I can still remember
the first time my feet hit Hong Kong soil.
After 18 hours, I arrived late one January evening, jumped into a hotel car
and watched as one of the most spectacular city skyline in the world, slowly take shape. My boss, at the time, had insisted I stay at the Intercontinental Hotel. Upon arrival I was immediately escorted straight to my room just in time to watch the Symphony of Lights. First impressions… utter-disbelief! I will always remember that moment. I felt I had arrived somewhere BIG.
I also remember
later that night at the hotel bar, while gazing across at the jaw-dropping
skyline, taking in the colorful city lights and bustling harbour, my eyes
focused on one building. I stared at
that building and wondered what it must be like to live in such a grand architectural
structure on such an amazing island and to be able to look out and see what I
was seeing every night. I couldn’t
fathom what that would be like. Little
did I know, one day I would.
 |
| The view from the Intercontinental hotel bar. |
Today, that
same building is where I see the latest Hollywood hits, grocery shop and workout. One of the boats I watched that first night,
today takes me to and from work. As a
resident of Hong Kong my impression is still the same, even though that
jaw-dropping view now looks different to me.
Today when I have drinks at that same bar, I don’t just see an amazing
city, but I see my home, a part of my past and a part of my future. I have learned to take nothing Hong Kong has
to offer for granted, because it is those things that equalize the hardships. Both are necessary to stay balanced here.
As a Foreigner,
my relationship with this city is different than one of an expatriate. It took a while for me to understand this, but
once I did (thanks to my good friend Isabelle) things started to fall into place.
I feel we arrive as living has
formed us, and as we continue to live
we continue to be formed. There is no
you or me, but rather a life there and a life here. I don‘t think we should say, Oh, he’s so
thoughtful, as our empression only counted up to the last time we enteracted
with him. As his enviroment changes and
situations pass, he’s changing and today he may or may not be still thoughtful. He is always a reflection of his life... the
life his enviroment is forming him to be... at that moment.
I want to share an article
that a good friend shared with me. But
first, let me say this... I started this blog as an easy way for my friends and
family to see what it’s like for me living in Hong Kong. I didn’t think about anyone else reading my
posts. However, turns out I have more
people in other countries reading my blog than I do in America. This amazes me, truely. I can only presume many of you have moved
away from your home country (maybe America like me) either permanently or
temporally and find my posts interesting or relateable. That being said, I hope this article will conitue
that theme and hopefully provide some further insight. Insight you don’t even know you need. It certainly had a profound impact on my
outlook on living abroad as a foreigner
and how I now preceive myself.
MEMORY
AND THE EXPATRIATE WRITER
by Douglas Shields Dix
“We have weathered so many journeys, and so many
forms of love. Would it have been the same, we ask one another, had we stayed
still, in the mill with the water running under us? There is no way of knowing”.
--Alastair Reid
Would it have been the same? The question that haunts this passage by Alastair
Reid, the Scottish poet, essayist, and translator, is a question that
inevitably comes to haunt the thoughts of all expatriates, exiles, émigrés, or,
in a term used by Reid to designate his own position, "foreigners."
Milan Kundera, an émigré, asked the question in his novel The Book of Laughter
and Forgetting: what if we could live two lives, with two separate threads of
identity, and then compare the two to see which one came out the best for us?
Of course, we cannot live two lives, and Reid realizes, like Kundera, that we
cannot know the answer to this question. While this is true for everyone--for
those who have remained in the mill as well as for those who have departed, for
those who have left, the question takes on a very different meaning. They
remember the reality that they have previously experienced, and experience that
reality as simultaneously present and absent: present in memory, present in
their awareness that the reality they have left behind continues to exist
somewhere else, and yet irrevocably absent, unavailable, or lost to them.
