrary political geographies in favor of thinking about place as being organized around naturally-determined boundaries such as ecosystems and watersheds. A bioregional imagination is those efforts to pay closer attention to what makes a place biotically unique, bringing with it a sensibility towards the natural world and our connection to it. A biological imagination also has the potential to act as a proactive force in an environmental movement forever rallying around the next disaster or impending crisis, allowing it instead to reimagine human communities that live sustainably in place.

Using the term bioregional imagination helps to reframe our assumptions of how generic conventions are being used, and to grant us a better understanding of a book’s implicit biocritical themes.

 

Iraq’s own bioregional imagination is overwhelmingly focused on its waterways. For a country located almost completely within the Tigris-Euphrates watershed, it is no surprise how often Iraqi novels and poetry invoke the nation’s lakes, rivers, and riparian zones, albeit most often in tangential ways or in the literal background.[2] But it is precisely for this reason that the concept of the bioregional imagination is so eminently useful. It can help us both reveal environmental themes within fiction that are otherwise not explicit or didactic, and can also point us towards unique narratological framings and thought-provoking conceits used in novels without having to rely on overused and one-size-fits-all genre designations like magical realism” or picaresque novels.Using the term bioregional imagination helps to reframe our assumptions of how generic conventions are being used, and to grant us a better understanding of a books implicit biocritical themes. Closer attention to the role of water bodies and ways in novels reveals how they are quite historically dynamic and often constitutive of the cultural worlds that novels depict.  

Environmental Memory in Al-Sayyid Asghar Akbar


Published in 2012, Al-Sayyid Asghar Akbar by Murtedha Gzar has been hailed as a local adaptation of magical realist conventions to the Iraqi context. The novel tells the story of Al-Sayyid Asghar Akbar, an enigmatic character who arrives in the city of Najaf in 1871 by boat, and proceeds to peddle a sort of prophetic genealogy to the residents of the city. The novel uses a playful and exaggerated historical fiction to recount much of the history of late nineteenth and early twentieth century Najaf, taking up themes such as religious patronage, political cronyism, and military imperialism. Much of the reason for the designation of the novel as
magical realismcomes from the novels capricious mix of fact and fiction. Asghar Akbars own story, for example, is narrated unreliably by his three granddaughters from the distant vantage point of 2005. Through this theme of genealogy and family history, the history of the city is as well re-narrated from multiple contradictory angles. Yasmeen Hanoush has detailed the ways in which Gzars novel depicts the city of Najafs using unusual temporalities in a way that shapes the novels suspicious and even potentially magical eponymous character.[3]

In quite a similar way, the geography of the city, and in particular its hydrology, is so continuously remapped as to make it come under suspicion. This eliciting of suspicion is exactly how Gzar triggers our bioregional imagination. As Lynch, Glotfelty & Armbruster say one of the tools bioregionalists often employ to reterritorialize their lives and place is mapping. Liberated from the control of the official cartographers of states and nations, map-making can be an empowering tool of reinhabiting and reimagining place, allowing us to visualize in a nearly infinite array of contexts and scales the multiple dimensions of our home places.”[4]

 One particular plot point that Hanoush focuses on in her article is the disappearance of a small imaginary town called Baghlat Abbas, which was told to have been located on the shores of the Sea of Najaf, an almost supernatural water body which once existed directly west of the town. Although located far inland and separated from the Euphrates river by several miles, popular lore adapted into the book tells of how Indian and Chinese traders were once able to pull their boats up to the city directly. In fact, the eponymous character of the novel himself arrives in Najaf on a ship called the Baghlat Abbas.  

Due to association with other fictive and uncanny elements including the unusual ship, its eccentric captain, and the timeless character of the place, the “Sea of Najaf” (which is documented to have existed during a former historical era) comes across as a fictive place in the novel.[5]

But there is also something very natural about the case of Baghlat Abbas and the Sea of Najaf as well. Although it may seem like an element from science fiction or fantasy, the water body known as the Sea of Najaf has in fact taken many different shapes throughout history. A look at the historical record of explorers and rulers, dating back as far as Alexander the Great, details an environment in constant flux. Overall, however, the Sea of Najaf for much of its history existed as a large freshwater lake whose proportions shifted according to seasonal rainfall. The Portuguese explorer Pedro Teixiera passed through Najaf in 1604 and described the lake in the following way: In the rainy season, they are swollen by much water from that desert and form here as it were a great sea; whereof the water-marks bear witness, showing a difference of fifty palms between high-water-mark and the level at which I saw it, in the reason of least water. This lake is of no regular form, but has various arms.”[6] And rather than the stuff of fantasy, pilgrims from India, as well as European explorers, once really did arrive in the city by boat. As a wetland depression area, the Sea of Najaf was once fed by various inlets, including the Euphrates itself (scientists have confirmed that the river once flowed to the West rather than the East of the city).  The Sea in fact only disappeared completely in the late nineteenth century when an Ottoman sultan is alleged to have blocked its main inlets with large rocks. After definitively drying in 1915, the area would become a collection of predominantly wetlands, orchards, and farmland, fed on a seasonal basis by heavy rains as well as a constant low-volume influx of water from springs, oases, and groundwater. The Sea of Najaf remained in this state for over one hundred years, enough time for several generations to pass and living memory of the Sea as a waterbody to come to seem like the stuff of legends.

However, in the early months of 2019, a flurry of news articles were published proclaiming the return to life of the Sea of Najaf. After a series of torrential rains and flooding in from several inlets, the depression area filled completely with water, even requiring local residents to construct earth mounds to prevent the flooding of developed areas of the city suburbs. Once the water settled, the remarkable sight of a large lake, returned to life, drew visitors from all over the country who spent their spring vacations visiting the newly reformed lake. Drone footage shows a long line of cars with families swimming in the water and grilling fish. The revival of the lake has also inspired speculators and developers eager to build tourist facilities and even a canal which would once again join the Sea to the Persian Gulf.

Just as Gzars attempts to undermine received narratives of Najafs political and social history through a strategy of unnatural narratology, the subtle references to hydrological elements like the Sea of Najaf in the novel encourages us to disabuse ourselves of the habit of mind which sees water bodies and ways as geographically and historically fixed. By asking us to question the history of Baghat Abbas and the Sea of Najaf, Gzar performs what Serenella Iovino calls narrative re-inhabitation: restoring the ecological imagination of place by working with place-based stories [and] visualizing the ecological connection of people and place through place-based stories.”[7] Just as the contradictory stories of Baghlat Abbas lead the granddaughters to go seek out the location of the town themselves, the novel Al-Sayyid Asghar Akbar encourages readers to ask what about the citys mysterious hydrological history is fact and what is fiction. As Iovino says, a historical curiosity also leads one to better understand the ecological connection of people and place. For example, there is an important link, alluded to at several points in the novel, between religious patronage and water systems. As a sign of the citys decline, residents complain about bones of the deceased swimming in the water of drinking wells and an outbreak of dysentery is traced back to a shallow well in Kufa nearby. In fact, the provision of drinking water by the construction of the “Hindiyya Canal” by Shii Indian Patrons in the form of a religious endowment in the eighteenth century is credited with completely reviving the city and making it a thriving destination for Indians arriving by ship. The entire machinery of the religious tourist economy of the city was lubricated, so to speak, by the shifting infrastructure of waterways.

Political Reterritorialization in The Old Woman and the River


The Old Woman and the River
(
Al-Sabiliat, 2016) by the late Kuwaiti author Ismail Fahd Ismail also allows readers to explore the waterways of Iraq, specifically the Tigris-Euphrates Delta and the Shatt al-Arab, with a bioregionalist imagination. The novel tells the story of an old woman named Um Qasem who is forced to evacuate her native village Sabiliyat on the Iran-Iraq border with the outbreak of the war between the countries in 1980. In order to protect its citizens, the government literally reterritorializes the village by putting it within an area of military zone operations, forcing the old woman and her family to move to safety in Najaf. But Um Qasem quickly becomes homesick and feels useless living in an adopted city. When her son brings her an orange to eat, she is overcome by nostalgia for her homeland remembering the orange orchard she used to see across the Chouma River.

Her imagination rises into the air to take form there. The place where shed lived is the taste and savor in the mouth, the spectacle and image in the minds eye. She feels herself drifting away. If only she could go back there. She shuts her eyes and sees her husband moving back and forth between their conjugal room and the Hilawi date tree.[8]

The old woman is so overcome by her connection to her origins, remembering her late husband and a specific tree in her home in the same breath, that she decides to simply walk back home with her donkey named Good Omen,a journey that would take approximately eighty-five hours to undertake.

In her review of the novel, Marcia Lynx Qualey refers to Um Qasem as Don Quixote, with Good Omen playing the role of both her trusty steed and Sancho Panza. But using the shorthand quixoticmisunderstands something crucial about Um Qasems motives. One could easily dismiss her return home as a simple form of senile obstinancy or simple homesickness, but that dismisses her actions as a kind of whimsical insanity. The term overlooks all of the ways that Um Qasems behavior both on the road and when she gets back to Sabiliyat are reflective of a deep and intentional ethics of stewardship and care. Her seemingly eccentric actions throughout the novel make sense as the actions of a woman deeply rooted in and responsible to a specific place. Her fantastical visions are not the equivalent of Quixotes seeing monsters in windmills, but come from her own bioregionalist imagination. That is to say, they are animated by the stories and modes of discourse of her specific bioregion, and illuminate ecological crises where others cannot see

Evading military convoys and security checkpoints, Um Qasem arrives home on foot. Once back in Sabiliyat she is dismayed to see what has happened ever since her village in the short time she was away. It seems as though the reterritorialization of Sabiliyat as a military operation zone was not merely a technicality. She discovers that the soldiers have built a mud dam across the Sayyid Rajab and Chouma river in an effort to thwart secret amphibious attacks by Iranian divers. This damming seems to have immediately dried out the area around her village and disturbed both the plant and animal life of the region. She surveys the area and sees all kinds of unsettling signs in the natural world. Being intimately familiar with the ecosystem, she can see all the signals of its disequilibrium. Close to her village, she notices the unchecked growth of sawgrass, a sign of neglect. She and Good Omen also startle a wild boar in a field, as wild animals have settled and made dens in the absence of humans. Elsewhere, the dense foliage and orchards filled with pomegranate, apricot, orange, and tangerine trees have all wilted. Um Qasem is dismayed.

It pained her to see the Shatt surging with water and pulsing with life while these rivers were reduced to deep muddy trenches overgrown with reeds and papyrus plants. What gave them the right to sentence the orchards to death?”[9]

Seeing the desperate state of her bioregion, Um Qasem has no choice but to become its clandestine steward. She begins planting rose cuttings and fixing up the houses of those who have left. She also tries to care for the animals whose habitats have been destroyed by the dam. She takes a particular interest in a group of frogs who are slowly dying in a stagnant cement pool. Their desperate state drives her finally to sabotage military infrastructure by bringing down the dam during a thunderstorm, re-irrigating the orchards and streams surrounding her village. These types of actions are referred to by Berg and Dasmann as acts of re-inhabitation: learning to live-in-place in an area that has been disrupted and injured through past exploitation.”[10] Um Qasem is not merely wandering around like a madwoman, trying to go back to life as normal as though a war werent taking place. She is instead fully aware of the damage the war has already caused, and is re-inhabiting her village with a specific eye towards repair. Seen in this way, Um Qasem is no longer choosing to ignore the realities of the military zone, but is instead acting within the unique terrain of consciousnessof her own bioregion as Berg and Dasmann call it.

