Author: asitoughttobemagazine

Two Poems by Letitia Trent

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Landscape Featuring Oklahoma

Our story is broken only
when the tent preachers land,
giving grandma a use for that fancy fan,
making all the bad women
vomit up money. Otherwise, I spend
most days pulling ribbon from the kitten’s
belly. Sometimes the husband
takes up hobbies, like disassembling
radios, and scatters the wire-furred
pieces on every empty surface.
I hammered one of his stray dials
to the cupboard and now
I can imagine the creamed corn
talking to me without
looking crazy. I tuck away
the hope that this is just
an independent movie—
the bad teeth bleach clean,
spackled pockmarks peel.
Times like these, the idea
of children  plays double-duty
as wish and shiver. They never work,
but people keep making them anyway,
like hand-held sewing machines
and herbal lozenges. Even the lawn,
sun struck mid-summer, wants to die
a little quicker but can find nowhere
high enough to jump from.

[“Landscape Featuring Oklahoma” first appeared in Black Warrior Review]


Ju On (dir. Takashi Shimizu, 2000)

Mother, when I return
you are still here, scuttling in the rafters, knees
busted, blue, blood
in your teeth, just like in life,

like after a fight, when you’d yawn
to pop the fluid
from your ears. Your mouth

snaps opened
and closed. You do now
the things you did

while alive, only slower,
the chores you hated, now over
and over, your hands

around an invisible broom,
sweeping the spotless floor
or crawling

down the staircase
on your palms and shins
toward the mailman’s knock and shuffle
of envelopes in his satchel

or a car in the driveway, the sound
of gravel and small rocks popping. You always wanted
to catch any movement

out of the house. Remember the cricket
in the well between oven
and wall? It was small and slipped

away when you cupped
hour hands to keep it. You stomped,
you shoved
the broom handle

and never caught it to stop it
from coming or going
without your permission. Now,
I always know

where to find you. Under the floorboards,
in the cupboards, in the pink
insulation. I can call you

when I need you, like a cat
you’ll come to a kiss
or your name, Mother,

Mom, Ma, come
down. I don’t want
you to miss this. You

cannot get
past the Welcome
Mat, you hiss

at the long knife of light
from the warm outside, but I
can get away now, look

I am half
in the doorway and half
way out.

[“Ju On (dir. Takashi Shimizu, 2000)” first appeared in Folio]


Letitia Trent’s work has appeared in The Denver Quarterly, Fence, Prick of the Spindle, and Juked, among others. Her chapbook The Medical Diaries is available from Scantily Clad Press and her newest chapbook, Splice, will soon be available from Blue Hour Press. She currently lives in Tel Aviv, Israel.

An Uneasy Revelry: a review of Before Saying Any of the Great Words

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An Uneasy Revelry

by Okla Elliott

“Unease in the ochre-filled skies, unease in the silky /labyrinth of the gut, unease / in the artist’s double, triple nibs”

—David Huerta, “Song of Unease”

Since many American readers may not be familiar with David Huerta, let me introduce you to the poet, before I go on to discuss this career-ranging selection of his poetry and Mark Schafer’s excellent translation of it. Huerta has written nineteen books of poetry and has received nearly every literary award a poet can win in his native Mexico. He is associated with the Neobaroque movement in Latin American literature and with postmodern language poetry. In 2005, he received the Xavier Villaurrutia Prize for lifelong contribution to Mexican literature. Suffice to say, he is one Mexico’s (and the Spanish language’s) major poets. He is also well known as a political columnist, translator, and activist. But fame and recognition are not enough to convince a discerning reader, and one ought not to be impressed by awards but rather by the work itself.

The first poem I’d like to look at, “Machinery,” is a good example of both Huerta’s strength as a poet and the difficulties Schafer had to overcome in translating him. It is a longish poem (65 lines), so let’s only look at the opening movement:

What’s the use of all this I ask you your fever your sobbing
What’s the use of yelling or butting your head against the fog
Why crash in the branches scratch those nickels
What’s the point of jinxing yourself staining yourself

The odd syntax and the overflow of poetic energy are well represented in the English. My only complaint is that in the first line, the English allows for a double reading such that the speaker asks the “you” his question and perhaps asks “your fever” and “your sobbing,” while also allowing “your fever” and “your sobbing” to still be the “all this” of his question—all of which is a really pleasant possible double reading, but which is unfortunately not in the Spanish. The Spanish reads “Para qué sirve todo eso te digo tu fiebre tu sollozo.” The verb is decir (“to tell, to say”), thus allowing for the more literal “What’s the use of all this I tell you your fever your sobbing” but which does not eliminate the possibility of a double reading, since the issue isn’t really so much the verb as the indirect object “te” in Spanish that is placed before the verb instead of after it in English, thus eliminating the possible double-meaning in Spanish and creating it in English. Basically, what we have here is an example of why Umberto Eco calls translation “the art of failure.” Spanish grammar clarifies what the English cannot without major alteration to either the sense or syntax. And so my complaint is not with Schafer’s translation but rather with the onerous task of translation itself. Schafer meets with dozens of these sorts of impasses throughout the book and generally finds innovative ways around them, and when no way around exists, he limits the loss in joy from the original, as he has here. (My complaint, I trust most will agree, is rather nitpicky and perhaps entirely unimportant in some readers’ minds.)