The memory of the one who has left--be they expatriate, émigré, exile, or
foreigner--differs from the memory of the one who has remained precisely in
this haunting awareness of the possibility of having remained, and in the
quality of this awareness, which brings a doubleness to every moment. Edward Said
refers to this as a "contrapuntal
awareness," the existence of every moment against the memory of another
moment from an entirely different cultural context, which can be both enabling
and anguishing in turns. Julia Kristeva has termed this paradoxical state
of affirmation and anguish a "scorched happiness," and argues that in
our rapidly globalizing world, it is gradually becoming the human norm. In this talk I will be discussing the
nature of this "scorched happiness" and its relation to memory in the
works of several writers who did leave their native land, including Gertrude
Stein, Henry Miller, Elizabeth Bishop, Alastair Reid, and Gustaf Sobin.
These may not seem the immediately obvious choices of writers to discuss;
however, the reasons for my choices will become clear in what follows. I must
admit that my use of the word expatriate in my title is somewhat misleading,
and is used only as a known category in order to enable me to introduce a less
well-known category--the category of "foreigner" that both Reid and
Kristeva have developed. The word
"expatriate" has nominated a person who finds him or herself by
choice or circumstance in a foreign country, but whose orientation remains
directed towards his or her country of origin, to which he or she intends to
eventually return. American expatriates inevitably tend to gravitate towards
other expatriates, forming expatriate communities that are unfortunately
all-too-often distinguished by their failure to grasp or at times even
acknowledge their foreign milieu; consequently, there is little experience of
deracination among this group, which invests its time in keeping up with the
baseball scores and the stock markets. The great period of expatriate
American writers is obviously the 1920s, when the ludicrously advantageous
exchange rate and prohibition sent waves of writers and would-be writers to
Paris: the list of names we expect to hear from this period is usually headed
by Hemingway and Fitzgerald, and yet Fitzgerald, despite his irony towards
expatriates in works such as Tender is the Night, was notorious for not having
made a single French or Swiss friend.
In contrast to the expatriate, exiles are those who cannot return to their
native land, usually for political or ideological reasons, and émigrés are
those who choose to adopt a new native land, and who, although inevitably
always remaining somewhat foreign, desire to become assimilated to the foreign
culture. I believe, along with Reid and Kristeva, that these three categories
leave out a whole category of people who, while
not expatriates in that they do not long for their native culture, not exiles
because they willingly choose not to return, and not émigrés because they do
not choose to assimilate to their new cultures, prefer to resist any sense of
belonging at all. Edward Said has used the term "self-imposed
exile" to describe one member of this group, James Joyce, but, even then,
he cast doubts as to whether such a strong term as exile should be used in a
world where vast numbers of refugees and exiles truly cannot go home again. Alastair Reid has used the term
"foreigner" to describe this group, and Julia Kristeva
"étrangère," with its dual connotations in French of both a foreigner
and a stranger, and so I will, following both, settle upon "foreigner"
as the term that best describes this group who chose to remain outsiders.
Certainly these categories shade off
into one another at a certain point, especially given that an
"expatriate" may incrementally evolve into a "foreigner,"
not to mention that a given person may find him or herself wavering in the
margins between the positions during this process of transformation. A
writer like Djuna Barnes is a case in point: she returned from what can only be
described as her expatriate experience in Paris to become something like an
"internal exile" or foreigner in her own land, living out the final
decades of her life in an almost monk-like seclusion in the heart of Manhattan
(what she referred to as her "Trappist phase"). However, despite
these kinds of overlappings there are certain distinct characteristics that can
be cited as typical of a "foreigner" in the sense that I wish to use
the term. While the foreigner refuses to
become assimilated, this does not prevent him or her from becoming immersed in
the local milieu, precisely because he or she is no longer under the hold of
the native land. As Reid writes, "The
foreigner's involvement is with where he is. He has no other home. There is no
secret landscape claiming him, no roots tugging at him. He is, if you like,
properly lost, and so in a position to rediscover the world, from the outside
in." The refusal of assimilation is due to a preference for
deracination or
"in-betweenness" that is very difficult if not impossible to describe
to those who have not encountered the experience. Kafka, a stranger in his
native land who didn't even have to leave to feel himself a foreigner, wrote in
his journal that he preferred to remain
wandering in the desert than to enter the promised land. This has been
interpreted to refer to his stance towards Judaism, and even marriage, but
clearly, as Maurice Blanchot suggests, it is also a wider stance towards his
existential condition, expressing his desire, as the horseman in one of his most famous parables puts it, to be
riding, always, "away from here."
