Margotlog: A Cuban Beside Me
I never expected to meet anyone from Cuba, but there he was beside me on a flight from Amsterdam to Minneapolis/Saint Paul--a wiry, curly-haired young man named Sergio. We weren't even near Cuba or Miami. What was he doing outside the ring I'd unwittingly drawn around Cuban participation in the world?
I hadn't given much thought to Cuba since the Cuban Missile Crisis, the first time I was old enough to realize that a world event might actually affect me. More recently when my husband and I have visited Key West, Florida, we've imagined that we can see Cuba just over the horizon. Once in the mid-1990s, we met a Minnesotan library aide, who was taking his girlfriend to Cuba, via Mexico. He seemed thrilled to attempt what was then, and still may be, a rather risky trip.
In my book, Up to the Plate, I remembered writing about Las Cubanas, a Cuban "girls" team, who hosted the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League during the World War II era. The All-American girls stayed at the Seville Biltmore Hotel in Havana and drew bigger crowds than the Brooklyn Dodgers who were there for spring training. One Cuban player, Isabel Alvares, also landed a place with the
All-American Girls, coming to the U.S. once she turned fifteen.
But May Day, as I'd mentioned in the book, was a dangerous time for the All-American visitors. The Havana hotel manager confined the female ball players to their rooms, fearful of political street fights on this "red letter" day for socialists and communists. In my rather hazy calendar of Cuban change, Castro's Communist revolution overthrew the right-wing Battista, and after that, came the missile crisis. Now, thinking about my impressions of Cuba, I saw that the country had seethed with turmoil before the overthrow of Battista.
Now, here was Sergio, telling me how hard he and his Canadian wife worked to support their two children in the very expensive city of Vancouver, Canada. Since he's a carpenter, he's been able to fit out their one-bedroom apartment to provide everyone a bed, but it's clear that he and his wife worry about how they'll afford college. "Everyone in my family went to college free in Cuba," Sergio tells me. "My mother, my aunt, both have advanced engineering degrees, and their education was financed by the government." I'm impressed by this far-sighted program of Castro's communist government, well aware that even in U.S., going to"state" universities like the University of Minnesota can cost close to $80,000 for a four-year college education, not to mention the additional cost of a masters or Ph.D.
Not only was it very pleasant talking with this kind and articulate young Cuban, but we even traded differing versions of what started the Spanish-American War--his certainty that the explosion of the U.S.S.Maine in Havana harbor was an intentional act of aggression, and my suspicion that the explosion was simply an accident which the U.S. took as a pretext for invasion. In either case, we agreed about U.S. aggression, and I remembered a memorial in the Key West cemetery listing the Cuban dead from the war, assuming that Key West had had a substantial Cuban population.
We also both applauded President Obama's recent visit to Cuba. When he arrived in Havana, Obama sailed smoothly through Fidel Castro's refusal to meet him (though Raoul Castro did greet him). Obama gave a speech encouraging better relations between the two countries. Both of us applauded the President's composure and far-sighted desire for more neighborly relations. In the end we both feared what the current Republican front-runners for the presidency might make of Cuba. Sergio told me that Fidel Castro himself seemed to have lost the ability to grapple with current affairs. He seems stuck on the past, on the missile crisis and what he had hoped but not been able to create for his country.
Friday, April 22, 2016
Sunday, March 20, 2016
Margotlog: Trump's Cabaret
Margotlog: Trump's Cabaret
Several weeks ago, we rented the 1972 movie Cabaret set in Berlin, Germany during the rise of the Nazi party. The naughty, insinuating face of Cabaret master of ceremonies Joel Grey rouses in me a cheap, nasty thrill of disobedience and slummyness. Writing soon after the movie's release, Pauline Kael called Joel Gray in the role a "devil-doll" which his intoxicating, leering nastiness,. On the music hall makeshift stage, scantily clad women strut around, showing their boobs, or belting out "Mein Herr," with Liza Minnelli, the Kit Kat Club star dancer/singer. But she's ultimately an American girl gone astray who'll get herself pregnant by a bisexual Brit student, and (shockingly for the time) have an abortion. Yes, her love-affair gone awry adds to the atmosphere of limits and decorum being breached, and though trenchant stuff for the era, it's not what makes my blood run cold today.