Let’s now look at “Sick Man” in its entirety, which exemplifies the productive strangeness of many of Huerta’s poems. Here, illness disrupts reality and language, making technically nonsensical language carry an emotional resonance that a more direct psychological realism could not:

The nighttime dog eats
two rings of blood
but the twilight dog chases him away.
The diamonds in his chest
burn and scatter.
The daytime dog licks
the entrance to his chest
but the nighttime dog
knows the way out.
All the dogs
want a backbone of diamonds.
Two rings of fresh blood spin around.
His chest finds itself increasingly alone
with the scent of barking.

That threatening bark is perhaps the threat of debilitation at illness’s hand, the fear of death, the crushing loneliness of serious illness. And the synergistic confusion is (and isn’t) the impenetrable meaningless of death/illness. I don’t mean to shrink Huerta’s poetic language to prosaic interpretations, since he could just as easily have written a straightforward thought-piece on illness and animal imagery, had that been what he intended to communicate, but I think the above-mentioned notions are some of the things he is after. Also, notice the perfect use of the title to force our understanding of the poem. I likely would have thought the poem was only mediocre if it were, for example, titled “Dogs.” His title (“Hombre enfermo” in the original) adds an emotional valence to all the words of the poem that would otherwise be mere pretty language without emotional import. This technique of title-as-lens is one Huerta uses to great effect throughout the book.

Schafer tells us in his introduction that he has two goals in mind with this book. “On the one hand, I want to offer English-speaking readers an overview of Huerta’s poetry since he published his first book, El jardín de la luz, in 1972. On the other hand, given that Huerta is alive and well, writing and publishing prolifically, I want to give readers ample opportunity to revel in his more recent work.” And revel is exactly what the reader does.
The publication of Before Saying Any of the Great Words is another in a long line of great contributions Copper Canyon Press has made to American poetry. In a post-monolingual world, and especially in the USA, which is quickly becoming officially and unofficially bilingual, I hope Huerta’s work will be read widely. Works in translation have a long tradition of influencing English-language poetry—from the Earl of Surrey, who invented blank verse in order to translate Virgil’s Ænead (which was metered but not rhymed)—thus allowing for Shakespeare’s plays to exist as we know them—to the importing of such forms as the sonnet from its Italian progenitors or the couplet from the French, and so on. What better time than now, in the age of globalization, for us to learn from our literary compatriots who live in other countries and write in other languages? I would therefore suggest Before Saying Any of the Great Words not only for classes on Latin American literature but also for poetry workshops, working poets everywhere, and anyone interested in the marvelously rich culture of Mexico.

***

[The above review was originally published in Florida State University’s The Southeast Review in a slightly different form.]

Andreas Economakis

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Fish

by Andreas Economakis

When he was thirteen years old he used to wander down to the little creek that slipped through the woods in front his mom’s house to fly fish. He never caught anything but he liked the whole experience, being down there with his dog, the velvety brown water reflecting the light and the clouds and the gnats and the trees amidst the clean forest smells of fermenting leaves and damp dirt and worms. He would cast tiny handmade flies into the moveable water and jerk them back up with the fishing rod, imagining a big spotted trout leaping out of the sweet water in pursuit of his bait. But no big spotted trout ever leapt out or even nibbled on his line and he got to thinking that maybe the creek had no fish in it, that maybe it was a dead creek. It didn’t bother him too much actually, it was kind of a relief, until that one afternoon when the dog started barking like mad.

The boy looked upstream and saw something big and silvery floating his way, barely moving but still alive. He waded out into the creek, he doesn’t know why, some things are hard to explain, and a big pale trout with bleached eyes flowed softly right up to his legs, on its side and gasping for air. The boy bent down and cradled the fish softly. It looked like it had been poisoned, all discolored and sickly, its cataract eyes glazed over and milky white. The fish shook for a brief second and went still in his hands. The dog stopped barking almost like he knew the fish had died a strange death. The boy waded back to shore holding the fish and the dog backed away, whimpering like his master had a stick and was gearing up to hit him. “What’s wrong dog?” he asked out loud and the dog turned and ran away.