Given the suffering and anguish involved in such a choice, it is quite
difficult to express what it might mean to see the world, as the quote from
Reid above suggests, "from the outside in." Lloyd Kramer, the author
of Threshold of a New World: Intellectuals and the Exile Experience in Paris,
1830-1848, explored precisely this question in regard to the thought of Marx,
Heine, and Mickiewicz, arguing that the experience of displacement suffered by
these thinkers was crucial to the nature of their thought. Kramer describes the
intensity of the exile experience as follows:
Exile challenges more than social
and intellectual identities, however, for it often brings about major
psychological adjustments as well. The
experience of living among alien people, languages, and institutions can alter
an individual's sense of self about as significantly as any of the traumas
known to psychologists. The referents by which people understand themselves
change dramatically when they are seperated from networks of family, friends,
work, and nationality. Although this separation affects each individual
somewhat differently, the resulting disorientation commonly provokes important
changes in self-perception and consciousness. Intellectual exiles
frequently respond to their deracination by describing home (idealistically) or
rejecting home (angrily) or creating a new definition of home (defiantly); in
any case they almost always explore problems of national and personal identity
in new ways and write about their conflicts in texts that can become unusually
rich revelations of both conscious and unconscious needs, motivations, and
anxieties.
According to Kramer these writers did not simply come to realizations about
their own conflicts, or the to-be-expected insights into the arbitrary social
construction of the host cultures they are inhabiting, they also gained,
inversely, realizations about the arbitrariness of their native culture as
well: "The 'normal' (or normative) values of the home country become more
relative: simply one way of explaining reality or social experience rather than
the way." The unconscious assumptions
from one's own native culture suddenly no longer function in the host culture,
and while the tourist or expatriate may tend to dismiss the unconscious
structures of the host culture as mere aberrations and cling to their own sense
of certainty and identity, the foreigner arrives at a point where he or she
acknowledges the arbitrariness of the unconscious structures of all cultures,
including (perhaps especially) his or her native culture. This "double" or "contrapuntal"
awareness makes its way into the writings of foreigners in a variety of ways,
be they social thinkers like Adorno or Said, poets like Shelley or Celan, or
novelists like Nabokov and Infante. To give two brief examples from American
literature, the writings of Paul Bowles are clearly largely concerned with the
first phase of this movement--the expatriate coming up against the
incommensurable otherness of the host culture (usually disastrously), while the
writings of the late Patricia Highsmith represent the second phase awareness of
the foreigner who can see into the arbitrary structures of her native culture,
in that her fiction transcends genre in its incisive critique of the
intricacies of American postwar culture.
But the inevitable question lingers: "For what price, this
knowledge?" It may seem that the
price to be paid is only a kind of hyper-cynicism and bleakness of vision,
certainly two of the possible characteristics of works by foreigners, but once
one is beyond the darkness of this abyss there is also a kind of strange joy
that emerges, which is perhaps best expressed in Julia Kristeva's phrase,
mentioned above, "a scorched happiness." For Kristeva, part of the affirmation of this state of being
is in the strength that arises from it: as Kristeva writes, "The foreigner feels strengthened by
the distance that detaches him from the others as it does from himself and
gives him the lofty sense not so much of holding the truth but of making it and
himself relative while others fall victim to the ruts of monovalency."