It's the SHOW, the Cabaret performances. As the secondary plot evolves, with a young German Jew trying to pass himself off as a pure-blood Protestant but falling in love with a Jewish heiress, and shedding his disguise to marry her, Joel Gray dances and sings with a costumed ape--"if you could see her as I do...she wouldn't look Jewish at all." It's his leer at the audience that rouses complicity and a thrill of defiling tabus which ultimately both rouses joy and alarm.
So why does Cabaret make me think of the Trump Act that's threatening to swamp the Republican party, and in another horrifying possibility, give him the presidency? What was it about the Nazis that helped them rise to power, setting aside the Wiemar Republic and vote in Hitler? As in Cabaret, it was their SHOW. The spectacle, first of a uniformed young blond man singing in a tea garden "Tomorrow belongs to me," with all the lyric loveliness of yearning youth until that yearning becomes insistent and ends with everyone in the audiences shouting in triumph. "Tomorrow will belong to me or by God, I'll trample all convention and borders, all warlike codes and prisoner rehabilitation into the dust." Gradually when men with such attitudes infiltrate every level of society, when their uniformed bodies fill the audience in the Cabaret, march through the streets, raise their hands in automaton salute, and shout in ecstatic, shameless power, "Heil Trump," then we might as well pack our bags and flee to Canada.
We have decided today that Germany's defeat in World War I, and the huge reparations demanded of the country, already heading toward economic collapse, helped to fuel the Nazi rise. But that doesn't explain how in disheveled defiance, a large white millionaire (billionaire) with disorderly hair can thrill and titillate American audiences into supporting outrageous shots and promises that will trample not just common sense but good will. That will send millions of Americans "back" from where they came, that will build fences along hundreds of miles, that will BRAND and no doubt ultimately imprison in ruthless camps, those deemed "OTHER."
I personally can't bear watching Trump. But there are millions of Americans (mostly white) who rise shouting to their feet at his unashamed abuse. Who suck it up like a substance they've craved for a very long time, and here he is, finally giving it to them. They and their master of ceremonies seem not afraid at all of the horror he may well be unleashing. It's time we all found a copy of Cabaret and watched it with ourselves in mind. As anyone who reads about the German Holocaust well knows, though German concentration camps murdered millions of Jews and "Others," and though the German armed forces fought long years against the Allies, Germany was ultimately decimated by World War II. Today German leader Angela Merken has led her country to open its borders to thousands of Middle Eastern refugees. It is an act of contrition for acts of unspeakable brutality, years and years ago, but not forgotten.
Several weeks ago, we rented the 1972 movie Cabaret set in Berlin, Germany during the rise of the Nazi party. The naughty, insinuating face of Cabaret master of ceremonies Joel Grey rouses in me a cheap, nasty thrill of disobedience and slummyness. Writing soon after the movie's release, Pauline Kael called Joel Gray in the role a "devil-doll" which his intoxicating, leering nastiness,. On the music hall makeshift stage, scantily clad women strut around, showing their boobs, or belting out "Mein Herr," with Liza Minnelli, the Kit Kat Club star dancer/singer. But she's ultimately an American girl gone astray who'll get herself pregnant by a bisexual Brit student, and (shockingly for the time) have an abortion. Yes, her love-affair gone awry adds to the atmosphere of limits and decorum being breached, and though trenchant stuff for the era, it's not what makes my blood run cold today.
It's the SHOW, the Cabaret performances. As the secondary plot evolves, with a young German Jew trying to pass himself off as a pure-blood Protestant but falling in love with a Jewish heiress, and shedding his disguise to marry her, Joel Gray dances and sings with a costumed ape--"if you could see her as I do...she wouldn't look Jewish at all." It's his leer at the audience that rouses complicity and a thrill of defiling tabus which ultimately both rouses joy and alarm.