The boy looked toward the stream for a moment and then walked to his pole. He picked up the fly end of the line, held the fish by the gills -they were brown like winter leaves not healthy pink- and holding his breath to keep the stink of decay and poison from his lungs he passed the hook through the trout’s fat cartilage lips. The fly stuck to the fish’s mouth like a girlish ribbon or a fancy pacifier. It looked so strange. It was so very dead.

The boy started back up to the house with his catch, his dog spying him from behind the trees, frightened like he’d never seen him before. The boy entered the quiet house and dropped the fish into the kitchen sink. Maybe because he didn’t want the trout’s death to mean nothing or maybe because he was on auto-pilot, he’s not sure, he pulled out a sharp little knife and stabbed the fish in its belly. Green-brown guts spilled out onto his fingers and clogged the drain. The stench made him gag and he almost vomited, but he continued until all the innards sat curdling in a frothy pool in the metal sink. When he was finished he pulled the tap and sent the slimy guts spinning down into the grinder.

The boy placed the dead fish in a rusty tin tray and doused it with olive oil and lemon slices and oregano. He turned the oven on and placed the fish inside before turning to the cupboards to pull out all that was necessary for a big family meal, a happy family meal with his mom, just him and his mom. A half hour later the fish was ready and looking quite good though the smell was one of decay and ruin. Right then his mom entered the kitchen. She had just woken up and looked the worse for wear and tear after a lonely 2-gallon night in front of the TV. She burst into tears when she saw the beautiful meal her son had prepared for her. She was so elated and overwhelmed that she turned hastily to go get dressed and accidentally smashed her face on the door, crumbling to the ground with a black eye and a sore jaw and a teardrop on the dirty cream-colored linoleum floor. She picked herself up like a work-horse and staggered off with a bitter smile and stubborn wet eyes to her room to change, not wanting to spoil this for her little baby.

The boy stood frozen for a moment. He then walked up to the fish and smelled it again. He turned and looked at the teardrop on the linoleum floor. He picked up the dead trout in its tray and walked out to the creek, the dog close behind all a wonder, all nervous energy. He slid the fish into the gurgling water. The trout slowly swam away with the lemon slices, all cooked now and ready to go.

–Andreas Economakis

Excerpt from the author’s current novel in progress: “Requiem For A Cat”.

Copyright © 2010, Andreas Economakis. All rights reserved.

For more stories by Andreas Economakis click on the author’s name below.

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: MAYA ELASHI

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IN A BIBLICAL GARDEN
by Maya Elashi

i saw the messiah this morning.
He was wearing a white kaffiya and riding a donkey
southeast, towards Jerusalem.

He didn’t look at me
though he knew i was there with two cameras: moving and still
He didn’t want any pictures taken
and i, in dissappointment, respected that it’s

not an everyday experience i said to myself as he faded into the multitude

now, my heart alone holds the image developing
still
i’ll keep walking the path they followed up and over the hill.


Maya Elashi is an Irish Jew. A Kabbalistic Hebrew Pagan Priestess to The Goddess. She is a gardener/herbalist, as well as a teacher of English and Hebrew. Maya plays and prays for peace in the Middle East (and worldwide).

Editor’s Note: Just in time for the Hanukkah holiday, and the holidays in general, comes this piece from Maya Elashi. A piece that, in both its brilliance and simplicity, captures both a moment in time and a spiritual experience. I recall seeing Maya read in a barn in Santa Cruz many years ago. She shared an exceptional long poem that was very well received by the audience and that ended with her singing a line from Tom Petty, “Oh my my, oh hell yes, honey, put on that party dress!” Maya has been one of the most influential people in my writing life, and was the first person to be completely thrilled that I was leaving the law to pursue a career as a poet and teacher. It is a true honor to share her work with you here today.

Frozen on a Street Corner While the Unbludgeoned World Moves Forward

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Michel Franco’s Daniel y Ana

In the last decade or so, Mexican film has been among the most consistently interesting in the world. It has a certain moral and social grittiness not seen in most American movies, but a tightly-edited watchability missing in European films. Some big-name, Hollywood-endorsed movies spring to mind – Amores Perros, Pan’s Labyrinth, Y Tu Mamá También – but there are also some worthy, less-heralded candidates. One of these is 2009’s Daniel y Ana.

Directed by Michel Franco and starring Gael García Bernal’s younger brother, Dario Yazbek Bernal, the film garnered critical attention at Cannes and other film festivals, but is still without its own wiki, and its IMDB page is incomplete and littered with negative reviews. I don’t want to psychoanalyze audience reaction too much, but part of this reception could be because the movie straddles an uncomfortable middle ground between shocking and subtle. It will turn off the easily offended, but with its nearly geologically paced shifts in character, it will also alienate thrill seekers. It is genuinely disturbing – a very different effect than simply being shocking.

