You shook your head. “I have a problem with my feet.”
He nodded. He didn’t speak, only pressed his thumbs along your instep. You were silent too, letting the sore bones and stiff muscles speak for you. You looked up at the cratered ceiling tiles and closed your eyes. His forehead touched your knees, bone against flat bone.
“I missed you,” he said afterward—his suit, your uniform, stretched across the table like ghost bodies.
Months after he’d disappeared, Pepe turned up again at the rehab farm. Relapse, said the once-addicted priest, is just part of the process. His rule for returning men was three strikes and you’re out.
EMERGING FROM THE darkness underground a few blocks north, you hobble to the river, coughing clouds of dust. On the grass a rescue worker tears a white sheet from a gurney into strips. Red tears rain down his face. You think again of saints. You collapse to your knees, a park bench for your prie-dieu.
You’ll catch your breath here, that’s all. Before you head back south. John’s tower stands, without its twin, still smoking in the distance. He’s still there. You’re sure of it.
Why shouldn’t you expect a miracle? You found Pepe, fine and floating in his cradle, didn’t you? What could have killed him didn’t, because you were there.
But Pepe was a child, and without sin, some voice reminds you. God’s book does not mince words about what happens to a man who does what John has done, what a woman like you deserves.
Is today a judgment, then?
God doesn’t say.
And so you offer what you would have offered on the day you were prepared to find your brother dead.
Take me.
You’ll walk into this river, wash away your sins. And if he lives, you’ll see to it yourself that he lives right. You’ll walk into this river and you won’t come out.
You know that bargains aren’t prayers. This kind of pagan trade isn’t what Jesus meant by sacrifice. Today, though, you’ll try anything.
And when you hear the second rumbling, you don’t run. When smoke, the second night in one bright hour, again snuffs out the morning, you kneel and wait, elbows on the slats, hands clasped at your brow, stubborn as a statue while the glass and dust and paper coat the town.
You’ve come this far. Why wouldn’t you go back for him? You came into this world with few advantages, but faith is wealth, and you, Esmeralda, are rich with it.
FOR ONE WHOLE year you both avoided the word love.
For one whole year you never talked about the future.
What you discussed, what kept you listening to each other all those hours in his office, was the past.
“I almost didn’t stay here in this city,” you told John. “Get out of here,” he said. By then you knew what this expression meant.
You were playing the game that lovers play, when lovers can’t believe their luck. What if John had worked for that firm and not this one? What if the cleaning company had sent you to a midtown building? You never would have met. And further back in time, and further: what if John became a fireman or cop, like his brothers? What if you never left the Philippines?
“It’s true,” you said. “Mrs. Guzman, the one who brought me, couldn’t keep me. She said she didn’t know that living in this city was so hard. She bought me a plane ticket and called up a family she knew in Manila.”
You told John about shopping for souvenirs at the airport. The T-shirts: so expensive. Snow globes you shook to watch the salt-shaped crumbs fall on the mini-skyline. People on the farm would ask about the snow—what would you tell them? That you hadn’t stayed long enough to see it? You looked at yellow-taxi postcards, bright red apple magnets. People would ask about the skyscrapers. Had you ever climbed to the top of one? What would you say?
“I kept thinking of this rhyme that day,” you said to John. “The Guzman kids liked it.”
Because John’s head was in your lap, your hand combing his white hair, you sang it.
If I were a spoon as high as the sky,
I’d scoop up the clouds that go slip-sliding by.
I’d take them inside and give them to Cook
to see if they taste just as good as they look.
“I never learned that one.” John smiled. “How would the sky taste, do you think? If we got close enough?”
“Soft but crunchy,” you said. (You had wondered too.) “And good for breakfast; just a little makes you full.”
You told him somehow you weren’t finished with the city. Something kept you here. The city wasn’t done with you.
“It’s brave, what you decided,” John said. “When you think about it.”