She is eventually caught by the soldiers stationed nearby who are bewildered both by her ability to bring down an entire dam by herself, and by the fact that she felt a need to bring it down in the first place. After a long but sympathetic interrogation, Um Qasem finally reveals her motives.

 Lieutenant Abdel Kareem asked her sympathetically, Youre concerned about the land getting watered.
Its a sin to kill the fruit of the earth.”[11]

But rather than laughing her off as raving mad, or punishing her as a saboteur, the soldiers are actually receptive to her suggestions that they place pipes underneath the dams to allow for partial irrigation. That she is able to endear herself to the soldiers and even win them over to her plan is due to the fact that she has acted as a local steward for them as well. From the moment she arrives in Sabiliyat she plies them with pickled vegetables and plates of grilled local fish. She even begins to play the role of a sort of adopted mother to one of them by the end of the novel. In a word, she is able to win them over to her biological imagination and her re-inhabitory project.

Conclusion

The interview with Khalid Suleiman mentioned at the beginning of this article emphasizes repeatedly the unique form and style that he took in composing his study of drought and climate change in Iraq in his book, using “a journalistic or literary approach that avoids theoretical language.” When asked what motivated him to write the book, Suleiman laments “the vast space that separates academic conferences and forums from the daily reality of people.” And so he begins both the interview and his book by showing off the power of the literary approach by use of a long story from his own life about a berry tree that his father planted in his house when he was a child. Next to the berry tree Suleiman’s father also digs a well that is initially dry and from which they never drink. But with time the well slowly fills and can be used to sustainably nurture the tree, which becomes an oasis for humans and animals alike. The story serves as a beautiful parable of the vernacular knowledge of environmental stewardship that Suleiman’s relatives “conducted through an organic and sensory relationship between the population and the dry landscape where our ancestors had chosen to live.”

What better way to describe bioregional literature’s mechanics than as fiction which mimics this “organic and sensory relationship” in its own engagement with readers? Rather than citing shocking statistics or warning of imprending crisis, Suleiman tries to build this kind of relationship with readers by using stories, making relatable and visceral his proactive attempt to reimagine human communities that live sustainably in place. Narrative is a profoundly effective invitation to participate in reimaginings of place because it does the work to “build a rapport” with readers; both by building a relationship of communication but also more literally by building a rapport in the word’s original sense of “an act or instance of reporting.” Likewise, bioregional fiction in Iraq roots its stories by working patiently with local conditions. Novels like Al-Sayyid Asghar Akbar and The Old Woman and the River creatively reimagine Iraq’s water bodies and ways using the entire narrative toolbox of speculative fiction— dubious narrators, fantastical events, eccentric characters, and subtle allegories— all to build out an entire infrastructure for creative reimagining focused on natural systems. It also adapts these conceits to local conditions, using everything from Shi’a clerics to the Iran-Iraq War, as a way to make these strange locations undeniably familiar. These novels do the work to coax readers into suspending disbelief for the sake of the fictional story in order to eventually have them train their speculative attention on places in the real world that need desperately to be reimagined.                                


[1] Milne, Anne, Bart Welling, Chad Wriglesworth, Christine Cusick, Dan Wylie, Daniel Gustav Anderson, David Landis Barnhill et al. The Bioregional Imagination: Literature, Ecology, and Place (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2012), 3–4.

[2] And one might be tempted here to refer to the region as Mesopotamia rather than Iraq as a way to emphasize it as a bioregion if not for its anachronistic and orientalist associations of the term.

[3] Murtaḍa Kazaar, al- Sayyid asgar akbar riwayat (Beirut: al-Tanwiir li-l-Tibaʻa wa-l-nashr wa-l-tawziʻ, 2012), 156.

[4] The Bioregional Imagination, 6.

[5] Yasmeen Hanoosh, “Unnatural Narratives and Transgressing the Normative Discourses of Iraqi History: Translating Murtaḍā Gzārs Al-Sayyid Aṣghar Akbar,” Journal of Arabic Literature 44, no. 2 (2013): 158.

[6] Pedro Teixeira, The Travels of Pedro Teixeira, trans. William F. Sinclair (London: 1902), 45.

[7] Serenella Lovino, Restoring the Imagination of Place,” in The Bioregional Imagination: Literature, Ecology, and Place, ed. Tom Lynch, Cheryll Glotfelty, and Karla Armbruster (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2012), 106.

[8] Isma‘il Fahd Isma‘il and Sophia Vasalou, The Old Woman and the River: A Novel (Interlink Books, 2019), 12.

[9] Ismāʿīl and Vasalou, 80.

[10] Milne, 6.

[11] Isma‘il and Vasalou, 150.

Creaturely empathy with desert animals: A Kuwaiti environmentalist’s social media experiment

https://www.madamasr.com/en/2019/10/08/feature/society/creaturely-empathy-with-desert-animals-a-kuwaiti-environmentalists-social-media-experiment/

For the first few seconds, it is not clear what the cavalcade is chasing out in the desert at dusk. The cameraman is filming from the driver’s seat of the moving car, his lens following a small black spot darting between the clouds of dust at the horizon. Suddenly, miraculously, the object zigs right in between the pursuing vehicles and then quickly zags off into the setting sun. At this point the viewer can recognize the object: it is a wolf, panting and exhausted as it tries to escape at full speed. All of a sudden, the thrill of the chase gives way to a sense of dread and deep empathy for the poor, hunted animal.

This sudden emotional shift is likely unintentional. But the hunting video has been reposted by a Kuwaiti environmentalist named Fanis al-Ajmi as a way to bring us in close contact with the wildlife of the desert. Despite the country’s arid climate, Kuwait is home to a stunning range of wildlife: over 420 species of migratory and endemic birds, dozens of mammal and reptile species, and around 800 species of insect. But like many countries in the region, Kuwait’s natural environment has suffered in recent decades at the hands of desertification, urban sprawl, habitat loss, pollution and overhunting. These pressures have led to the local extinction of the Arabian wolf, Arabian oryx, striped hyena, jackal, various types of gazelle and other species which have been recorded in cultural memory as far back as the pre-Islamic Muʻallaqat, the most famous of the qasidah form of Arabic poetry.

 

Strung out along the route in groups,

 like oryx does of Tudih, 

or Wajran gazelles, white fawns 

below them, soft necks turning,

 

-Labid (translation by Michael A. Sells)

 

During a period of crisis for wildlife in the region, Ajmi is bringing a new poetic sensibility to recording the experiences of animals. His curated work offers us an example of how social media can open up an intimate, dramatized and empathetic window into the world of animals.

Fanis al-Ajmi’s argument about hunting

Fanis al-Ajmi is a Kuwaiti engineer and labor activist who has worked on various government initiatives and other environmental stewardship projects. He has been particularly involved in the government’s 10,000 Tree Saplings planting project. With the cooperation of other state agencies, and general enthusiasm from the Kuwaiti public, the project has already planted nearly one million saplings of native plants and trees in Kuwait as of July 2018.

Ajmi’s special contribution has been his use of his social media to make conservation issues come alive in an intimate and unsettling way, to show how environmental destruction is playing out on animals themselves. In the last couple of years his posts have become particularly focused on desert animals, cataloguing especially pictures and videos posted by local hunters. According to Ajmi, his friends and followers regularly send him things they see online and he works to curate a large archive on his Instagram and Twitter feeds. Although much of this content was originally meant to be boastful or entertaining — to show off hunters’ neatly stacked piles of kill — when their content is reposted by Ajmi they are suddenly turned into scenes of wanton slaughter and cruelty. The posts are deeply unsettling and can sometimes be hard to watch. Scrolling through his feed will reveal a mesh bag filled with frightened, captured birds; a gazelle tied-up, having its throat torn into by a pair of hunting dogs; a pregnant rabbit disemboweled, its writhing offspring pulled from its body cavity; wolves chased to the point of exhaustion and then shot. Like the animals used in classical Arabic prose going back to the writer al-Jahiz’s collection of treatises, Kitab al-Hayawan (Book of Animals), these graphic scenes are used to convey what scholar Jeannette Miller calls “the transcendent value of disgust”.

 

Much of the appeal of hunting in the region is in the way that it invokes an idealized past. Natalie Koch has shown how falconry in particular has worked to romanticize the Arabian Peninsula’s Bedouin past. Hunting is very much tied to iconic representations of Gulf identity, and with the rise of social media it has become a favorite pastime for conspicuous consumption.  Hunters post images of fancy weapons, glamorous desert encampments, and ostentatious collections of trophy kills. Ajmi is confronting these invented traditions and ceremonial presentations of hunting by co-opting content for his own narrative. He has a particular story to tell about hunting in the Arabian Peninsula. “Muslims and Arabs once used to hunt out of a sense of need or hunger only, and had beautiful values such as forbidding hunting in the times when animals were mating or when they had new offspring,” he said via email. In the past, hunters had an intimate connection with the land on which they hunted, and understood the seasonal and migratory shifts in the landscape. In contrast to this vision of former symbiosis, contemporary desert ecosystems are under incredible stress due to the ways that hunting practices exploit nature without regard for its welfare. It is estimated that between 1.7 million and 4.6 million birds are illegally killed each year across the Arabian Peninsula, Iraq and Iran. Ajmi gives ample evidence of the ways in which hunters are killing fauna in the hundreds and thousands without regard for natural limits or ecological cycles. His written comments and captions use a traditional ethical appeal, lamenting how hunters have lost their way, no longer hunting from necessity but for selfish purposes like machismo and bragging (al-tabahi wal-tufakhir). In turn, a growing number of people are joining in on the conversation, creating a growing online community of like-minded environmentalists in the region who are making and sharing their own content.

Along with his focus on the immense scale of destruction, Ajmi gives attention to individual animals, emphasizing in animals what they share with humans: what scholar Anat Pick calls the creaturely — the material, the temporal, and the vulnerable. Pick’s beautiful book Creaturely Poetics: Animality and Vulnerability in Literature and Film (Columbia University Press, 2011) argues that these embodied qualities can form the basis of a new ethics, in place of our traditional focus on intellect, emotion, or language — all things which create a harmful separation between us and other species. Ajmi’s work is centered precisely on building this new code of ethics. In one video from November 10, 2018, the camera is zoomed in on a hyena standing on a rock outcropping on the other side of a rocky desert valley.

For seven whole seconds, the hyena stares in the direction of the camera, inviting interpretations of its mental state. Is it naively curious at the sight of distant humans? Is there a look of pleading in its eyes? This intense focus on cryptic animal emotions is reminiscent of the attention paid to the faces of the wolf and his mates in al-Shanfara ’s muʿallaqah

Wide-jawed, gape-mouthed,

As if in their jaws

Were the sides of a split stick, 

Grinning, grim 

(translation by Michael A. Sells)

In both the poem and the post, close attention is paid to the movement of the face in an effort to understand the mental state of the animal, something that is ultimately impossible to determine. This scrutiny, nevertheless, draws us in to careful attention and empathy for the hunted animal. In remarkable ways, Ajmi is using digital mediums to recreate many of the rhetorical and emotional experiences that animals have provided throughout the long history of Arabic literature.