So why does Cabaret make me think of the Trump Act that's threatening to swamp the Republican party, and in another horrifying possibility, give him the presidency? What was it about the Nazis that helped them rise to power, setting aside the Wiemar Republic and vote in Hitler? As in Cabaret, it was their SHOW. The spectacle, first of a uniformed young blond man singing in a tea garden "Tomorrow belongs to me," with all the lyric loveliness of yearning youth until that yearning becomes insistent and ends with everyone in the audiences shouting in triumph. "Tomorrow will belong to me or by God, I'll trample all convention and borders, all warlike codes and prisoner rehabilitation into the dust." Gradually when men with such attitudes infiltrate every level of society, when their uniformed bodies fill the audience in the Cabaret, march through the streets, raise their hands in automaton salute, and shout in ecstatic, shameless power, "Heil Trump," then we might as well pack our bags and flee to Canada.
We have decided today that Germany's defeat in World War I, and the huge reparations demanded of the country, already heading toward economic collapse, helped to fuel the Nazi rise. But that doesn't explain how in disheveled defiance, a large white millionaire (billionaire) with disorderly hair can thrill and titillate American audiences into supporting outrageous shots and promises that will trample not just common sense but good will. That will send millions of Americans "back" from where they came, that will build fences along hundreds of miles, that will BRAND and no doubt ultimately imprison in ruthless camps, those deemed "OTHER."
I personally can't bear watching Trump. But there are millions of Americans (mostly white) who rise shouting to their feet at his unashamed abuse. Who suck it up like a substance they've craved for a very long time, and here he is, finally giving it to them. They and their master of ceremonies seem not afraid at all of the horror he may well be unleashing. It's time we all found a copy of Cabaret and watched it with ourselves in mind. As anyone who reads about the German Holocaust well knows, though German concentration camps murdered millions of Jews and "Others," and though the German armed forces fought long years against the Allies, Germany was ultimately decimated by World War II. Today German leader Angela Merken has led her country to open its borders to thousands of Middle Eastern refugees. It is an act of contrition for acts of unspeakable brutality, years and years ago, but not forgotten.
Sunday, February 28, 2016
Margotlog: Cold and Cats and Joyce Lyon's Drawings of Trees
Margotlog: Cold and Cats and Joyce Lyon's Drawings of Trees
"Bundle up!" My mother used to say. We were kids in Charleston, South Carolina, and "bundling," as in wrapping a girl in a blanket and putting her to bed with a visiting young man (when sleeping space was scarce--or not)--well, it was something they did in our mother's North Dakota, not in S. Carolina where the weather was mild.
But even when we walked home from school, lowering winter days sent humid cold went right through us. In our Old Citadel apartment with its sixteen-foot ceilings, heat rose and disappeared. Our father, who "felt the cold," wrapped a gray-blue scarf around his neck and pinned it in place. He wasn't Santa Claus but something like the Muffin Man or the "old man dressed all up in leather,"
I asked his destination and said the day was fine,
He said he was on his way to Dalton by way of the Alton line
So memory has it in those "misty, moisty mornings of real Chicago weather." Another from my mother's cornucopia of sayings.
Today before I began walking our Saint Paul neighborhood, it rained, then snowed furiously for twenty minutes, then settled into a gray-white wind. I had to go back for a scarf before heading out along rain-wet sidewalk, past piles of musty, declining snow.
On either side of us now live members of the next younger generation. Pet ownership, in place for decades at our house, now attracts them. Other homeowners along the block have put up bird feeders. I don't complain of these expansions of sympathy. But I have to remind myself that, like them, we began by adopting cats that actually lived elsewhere, or cats that wandered the neighborhood, taking hand-outs where offered.
With all the cat action, the birds I've enjoyed feeding for years now disappear for days at a time. It doesn't help that hawks fly over periodically. A few days ago, a mound of white feathers tinged with gray identified the remains of a pigeon. Only a large hawk, a red-tailed hawk, could have carried away a bird that big. A slanting streak of blood on my side window marked the passage.
What, after all, do we care about? Good question to ask this season when politicians of many stripes seek to engage us. Yesterday evening, Fran and I visited Form and Content Gallery, a Minneapolis cooperative just north of Hennepin Avenue. Our friend Joyce Lyon had new work there.
What, after all, captures and moves us? I have admired her large pastel drawings for a long time, especially those early ones of her night backyard in South Minneapolis--the dark suffused with bright light from indoors, as if a fire burned and menaced the arms of trees and the rigid angles of a clothes pole.