“But I wasn’t thinking, not at all.” You laughed. “Is it brave, or crazy? If I was thinking, I’d go home. I had no job. I had no place to live.”
The job that brought you to him, to this building, was still eighteen years away that day. There would be lucky accidents and Doris and a change of laws and many other rooms to tidy in between. But as it happened, when you backtracked through the gate, and spent some of your last bills on a taxi back into the city, on a crisp, clear day like this one, you came very close to him and didn’t know it. You just didn’t know exactly where to go.
As far as towers went, you hadn’t even been in this land long enough to know the difference between tall and high.
“I want to see the highest building in this town,” you told the driver.
So he brought you here.
Love Poems for the Border Patrol
Amitava Kumar
I am trying now to remember when it was that I stopped thinking of myself as a new immigrant.
Was it after three years? Five? Fifteen?
I have a narrative in my mind that is teleological—I think the word for this, from my graduate-student days, is Hegelian—and it culminates in my becoming a writer. A writer of immigritude. There is something else. I cannot put a date to it but I suspect that the rawness of always feeling out of place, of not belonging, that fighting sense I had of forever being on edge, diminished or even disappeared once I reached the understanding that I no longer had a home to which I could return. Which went hand in hand, and this is part of the Hegelian schema I’m inhabiting here, with my finding a home in literature.
I arrived in the US for graduate study in literature in the fall of 1986. I was twenty-three. After a year, I began to paint even though I had come to the US with the intention of becoming a writer. I painted small canvases, abstract forms which sometimes had words, often in Hindi, written on them. Why did this happen? Maybe because one day in the college bookstore I had seen a coffee-table book that had the word INDIA printed on it in large letters. It was an expensive book but it had a discount sticker on it and I bought it. Inside were the expected photographs of the Taj Mahal, busy streets, people playing Holi, a Rajasthani shepherd wearing a bright turban. There was also a section on art. I saw the reproduction of a painting by S. H. Raza. On the left side of the canvas, at the bottom, were the words in Hindi: “Ma lautkar jab aaonga kyaa laoonga?” (Ma, when I come back, what will I bring?) Abstract art had never pierced me thus.
The real change that happened soon after that time was that I began writing poems. My poems were about India; they were political and of little aesthetic value. But they allowed me to imagine scenes from the life and the landscape I had left behind. The moon, voices in the dark, a village path, a fire. Which is to say, I had carried my memories with me when I left home, and after a while they found expression on the page. I haven’t looked at these poems for a long time. They speak to me of a missing wholeness. I brought two bags from home, but I left a third behind. / Bags, passport, my shoes crossed the yellow lines, something was left behind. / Here I am, a sum of different parts. Travel agents sell ads for the parts left behind.
IN THE POETRY of immigrants nostalgia is as common as confetti at parades and platitudes at political conventions. In my case, I’ve got to say, my nostalgia was simply the clear bottle in which was stored an explosive r
age. This was a rage directed against the figure of the immigration official. I wasn’t lying when I had been asked at first if I was planning to return; but later, things changed and I didn’t know what would happen in the future. There was the sense that it was I, and not the person interrogating me, who had paid a price by leaving home. I deserved sympathy. A part of me also felt that I belonged in this new country where I had lived for, say, a decade or more. But there was no chance of having an honest discussion about this with the immigration official. It all seemed an exercise in bad faith.
OTHER PEOPLE, UNLUCKIER than me, have suffered definite traumas. Famine; dictatorships; bombed cities; families wiped out. No such horrors in my past. All I had experienced was ritual humiliation at the American embassy in Delhi and at the immigration counters in several airports and land crossings in the United States. The poems I started writing after a few years in this country were accounts of such encounters. “Poems for the INS” (the acronym stood for Immigration and Naturalization Service, a name which changed in 2003, with the agency subsumed under the newly created Department of Homeland Security) were a series of poems I wrote offering vignettes that staged imaginary conversations between the narrator and the official at the visa counter. “You can’t trust them,” one officer says. / I’m prepared to bet he is from Brooklyn. / There is no response from the other one. He is not angry, / just sad that I now work in his country. / This quiet American has pasted Hindi alphabets / on his left, on his right there is a proverb from Punjab. / “You just can’t trust them,” the first one repeats, shaking his wrist to loosen his heavy watch. / The one sitting down now raises his weary eyes. / “Did you, the first time you went there, / intend to come back?” / “Wait a minute,” I say, “did you get a visa / when you first went to the moon? Fuck the moon, / tell me about Vietnam. Just how precise / were your plans there, you asshole.”