The changing desert 

In classical hunting poems, seasonal changes in the environment were experienced and understood directly through animals themselves, like Antara ibn Shaddad ostrich kneeling on withered, crackling reeds in the dry reason or Amr bin Kulthum’s camel frisking in the vernal season. By following changes to animals and the landscape, Ajmi’s posts bring our attention to what is new and unnatural in today’s seasonal changes: the results of changed weather patterns as well as direct human harm.

A video from December 16, 2018, shows a patch of green grass growing miraculously in the middle of the desert, blossoming from a surprisingly wet winter.  A series of torrential storms had moved through the Arab Gulf the month prior, bringing large-scale flooding: 25 centimeters of rain over four days, more precipitation than Kuwait receives on average in a year. The desert responded by blooming in normally barren places. However, it is neither birds or wild beasts who are frolicking in the temporary meadow, but a group of jeeps skidding about and spinning donuts. The cameraman eggs his friends on and laughs as the cars grind up the grass in their tires. In his commentary, Ajmi is aghast.

“Their actions last seconds but their destruction will last for years, the sand crumbles and the grass is torn up and it will take a long time for the earth to heal itself, why this selfishness and vandalism, what is the fun in that?”

Over the months of November and December, Ajmi tracked both the positive and negative effects of this intense period of rainfall: camels and their offspring drinking at watering holes, city streets being buried in mudslides, and the sprouting of rare flowers in the desert, like the bakhtari flower. While it can not be directly determined, there is an overwhelming probability that changes in seasonal rains are being caused by climate change.

As Bill McKibben says in his book The End of Nature (Anchor, 1989), we must alter our understanding of dramatic acts of nature to incorporate the ways that we now act as the secret force behind them: “If the waves crash up against the beach, eroding dunes and destroying homes, it is not the awesome power of Mother Nature. It is the awesome power of Mother Nature as altered by the awesome power of man, who has overpowered in a century the processes that have been slowly evolving and changing of their own accord since the earth was born.”

A recurring scene in Ajmi’s posts is that of the hunter’s surprise and shock as animals approach them for aid. Several videos show animals risking the danger of humans to seek shade or water, which is provided by surprised, often laughing observers. Lizards run towards the shade of a jeep. In one video, a bird of prey finds salvation in a makeshift watering hole: a bit of water left by humans in a metal can. In another video posted on Twitter, a man provides a draught of water from a spray bottle to a stork perched on top of a watering basin.

What these videos do not depict is the reasons why animals would be desperate enough as to approach humans for water. The famous watering holes and migration routes of the qasidah form of poetry have been disrupted or removed, and the looming transformations that are quickly beginning to unfold due to climate change will pose even graver challenges to the future of wildlife in the region.

In the face of this intense ecological destruction, people are beginning to understand the fragility of wildlife and take steps to act as stewards to the many species of the desert. Ajmi shows hunters untying wolves from nets, a local man who has adopted a pet rock hyrax, and kids petting a monitor lizard and learning that it’s harmless to humans. In one video posted from an account from nearby Iran, conservationists have created artificial watering holes up in the mountains and in remote locations in order to provide water for wild animals. Rather than annihilating God’s creations, Ajmi encourages his followers to be like these stewards of God’s creation. “This ingenuity is what our culture needs,” he writes.

This stewardship is not entirely selfless. The way that Ajmi focuses on the bodily vulnerability of animals acts as a reminder of what may still very well be the fate of man himself. As the climate of the Gulf is set to become, again, increasingly hostile and even potentially unlivable, there is new relevance for understanding what animals can tell us about nature. To ignore the suffering of animals, and to expedite their extinction through excessive hunting is to ignore nature’s warnings for how much the future of our own species may be subject to human cruelty or charity. The presence of animals, whether it be in the rahil — the travel section of a poem — or on Twitter, reminds us that technology and progress can be forces as harsh and blind as the desert itself. As Ajmi’s animals try to survive amongst the dangers of the desert and of humans alike, they offer us an unspoken warning, echoing that offered by the poet Imruʾ al-Qais and his wolf.

Both of us, when we obtain a thing, destroy it, and he who tries to cultivate my land and your land, will surely become emaciated.

 

Learning the proper posture to become an internet imposter while reading Impostures

https://www.madamasr.com/en/2020/06/03/feature/culture/learning-the-proper-posture-to-become-an-internet-imposter-while-reading-impostures/

 

A friend of mine recently admitted to me that he often visits women’s clothing websites. He isn’t interested in buying anything, he just does it to mislead the artificial intelligence following him around on the internet. He knows that computers are constantly surveilling him in order to tailor marketing content. But if they would usually be bombarding him with images of razors and whiskey decanters and other products meant to appeal to his demographic, they are instead filling the little ad windows on his websites with pictures of beautiful, demure women in tasteful clothing. They look on affectionately as he goes about his day online the internet in peace — a small victory in the long psychological war we are losing against artificial intelligence.

These days we’re all trying to hide on the internet. Private browsing windows, proxy servers, and VPNs are all just a normal part of internet life. Samir al-Nimr’s article on Mada Masr last year offered a handy three-step guide to hiding your true political opinions from the eyes of the government. But far more insidious than government surveillance, algorithms are designed not only to find out what we think and want, but to get us to think and want things in the first place. Jia Tolentino, author of the excellent new book Trick Mirror, speaks about what happens when we let our identities be colonized by capitalism, and end up completely identifying with the online marketplace.

“the things that you see are the same things that everyone else sees. Everything is intertwined with these basically four central networks and what everyone is looking at algorithmically influences what everyone else is looking at … and the programmatic capacity for surprise has dwindled to nearly nothing.” 

At stake is not only our privacy, but our autonomy. Tolentino claims that the only escape from the hellscape of the internet would be “social and economic collapse.” But my friend, it seems, has begun to find another way: by using AI’s own gullible logic against itself, he is able to surf in peace. His clever deception has made me wonder where else we could find ways of hiding our intentions and meanings in plain sight online.

I discovered a possible answer while reading another story about women, fashion and deceptive codes. It was in the new English translation by Michael Cooperson of Al-Hariri’s Maqamat (Impostures, May 2020). It might sound strange to have found inspiration for digital deception in a work of Arabic rhymed prose from the 11th century, but then again the maqamat features a series of episodes in which an anonymous and eloquent trickster always succeeds in swindling a gullible narrator. In the story in question, the narrator Abu Zayd takes his son in front of a judge to accuse him of borrowing a piece of his property and damaging it. Asked by the judge to describe what has been damaged, Abu Zayd says the following:

She was sharp as a tack and neat as a pin, and she could handle rough patches. She would tear through a job of work, then lie there flat as a board. She didn’t mind filing; she always kept her head, and never lost the thread. She was good for a nip and a tuck, but she only had one eye. She might string you along, or take a stab at you, but she always got her point across.

The “she” to which Abu Zayd refers is made to sound like he’s describing his female slave, but after the judge demands that he speak plainly, Abu Zayd reveals that he is in fact actually talking about a needle. One could argue that the trick works better in the original language, since the word for possession and slave (mamlukah) are the same in Arabic, and since both objects and people can be referred to as “she” in Arabic. But to make up for any of the specific shortcomings inherent to English, Cooperson weaves in a third entendre, composing the whole chapter with the language of sewing, tailoring, and the garment industry, as can be seen in all of the puns and wordplay above. What was already an intense overlapping of codes, languages, and sexual innuendo in the original text becomes even more wonderfully complicated in the translation.

Cooperson teaches pre-modern Arabic literature and translation at UCLA, and his own translations include a modern Egyptian novel about a time-traveling pickle salesman and a 19th century historical fiction about the fall of the Abbasid Empire. He has also translated from French a book by the Moroccan author Abdelfattah Kilito called The Author and His Double which argues that genre, not authorship, is the single most important feature of classical Arabic literature. This is an important point to keep in mind when approaching the text in the way that Cooperson does. He claims that previous attempts using the lexical approach have contributed nothing to making the Impostures part of Anglophone literary culture.

Rather than trying to be completely faithful to the details of the author’s original text, Cooperson attempts to translate the genre’s spirit of verbal performance itself. In his manifesto-level introduction, he claims that it is this performance, after all, that is what the maqamat are actually about. That is to say, rather than an innovative plot or characters, much of the appeal in Al-Hariri’s Maqamat lies in the verbal games that he sets up for himself: writing speeches that can be read both forward and backward, poems written with strict constraints on which letters he can use, and riddles that mean two things at once. The challenge for Cooperson is that many of the elements in Al-Hariri’s original performance “are tied to particular features of Arabic. These include rhyme, especially prose rhyme, and constrained writing — lipograms, palindromes, and the like. Strictly speaking, none of these features can be translated; they can only be imitated.” Cooperson’s solution was to take advantage of a feature that makes English itself unique: “Arabic has rhymed prose, which English (mostly) lacks. But English, unlike the kind of Arabic that Al-Hariri is using here, can … be written in a bewildering variety of historical, literary, and global styles.” The performance that Cooperson puts on by making use of this diversity is remarkable: there is everything from imitations of Chaucer and Frederick Douglass, to Singaporean creole and Australian outback idiom, to thieves’ cant and legalese.

But just as there are of course examples of rhymed prose in English, there is also in fact a bewildering variety of Arabics. It is just that the vast majority of historical and contemporary writing in Arabic has tended to be in formal Arabic. As a consequence of this, most of the datasets which have been used to train computer algorithms have also been based on a single formal register. Even if computers are increasingly able to recognize various spoken dialects, they have few defenses against the types of word games and tricks that an author like Al-Hariri specialized in. Even though he himself wrote in formal Arabic, his maqamat is filled with all types of hyper specific verbal performances which no human — much less a computer — could directly translate.

Codes are, after all, one of Arabic’s specialities. One shouldn’t forget that the modern science of cryptology arose with the Arabs in the 700s when Al-Khalil demonstrated the potential of using standard plaintext phrases to decrypt messages in Kitab al-mu’amma. Arabic is rich with a history of idioms, jargons, pidgins, and language games, any of which can be used to secure your interactions from the watchful eyes of the algorithms. Even the simplest of them should be sufficient to throw the digital dogs off your trail. If, as Justin E. H. Smith claims, the current technological moment is to language something like what the Industrial Revolution was to textiles, then it’s time to throw a wrench into the works.

 

Cryptology and Dotless Writing 

One of the most famous linguistic tricks that Al-Hariri plays in the original maqamat is that of constraining himself to use Arabic words whose letters contain no dots — which comprise less than half of the Arabic alphabet. Maqamat al-Maraghiya has every second word contain no dots, whereas al-Maruwiya includes a sermon whose words contain no dots at all. (Cooperson constrains himself in his translation by alternating between English words of French and Germanic origin in the first case, and by writing his own sermon without use of the letter ‘e’ in the second case). But Al-Hariri was not the first and certainly not the last to write bil-huruf al-muhmalah (see this Twitter thread by Sohaib Saeed). Entire Qur’anic commentaries, like those of the Mughal court poet Faydi (d. 1595), were written without dots. Even the fourth Caliph Ali wrote a sermon without dots. As for fooling a computer, one doesn’t even have to be half as clever. By merely switching the placement or presence of dots, you should be able to easily stump artificial intelligence. Take this example from Google Translate.