Most synopses of the film have shied away from the trauma at its heart, perhaps reluctant to ruin the suddenness with which the trauma occurs. I, for one, had guessed at it simply by looking at the movie’s cover, but the movie remained vital and unruined for me. In fact, this knowledge, coupled with the slowness of the movie’s first act, created a nice simmering dread which I found just as effective as the hammer-to-the-head suddenness of real trauma.

Therefore: spoiler alert for that which there is no way, really, to spoil.

Daniel and Ana are brother and sister, young privileged Mexicans at pivotal points in their lives. Ana is on the verge of getting married. Daniel is a typical teenager, taciturn and self-involved, on the verge of losing his virginity to his girlfriend and resentful of not having been given a new car yet. One day the siblings go shopping and Daniel fails to make the appropriate turn on the way home. Two men jump into their car and hold a gun to Daniel’s head. They blindfold Daniel and Ana, throw them in the trunk, and take them to a big, starkly furnished house. And yes, if you haven’t guessed, they force them to have sex. On camera. Brother and sister.

The true horror of this scene is not just in its unflinchingness, but in the way it indicts the viewer. Daniel and Ana are beautiful, slim, and pale, like Greek statues. You cannot look away as Daniel fucks her from behind. Her face is buried in the mattress, and though we know she is weeping, it might be mistaken for orgasmic bliss. Daniel comes quickly and shamefully, as any teenager having sex for the first time might.

What follows is a study in post-traumatic stress. Both victims retreat from the world in their separate ways. Ana breaks things off with her fiance and retreats into her room.  Daniel stops going to school, spends time in movie theaters watching any old film. He also breaks things off with his girlfriend. Quite understandably, both do not talk to their parents about what happened.

In the end Ana proves to be the stronger about it, more equipped to deal with it because of her relative adulthood perhaps. She sees a therapist, weeps, and delicately broaches the subject with Daniel. Daniel meanwhile lies about going to the therapist and continues his self-destructive behavior. He googles their video, but gets no matches. There is another big twist at the heart of the film and perhaps you can figure it out. It didn’t surprise me, but I still don’t want to give everything away. Suffice to say it had the quality of being both unexpected and entirely appropriate that all the best storytelling should have.

As It Ought to Be cofounder, Okla Elliott, compares Franco’s subject matter to Neil Labute – that great American playwright, director, and darkly comic moralist responsible for Your Friends and Neighbors and In the Company of Men – and that’s as useful a touchstone as any. But he admits that the comparison is of limited use, and indeed, Labute has a venomous edge that Franco does not. Labute seems to see everyone as disgusting – either weak and sniveling or sociopathic – while Franco’s aim is to show us how fundamentally good people react to horrible events. Though Daniel, and to a lesser extent Ana, behave badly throughout the movie, we understand why. There is no comic distortion or exaggeration. This goes back to the difference I outlined earlier between shocking and disturbing: the shocking cries “Look at me!” while the disturbing goes about its quietly gruesome business, twisting the psychological knife deeper and deeper. It doesn’t need to beg for attention because it’s impossible for us to look away.

Further, Labute is a playwright and his characters vocalize their trauma in a way that seems psychologically untrue to me. One reason I think this movie was, relatively speaking, not well received by audiences is that there is so much silence at its heart – that the shifts in attitude of its two main characters are so gradual and happen over scenes that only seem repetitive. In pace, Daniel y Ana resembles a Euro-film (or the American idea of one), and yet there is no fashionable ennui here, or Bergman-like scenes of Freudian camerawork, just two characters coming to grips with their shattered relationship with each other, their family and lovers, and the world.

There is a beautiful and telling image some two-thirds of the way into the movie: Daniel is deep in his daily wanderings on a crowded street; the light changes and all the pedestrians move forward in a wave, crossing to the other side of the street, but Daniel just stands there. This strikes me as the perfect symbol for the way trauma affects us: it leaves us frozen on a street corner while the rest of the world moves—steadily, ignorantly, heartlessly—forward.


Waking Up

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Lon Chaney in The Phantom of the Opera, 1925. Photo source: g4tv.com.

Waking Up
By John Unger Zussman

In line for the tram at the Universal Studios tour, we filed past a statue of Lon Chaney in the old silent classic, Phantom of the Opera. It was lifelike in its detail—sunken eyes, jagged teeth, black cape. We admired it and passed it by.

A small crowd gradually arrived, waiting and chattering. A father and his small child stopped in front of the statue. The father began to explain who Lon Chaney was when, suddenly, the statue came alive, snarled, and swooped menacingly at the child. Everyone jumped back, startled, our hearts skipping a beat; so you can imagine the child’s terror, her scream piercing the waiting area.