Writing as revenge. Fantasy in the purest form. Fantasy tethered to the hurt of the real. Now, with the distance of more than two decades, I feel a distance from that rage. And I also feel some tenderness for the person who was trying so very hard to inscribe an idea of himself against nullity. How else to understand this desperate stance? The cigarette smoke lingered / in the blue Minnesota chill / as my friend said, “I’d like to talk / to you of other things. / Not politics again things like / whether you are lonely.” / “What could be more political than the fact that I’m lonely, / that I am so far away / from everything I’ve known?
Tenderness also for the humble inventory provided to the immigration official after the applicant is asked if he has any property in India, or relatives, anything: the list included the yellow of mustard blossoms stretching to the horizon, the old house with its damp walls and his sister’s laughter, the smell of spices over a naked fire. But here’s the crucial thing: in drawing up this inventory I was already moving away from who I was when I had arrived in the US. In remembering what I had lost, I was filling my mind with memories. These poems became the screen behind which my past receded.
AFTER TEN OR fifteen years, certainly by the time I had published Passport Photos, the confusion and loss of my early years had been replaced by a self-conscious construction of an immigrant self. I’m calling it a construction because it was an aesthetic and a textual idea. I was taking pictures of migrant life; I was reporting on novels and nonfiction about immigrants; my own words were an edited record of what I was reading. An eclectic mix of writers: Frantz Fanon, Aimé Césaire, June Jordan, Jamaica Kincaid, Hanif Kureishi, Salman Rushdie, Marguerite Duras, Guillermo Gómez-Peña. Reagan was still president when I came to the US. The Iran-Contra hearings, and not the O. J. trial of a decade later, was my introduction to televised spectacle. Gap-toothed Ollie North and his proclamations of innocence, the volume of hair on his secretary Fawn Hall’s head, reports I read of Reagan declaring, “I am a Contra.” I had consumed all of this as an innocent—and by writing poems I began issuing my declarations of independence. While writing this piece, I went back to read a long poem I had written in the midnineties, “Trotsky in the Park.” I was on a postdoc fellowship at Stony Brook University and living in a sublet apartment in the East Village. I recognize what I’m doing in the poem: I’m drawing a map of a part of New York City in those lines, and placing people and their talk on the streets where I had seen or heard them. In other words, as an immigrant, I’m making myself at home, if that’s the phrase I want, by writing myself into the urban landscape before my eyes.
Recently, I was reading the lectures that the novelist James Salter delivered at age ninety, at the University of Virginia, shortly before his death. In one of them, he quoted the French writer and critic Paul Léautaud (1872–1956) who had written: “Your language is your country.” Salter had added: “I’ve thought about it a great deal, and I may have it backwards—your country is your language. In either case it has a simple meaning. Either that your true country is not geographical but lingual, or that you are really living in a language, presumably your mother tongue.” When I read those words I thought of my grandmother who died a few years after I came to America. She was the only person to whom I wrote letters in my mother tongue, Hindi. On pale blue aerograms I sent her reports on my new life in an alien land. Although she could sign her own name, my grandmother was otherwise illiterate and would ask the man who brought her the mail in the village or a passing schoolchild to read her the words I had written. And when my grandmother died, I had no reason to write in Hindi again. Now it is a language that I use only in conversations, either on the phone with my friends and relatives in India or, on occasion, when I get into cabs in New York City.