 

Language Games

Almost every language has its own language game or argot: a system of manipulating spoken words to render them incomprehensible to the untrained ear. English has Pig Latin, French has Verlan, and Spanish has Jeringonza. There are several lesser-known Arabic versions, but my favorite was known as Misf: popular as a secret language among young people in Mecca from the 1930s to the 1960s. The game is simple: you add the syllable /rb/ after the beginning of the stressed syllable of the Arabic word. So, for example, the word kalaam (speech) becomes kalaarbaam, fiil (elephant) becomes fiirbiil, and qaal (he said) becomes qaarbaal. A computer has no idea what to do with this.

Jargon and Pidgins 

Along with an assortment of codes and word games, Arabic also has its own history of rich historical and global styles. There is no single equivalent word for ‘jargon’ in Arabic, options include ratana ‘jargon; lingo, gibberish’, lugha siriya ‘secret language,’ sim or sin, g or gaws as they call it in the Maghreb. But what is certain is that the history of the Arabic language contains multitudes, from medieval to modern, from those spoken among Arabic-speaking Jews to those used by Islamic scholars. In modern Egypt alone, the scholar Ali Issa (1988) identifies nine distinct jargons: lughat al-nassaleen ‘the language of pickpockets’, lughat al-ḥaramiya ‘the language of thieves’, lughat an-nassabeen ‘the language of swindlers’, lughat al-muxaddirat ‘the language of drugs’, lughat al-mutasawileen ‘the language of beggars’, lughat al-saa ‘the language of goldsmiths’, lughat al-munajideen ‘the language of craftsmen who renew and restuff upholstery’, and lughat al-awaleem ‘the language of female entertainers.’ Choose from any of the existing jargons, or make a brand new one with your friends. The computers will be none the wiser. I prefer the secret language of the medieval Islamic underworld, the jargon of the famous Banu Sasan. Here is the effect of using just one of their words taken from Abu Dulaf’s Qasida Sasaniya.

يجتمع الناس عليها، والتكسيح: الممانعة.

إلى أن يقع التنبل في محصدة الجزر

The word “al-tanbal” means “the simpleton who is the victim of tricks played on him” (هو الأبله الذي يقبل المخاريق على نفسه). Google Translate is just one such simpleton.

And while computers are not so credulous as to fall for normal dialects (Egyptian or Levantine dialect won’t protect you) there are still innumerable pidgins, creoles, and invented languages that you can use. The advantage of using Juba or Gulf Pidgin Arabic is that they are simple to use by design, meant to help non-Arab speakers communicate while in Arab countries. But even though they are simple, they are immune to digital prying.

And lastly, there are versions of Arabic that never existed in the real world at all. Fremen, made famous by the novel Dune by Frank Herbert, is an invented language which is supposedly an amalgamation of Arabic and another alien language called Chakobsa. Although a sci-fi creation, Fremen is not actually hard to decipher for the normal Arabic speaker. Here, for example, is a proverb attributed to l-Riyas, a religious leader from the planet Bela Tegeuse.

 

al-raqs quddam alumi majhudan la yura amal-u dancing in front of the blind is an effort goes unseen.

Luckily, your efforts will only go unseen by the blindness of computers who can’t understand encoded language, much less that which uses the ultimate double-code: irony.

 

Irony 

Of all of the codes that Al-Hariri puts to use in his maqamat, and which Cooperson faithfully imitates, none is more effective than irony. That is because there is no code to crack; the hidden message is in the code itself. In his famous article “On the Concept of Irony”, Paul de Man tells a story about a German philosophical text by Friedrich Schlegel called “Über die Unverständlichkeit” which, through the mischievous turn or irony, actually begins to read like a description of sexual intercourse. As de Man explains, “It’s not just that there is a philosophical code and then another code describing sexual activities. These two codes are radically incompatible with each other. They interrupt, they disrupt, each other in such a fundamental way that this very possibility of disruption represents a threat to all assumptions of what a text should be.” This same trick used by Schlegel is used time and again in both Al-Hariri’s maqamat, and in Cooperson’s translation. Just like the chapter on Abu Zayd and the needle, Chapter 35, maqamat al-shiraziyya, is simultaneously about a young woman who needs money for a dowry and about drinking wine. For his part, Cooperson encodes the chapter further by using the language of wine-making and wine-tasting. Maqamat al-shatawiya in the original includes an old man telling riddles based on double meanings, and Cooperson ups the ante by adding Cockney rhyming slang to the mix. The old man describes his relationship to telling truth by saying:

I’ll ‘ave a Rex, but no pork pies!

Rex Mossip is gossip, and porkpies are lies

Ya don’t Adam an’ Eve me? But it’s Irish stew!

The first one’s “believe,” and Irish means true.

 

It’s all very silly, but at the same time also an astounding performance of literary skill. Just like the riddles themselves, Cooperson’s translation can be read as both things at once.

There is a third entendre as well. Beyond being an important translation of a criminally neglected work of world literature, and an impressive literary work in its own right, Impostures is also akin to a guidebook on linguistic deceit. It gives us all kinds of tips and tricks for confronting the futuristic threat of artificial intelligence with dependable medieval technology. But that is not to say we should be so literal as to just try to use Al-Hariri’s same codes. Instead we should aspire to Cooperson’s spirit of verbal performance, coming up with our own language games, encrypted messages, and ironic codes in an effort to always keep one step ahead of the algorithms. Luckily, one need doesn’t have to be Arabic’s greatest wordsmith in order to do so. If the internet has given rise to an algorithmic surveillance society that Orwell could never even have imagined, it has also given us a Newspeak he couldn’t have comprehended. The internet has changed the rules of language. We forget it sometimes, but we’ve grown up in a revolutionary period of linguistic history. While we might not be as familiar with lipograms or palindromes, we’re all fluent in the language of emojis, acronyms, and memes. As Gretchen McCulloch explains in her book, Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language, “the internet was the final key in [a] process that had begun with medieval scribes and modernist poets — it made us all writers as well as readers.” Like my friend and his women’s clothing models, we can all invent our own impostures, coming up with ever-new scenarios of eloquent tricksters swindling gullible narrators.

HemisFair ’68: A World’s Fair During the Age of Global Revolution

 

During the long summer of 1968, at a time when a decade of anti-colonial struggle and cultural revolution was coming to its violent crescendo, with rioting in Paris, student massacres in Mexico City, and the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, San Antonio put on a second-rate world’s fair. The technical name for it was a “second category fair,” a designation given by the Bureau of International Expositions which had overseen a first category fair the year prior in Montreal. San Antonio’s 1968 Hemisfair was literally one tenth as large as Expo ‘67, squeezed into a 92-acre site in downtown San Antonio. The modesty of the event can be explained in part by the city’s ethos of limited local governance, funding construction of the fair through a complex public-private partnership. On top of showcasing the cultures of twenty three different countries and hosting nineteen corporate pavilions, the Hemisfair was also meant to be a moneymaker for the city.

The fair had been years in the making, and so there was no way for anyone to have predicted that it would be opening only two days after the assasination of Martin Luther King Jr.. President and local hero Lyndon B. Johnson had planned to be in attendance for the official opening, but was forced to stay in Washington to deal with the riots breaking out all over the country in response to Dr. King’s murder. 13,600 federal troops were enforcing a 4pm curfew in the capital city while rioting also took place in Chicago, Baltimore and over 100 other U.S. cities. On the very same day as the opening, a deadly shootout would take place between Black Panthers and police in Oakland, California. President Johnson gave a radio address calling for calm in the wake of the King assassination, declaring the following Sunday as a day of mourning, and ordering flags to be flown at half staff.

In his stead, Johnson had sent the First Lady to San Antonio for the opening of the Hemisfair. Ladybird Johnson spoke frankly about recent events, calling for calm and prayerful work in response to the country’s internal strife. Texas Governor John Connally also spoke at the opening ceremony, citing San Antonio’s 250 year history of rich flavors and a myriad of cultures. It was no doubt his effort to rhetorically shoehorn in the fair’s preselected theme into an acknowledgment of racial tensions which had finally boiled over.

 

“So it is most fitting that today, two and a half centuries later, San Antonio opens its heart and its arms to peoples of every land. We do so with grateful tribute to those before us for the heritage that is ours. We do so with fervent hope that this great world exposition may help point the way to a world of peace and understanding for the generations to come.

 

But despite the conciliatory tone of officials, it cannot be assumed that the crowds gathered for the opening day of the Hemisfair were in need of consoling. The New York Times described the awkwardly juxtaposed mood surrounding Mrs. Johnson’s speech.

 

As thousands of visitors thronged through the “town within a town” under a beaming sun and a cloudless sky, somber words of caution about the country’s internal strife and the need for harmony among all peoples of different races and cultures were heard over the brass of military bands saluting the international exhibition.

 

It was not only the sun that was beaming. Pictures of the crowd at the entrance turnstiles on inauguration day show a crowd of smiling, white faces. Although remembered universally today as a national tragedy, it is well documented that large parts of the country celebrated the murder of Dr. King in 1968, especially in the South. There are accounts of laughter, the honking of car horns, and a public display of jubilation and glee. In San Antonio, many fairgoers were too excited to catch the water-ski show, held in a tiny lake next to the Lone Star Brewing Co. pavilion, to bother worrying about some impending race war. It had at one point dawned on organizers that the city’s widespread slow walking of racial integration might be a bad look for the host city and efforts had been made to meet with local business owners to go further than the standing policy of “vertical integration” whereby people of color could order a cup of coffee or sandwich as long as they didn’t try to sit down. Like much of the progress made during the Civil Rights Movement, the most successful push to finally get white Americans towards doing the right thing was the spectre of the Cold War and having their racism exposed on the world stage.

The entire six month run of the San Antonio Hemisfair would showcase this same remarkable display of tone deafness. While solidarity between students and workers in Paris threatened to take down de Gaulle’s government in May, the French Pavilion was putting on a marionette show for adults called Les Poupées de Paris. As bishops from all across Latin America met in Medellín for a conference which would lay the foundations for Liberation Theology, the Columbian Pavilion at the Hemisfair would feature an exhibit on coffee. As Air Force bases in Thailand launched sorties of Agent Orange over the skies of Vietnam, the Hemisfair would be the home base for the Thailand pavilion and its small, meditative Buddhist altar, stocked with incense and bouquets of red and pink roses.

Despite attempts by organizers to keep up appearances, San Antonio’s Hemisfair would end up being a showcase for all kinds of politics, both local and international. From the West Side community’s boycott of the fair, to the anti-communist art curations, from America’s toxic effluvia being projected onto a jumbotron, to the 15 brave students who picketed the Vietnam war on opening day with balloons that read “McCarthy for World Peace,” Hemisfair would end up being a miniature fair as well as a microcosm for politics in the late 60s.

 

Planning and Construction

 

The Hemisfair had originally been dreapt up in the late 1950s as a way to celebrate the city’s 250 year anniversary. Anticipating its modesty, planners tried to brand the fair as a “jewel-box fair” and referred to it as being “human scale.” It was to be “less world-of-the-future than here-and-now.” The term ‘Hemisfair’ was chosen in reference to the shared hispanic heritage of San Antonio and the rest of Latin America. The motto chosen for the fair was “the Confluence of Civilizations in the Americas,” and promotional materials promised the flamboyance of a fiesta, the inspiration of man’s art, the marvel of his accomplishments in science and industry, and the fun of a fair.