However, even more important is the whole mode of being that emerges when one
is constantly prevented from falling into habit, and is forced to live, always,
"in the moment." Kristeva writes,
The foreigner calls forth a new idea of
happiness. Between the fugue and the origin: a fragile limit, a temporary
homeostasis. Posited present, sometimes certain, that happiness knows
nevertheless that it is like fire that shines only because it consumes. The
strange happiness of the foreigner consists in maintaining that fleeting
eternity or that per- petual transience.
I would compare this state to Nietzsche's concept of the eternal return as
interpreted by the late French philosopher Gilles Deleuze: Deleuze understood
the ethical inflection of Nietzsche's concept as signifying that the most
affirmative life is one that wills every moment fully and actively as if it
were going to return eternally, against the knowledge that in fact nothing
returns (but difference--a different moment, leading to a final moment that can
never be anticipated). I cite the eternal return in this context because it
suggests the paradoxical nature of this mode of "living in the moment": it does not mean forgetting the flow
of history we are embedded within temporally, just as the
"doubleness" of this mode of living does not mean forgetting one's
native culture spatially. This is why memory plays a particularly important
rôle in the foreigner's mode of being, bridging the false dichotomy of the
spatio-temporal, and revealing insights into the relation between memory and
identity for foreigner and native alike.
Henri Bergson referred to memory: a "leap into ontology"--prior even
to the psychological valences of memory there is the sheer immersion in
duration, as the brain not only hearkens back to the past, but also, in fact,
instantiates a past neurophysiological state. The temps perdu that opens to us
at the instant of memory is grounded fundamentally in the sensory, which is to
say, in varying degrees of the spatial. Despite Einstein, we still tend to see
time and space as separate, when in fact they are inseparable. In its widest
instance, this spacing is our finitude: "our time," as Jean-Luc Nancy
suggests, "means precisely, first of all, a certain suspension of the flow
of time," a certain spacing. For the individual, this spacing, in its
widest sense, is the "event" of their lives, bracketed by his or her
birth and death; but more specifically, it is instantiated in the
spatio-temporal context of their lives, the "where" as much as the
"when." Consequently, "place" is crucial in the
determination of our epistemologies--the site where our memory is grounded, and
the awareness of this fact is never so strong as when we lose or leave our
"place."
As J. Gerald Kennedy, the author of Imagining Paris: Exile, Writing, and
American Identity, writes,
No experience intensifies our consciousness of this fact more than immersion in
a foreign environment, which exposes not only our complex dependence upon
knowledge of topography, climate, language, and culture among the most obvious
determinants of place) but also reveals the considerable extent to which we are
creatures of place, deriving our most basic sense of self from the relation
which we have formed with the place or chora in which we have our being.The
experience of expatriation often discloses an alternate self responsive to the
differences which constitute the foreignness of another place.
Memory is certainly affected by this
loss of place: for the foreigner, memory is no longer connected to the spatial,
so rather than experiencing the gradual transformation of the same identity
over time, there is a much more radical break with the spatial that reveals the
multiple fragmentary threads of identity, or perhaps even its absence. What
Americans are to Europeans in a wider sense--with their constant moving,
migration, and perambulation, the foreigner is to the American, which may explain
why voluntary expatriation has been so overwhelmingly an American theme. As
Gertrude Stein wrote in her book Everybody's Autobiography, which recounted her
return to the United States in 1934-35 after several decades abroad, "What was the use of my having come
from Oakland it was not natural to have come from there yes write about it if I
like or anything if I like but not there, there is no there there."
This is precisely the point:
"...there is no there there." Stein realized that there was
something ungrounded about America, but although it was ungrounded it did not
admit it to itself; consequently, for her it did not produce a propitious
environment for creative growth. She went so far as to suggest the need for all
writers to live in two countries, and is well-known for having said,
"America is my country and Paris is my home town." This doubleness
allowed her to see the fragmentary nature of identity, as is clear from the
following passage from the same book, in response to a visit to her home town:
It is a funny thing about addresses
where you live. When you live there you know it so well that it is like an
identity a thing that is so much a thing that it could not ever be any other
thing and then you live somewhere else and years later, the address that was so
much an address that it was like your name and you said it as if it was not an
address but something that was living and then years after you do not know what
the address was and when you say it it is not a name anymore but something you
cannot remember. That is what makes your identity not a thing that exists but
something you do or do not remember.