Now she has created watery daylight where sparse trunks of trees bend slightly, move off into their own business, or align themselves either side of a goddess beam. Now we are quiet observers, letting the trees make what they will of us.
There is both vacancy and relief in this quiet grove. We don't always have a say.
"Bundle up!" My mother used to say. We were kids in Charleston, South Carolina, and "bundling," as in wrapping a girl in a blanket and putting her to bed with a visiting young man (when sleeping space was scarce--or not)--well, it was something they did in our mother's North Dakota, not in S. Carolina where the weather was mild.
But even when we walked home from school, lowering winter days sent humid cold went right through us. In our Old Citadel apartment with its sixteen-foot ceilings, heat rose and disappeared. Our father, who "felt the cold," wrapped a gray-blue scarf around his neck and pinned it in place. He wasn't Santa Claus but something like the Muffin Man or the "old man dressed all up in leather,"
I asked his destination and said the day was fine,
He said he was on his way to Dalton by way of the Alton line
So memory has it in those "misty, moisty mornings of real Chicago weather." Another from my mother's cornucopia of sayings.
Today before I began walking our Saint Paul neighborhood, it rained, then snowed furiously for twenty minutes, then settled into a gray-white wind. I had to go back for a scarf before heading out along rain-wet sidewalk, past piles of musty, declining snow.
On either side of us now live members of the next younger generation. Pet ownership, in place for decades at our house, now attracts them. Other homeowners along the block have put up bird feeders. I don't complain of these expansions of sympathy. But I have to remind myself that, like them, we began by adopting cats that actually lived elsewhere, or cats that wandered the neighborhood, taking hand-outs where offered.
With all the cat action, the birds I've enjoyed feeding for years now disappear for days at a time. It doesn't help that hawks fly over periodically. A few days ago, a mound of white feathers tinged with gray identified the remains of a pigeon. Only a large hawk, a red-tailed hawk, could have carried away a bird that big. A slanting streak of blood on my side window marked the passage.
What, after all, do we care about? Good question to ask this season when politicians of many stripes seek to engage us. Yesterday evening, Fran and I visited Form and Content Gallery, a Minneapolis cooperative just north of Hennepin Avenue. Our friend Joyce Lyon had new work there.
What, after all, captures and moves us? I have admired her large pastel drawings for a long time, especially those early ones of her night backyard in South Minneapolis--the dark suffused with bright light from indoors, as if a fire burned and menaced the arms of trees and the rigid angles of a clothes pole.
Now she has created watery daylight where sparse trunks of trees bend slightly, move off into their own business, or align themselves either side of a goddess beam. Now we are quiet observers, letting the trees make what they will of us.
There is both vacancy and relief in this quiet grove. We don't always have a say.
Thursday, January 14, 2016
Margotlog: Wesley McNair's The Lost Child (Part 3 of 3) Reading the Riffles
Wesley McNair’s The Lost Child (Part 3 of 3)
Reading the Riffles
It helps me
understand the skill and insight Wesley McNair brings to interpreting his
mother’s aging and dying to remember how the Niangua rolled before us in a
constant, challenging glimmer.
For as his mother
tries to renew her connection to every object bagged up during her stay in the
hospital, she keeps inventing motives and miracles happening around her,
…as if
when she examines
each
rescued object…..
the past
suddenly becomes the present
and time
has not happened to her at all…(“The Abduction”)
Later, as she lies dying in the hospital, the anger and hurt
she vented on him as a child now, he understands, has prepared him for “the
shock
Of this final
unbelievable loneliness…..
…………..And
never mind
her lifelong
anger, and all the failures
of the
heart…………
he can reach her now only “through her favorite song
he sang as a
boy to lift the grief from her face," The Tennessee Waltz. (“Dancing in
Tennessee”)
In the very act of bringing home her ashes, he discovers again “the
scar of/ her rejection and hurt”
disappearing
into her work, then and in all
the years
afterward…
Yet the river of her family affection carries him along,
with an occasional scrape—her brother calls her a damn Yankee.” He joins them in lifting her soft ashes in their hands,
……………each of
them speaking
to my mother
in a soft casual way as if
she stood
there beside them…
And because this binds him to them, and because together they have brought her finally home,
“she would never, ever again, be gone.” ("Why I Carried My Mother’s Ashes").