But hiding immediately behind the earnest and altruistic language used in its promotion was the self-seeking economic and political motivations behind the fair’s planners. The city of San Antonio had lived through several decades of cultural decline as Houston and Dallas had overtaken it as chief economic engines of the state, and Sunbelt-wide demographic shifts towards the suburbs were emptying out San Antonio’s downtown. The Good Government League (GGL), San Antonios’s oligarchic council-manager government, was dead set on using the fair as a way to promote business in the city, specifically to jumpstart the tourism industry, which in the mid-60s was its 2nd biggest industry after the military. With Anglos fleeing the central city for northern suburbs, and the Mexican-American population increasing from 41 to 52 percent between 1960-170, the Hemisfair offered an opportunity for the GGL to try wrestle back racial control over the future of downtown. This helps explain why, despite all of the difficulty in dispossessing and bulldozing a vast tract of land downtown when the city was surrounded on all sides by open countryside, the GGL was dead set on having the Hemisfair built where it was.

There were economic ambitions beyond the downtown economy as well. The Hemisfair corporation chairman and millionaire construction magnate H.B. Zachary imagined the fair as helping to recenter San Antonio as a hub of international commerce with South America. He dreamed of an international trade mart to help American businesses foster economic development in South America, and even lobbied President Johnson to relocate a series of governmental organizations in San Antonio: The InterAmerican Development Bank, the Organization of American States, and all other government offices dealing with the region. President Johnson almost went for it. Hemisfair was meant to jumpstart the tourist economy as well, and help bring the city back to a standing with its richer neighbors down the highway.

Planning meetings for Hemisfair happened much the same way that they were for the GGL: in private. Except for the few token members from the African and Mexican-American population that they had brought in in order to neutralize criticism, the GGL was essentially made up of downtown business owners and managers and a few representatives of the Anglo social elite. But while their mechanizations were private, the Hemisfair planners would nevertheless enlist all sorts of public help when it came time to fund construction of the fair. Much of the money would come by way of the argument that the Hemisfair counted as a project of urban renewal. This included a $12 million grant from the Federal Government for an “urban renewal project” along with a $30 million from a city bond. The San Antonio Urban Renewal Project, begun in 1956, was the local offshoot of a multi-billion dollar program by the federal government in order to rehabilitate or remove “blighted areas” across the country. The area that would become Hemisfair had been identified and named as “Urban Renewal Project 5” by the city: 140 acres on the south side of Commerce street that happened to be home to 2,300 people.

The neighborhood in question, known at the time as Germantown, had once been a relatively affluent section of the city. It was also one of the city’s oldest. While the planners tried their best to argue that the neighborhood was hopelessly dilapidated, according to the city’s own survey of the Project 5 area, only 2% of the structures in the area were considered “blighted.” A full 70% were judged to be merely “deteriorating.” The neighborhood was home to many different ethnicities, and was full of important historical structures and homes from the 19th century, including the Polish community’s St. Michael’s Parish, which had first celebrated mass in the neighborhood in a converted bakery in 1866. The church and  its property would be sold to the Hemisfair in 1965 for $370,000 and demolished to make way for the Tower of the Americas. Ella Stumpf, who worked to try to preserve some of the structures in the area, said that Germantown “was not a slum at all. It had 200 houses almost as good as anything in King William.”

There are many  stories of those residents who resisted in one form or another to the displacement that eventually came to the neighborhood. At 204 Dunning Avenue there lived Maude Willox, 78, who was wheelchair bound and practically blind. Despite her disabilities, she was staunch in her resistance to displacement. She stated that she would “have to be carried out in a pine box,” if the city ever came to evict her. When they finally did a month later, she lamented that “those with money, power, organization, influence, and propaganda can destroy weak and helpless and objectors and scatter their disoriented life over the countryside.” Her house was replaced with the IH10 and IH37 interchange. The most famous case of resistance came from retired pilot Frank Toudouze. He lived in a house on 123 Wyoming street, next door to his grandmother who had been born on the year that the Civil War ended. Like Willox, Toudouze pledged that the authorities “will have to knock that door down and drag me out” when asked about the plans to dispossess him, adding “I’ll never sell my house. I want to live in peace. HemisFair is illegal. It’s a private concern.”

Toudouze was referring to the claim made by many that the fair was not in fact being planned for the public good, but for the enrichment of the GGL and other wealthy investors and businessmen. Rather than attending to urgent infrastructure repairs like drainage and the sewer system (a city public works employee drowned in the street during a rainstorm) city government officials like Walter McAllister, Jr. (the mayor’s son), 0. J. savings (vice president in the mayor’s savings and loan association) and Arthur Troilo (the urban renewal lawyer who instituted condemnation proceedings) all stood to benefit from HemisFair construction and concessions. Mr. Troilo for one would soon benefit from providing boats that would sail on the very lagoon that would be built over Toudouze’s house.

Toudouze sued the Urban Renewal Agency of San Antonio, but his case was overruled, and so was reduced to plastering over the front of his house with anti-urban renewal messages. In the end, he too was evicted. On April 6, 1965 the sheriff and several deputies smashed the glass of his front door and rushed in to find Frank sitting at this small kitchen table, wearing sunglasses and a felt cowboy hat. Frank continued to sit calmly, next to his cup of coffee as the sheriff served Frank an eviction order, and in a final act of defiance, Frank insisted on playing “May the Good Lord Bless and Keep You” on his harmonica.  As promised, Toudouze refused to move himself and would have to be carried out of his house by several officers.

One of the last residents to leave the neighborhood was Florence Eager Roberts. Roberts was given a slight delay by the courts so that she could celebrate her 100th birthday at home. She was finally vacated in August 1967. Eventually around 1,600 people were displaced from their homes to make way for the fair.

But the GGL and the Hemisfair leadership’s steamrolling, literally, of downtown residents for their pet project did not come without political consequences. One of them was the election of Peter Torres, the first person elected to the city council in the face of opposition of the GGL since 1955. Torres ran in opposition to the GGL (who he referred to as the “Good Gravy League”) and their close association with the Hemisfair, whose image had increasingly soured with the Mexican-American community. Torres was able to hammer home the GGL’s obsession with the fair while “the city starves,” stating on the morning after the drowning of the public works employee that “Here you’ve got the city fathers, we’ve got some real problems in the community, and they’re talking about the color of the goddamned carpets.”

Other community leaders, like Albert A. Peña Jr., urged West Side residents to protest the fair. And picketers showed up. Four months before the fair even opened, at an earlier dedication ceremony of the convention center, a dozen picketers, including women and children, stood outside the event holding signs “Who Died on Hemisfair?” in protest of the seven workmen (all hispanic) who had died up to that point during construction. Others were moved to protest by the painfully ironic fact that a fair ostensibly set up to celebrate Latin America and its cultural and historical ties to the United States has neglected the Hispanic community in its own backyard. “Maybe a little more recognition for the Mexican-American segment of San Antonio and through all of Texas,” suggested West Side resident Genaro Garcia while explaining the reasons why he supported a Mexican-American boycott of the fair. Not only had the fair exploited their labor, endangered their lives, and failed to even acknowledge them as a community, it was also prohibitively expensive for Mexican Americans even to attend. While Governor Connoly jet set around Latin America wooing international sponsors, back home in Texas he was a staunch opponent of a campaign to raise the minimum wage. Flyers passed out by fair protestors read  “Save your money. San Antonio must first pay the $1.25 minimum wage, and equal opportunity for all.”  Others read “Hemisfair is not for the poor Mexican-American.” Some even picketed the fair’s opening day alongside the anti-war student protests, with signs reading “After Hemisfair Visit West Side San Antonio, Confluence of Poverty.”  In response to protests over the racial disparities surrounding the fair, the mayor Walter McCallister and others would, inevitably, claims links between the local Mexican American community and the global communist movement, clearly not the type of globalism fair planners had hoped to promote. The following day in response dozens more would picket his business downtown.

These political protests would affect the international image of the fair as well. As Timothy Palmer says “the squabbles over federal funding, historical preservation, and perceived conflicts of interest deflated public confidence in San Antonio and contributed to flagging interest among industrial exhibitors. And even a Texan in the White House could not provide the muscle power to convince many poor Latin American countries to participate in this fair of the Americas.”

 

The International Order

 

Ever since the end of the Second World War, world fairs had been caught in the middle of the Cold War, with fairs becoming “staging grounds for displays of U.S.-Soviet rivalry.” The Soviet Union had skipped out when the fair was held in Seattle, and when New York failed to receive official endorsement by the Bureau of International Expositions, it gave even more of a reason for the Communist bloc to boycott it again. When the fair was held in Montreal in 1967, the Soviets had shown up with bells on. Their pavilion was one of the Expo’s largest, and was visited more than any other. Right in front of the massive modernist building complete with convex roof and glass walls was an enormous bronze bronze monument, shaped like a Hammer and Sickle, covered in pro-communist friezes. It goes without saying, any of that was completely out of the question for San Antonio’s fair. However, planners would soon find themselves without the luxury of being too picky.

Even though the fair was specifically marketed as a Pan-American celebration, there was a glaring lack of participants from Latin America up until the last moments. Even with the White House directly pressuring countries, with only a month to go there were only four Latin American countries signed up: Venezuela, Colombia, Panama, and Mexico. Mexico had only recently signed up, requiring diplomatic damage control after the country admitting to considering Hemisfair as an affront to their own international extravaganza: the 1968 Olympics. Fair planners had to change their dates to smooth things over. In the last minute, the White House helped arrange financing for three different additional Latin American entities: a Bolivian Pavilion, a Central American pavilion which crammed together 5 countries in three thousand feet, and the Organization of American States pavilion. The OAS exhibit was perhaps the fair’s most straightforward example of the kind of Monroe-style Pan-Americanism that it had in mind. The art exhibits on display were made up in part by works that had been chosen through the as the Esso Salon of Young Artists in 1964-1965. It was praised by its staunch anti-communist curator José Gómez-Sicre as a singularly import example of  capitalistic initiative, claiming “when the history of contemporary art in Latin America is written, the historians will have to distinguish two periods: pre-Esso and post-Esso.” It was claimed that the exhibit sought to combat the politicization of Latin American art, but what that really meant was its overwhelming association with the international left. While the OAS had kicked Cuba out of the organization in 1962 due to the actions of its Marxist government, Gomez-Sicre made sure to still include works by Cuban exiles, including what must certainly have been a completely apolitical sculpture entitled “political prisoner” (preso político) by Roberto Estopiñán.

A neatly curated vision of capitalistic initiative was exclusively what was on offer at the international pavilions. The German pavilion had its front facade handsomely glassed off with floor to ceiling panes, revealing a room overflowing with abstract white orbs. Inside, it offered a few impressions of German life “not unlike a peep show” as the accompanying brochure claimed. The marquee to the booth listed the name of the country in English, Spanish, and German, but the booth itself only represented those parts of the German speaking world not behind the Iron Curtain.

 

The Federal Republic of Germany has attained new importance in the world and in international markets as a highly developed industrial country that exports half of its gross product… Today’s Germany is not only assessed on the basis of its poets and philosophers but its industrious population and technical inspiration.