Her return to America confirmed her in her choice to remain abroad, partly due
to its lack of culture (she complained that all of Paris is a painting but that
it is very difficult to find paintings in America), but also due to the shock
she experiences in her realization that it led an independent existence from
her "other reality." Prior to her return she at least had confidence
that her memory was adequate, but due to the vast transformations in the places
that she knew, as well as her own ly a matter of a final choice. One strategy
is the hyperbolic rhetoric Miller uses in his works--the blustering braggadocio
of his narrators as they negotiate the perils of their existence. Another
strategy is the deflation and deflection of the external forces that would
constrain him. Miller's acerbic stance towards the "air-conditioned
nightmare" of his native country is his strategy of diffusing and distancing
the ever-constant threat it poses, as the following passage from Tropic of
Cancer illustrates:
It's best to keep America just like
that, always in the background, a sort of picture post card which you look at
in a weak moment. Like that, you imagine it always there waiting for you,
unchanged, unspoiled, a big patriotic open space with cows and sheep and
tender- hearted men ready to bugger everything in sight, man, woman, or beast.
It doesn't exist, America. It's a name you give to an abstract idea...."
But this was Miller's first completed Paris novel, which functioned to
neutralize the hold that his wife June, his mother, and his native country had
over him. Having distanced (if not liberated) himself from these overwhelming
psychical gravities, Miller was able to return in memory to his Brooklyn
childhood in his second novel written in Paris, Black Spring. The displaced
past returns with an involuntary intensity when Miller is finally strong enough
to confront it:
Suddenly, walking down a street, be it real or be it a dream, one realizes for
the first time that the years have flown, that all this has passed forever and
will live on only in memory; and then memory turns inward with a strange
clutching brilliance and one goes over these scenes and incidents perpetually,
in dream and reverie, while walking a street, while lying with a woman, while
reading a book, while talking to a stranger...suddenly, but always with
terrific insistence and terrific accuracy, these memories intrude, rise up like
ghosts and permeate every fiber of one's being.
It is difficult to know how much the foreigner's having departed creates the
loss that memory gives rise to, and how much the foreigner's having departed
creates the conditions that make such haunting memories even more possible, by
virtue of the clean break made by their departure that opens up the possibility
of grieving the past as over and done with. Clearly both somehow exist
simultaneously, creating paradoxical effects: on the one hand, Miller writes, "I
go back over the Brooklyn Bridge and sit in the snow opposite the house where I
was born. An immense heartbreaking loneliness grips me"; on the other
hand, Miller once confessed that the happiest day of his life was the day his
mother died, the second happiest the day of her funeral. Clearly there was
something being left behind, but just as clearly the loss was anguishing and
yet strangely affirmative.
In the writings of the poet Elizabeth Bishop we find the same symmetry between
her departure for a life in Brazil and the opening of the possibility for her
to confront memories that would bring her incredible suffering, but also
healing. It was only in Brazil that she could finally confront the trauma of
losing her mother to madness when she was only five years old: she said it took
her twenty five years to get around to writing the story "In the
Village," which took only two days to write with "the aid of
cortisone and Gin and Tonic." The story recounts the final breakdown of
her mother, and in the opening paragraph we can see how the entire landscape of
the Nova Scotian village she grew up in has been transformed, in memory, into
the site of her trauma:
A scream, the echo of a scream, hangs over that Nova Scotian village. No one
hears it; it hangs there forever, a slight stain in those pure blue skies,
skies that travelers compare to those of Switzerland, too dark, too blue, so
that they seem to keep on darkening a little more around the horizon--or it it
around the rims of the eyes?--the color of the cloud of bloom on the elm trees,
the violet on the fields of oats; something darkening over the woods and waters
as well as the sky.