In this book of humorous and humane, angry and revelatory poems, Wesley McNair renders his mother's anger, and confusion, her stubborn, yet elated growing
old, and the twining stories of her siblings who second-guess each other, hide
truths from themselves and at times embrace love and
persistence. Thus, he helps remind us of our own riffles and fear, what we hide from ourselves and what will ultimately puncture our certainty, even as we find joy in living to navigate at all.
Wednesday, January 6, 2016
Wesley McNair's The Lost Child, Part 2 (of 3)
Wesley McNair’s The Lost Child, Part 2 (of 3)
There are many
ways to be an outsider. In an email McNair wrote how, when he took his mother’s
ashes to the Ozarks, he renewed his friendship with his mother’s sister. “She
talked on and on in the lamplight with her beautiful country accent…using these
long, unfolding sentences…as if the sentences…were timeless and could contain
anything.”
These sentences,
Wes explained, become the long, looping medium of The Lost Child's
second section filled with family poems and titled like the book. Describing for
example, an annual Fourth of July reunion, he hears “husbands…making wisecracks
at each other” as they watch Chip’s second wife Donna, sitting “near the tubs
with her empties.” The men imagine she might turn out like her mother who’d
“gone to partying and alcohol,” but as they all knew,
…………..in
families there were things
you didn’t say
to a person, storing them up
from phone calls
or visits one-on-one where you first
heard them, while
confessing something in confidence
which got spread
until everyone knew your story too.
(“The American
Flag Cake” p. 36)
Now I am back on the Niangua River, watching for riffles
made by stones just below the surface, still not knowing if I’d seen a “shy
poke,”
McNair’s
narrative poems, constructed of these long lines grouped in five, six, or
seven-line stanzas, read like the swift shifts and nuances of conversation.
Talk is the family’s medium, showing off glinting, weaving alliances, and
the sudden isolation that sends us toward loss and death.
One of my
favorite poems in this long, middle section is “The Run Down 17 Into Phoenix.”
Its underlying story is simple and part fictional as the poet says of all these
poems: Even with her new house in Amarillo, Texas, Jo-Lynn starts
missing her husband Floyd on his long-distance trucker runs toward Phoenix. Her new home
feels empty. Even surrounded by life-size, inflatable bears doesn’t keep her
teeth from chattering as they used to when her first marriage went belly up.
Sympathetic, Floyd's teeth rattle too, but he still can’t help being
proud of the time he’s making to Phoenix, driving in the dark.
Halfway through
these long looping poems, Ruth reappears as the outsider sister, determined to
go her own way. She full of delusions that sometimes sweep her up into an
end-of-the-world “rapture,” and sometimes gnaw at her, making her justify her
lonely obsessions. When Ruth’s sister Mae calls “…to offer comfort on Ruth’s/ first night in the nursing home,”
Ruth doesn’t know who she is. And Mae
then listened to
the distant voices
of the
commercials on tv, while Ruth thought about
husbands and
sisters and women getting cleaner counters
and kitchen
floors. “The only one who’s still alive,”
Mae added, then
wished she hadn’t, because
It made her
think of how useless and dead she felt
In that moment
as the family helper....
Friday, January 1, 2016
Margotlog: An Ozark Family: Wesley McNair's The Lost Child
Margotlog: An Ozark Family: Wesley McNair's The Lost Child (Part 1 of 3)
When we first moved to Kansas City, Missouri, years ago, the city seemed not much different from cities I'd known on the east coast. That is, until one June morning when I opened the door to find six, black Angus steers standing in our parking lot.
Kansas City was a cow town. And didn't I remember that Dorothy in "The Wizard of Oz" lived in Kansas? Maybe Oz referred to the Ozarks.
That summer we rented a cabin and a canoe in the Ozarks. As our host slid the boat into the Niangua River, he pointed downstream. "There's a shy-poke," he said with a grin. I scanned the water but had no idea what he meant.
It's hard bringing to life the shy pockets of life hidden from the main currents. Recently attending a workshop in New York, I enjoyed meeting Maine's (soon-to-retire) poet laureate Wesley McNair. Listening to his almost uninflected speech, I wondered what it was like for him to live as far north/east as we lived north/central. Yet though I was intrigued by his Maine poems, the book of his I bought was the newest one about his Ozark mother and her quirky, sometimes downright zanny clan.