 

Although contributions to the global GDP were the most important point of emphasis, Germany also made sure to emphasize its cultural impact, providing visitors the chance to be “music detectives”  with a tape-recording quiz of classical as well as other German compositions. First prize winner would win a one-week round-trip for two to Berlin which remained “free and open despite everything.”

The other post-war economic powerhouse Japan, located on just the other side of the Schultz house, also took advantage of its booth to showcase its contributions to the world capitalist economy. Its brochure includes a series of statistics numbering its Industrial production index, Domestic capital formation, and Consumer durable diffusion per household. One of the main displays in its pavilion was dedicated to the opening of the New Tokaido Super Express, a so-called “Bullet Train” that made the trip between Tokyo and Osake in three hours. Given the contemporary state of intra-city train transportation in the State of Texas, this still comes off as futuristic today.

As mentioned, the remaining international pavilions were encouraged to keep their politics to a minimum. Better a scale model of the Panama Canal than any reference to any of the events that would lead up to its coup d’état in October. And better to display China’s traditional art for visitors than smash it as Red Guards were currently doing in the Cultural Revolution back home. But despite keeping such a tight lid on proceedings, it would end up being the United States whose pavilion would end up making the greatest political statement of the whole fair.

 

 

US

 

The international pavilions at world’s fairs have always been as occasion for hyperreal, over-the-top recreations of the most exotic aspects of home countries. There was a complete recreation of a Belgian village at the 1964 New York fair, complete with cobbled streets, beret-clad accordionists and a Creperie. Inside the USSR pavilion at Montreal, there was a miniature to-scale rotating industrial port, with a little model ship recreating of the atomic icebreaker “Lenin,” and petroleum tanks showing the wonders of communist industry. There were also the less than flattering flattering recreations as  well. Egyptians were shocked and dismayed to see the gratuitous grunginess on display at the Cairo street remade for the Paris fair in 1889, complete with dirty walls and imported Egyptian donkeys. This enthusiasm for the theme-park-ification of global culture  oftentimes led to pavilion showboating, with some outshining others based on each respective countries investment in their space. In light its own spirit of modesty, the San Antonio Hemisfair had provided strictly regulated booth space, 50×60 feet steel framed buildings with open front facades for participant countries. These little gas station store sized booths, rarely accommodating more than a single room, were all clustered around the intersection of Durango (now Cesar Chavez) Boulevard and S. Alamo Street in the section of the fair called “Plazas del Mundo.”

And so it’s not a little ironic that the United States, not bound to its own restrictions, would end up erecting a grandiose pavilion that would serve as a colosseum-sized place to  air its own dirty laundry.  The pavilion included the 70 foot tall circular “confluence theater”, encased in glass and skinny modernist columns, along with a “Migration Courtyard” where public speeches, cultural events and acrobatic performances were held. Along with Joe Louis’ boxing gloves and Ty Cobb’s bat, the Confluence theater held the world’s largest curvilinear motion picture screen. Viewers would be shuttled into one of three separate auditoriums where they would begin watching a normal 35mm sized film. Film projectors up in the booth would then switch the footage briefly to the early silent film 1.33 format to show a Wright Brothers type of airplane flying towards the audience, at which point the theatre would go dark with only the rumbling noise of the airplane engine. In total darkness, the walls between the theaters were removed and the 35mm screens folded up into the ceiling. When the lights came back on, viewers would be in one large semi-circular room looking at an integrated triptych projected on with 70mm projectors.

But the movie that viewers saw when the lights came back on was not what planners had envisioned. The Department of Commerce had tasked filmmaker Francis Thompson, coming off of his Oscar win in 1965 for best short documentary, with making a film using his pioneering method of multiscreen documentaries. But the film he chose to make for Hemisfair, entitled “US,” would end up causing a firestorm of controversy even before the fair opened. By the time Mrs. Johnson came for opening day, she was being trailed by reporters asking her opinion about the film. “Very artistic, very stirring…” she told the New York Times, “but it lacked the element that is going on today to provide balance—the element of hope.” Other politicians were less diplomatic, promising to boycott the film it saw as besmirching the image of America. William F. Buckley Jr. called the film a “Wagnerian seizure of despair over American’s shortcomings.” Many ordinary fairgoers seemed outraged, and the pavilion received bomb threats in response to the movie.

When President Johnson finally made it to the fair 3 months after the opening for the 4th of July, flanked by dignitaries and eating an ice cream cone, he was asked whether he had liked the film. “No comment,” was his only response.

But what was it about the film that caused so much outrage? As Richard Schickel wrote for Life Magazine,

 

the content of this work is much more interesting than the technological inventiveness of its presentation…it is one of the few films of any sort sponsored by a government—any government—that dares to criticize the nation whose taxpayers underwrote it.

 

What was remarkable about the film was that it was honest. After all of the efforts to bulldoze urban blight, to shuttle the Mexican American community out of view, and to paint a picture of a happy-go-lucky capitalist league of nations, Hemisfair ended up giving its most high-profile presentation to a movie that spoke frankly about genocide, slavery, segregation, and ecocide practically by accident. The film begins narrating the history of the traditional story of the first explorers of a “vast, unhumanized, virgin wilderness” but then immediately exposes this as myth. “Empty? No! There were noble savages, indian tribes, tillers and hunters roaming freely through the forests and plains….we wanted their lands, with War and whiskey we worsted them.” The film lauded the immigrants who crossed the Atlantic to build the nation, but also reminded the three separate audiences of “those earlier, luckless millions who were made to come, torn from their African homes by force.” For every optimistic narrative about the nation, the narrator offers the sobering, alternate history.

After the drone of the plane engine, and the darkening of the auditoriums, and the revealing of the curvilinear screen, the audience was treated to a montage of the “sheer ugliness of man-made America and the deeper ugliness of racial prejudice,” with forests being clear cut for lumber, urban ghettos and closeups of the abject poor, black families being gawked at by white neighbors as they try to move in, traffic clogged superhighways, trash filled rivers, clouds of smoke, and other scenes of “irredeemable desolation” as the film put it. As the stream of images flooded past, the narrator continued in his calm, damning voice, decrying that sacred freedom cherished by Americans, that empty freedom “to let poisons befoul the streams till the fish die, discommodate cities, turn smiling fields into junk graveyards and garbage dumps, let noxious effluvia fill the air, polluting our lungs.”  Not content with their own rhapsodizing, the filmmakers commission the poet W.H. Auden to contribute his own concluding thoughts about American’s ugliness at the end of the film.

 

The eyes of the world are upon us

And wonder what we’re worth,

For much they see dishonors

The richest country on earth. 

 

Once the movie was done, shell-shocked moviegoers were escorted by a group of young, attractive ushers down a corridor which led finally to an image of themselves projected on a screen with a sign over it reading “Am I Part of the Problem?” and, a little further down the exit ramp “Am I Part of the Solution?”

 

A Walk Around the Fair

 

The only participants who seemed to share the business-friendly vision that fair planners had actually hoped to promote were the corporations themselves. Stationed on the East Side of the fair, they were not limited to small, pre-built boxes, and could be as austentatious as they pleased. Postcards of the I.B.M. Pavilion make it look like a mix between an Orange Julius and an Apple Store. It featured a strange and novel contraption, described as a “machine that looks like a typewriter with a television screen on it.” Once a fairgoer sat at this proto-computer and input the day of their birth, the screen would announce the precise number of years, months, days, minutes and seconds that they had been alive. The gimmick was amazingly prescient in showing off the ways that the computer would one day be used to explore ever greater heights of narcissism. This was not to be confused with the Bell System Pavilion’s “Age-Guesser,” or any of its other technological contraptions such as the Pictophone (available for televised chats with other persons in Chicago, Philadelphia and Disneyland), or the special “ranch” where youngsters were invited to talk to their favorite cartoon characters. Still thoroughly invested in the invention of the internal combustion engine, the Gulf Oil Corporation allowed children to putter around in one of thirty miniature gas-powered convertibles over a model freeway.

Many of the other Industrial and Institutional Exhibits were far less ambitious. The GE Theaterama offered a twenty-minute show entitled “The Wonderful World of Progress,” the Coca-Cola Company pavilion had a 25-minute puppet play called “Kaleidoskope”, and the Ford Motor Company had a ten minute movie in the round called “The Wide World of Ford.” Kodak at least seemed partially work in the fair’s theme into its branding, claiming in its advertisement for the pavilion that its “displays show how photography is an international language that binds people together in the things they treasure and want to remember.”

Besides the international and industrial pavilions, the fair was stuffed to the brim with a bevvy of strange attractions. The best way to satisfy the imagination of what it was like to walk the fair may be the Texas Archive of the Moving Image, which has an online collection of amateur footage from several families who brought cameras along with them during their visits. The home movie reel from the Ramon Galindo family has an extended clip of a day at the fair, and it’s shot with a realistic intimacy and randomness.  You can see bored ladies in pearl necklaces and beehive hairdos, families licking their fingers as they finish lunch in the Goliad Food Plaza, audience members lackadaisically clapping in the summer heat for a mariachi island playing out on a tiny circular island. The Jeske family home video also has a close up of the mariachi show, along with a canal boat slowly chugging past in the background. The Jeske’s also filmed has an extended shot taken from inside of the moving monorail (heart bestill!) and, miraculously, an actual performance of Daredevil Henri LaMothe’s famous diving stunt. This was the same diving stunt that captivated reporter Calvin Trillin when he toured the fair shortly after its opening.

 

LaMothe stood poised on the platform for several minutes while the announcer spoke ominously of wind direction. Then he dived forward in a swan dive, landing perfectly on his stomach. The crowd cheered.       

 

To watch the stunt in living color on the Jeske’s home movie  is something else. LaMothe does actually ascend up a skinny, forty-foot ladder wearing what looks like white pijamas, but his “swan dive”  is so gangly and anti-climactic, a little splash of water coming up over the heads of people in the crowd, that it looks on film like an acrobatic clown act.

Calvin Trillin walked around the whole fair soon after it opened for the New Yorker, and after graduating from Yale reporting on integration in the South, was snarkily underwhelmed by the recycled feeling of the fair. The Tower of the Americas looked too similar to the Space Needle and the Unisphere. Some of the exhibits at Hemisfair were recycled. Les Poupés de Paris had been shown before at both Seattle and New York. The Kinoautomat and the Laterna Magika were recycled as well. The one exhibit that Trillin did find unique was the Institute of Texan Cultures.

 

Announcing that it would use solid history to correct the cliché that all Texans are boors, the Institute has arranged a tasteful and instructive exhibit dominated by historical artifacts of the various ethnic groups that have contributed to the state. Of course, nobody is fooled for a minute. Near the entrance, where it can’t be missed, is a garish display of Texas products dominated by a green-and-white helicopter, a gigantic tire, and stacks of Pioneer Bisquit Mix and Texsun Grapefruit Juice—ad if the designers felt compelled at the last minute to say, “Don’t be put off. It’s just us boars.”