The actor set down a tip jar, then turned to the girl and gave her a sweet. He cajoled her until, safe in her father’s arms, tears drying, she asked him how he could stand so still for so long. At that moment, the tram arrived. As we rode away, the actor reassumed his pose for his next victims.

Many years later, I have forgotten what else we saw at Universal Studios. But after witnessing stone turn to flesh, I understand what the physicists have been telling us. Matter is not as we perceive it. The world is a field of probabilities waiting to happen. And any object, no matter how inanimate or inert, might merely be awaiting its moment to awaken into life.

Copyright © 2010, John Unger Zussman. All rights reserved.

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: NATHAN WISMAN

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Photo by Joshua Band.

BURRS
by Nathan Wisman

Your one, your only,
that grinning face.

For you, the cold dew
smears his arms.
The thickets of shivering weeds
part around his determined body.

Strips of cloudy sky traversed again and again
by the sun.
It is never warm enough.
Strips of pinpricked black tread upon again and again
by some moon.
The wait for an echo becoming impossibly long.

Burrs do not stick to wetness.
Turn your shivering back.
Because to burrs, wetness
means death.
Grasping for you, along the hedgerows.

Echelons of rings surrounded again and again
by echelons of rings.
All so artificial.
Squads of leaves piling upward again and again
by shoving winds.
The tree’s rocking impossibly slow.

Tendrils of steam rise from beneath steel lids.
Feel lumps beneath your skin.
Because to steam, rising
is all there is.
Reaching upwards to you, from limestone basins.

A soulmate, a lover,
your ultimate, your final,
those hands tangling endlessly.


Nathan Wisman lives in San Francisco, California where he writes in a number of mediums and imagines he has a cat named Fitzgerald. His favorite authors include Cormac McCarthy and Bret Easton Ellis, and he strongly encourages you to read Catch-22 and Eating Animals.

Editor’s Note: Sometimes there is an “it” factor in poetry. That inexplicable dust that shimmers over a poem. Natural raw talent apparent from the words and equally from between them. The work of today’s poet strikes me in such a way, and my personal poetic landscape has been forever altered by the words “to steam, rising is all there is.”

Andreas Economakis

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The author and his p-spot in second grade

The P-Spot

by Andreas Economakis

When I was a young boy I was fascinated by the Dictator of Greece and his cadre of austere military men. What I think impressed me the most was the Dictator’s black bulletproof limousine and the fact that the cops would stop all the traffic so that his convoy could roll through the lights without stopping. In a city that was already starting to show the signs of traffic gridlock like most cities today, I reckoned that the ability to cruise through red lights uninterrupted was the equivalent of absolute power. One time I even managed to see the Dictator’s shiny balding head as he sat in the back seat of the limousine. He seemed to be both smiling and angry at the same time. Maybe he was smirking at all us hapless motorists who had to wait for him to go by. I didn’t know enough back then to question the politics of the whole situation. I was blinded by all the guns and uniforms and cops and pomp and circumstance.

During the time of the US-backed military dictatorship or junta (1967-1974), my family occasionally used to eat at a restaurant called Anna’s on the corner of Kifissias and Katehaki avenues, across from the old Luna Park. I loved that restaurant for a myriad of reasons. First of all, they served steamed snails in a red sauce. Second, it was across from the Luna Park. After dinner, while my mother and father argued or drank or sat silently avoiding each other’s eyes, my brothers and I would go over to the Luna Park and play bumper cars and shoot balloons and race go carts. You could even win bottles of booze from the games, something which later became a fun way to score cheap liquor with my stepbrother Lee. But what was most cool about Anna’s was that the Dictator’s second-in-command would occasionally eat there, plain-clothes police escort always occupying the nearby tables. This man also had a shiny bald head, though his was clean shaven like Mussolini’s infamous pate. He always looked angry in his double-breasted suits. I tried to imagine what kind of cool guns he and his police escort carried under their jackets.

Though my dad and my friends all quietly intimated that the dictatorship was bad and doomed, I liked looking at those severe men in their snappy uniforms and at the symmetrical military parades they staged several times a year. And, of course, I loved being stopped at the traffic lights, hopefully first in line, where I could see the black cars and their police escorts whiz by unobstructed. What could possibly be wrong with these cool-looking people in their uniforms? I mean, everything was fine at home, right? We had food and shelter and pets and whatnot. Why was everyone complaining? Life seemed to roll on normally every day and, barring a few small hassles, I was happy. Okay, it was annoying that we had to go to church every morning before school (by Dictator’s decree), to stand for an exhausting hour while mysterious bearded men in black robes and tall hats droned on and on in an indecipherable language. But that was made up for by the cool censorship stamps on the back of every school book. Each stamp displayed an armed soldier standing in front of a flaming eagle, the Dictator’s sacred flaming phoenix. Rumor had it that if you removed the stamp you would be sent to jail instantly. My friends and I toyed with the stamp constantly, sometimes removing it and glueing it back on with spit. We imagined armed men bursting into our classroom and hauling us off kicking and screaming to the torture chambers. We were such rebels. No armed men ever came to haul us off of course, not for the stamps nor for us substituting dirty words in for the real ones when we sang the national anthem in the school yard every morning. So what was wrong with the Dictatorship? My young eyes simply could not see what the fuss was all about. Then one day it all became clear to me.