Most American poets of our generation cut their eye teeth on family poems. Freed from more formal modes of the recent and distant past, we wrote free-verse family poems that came to grips, settled a score, or fondly revealed family traits. McNair's poems in The Lost Child share something with such poems of early adulthood, but they also have a mature canniness, shapeliness, and depth that come only from long practice navigating the undercurrents.
The slim book begins and ends with poems about his mother's death. In the opening poem he shows us both the shambles of her life alone and her refusal of help:
......the bags of unopened mail
. and garbage and piles of unwashed dishes.
..........................................................................
.....in her don't-need-nobody-
to-help-me way of walking, with her head
bent down to her knees as if she were searching
for a dime that had rolled into a crack...
Then comes the shock of what brings her low:
......When the pain in her foot she disclosed
to no one was so bad she could not stand
at her refrigerator packed with food and sniff
to find what was edible....
At first the hospital is a bit like Elysium: "her white room among nurses who brushed/her hair while she looked up at them and smiled..."
This pleasure disappears when her Ozark kin show up, the ones she's known largely through late night phone calls: her "stout, bestroked younger brother...her elderly sister/ and her bald-headed baby brother/
whom she despised." They file into the hospital room, come "all the way/from Missouri."
Her suspicion cuts to the bone:
When it became clear to her that we were
not her people, the ones she left behind
in her house, on the radio, in the newspaper
she would not speak. She turned away.
The relatives plead, then accuse:
..........You was always
the stubborn one. We ain't here to poison you,
turn around and say something.
In the last line, the poet show how she snaps shut:
When she wouldn't.
This is only the beginning of Wes McNair's discovery of his Ozark family. When he takes her ashes home to be buried, her sister sits talking with him. Her beautiful speech, he will tell me, used "old country expressions like 'a-going,' and 'fixin' to, and 'this-a-way, that-a-way.'" Fictionalizing some, and borrowing some, he brings the Ozark kin to life as if we sat with his favorite aunt and listened to long looping stories, connected by and, and because, and so and when.
(Part 2 The Family Poem)
When we first moved to Kansas City, Missouri, years ago, the city seemed not much different from cities I'd known on the east coast. That is, until one June morning when I opened the door to find six, black Angus steers standing in our parking lot.
Kansas City was a cow town. And didn't I remember that Dorothy in "The Wizard of Oz" lived in Kansas? Maybe Oz referred to the Ozarks.
That summer we rented a cabin and a canoe in the Ozarks. As our host slid the boat into the Niangua River, he pointed downstream. "There's a shy-poke," he said with a grin. I scanned the water but had no idea what he meant.
It's hard bringing to life the shy pockets of life hidden from the main currents. Recently attending a workshop in New York, I enjoyed meeting Maine's (soon-to-retire) poet laureate Wesley McNair. Listening to his almost uninflected speech, I wondered what it was like for him to live as far north/east as we lived north/central. Yet though I was intrigued by his Maine poems, the book of his I bought was the newest one about his Ozark mother and her quirky, sometimes downright zanny clan.
Most American poets of our generation cut their eye teeth on family poems. Freed from more formal modes of the recent and distant past, we wrote free-verse family poems that came to grips, settled a score, or fondly revealed family traits. McNair's poems in The Lost Child share something with such poems of early adulthood, but they also have a mature canniness, shapeliness, and depth that come only from long practice navigating the undercurrents.
The slim book begins and ends with poems about his mother's death. In the opening poem he shows us both the shambles of her life alone and her refusal of help:
......the bags of unopened mail
. and garbage and piles of unwashed dishes.
..........................................................................
.....in her don't-need-nobody-
to-help-me way of walking, with her head
bent down to her knees as if she were searching
for a dime that had rolled into a crack...
Then comes the shock of what brings her low:
......When the pain in her foot she disclosed
to no one was so bad she could not stand
at her refrigerator packed with food and sniff
to find what was edible....
At first the hospital is a bit like Elysium: "her white room among nurses who brushed/her hair while she looked up at them and smiled..."