 

The designers, in fact, had the question of boorishness in mind when designing the institute. Director R. Henderson Shuffler expressed his concern that most Texans had absorbed the phony myths about themselves as being “a bunch of hell-roaring pumpkins in buckskin who came brawling across the frontier, shoved the Indians and Mexicans out, and settled down to shooting each other at high noon in front of the village saloon.” It is fascinating to hear Hemisfair planners speak so frequently about their worries of how Texas would be perceived, expressing a tacit awareness of a World Fair’s magnifying glass-like ability to simultaneously distort and amplify details about any place it represented. The Institute of Texan Cultures was the best effort to counteract hyperbole with an anthropologists’ dignified bearing. All these decades later the Institute of Texas Cultures has remained a plinth-like time capsule to the zeitgeist and visual aesthetic of the better angels of the original fair. While the entrance way and gift shop have been given a facelift (or perhaps several) over the years, the farther you venture back into the penumbral exhibition hall, the more likely you are to run into retro typography, outdated facts, and uncomfortably worded but well-intentioned descriptions of Texas’ many ethnic groups. The ‘Institute’ is now managed by the University of Texas at San Antonio and so the entire museum is rapidly being brought into the 21st century. This is much to the benefit of the state’s efforts at multicultural education (have you ever heard of the Wendish Texans?) and much to the dismay of amateur world’s fair historians.

The unapologetically boorish Id to the Institute of Texan Culture’s ego was the Lone Star Brewing Company’s Pavilion. A perfect encapsulation of the fair’s conflicted relationship with scale, the pavilion was a 20,000 square foot star-shaped shrine to the national beer of Texas, overlooking the water-ski lagoon and built for a cost “in excess of half a million dollars.” It had refreshments, entertainment, and history all contained within its deceptively small structure. The best bar at the whole fair must have been Lone Star’s “Refreshment Center,” with a 126-foot counter on the first floor, a 60-foot counter on the second floor, and a veranda where one could watch the Waterski show while sipping their Lone Star or root beer. Accompanying their cold steins (40c for light beer, 50c for dark beer) the pavilion offered an assortment of dishes including chop’t steak and mashed potatoes, Los Nochitos (“so very Mexicana”) or the Baron of Beef. The specialty of the house was the “Poteet Popsickle”: a Kolbase sausage topped with hot jalapeno peppers, and pickles (60c). But the real entertainment was provided by the series of branded exhibits held within the pavilion. The Lone Star Hall of Horns and the Lone Star Hall of Fins provided a world class collection of hunting trophies hung up under old saloon style chandeliers hanging from the raftered ceilings. If taxidermy wasn’t your thing, the Lone Star Hall of Wildlife and Ecology featured a series of wildlife and ecology dioramas, set in relief by the museum’s dark wood panelling. For the ladies, the pavilion featured the Lone Star Hall of Coronation Robes featuring  handmade coronation robes from former Fiesta queens and princesses. But the piece de resistance was the Lone Star Hall of Texas History, a series of 15 dioramas made especially for the fair by the artist Emilie Toepperwein and her Texas historian husband Fritz. Using hundreds of items of real memorabilia and antiques, they fabricated live-size figures utilizing “unusual electronic methods [to] provide maximum realism and heightened dramatic effect” to stage scenes from Texas history. The wax Davey Crocket was festooned with a real coonskin cap, and Jean Lafitte’s pirate ship was stocked with a miniature cannon. In a picture featured in the “Bru-It” company magazine published right before the opening of the fair, Mrs. Toepperwein can be looking adoringly at Davey Crocket’s dismembered head of as she pulls it out of a cardboard box.

Although the Lone Star pavilion is no more, the priceless collection housed briefly under the roof of the Lone Star Pavilion can still be seen in various pieces around the city. Many of the wildlife and ecology tableaus were transported in toto to the Witte Museum where you’ll still be able to see a mountain lion disgorging a deer in the 3D Chisos Mountains. And much of the taxidermy and dioramas from the Hall of Texas History can now be found at the Buckhorn Saloon and Museum, where a waxy Stephen F. Austin will continue to issue land grants to anglos in tophats into the foreseeable future.

 

What Remains of the Fair Today?

 

Even though it is quite easy to overlay one of the many souvenir maps of the ‘68 Hemisfair over the same 92 acres of downtown today and approximate the site of each pavilion, it is still somehow seems hard to imagine that such a hapless, kitchy wonderland occupied the site. Even though several of the buildings, like the Eastman Kodak Pavilion and the United States Confluence Theater are still in use and retain their basic, dated shape, it is still seems impossible that this quiet downtown park was once busy with monorails and skyrides, flying indians and flamenco dancers; incomprehensible that the flat, hot park was once crisscrossed by canals and lagoons, floated by gondolas, dining barges, flower boats and other members of the “Hemisfair Armada.” The souvenirs and memorabilia from the fair are incredible distillations of the 1960s aesthetic, from the modernist optimism of its brochures to the technicolor palette of the Pavilion guidewomen’s uniforms, seen perched on the seats of gondolas and holding open pavilion doors on postcards. The mood of the fair seemed to perfectly encapsulate the waning days of a certain American earnestness, underwritten by sweeping so much politics under the rug. The clumsy melancholy of the whole spectacle is so entrancing that souvenirs and relics of the event have become a small industry.

From an economic point of view, the fair was a failure. City taxpayers ended up having to pay much more than the “thin dime” they were promised by fair planners. Ticket sales slumped far below projections, the fair way plagued with mechanical problems like a blackout at the Tower of the Americas and a monorail crash that left one dead. One of the best outcomes for the city was actually the effect that the failure of the fair had on delegitimizing the oligarchic rule of the GGL, whose monopoly on power was initially broken by bad press over the fair and which would eventually complete crumble by the end of the next decade. For almost twenty years after the event, most of the fairgrounds would be themselves a scene of urban blight on the city, with graffitied sculptures, condemned buildings, and a chain-link fence put up around the whole mess. The city has spent decades reimagining the site, with efforts continuing to the present day. Only now, more than 50 years after the original fair, is the space beginning to in any way resemble what preservationists had initially imagined. Famous local architect O’Neil Ford, whose enthusiasm for vernacular architecture and  historical preservation was only matched by fair organizers’ gusto for ready made structures and indiscriminate bulldozing, had once imagined clusters of old homes encircled with landscaped plazas. “I thought a fair should be like a park…The pattern of flow ought to be absolutely different from a street pattern. It was to be rhythmic, soft circles, so that the public flowed around things.” Nowadays the Hemisfair site is finally coming to take on the “human scale” promised by overzealous bureaucrats back in the early 1960s. Cafes, playscapes, and art exhibits are coming alive as the park becomes a place San Antonians would actually like to spend time in.

 

World Fairs usually leave behind at least one grandiose structure to remember them by. You can still get a sense of the majesty of the White City when you visit the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago, or feel the retro excitement in the brutalist detritus left behind in Flushing Meadows-Corona Park by the New York World’s Fair in 1964. Sometimes, as is the case with the Eiffel Tower, the monuments reach a level of fame that far outshines the fairs they were originally built for. Other times, when no longer surrounded by an exuberant, futurist carnival, some of these monuments stick out like awkward, over eager orphans. For the 1968 Hemisfair, this structure is the Tower of the Americas. Planners of the fair had spent years fighting over the funding, placement, and construction of the tower, and all of that after finally deciding, by attrition, that the grandiose structure would be yet another tower, even though one had already been constructed many times before for fairs and expositions. It was meant to be the centerpiece of the Hemisfair, and to serve as a landmark for the city moving forward.

It is no doubt iconic, recreated everywhere in the city today, from basketball jerseys to taco wrappers to cable company vans. Standing at 750 feet in a relatively flat city without much gusto for skyscraper building, it’s visible from practically anywhere inside Loop 1604. But the building itself has never garnered much praise for its aesthetic value. With its alternating brown spandrel panels and glass serving as its only ornament, the observation deck’s truncated cone looks like an unglazed bundt cake. The structures elevation is provided by a vertically ribbed tower, resembling a large churro made out of concrete. The whole thing together looks particularly graceless since the deck is perched incongruously on top without any transition between the two parts. Whereas the Space Needle has a Jetsons-like sleekness to it, and Berlin’s Fernsehturm has at least a sense of proportion to its ugliness, the Tower of Americas looks haphazard, like a small town bank branch plunked down on top of an oversized highway overpass beam.  Back when it was built, H.B. Zachry called it “ugly as a mud fence.” While it was still under construction, trade magazines tried not to draw attention to its aesthetics, and opted instead to focus on its sheer height. It would soon tower above other more modestly constructed obelisks, “52 feet taller than San Jacinto Monument and 67 feet higher than the Washington Monument,” neither of which would soon be hope to a doughnut-shaped revolving restaurant at their 550-foot level.

In 2014, an intern at Trinity University uncovered architectural designs for an alternative design of the tower, made by O’Neil Ford himself. In them, the base and deck of the tower are merged into a streamlined whole, creating a far more satisfying and unified silhouette. But the gawkish structure that was actually built functions as a much better symbol of the forces behind it: design by committee. And a cost-conscious and nepotistic one at that. In 1966 one of the Hemisfair executive committee members, D.J. Rheiner, had won the contract to build the tower before many other firms even know that the project was up for bids. Eventually Henry B. Gonzalez got involved, forcing the committee to drop the bid, which only put the question of  financing for the tower in doubt. Eventually San Antonio taxpayers approved a general revenue bond and  the construction contract was given to another company. In order to save costs on construction, the tower would be built using slip-form construction, with an observation deck that could be built on the ground and then shimmied up into place. It turns out it isn’t for nothing that the upper deck looks clumsily hoisted up there.

If you make a pilgrimage to the fairgrounds today, or merely walk through it on your way to pilgrimage the Tower of the Americas, you will walk past a plaza made up of pyramidal water features and semi-tropical landscaping. In an unassuming shallow pond nearby stands a series of columns supporting long concrete crossbeams. This piece of public art, which would normally be about as inspiring as a corporate plaza installation, is called the Mini-Monorail Monument because it is supposedly constructed out of remnants of the original transportation system that used to encircle the fair. It is reassuring that the fair’s goofiest and least practical showpiece has been preserved for posterity. Other hidden artifact can be found throughout the site. A few homesteads were preserved from the original Germantown, like the Halff House which hosted an 1890s nostalgia bar and an Oompah band during the fair; or the American Pavilion, now converted into a courthouse. The beautifully modernist Women’s Pavilion, once heralded as a place to showcase ““the other half” with all her faults, foibles, fun and fantasy,” is finally being renovated to serve as an indoor event space. It makes one hope that as the Hemisfair park continues to be redeveloped into the future, that the city will find ways to be respectful of what occupied the site before it, in a way that the original fair never did.

 

Translating a Strange Woman

All happy translators are alike, but every unhappy translator is unhappy in their own way. Beyond the countless technical, ethical, and philosophical challenges behind the act of translating a text itself, there is the translator’s relationship with their author. These relationships can be intimate and intense, a thrilling if fraught artistic collaboration. An author may balk at any suggested changes, offer too many of their own, or insist that the translator communicate what was meant rather than what is actually written. Or, worse still, the author can say nothing at all. Many translators work with the fervor of a spurned child, working through a novel without ever having the benefit of feedback from their authors. They work selflessly and by themselves for years on end, without a single piece of advice from the person who knows the text best. After suffering the deafening silence of the author, translator then weather the silence and rejection of editor after editor, armed only with the promise that one day a reader might discover your beloved author for themselves. If the book is one day published, they continue to wait, hoping that their efforts will somehow get the attention of their estranged author. But this can be hard to come by as words of love from an emotionless father. Many are spared the heartache by translating the works of authors who have already died.