It was Apokries (Greek Halloween) and I was a bit upset because I didn’t have a costume to wear to school. I knew my friends would all dress up as Zorros and pirates and crusaders and cowboys and fairytale princes. Somehow or other my parents had forgotten to get me a costume. At the last minute at home, before my brothers and I had to go meet the school bus, my middle brother came up with the idea of having me wear some shorts and sneakers and a red and white Arsenal soccer T-shirt. I was going to go to school dressed as a footballer. I guess it was a pretty dumb idea, considering I dressed this way every day, but what other options did I have? I remember being completely embarrassed on the bus as I sat between Captain Hook and one of the Seven Dwarves. Taking pity on me, my brother inked a mustache on my upper lip. I guess he figured that I would look less stupid as an older footballer. Well, my classmates all made tremendous fun of me, but pretty soon they moved on as they were too busy showing off their own cool costumes. I dreaded the fact that the school photographer, who was making his rounds from classroom to classroom, would immortalize me in my silly duds. I decided that I would stand in the 2nd row during the photo in order to conceal my shame.

My teacher back then was a horribly strict woman who was the living reincarnation of the Devil. She loved the Dictatorship and kept us kids terrorized with threats and actual manifestations of punishment. In step with the Dictatorship’s policy of order, Mrs. M. demanded military-like obedience from her 1st, 2nd and 3rd graders. I was in the 2nd grade then and I feared and loathed this woman with passion, as did all my peers. We would sit in twos at our desks, hands clasped together in front of us (as regulations dictated), trembling with fear, hoping she wouldn’t call on us for something or other and consequently whip the shit out of us with her ruler or with the flesh-stinging mullberry twig she cut every morning from the school yard. Anyway, that Halloween we were sitting there, hands clasped in front of us, for what seemed like a very long time, waiting for the stupid photographer to come by, when I suddenly realized I had to pee real bad. I started shaking my two legs back and forth to ease the pain. The bell finally went off signaling the break. Mrs. M. ordered us to stay put. The photographer was due any minute. The pain in my bladder became intense. Braving the anticipation of Mrs. M.’s anger, I raised my hand meekly and asked her if I could run to the bathroom. “Absolutely not!” she barked. She reiterated that the photographer was due imminently. Fifteen agonizing minutes went by. I was in tears, my knees knocking together, my bladder ready to explode. I wasn’t going to make it. I raised my hand again and was shot down again, this time with a threat. I secretly cursed her and the dictators and all they stood for for the first time in my life.

It was at the very moment that the door swung open and the photographer marched in, the moment that my mind imagined a big wave crashing against the shore, that I was finally overwhelmed. Warm urine flooded my khaki shorts and trickled down my trembling leg. Mrs. M., resembling a military sergeant-at-arms, barked out that we should all line up together in front of the blackboard in two rows, one behind the other. Trying to conceal my mishap, I crept up to Mrs. M. and indicated my problem. She looked at me and my dark pee-stain with disdain and ordered me to the front line. Defeated, I edged my way to the front, choosing the corner. Maybe the photographer would crop me out by mistake. No such luck. The flash flashed and I was immortalized, huge pee-spot in the middle of my shorts, stupid Arsenal outfit and all. It was from that day on that I came to hate all fascists and military people and authoritarians. I hated Mrs. M. and everyone who was like her. I hated the Dictator and his bald-headed, limousine-riding, uniformed thugs. My eyes were finally open. I had to pee on myself to wake up, but I was finally awake.