This pleasure disappears when her Ozark kin show up, the ones she's known largely through late night phone calls: her "stout, bestroked younger brother...her elderly sister/ and her bald-headed baby brother/
whom she despised." They file into the hospital room, come "all the way/from Missouri."
Her suspicion cuts to the bone:
When it became clear to her that we were
not her people, the ones she left behind
in her house, on the radio, in the newspaper
she would not speak. She turned away.
The relatives plead, then accuse:
..........You was always
the stubborn one. We ain't here to poison you,
turn around and say something.
In the last line, the poet show how she snaps shut:
When she wouldn't.
This is only the beginning of Wes McNair's discovery of his Ozark family. When he takes her ashes home to be buried, her sister sits talking with him. Her beautiful speech, he will tell me, used "old country expressions like 'a-going,' and 'fixin' to, and 'this-a-way, that-a-way.'" Fictionalizing some, and borrowing some, he brings the Ozark kin to life as if we sat with his favorite aunt and listened to long looping stories, connected by and, and because, and so and when.
(Part 2 The Family Poem)
Margotlog: Crime and Punishment in Chernobyl
Margotlog: Crime and Punishment in Chernobyl - Svetlana Alexievich's "Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster"
I bought a copy of Voices from Chernobyl when I read that the author, Svetlana Alexievich had won the Nobel Prize in Literature. But eventually, even without this intense spotlight on her achievement, I would have found my way to her book partly because I, too, have created literature out of other "voices"--my oral history memoir of Minnesota's premier Ojibwa artist George Morrison, Turning the Feather Around (MN Historical Press). But also because, every year or so, I read one of the great works of Russian literature. Voices from Chernobyl belongs with Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment, Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, and Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago.
In Jane Austen's miniature world, immense things happen in muted form. Long years of waiting and longing plague Ann Elliot in Persuasion but we hear hardly a peep from her. Elizabeth Bennett in Pride and Prejudice experiences her comeuppance on a rather small stage. But the works of the Russians invoke wide and troubling distances, uncertainties that drill deep into the psyche, and as in Voices from Chernobyl, a range of experiences that often defy categorization.
The nuclear disaster in Chernobyl made world headlines when it occurred in 1986. The explosion and nuclear fire released radiation so intense that in some locations, it could not be quantified with available instruments. Men with inadequate protective clothing arrived to attempt to contain the fire and the spill of radiation For months and years after, residents near enough to have been affected were offered relocation, butthe true story of Chernobyl was not officially told. Only a softened, hushed version found its way into the press.
One of the rare gifts in Svetlana Alexievich's "Voices of Chernobyl" is to respect the confusion and silencing that characterized the disaster from the beginning. She takes the people she interviews at their word. She does not dispute what they experienced, including what various official agencies told them. Yet, from these
voices, including many refugees from "Armenia, Georgia, Abkhazia, Tajikistan, Chechnya" who came to live in the homes left by escapees from the disaster, she records the intensity of feelings, their shock and chagrin at finding themselves living in a destroyed world, where the destruction is not always noticeable.
Commenting on her response to these stories, she writes in the afterword, "I often thought that the simple fact, the mechanical fact, is no closer to the truth than a vague feeling, rumor, vision....The development of these feelings, the spilling of these feelings past the facts, is what fascinates me." (p. 236)
Some of the sections read like choral call and response: "The only time I don't cry is at night. You can't cry about the dead at night....."
"We have the best kind of Communism here--we live like brothers and sisters..."
"The boss-men come, they yell and yell, but we're deaf and mute. We've lived through everything, survived everythng."
"I'm not afraid of anyone--not the dead, not the animals, no one. My son comes in from the city, he gets mad at me. 'Why are you sitting there! What if some looter tries to kill you?' But what would he want from me? There's some pillows..."
"Why did Chernobyl break down? Some people say it was the scientists' fault. They grabbed God by the beard and now he's laughing. But we're the ones who pay for it." (pgs 76-78)
Many other segments are what the author calls monologues: Here's a bit from "Three Monologues about a Homeland" Lena M.--from Kyrgystan says: "The place we called our homeland doesn't exist, and neither does that time, which also was our motherland....This is our home now. Chernobyl is out home, our motherland. [She smiles suddenly.] The birds here are the same as everywhere. And there's still a Lenin statue....People don't understand. 'Why are you killing your children?'....I'm not killing them. I'm saving them...They fear what they have here in Chernobyl. I don't know about it. It's not part of my memory."