At another point in his lectures, Salter told his audience that “style is the entire writer.” He said: “You can be said to have a style when a reader, after reading several lines or part of a page, can recognize who the writer is.” There you have it, another definition of home. In novels like A Sport and a Pastime and Light Years, the sentences have a particular air, and the light slants through them in a way that announces Salter’s presence. All the writers I admire, each often different from the other, erect structures that offer refuge. Consider Claudia Rankine. You are reading her description of a woman’s visit to the new therapist. The woman has arrived at the door that is locked. She rings the bell on the front door. The therapist opens the door and yells, Get away from my house! What are you doing in my yard? The woman replies that she has an appointment. A pause. Then, an apology that confirms that what just happened actually happened. If you have been left trembling by someone yelling racist epithets at you, Rankine’s detached, near-forensic writing provides you the comfort of clarity that the confusion of the therapist in the story doesn’t.
THIIRTY YEARS HAVE passed since I left India. I have continued to write journalism about the country of my birth: this has allowed me to cure to some degree the malady of distance. Writing journalism, with its open-ended exploratory questions, its demand for encounters with people and places, has been a gift to me. The tone of my writing has been primarily observational and I’ve reflected a great deal on the literature that is suited to describe or engage the conditions in the country of my birth. But I have also known for long that I no longer belonged there.
DESPITE THE LONG years here in the US, I have explored little. My journalism, while extending to, say, South Asian immigrants jailed on charges of terrorism, hasn’t been extensive. I haven’t reported in grand detail on rituals of national life, or road journeys, or malls, or the death of steel-manufacturing towns. I think this is because I feel a degree of alienation that I cannot combat. I’ve immersed myself in reading more and more of American literature, but no editor has asked me to comment on Jonathan Franzen or Jennifer Egan. It is assumed I’m an expert on writers who need a little less suntan lotion at the beach. I don’t care. Removed from any intimate connection to a community or the long association with a single locale, my engagement with literature is now focused on style. Do my sentences, in their simplicity, their plain de
scriptive quality, reveal once again the voice of the outsider, a mere observer?
Do I detect a trace of self-pity or sadness in the questions above? I don’t mean to convey that impression. The world is what it is. And, in any case, there are degrees of estrangement. I contemplate my solitude, which is actually a luxury, with the fate of others. Let me give you an example. In a cemetery that is only a few miles away from my home in the Hudson Valley is the gravestone of an Indian woman. “Anandabai Joshee M.D. 1865–1887 First Brahmin Woman to Leave India to Obtain an Education,” reads the inscription. Joshee was aged nine when she was married to a twenty-nine-year-old postal clerk in Maharashtra, and twenty-one when she received a doctor’s degree in Pennsylvania. A few months later, following her return to India, she died of tuberculosis at the age of twenty-two. Her ashes were sent to the woman who had been her benefactor in the US and that is how Joshee’s ashes found a place in Poughkeepsie. Joshee had already achieved so much, and against such great odds, by the time she died. I’m aware that when she died, Joshee was younger than I was when I left India for America; involved in medical studies, and living in a world that must have felt immeasurably more distant than it does now, she probably didn’t have time to write poems or worry about style. I read in a publication recently that earlier this year a crater on the planet Venus was named after her. It made me think that brave Anandabai Joshee now has a home that none of us will ever reach.
Blue Tears
Karissa Chen
If the Communists swim ashore, they’ll slit our throats in our sleep and cut off our ears. That’s what some of the other men say. The Communist generals wear belts of ears around their waists, the cartilage and skin turned black, curling into themselves like dried fungus.
Nobody sleeps on the beach, not even the areas where there are no mines. Nobody except me. I volunteer for all the night sentinel posts, stationed in that little tower overlooking the sea. After my shift is over, instead of heading back to my bunk, I sleep out on the sand. I tell people it’s because I like looking at the fading stars. My commander, Colonel Li, never stops me.
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