The following year the military junta started to unravel, plagued by its catastrophic handling of student and civilian unrest and its asinine mismanagement and meddling in international affairs. Within a year of the bloody Athens Polytechnic uprising and the Cyprus fiasco the Dictatorship fell and all those bald-headed fascists and M.-types got sent to jail. I rejoiced. I’ll always remember riding my bicycle down to the center of Athens a couple of days after the Athens Polytechnic students’ revolt that ultimately led to the downfall of the Junta. The Dictator had sent in tanks and over twenty protestors were killed as they chanted anti-government slogans. One of the tanks simply rolled over the university’s gates and squashed many of the protestors. The tanks on the streets opened fire and rolled over everything in their way, leaving flattened cars and dead people lying in pools of blood. I remember walking around the area where the events had taken place, my heart pounding. As I crept amongst the carnage and bullet casings and broken glass and garbage and revolutionary fliers, I saw a tattered pair of pants lying on the street, soiled with tire and tank tracks. Near the crotch was a fist-sized imprint of dried blood. It looked a lot like the photo of my Halloween shorts. My heart sank. I was pretty sure that the pants’ occupant hadn’t met a good end. On my way back home I took an oath to never trust dictators and “men of authority.” I remembered my humiliation with Mrs. M. and I took an oath to never trust “women of authority” too. I vowed to myself to always fight violence and hatred and tyranny. I wanted to kill all the fascists. If they stick it in your face, then stick it right back to them.

The Military Junta eventually collapsed but my anti-fascist resolve and belief that violence was necessary to fight tyranny continued. It took me years to realize that I had missed the point. You cannot fight hatred and violence with hatred and violence. The proof was the military Junta itself. It fell because of mismanagement and bad decisions in the international political arena. It fell because it was unpopular. It fell because of the events at the Athens Polytechnic. But most of all it fell because it was based on a philosophy of violence and tyranny. Democracy cannot not exist where violence prospers.

Looking back now, I realize that the photograph of me with the pee-stain is the first photograph of a conscious me. It was like I was born then. That was when I woke up from my childhood dreams. I would be reborn again years later, when I freed myself from the belief that hatred and violence can solve anything. No photograph this time of a childish me with an embarassing p-spot. Just a quirky smile and one eye half-closed, questioning, wondering if the photographer back then knew what I know today.

–Andreas Economakis

This piece is part of a collection of stories on blindness entitled: The Blindness of Life.

Copyright © 2010, Andreas Economakis. All rights reserved.

For more stories by Andreas Economakis click on the author’s name below.

Come, let us go down, and there confuse their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech: On Learning Hebrew in Israel

Posted on by asitoughttobemagazine

by Letitia Trent

As our plane arrived in Israel’s airspace, I listened to Pimsleur’s Hebrew lessons on my headphones, which go over the same phrases in half-hours of repetition, the accent-less audio-guide voice followed by the native speakers, who respond to his commands (Tell her you do not speak Hebrew. Ask her how she is doing today. Say “let’s go to my place”). I practiced the way the female voice’s inflection went up at the end of certain phrases, such as beseder (OK or Good).

I had tried to study ahead of our scheduled move to Tel Aviv. In Burlington, Vermont, my husband Zach and I had weekly basic Hebrew lessons from an Israeli man studying in Burlington. He was young, with messy black hair, but had a courtly, polite, and serious demeanor that belied everything I’d read about Israeli youth from the Let’s Go Israel! travel book.  He photocopied Hebrew words and phrases transliterated into English for us and insisted that we had to study. We tried to please him, but usually had lost the worksheets or neglected to study them at each meeting. We met once a week, which wasn’t enough for anything to stick. By the time we boarded the plane, after a month of visiting family in Oklahoma and Arkansas, we’d forgotten everything. Pimsleur didn’t help. By the end of the flight, I knew how to say “I don’t speak Hebrew”, “I don’t understand Hebrew”, and “Do you speak English?” It would have taken another five or six hours of listening to get past the words for hotel, the taxi, and the bills and down to something substantial. By the time we landed at Ben Gurion, we had no Hebrew but assertions about how we cannot speak it.

#

Although I’ve never been particularly quick when it comes to subjects like Math or Science, I’ve excelled in language since Elementary school. My memories of school are punctuated with sudden realizations that what others seemed to struggle with—reading, vocabulary, comprehension—came easy to me. I can remember a whole section of read-and-respond comprehension questions in a standardized test where we had to read a dry, boring history text and then respond to questions about the meanings of sections. I finished the test and set down my test booklet. I noticed, then, that everybody else was still working—most still reading the text. This wasn’t a source of pride, but curiosity: how could something so essential to me, language, be so difficult for everyone else? My inner life from the ages of eight to seventeen came almost exclusively from books. I was shy and physically isolated from other people my age (I lived in the woods, by highways, and didn’t own a car until I got married), and so I learned about people who were not me from books.  I didn’t understand what everyone else had inside of their heads, if it wasn’t books.

Before moving  to Tel Aviv, I’d imagined that my primary discomfort would be in speaking to people, but this is not the case. About 85 % of people in Israel speak English, and even more in Tel Aviv. The problem isn’t speaking to people so much as grasping the general tone of a place based on the signs, the advertisements, what people choose to put on chalkboards outside of bars and restaurants.  Now, the world around me is encoded in chunky Hebrew letters which carry messages that I don’t understand.  A billboard by the sea, featuring a picture of a boy smiling, his hands folded school-picture style on the table before him and with a paragraph of block-text to his right, baffles. Is this billboard an advertisement, a warning, or a public service announcement?