And then there is the curious case of Amy Marie Spangler, translator of A Strange Woman by Leylâ Erbil. When Spangler set out to translate this complex and inventive first novel by one of Turkey’s most prestigious authors—itself a complex family drama that is in many ways about miscommunication—she had to account for not one absent author but two. As she explains in her translator’s preface, Spangler did not start translating Tuhaf Bir Kadın from scratch, but originally sought to shepard a pre-existing translation by the deceased Turkish poet Nermin Menemencioğlu to publication. Menemencioğlu had completed the translation all the way back in the early 1970s, shortly after Erbil first published the novel in Turkish. The only problem was that while Menemencioğlu had finished her translation, Erbil wasn’t done writing the book.

***

Tuhaf Bir Kadın is a fractured story of a woman named Nermin and her relationship to the people in her world: her friends, her mother, her extended family, her father, her husband, and her class. Over the course of four sections, each of which are written using different narrative styles and perspectives, she tries to understand others and to explain herself. The sections themselves are made up of a range of voices and mediums: journal entries, newspaper clippings, streams of consciousness, and dream logic. The second section, entitled The Father, revolves around the real-life unsolved murder of the Turkish communist Mustafa Suphi, and the efforts of the protagonist Nermin’s father to piece together clues about who killed him. At the same time, the father wrestles with his own impending death, and tries to work through the evidence of his own life. As the father lies on his deathbed, his memories are mixed with random facts from the case and bits of written cultural objects, creating a type of linguistic collage that allegorizes the interchange between personal memory and national history, a genre at which Erbil would excel at in later novels.

But because the Suphi incident was a real-life case, Erbil continued to insert new evidence from the case into the novel whenever there was a new printing. Over the course of 40 years before Erbil herself passed away, the novel would come to eventually differ from the original translation. When Spangler took up the crusade of having the original translation published, she realized that there were several differences between the older translation and the updated original. As Spangler explains in her Translator’s Preface, “unable to help myself, I began comparing Menemencioğlu’s translation to the Turkish line by line and found that the English had been stylistically “smoothed out” in many ways. Knowing what a stickler Erbil was when it came to style, and how deliberate she was in the choices she made, I wondered if the translation shouldn’t be further edited.”

Spangler has the reverence and precision of the most dedicated exegetist, but she seems to have been torn between two loyalties. On the one hand, Menemencioğlu’s translation text should carry scriptural authority as it was made with direct consultation of Leylâ Erbil herself. The two undertook an extended correspondence, and Spangler had direct access to read their exchange by visiting the new Leylâ Erbil archive at Boğaziçi University. Some of these letters discuss specific editorial choices related directly to A Strange Woman. But on the other hand, Spangler is a dedicated Erbilist, and the hermeneutic of “grammatical insurgency,” as Erbil’s style came to be known, has little regard for values like precedence, authority, or entrustment. Erbil would at times go so far as to disavow loyalty to her own style. “I’m not the one who decides my writing style, it’s the people, places, geography, history, archaeology etc. that dictate it to me.” Spangler, then, seems to be on firm textual footing to make her own choices. In her Preface she lays out her justification for avoiding any stylistic choices that would betray the text’s difficulty, inventiveness, and strangeness.

Given the history of these changes, one cannot themselves help from comparing Menemencioğlu’s earlier translation to the one that has just been published. Beyond the mere curiosity of seeing how Spangler manages to satisfy contending claims, it would be a disservice to the memory of Erbil to not keep prodding. Looking closely through both versions, there are indeed numerous changes to the originally translated text. But most of them show the delicacy of a respectful proof-reader; a fussing with punctuation and a tweaking of syntax. Only occasionally does Spangler go so far as to translate an entire word differently. At first glance it seems that Spangler herself has merely “smoothed out” the text and updated it for a contemporary audience.

But one should not be misled by the seemingly innocuous addition of a comma or parentheses into thinking these changes are minor. Erbil was famously fastidious about punctuation (she is credited, after all, with inventing her own punctuation system including comma-exclamation points and triple commas as the pre-existing symbols didn’t capture the nuance of pace and phrasing to her satisfaction). The small changes in fact add up and reveal deeply meaningful things to the English-language reader about the people, places, geography, and history of the novel. To take just one example, in the Father section of the novel, Nermin comes to visit her father in the hospital.

Erbil 9th edition Turkish text
Karım hıçkırmaya başladı, dışarı çıkardılar onu. Nermin çıkmadı. Kötülükle karşılaştığında katılaşır, kanı donar, “ıslanan tilki yağmurdan korkmaz” derler, öyle bu kız. Geldi oturdu yatağımın ucuna ayaklarımdan başladı, bacaklarıma, kemençeme, kemençemin sapına, çeneme, dudaklarıma, burnuma, gözlerime, kaşlarıma, alnıma, saçlarıma, kulaklarıma uzun uzun baktı, yorganın dışına düşmüş elime uzandı nabzımı saydı, “Ağrın var  mı?” dedi. “Yok, şimdi iyiyim.”
Menemencioğlu’s translation
My wife is sobbing now, so they quietly get her out of the room. Nermin doesn’t go with her. When things go badly, that girl grows hard, her blood seems to freeze, a wet fox doesn’t feel the rain, they say, that’s how she acts. She sat down at the foot of my bed, her look sweeping up from my feet, past my legs, my fiddle, the handle of my fiddle, my chin, lips, nose, eyes, forehead, ears. My hand was hanging out from under the quilt, she took it and felt my pulse. “Do you have any pain?” she asked. “No, I’m fine now.”
Spangler’s Edit/Translation
My wife began sobbing at this point, so they led her out of the room. Nermin didn’t go with her, though. When things get tough, that girl goes hard, her blood freezes, there’s that saying, “a wet fox doesn’t feel the rain”— that’s exactly how she is. She sat down at the foot of my bed and began looking at me, slowly moving her gaze, beginning with my feet, past my legs, up my kemençe, my kemençe stem, my chin, lips, nose, eyes, eyebrows, forehead, hair, ears, she reached out and took my hand, which was hanging out from under the quilt, and felt my pulse. “Do you have any pain?” she asked. “No, I’m fine now.” (115)

 

 

 

 

 

In describing Nermin’s stoicism, the father in Spangler’s translation uses more pointed expressions. In English to go hard is harsher and more sudden than to grow hard, and the word “seems” is deleted to make the freezing of her blood a full metaphor. The entire sentence echoes the idiom “when the going gets tough, the tough get going,” which suggests that Nermin approaches even the most vulnerable moments of familial intimacy with an attitude of self-reliant hardheadedness. As will be revealed in the conversation between them that follows, Nermin holds just such an attitude, and it is precisely this lack of empathy that sabotages her efforts at political proselyting.

Her father also describes her by using the proverb “a wet fox doesn’t feel the rain,” but in the newer translation it is bracketed off from the indirect discourse by the use of parentheses. Menemencioğlu’s version could be read as if the proverb is well known, the “they” being used to signal the passive voice rather than a specific deictic. But in keeping the parentheses from the original, Spangler holds on to the separation of voices, insisting that there is a specific “they” in mind who say this particular proverb. The Father section of the novel is filled with allusions to the specific climate and culture of the Black Sea region of northern Turkey. Compared to the rest of the country, this region is rainier and more forested. The proverb, then, seems to be a regionalism unique to the Black Sea, some linguistic remnant of the father’s childhood perhaps. This is very much in line with all of the dense and particular cultural references that make up the stream of consciousness in this section. The parentheses do much more to suggest the specificity of the proverb then, to make it more tangibly a linguistic remnant from the Father’s childhood, an expression coming to him now as something about his grown daughter reminds him of the stoicism and resolve of the villagers he knew in his youth.

And lastly there is the issue of the kemençe. Lying exposed on the hospital bed, Nermin’s father feels vulnerability and embarrassment which is only compounded by the fact that his own daughter sees him in this state. She sees everything, even his most private parts. There is nothing to shield him from her unempathetic gaze, nothing except euphemism. In Menemencioğlu’s version he describes her looking at his fiddle, which seems like a strange and unobvious slang word for penis. A quick reading might not take it to mean penis at all. This is because a kemençe, the word in the original text, and an American-style fiddle, are not at all the same instrument. Looking up kemençe in a Google image search will quickly reveal that it has a much narrower, and much more phallic shape. Its head looks practically explicit once the inference has been made! Besides being more overtly sexualized, the kemençe is also more regionally specific, again being an instrument associated with the Black Sea region. Like most idealistic translators, Spangler has a distaste for the coddling use of footnotes, and italicizes kemençe without ever explaining what it is. She knows that English-language readers all have access to the internet, and the only thing worse than having to include a footnote in having to use it to explain a sexual euphemism. But the real point is kemençe does so much work in the text, suggesting all at once the father’s connection to regional culture, his physical vulnerability and awkwardness, and the strange phenomenon of being medically examined by one’s own daughter, an experience that so flips the parent-child dynamic that it is the father who now is made to describe his own genitals like a child.

***

Because it inevitably requires so much interpersonal interpretation, there is something of the analyst’s job in translation. A careful translator looks for the smallest tic, the smallest phrase for symptoms. The small changes in the examples above are what many would consider as falling into the realm of proof-reading rather than editing. Nevertheless, each one tells us something different about the uniqueness and complexity of the novel’s characters, and shows us the complicated and dysfunctional relationship between them. Any good Erbilist knows that even the slightest changes in punctuation can have immediate and enormous consequences for the text, especially when the text deals primarily with psychic life in both form and content.

“I firmly hold the view that since all people are all debilitated and wounded (in a society—in a world—where everyone is debilitated, to be debilitated is to be “normal”), it may not be enough to describe them in familiar sentences or to make them speak in the first-person singular. Similarly, a text that alters and plays with the structure and meaning of the sentence requires that we change the traditional use of punctuation.”

 

And changes in form and structure not only capture the fraught relationships between the novel’s characters. They also reflect on the relationship between author and translator. And this relationship, like that between analyst and analysand, is just as susceptible to transference. As Janet Malcolm describes the phenomenon, “the idea that the most precious and inviolate of entities—personal relations—is actually a messy jangle of misapprehensions, at best an easy truce between powerful solitary fantasy systems,” transference sounds not a little like translation. Whether conducted through intimate correspondence, or intuited through literary seance, both of the translators of A Strange Woman still had to deal with the inherent limits of using language to understand and explain their author.

And the non-diegetic relationships of the novel go far beyond that: relationships between first and second translator, translator and editor, editor and reader. As much assistance as English-language readers generally need today to read translated novels from other countries, one should have nothing but sympathy for someone who tried to market a Turkish novel translation back in the 1970s. Indeed, despite the brilliance of the novel, it seems no amount of “smoothing out” was enough for English publishers back then. It is to Spangler, and the rest of our good fortune that it was Deep Vellum who finally decided to publish A Strange Woman. Their commitment to not only translating world literature, but difficult world literature, makes them the perfect host for Leylâ Erbil’s long-awaited arrival into English. Understanding this context helps us to acknowledge that the two texts differ slightly not due to differences in skill or personal taste, but because they carry the symptoms of countless relationships of dysfunction. It is no wonder, then, that every translator finds their own way to translate those points when language fails and stumbles.