This ultimate awareness of limits, this is one of the most startling elements in these strangely moving, yet unconnected accounts. Add to that, the refusal to be characterized by anything except ongoing life, with its mixture of the bizarre, quiet, hateful, sad, sustaining and unpredictable.
I read it avidly, quickly. Then, when I'd finished, I wasn't sure what I'd read. Perhaps some other time, I'll start over.
I bought a copy of Voices from Chernobyl when I read that the author, Svetlana Alexievich had won the Nobel Prize in Literature. But eventually, even without this intense spotlight on her achievement, I would have found my way to her book partly because I, too, have created literature out of other "voices"--my oral history memoir of Minnesota's premier Ojibwa artist George Morrison, Turning the Feather Around (MN Historical Press). But also because, every year or so, I read one of the great works of Russian literature. Voices from Chernobyl belongs with Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment, Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, and Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago.
In Jane Austen's miniature world, immense things happen in muted form. Long years of waiting and longing plague Ann Elliot in Persuasion but we hear hardly a peep from her. Elizabeth Bennett in Pride and Prejudice experiences her comeuppance on a rather small stage. But the works of the Russians invoke wide and troubling distances, uncertainties that drill deep into the psyche, and as in Voices from Chernobyl, a range of experiences that often defy categorization.
The nuclear disaster in Chernobyl made world headlines when it occurred in 1986. The explosion and nuclear fire released radiation so intense that in some locations, it could not be quantified with available instruments. Men with inadequate protective clothing arrived to attempt to contain the fire and the spill of radiation For months and years after, residents near enough to have been affected were offered relocation, butthe true story of Chernobyl was not officially told. Only a softened, hushed version found its way into the press.
One of the rare gifts in Svetlana Alexievich's "Voices of Chernobyl" is to respect the confusion and silencing that characterized the disaster from the beginning. She takes the people she interviews at their word. She does not dispute what they experienced, including what various official agencies told them. Yet, from these
voices, including many refugees from "Armenia, Georgia, Abkhazia, Tajikistan, Chechnya" who came to live in the homes left by escapees from the disaster, she records the intensity of feelings, their shock and chagrin at finding themselves living in a destroyed world, where the destruction is not always noticeable.
Commenting on her response to these stories, she writes in the afterword, "I often thought that the simple fact, the mechanical fact, is no closer to the truth than a vague feeling, rumor, vision....The development of these feelings, the spilling of these feelings past the facts, is what fascinates me." (p. 236)
Some of the sections read like choral call and response: "The only time I don't cry is at night. You can't cry about the dead at night....."
"We have the best kind of Communism here--we live like brothers and sisters..."
"The boss-men come, they yell and yell, but we're deaf and mute. We've lived through everything, survived everythng."
"I'm not afraid of anyone--not the dead, not the animals, no one. My son comes in from the city, he gets mad at me. 'Why are you sitting there! What if some looter tries to kill you?' But what would he want from me? There's some pillows..."
"Why did Chernobyl break down? Some people say it was the scientists' fault. They grabbed God by the beard and now he's laughing. But we're the ones who pay for it." (pgs 76-78)
Many other segments are what the author calls monologues: Here's a bit from "Three Monologues about a Homeland" Lena M.--from Kyrgystan says: "The place we called our homeland doesn't exist, and neither does that time, which also was our motherland....This is our home now. Chernobyl is out home, our motherland. [She smiles suddenly.] The birds here are the same as everywhere. And there's still a Lenin statue....People don't understand. 'Why are you killing your children?'....I'm not killing them. I'm saving them...They fear what they have here in Chernobyl. I don't know about it. It's not part of my memory."
This ultimate awareness of limits, this is one of the most startling elements in these strangely moving, yet unconnected accounts. Add to that, the refusal to be characterized by anything except ongoing life, with its mixture of the bizarre, quiet, hateful, sad, sustaining and unpredictable.
I read it avidly, quickly. Then, when I'd finished, I wasn't sure what I'd read. Perhaps some other time, I'll start over.
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