The scream hangs like that, unheard, in memory--in the past, in the present,
and those years between. It was not even loud to begin with, perhaps. It just
came there to live, forever--not loud, just alive forever. Its pitch would be
the pitch of my village. Flick the lightning rod on top of the church steeple
with your fingernail and you will hear it.
This passage questions the very location of the real: is it in the landscape,
or in the subjective memory of the landscape as it is inscribed in the memory
of the little girl, and recaptured by the older poet? The same question is
posed in her poem entitled, simply, "Poem." In this poem the poet has
come across a family heirloom--a small painting, and she begins by questioning
the value of the painting, commenting on its technique and style, when suddenly
she realizes that she is looking at a picture of her home village. This brings
the poet to consider the relation between art, life, and memory, as she
considers the convergence of her look, her memory, with that of the painter, in
the following passage:
I never knew him. We both knew this place,
apparently, this literal small backwater,
looked at it long enough to memorize it,
our years apart. How strange. And it's still loved,
or its memory is (it must have changed a lot).
Our visions coincided--"visions" is
too serious a word--our looks, two looks:
art "copying from life" and life itself,
life and the memory of it so compressed
they've turned into each other. Which is which?
Life and the memory of it cramped,
dim, on a piece of Bristol board,
dim, but how we live, how touching in detail
--the little that we get for free, the little of our earthly trust.
While representations like this painting
might evoke memory and the loss memory holds for everyone, the difference for
the foreigner is that the loss of people, place, and time permeates reality to
the point that it becomes an immanent fact of their existential condition. Again,
it is difficult to say whether or not initial experiences of loss motivate the
foreigner to leave in the first place, or if the departure instigates the loss,
but it is probably both simultaneously. In the case of Bishop, the early death
of her father, the madness of her mother, and death of the grandmother who had
become her guardian clearly affected the course the rest of her life would
take, including both her geographical wanderings and her choice of unstable
partners and friends (Bishop experienced in her 20s the suicide of a man
infatuated with her, later the repeated bouts with depression of her friend
Robert Lowell, the suicide in her New York apartment of her partner for over a
decade, Lota de Macedo Soares, and the severe mental breakdown of her last
lover, Suzanne Bowen). Her own alcoholism and depression were symptoms as well,
and her final years back in the United States were punctuated with severe
depressions when she couldn't write at all; however, when she did write, the
poems were astonishing, and perhaps the most astonishing poem of all is the
villanelle "One Art," a devastating poem that expresses the bare fact
that life is loss in a mock ironic manner that only serves to make the poem even
more poignant:
ONE ART
The art of losing isn't hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.
Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.
Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.
I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.
I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.
--Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident
the art of losing's not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.
An understanding of the irrevocability of loss may certainly be a
characteristic of the foreigner's mode of being, but this does not mean that
the foreigner's mode of being is without affirmations, or that this
understanding of loss cannot itself be made into an affirmation. Alastair
Reid's definition of "foreigner" gives the term a quite positive
inflection, and his works--mostly poetry, translations, and the book of essays
from which I have borrowed the term "foreigner" (entitled
Whereabouts: Notes on Being a Foreigner)--while being often centered upon the
losses he has experienced, always derive a meaning from the experience that
transcends the loss. Although Reid is a Scotsman, I claim him, at least for
this paper, as an American (as if this mattered), because after a life full of
travel he now spends half of his year in New York where he works as an editor
on The New Yorker magazine, and the other half in the Dominican Republic, where
he lives a mile down the beach from where Columbus discovered the New World. In
the following passage, Reid speaks of the affirmative aspect of being a
foreigner:
In a foreign country, the pattern of
days is less predictable-- predictable--each one has its character, and is
easier to remember. So, too, the weather; and so, too, the shape and feel of
newspapers, the sound of bells, the taste of beer and bread. It is all rather
like waking up and not knowing who or where one is. If, instead of simple
recognition, one can go through a proper realization, then quite ordinary
things take on an edge; one keeps discovering oneself miraculously alive. So,
the strangeness of a place proples one into life. The foreigner cannot afford
to take anything for granted.
Reid locates these possible realizations in a space between two overwhelming
dangers: the belief "that there might somewhere be a place--and a
self--instantly recognizable, into which they will be able to sink with a
single, timeless, contented sigh," and "the faint terror of being
utterly nowhere and anonymous." If the foreigner can weather these two
dangers, then "From there, if they are lucky, they smuggle back occasional
undaunted notes, like messages in a bottle, or glimmers from the other side of
the mirror." What is smuggled back from this space is not anything that is
not already there in the lives of everyone, it is rather merely a heightened
awareness that a foreigner is forced into by circumstance, and which he can then
share a bit after he steps back through the mirror.
The poet Gustaf Sobin has dedicated his life to the "smuggling back"
of these "occasional undaunted notes" Reid writes of. Sobin has lived
in Provence, France, since 1963, where he first went with the French poet René
Char to see Char's native landscape; since then, he has published two novels
and over a dozen books of poetry, three of the most recent with the New
Directions Press. For Sobin, being a foreigner is essential for his work. As
Sobin states,
I find, living at a distance in which one's own language is used--almost
exclusively--for writing. The words take on a kind of buoyancy, a kind of
freshness. they're free of so much exhausted usage. You know, from media,
publicity. From laundry lists, too, and one's own idle chatter. All that
day-to-day attrition.
It is not only an awareness of the arbitrary structures of one's own culture
that are an essential aspect of being a foreigner for Sobin, but beyond this he
gains a sense of the arbitrariness and thus the pure materiality of his native
language itself, where he locates poetry in its purest form:
You know, it's such a beautiful thing to
hear a perfectly common word in one's own language being turned, weighed,
rolled as if across one's palm, blown across the room like a fresh thing: like
the fresh, vibrant thing it really is! It becomes an event, a celebration. But
it needs--at least for me--the strangeness of an alien culture in which to
resonate.
Sobin's poetry is, to use just one word that reflects its origin:
"apart." Claiming roots in the Orphism of Robert Duncan and the
intensive objectivism of George Oppen, Sobin's poems have grown on distant
shores, and belie any categorization that would place them easily within the
canon of contemporary American poets. For Sobin the poem is a living entity--a
pulse, a breath, an energy, and their fragmented threads move forwards like
waves, just as the characters in his novels move by inner promptings that speak
of some strange, unknown necessity that is beyond merely psychological or
social motivation. There is a deliberate letting go in his works--of certainty,
and of meaning as the static, stratified arc of ideology, which clearly is
based in his existential condition as a foreigner. The words in his poems not
only represent, but are the motions, processes, and energies of the spirit, and
clearly Sobin sees our selves as the same mutable flowings--as is clear from
the following passage, the last stanza from his poem "A Portrait of the
Self As Instrument of Its Syllables" from his book Voyaging Portraits,
where the self is portrayed as nothing save the movements and energies of the
poem that it is:
shadows lapping
against
chalk,
for
ten years,
the
breath went,
dismembered.
erred
bone erred
measure.
through
the nomen
(in
its cellulated wastes)
the
poem moved,
dis-assembled,
un-spoken.
What the foreigner brings us to see, in these messages smuggled back from the
other side of the mirror, is that our existence is not like the solid substance
of a noun, which our habit molds into seemingly immutable being, but is rather
composed of the verbally transitive processes of our mutable becomings, losses,
and perishing. In memory is held the trace of our passing, and the foreigner's
strange and estranged relation to memory reveals to him or her in vivid
instants what is true for everyone: that we are, as Kafka wrote, "a memory
come alive," and indeed only a memory--our supposedly solid existences
melting into memory as soon as they occur.
we pretend to be here, don't we? and
sometimes, per-
haps, we really are. but only drawn, drafted: in the very
instant of our own extrications.