I can recognize letters and some words, but for the first time in over twenty years, I have to try to read. I sound out Hebrew words painfully, like a child. The feeling brings me back to elementary school, when I hated speaking out loud in class so much that I flatly refused to read aloud, so I was eventually put into remedial reading classes, where we practiced sounding out words slowly, hunched over our desks with our fingers under each letter. The remedial reading room gave me sympathy for those who couldn’t read well. It was embarrassing to be stuck on a hard combination of letters, like the word thought, it’s unmercifully illogical “ou” and “ght” combinations, which sound nothing like the individual sounds of those words.

After almost four months of Israel, as soon as someone comes up to me speaking Hebrew, every bit of Hebrew I’ve learned falls out of my head. I get tongue-tied, afraid that I’m wasting somebody’s time and end up saying the only words that come to me: Anglit (English), I say, apologetically, Slicha, Slicha (sorry/excuse me), Ani rac medeberette anglit (I only speak English).

#

In our neighborhood, the old city of Jaffa, or Yafo, as it’s pronounced in Israel, Arab shops and restaurants outnumber Jewish ones. At first, I tried to speak in Arabic to the Arab shop owners and Hebrew to the Jewish ones. In almost every shop in Yafo (above the cash register, usually) you’ll find some indication of the religion of the shop owner. In Arab shops, you’ll often find fancy Arabic calligraphy or a Tree of the Prophets of Islam. In Jewish shops, you’ll often find a chamsa (hand-shaped good-luck charm).

I heard from Zach that one of his friends, a non-Israeli who speaks Hebrew fluently, found that some Arabs find it offensive for Hebrew speakers to try to speak Arabic. Though Israel officially has two languages—Hebrew and Arabic—Hebrew is the spoken language of the country, and in my experience, few Jews are fluent in Arabic. Many Arab-Israelis, though they know and speak Hebrew, speak Arabic with each other (you hear it in the streets of Yafo, coming from clouds of perfumed smoke at nargilla bars or groups of young men at coffee shops). The language is one way to retain Arab culture in a country dominated by Judaism and Jewish culture.

My Israeli friend D, though, told me that it isn’t so clear cut. The problem isn’t just Hebrew and Arabic: it’s any dominant language confronted with a more marginalized one.  Of course, you can speak any language with a heart of condescension, with a sense of ridiculous pride that you’ve spent ten minutes on the internet looking up the correct words for hello and goodbye. This can happen anywhere.

Anything done with kindness will be understood as kindness, she told me. I am still not sure.

Language is personal, political, and what we use to wound and show superiority. My native language is a bully, and the language I’m learning is tied to the concept of Zionism, which I imagine that most Arab-Israelis resent. I don’t know how my intended kindness translates.

#

Our Ulpan teacher, Chava, holds up her hands as we stumble over the Hebrew letters.

Hebrew is simple, she says. Hebrew is not a problem.

She’s right. Hebrew, unlike most languages I’ve tried to learn, is very regular and is indeed not much of a problem outside of the different alphabet, pronunciation, and maddening lack of vowels. Hebrew is so regular because its spoken form was largely constructed, with modern words added to the lexicon. Hebrew, after the diaspora in 70CE, remained primarily in written form through religious texts. When early Zionist leaders such as Ben Yehuda set about systematizing, modernizing, and creating the new/ancient language of Hebrew, they understand why it was so important: a culture must have its own language. Taking a common European language wouldn’t have worked: Israel had to reach back farther.

It’s astonishing to think about how new spoken Hebrew is. In 1881, when Ben Yehuda moved to Palestine and insisted on speaking only Hebrew with his family, he was probably the only Jew in Palestine speaking Hebrew exclusively in the home. Now, a little over a hundred years later, an entire nation speaks it, and the language has grown from its roots into its own, strange creature.

The difficulty arises in Ulpan class of exactly how to teach Hebrew. Do you teach schoolbook Hebrew or Hebrew the way it is spoken, which is often in an extremely contracted form with frequent intrusions of other languages, such as Yiddish, German, and Arabic? For example, while standing in the line at the bank or grocery store in Israel, if you don’t move quite quickly enough, you might hear yalla, yalla, usually from an elderly man or woman at the back of the line. Yalla is an Arabic word. Once, in a taxi on our way back from a party, we heard the taxi driver explain to a passenger in the front seat—a Transylvanian woman working in Israel—that the word yalla was not actually a Hebrew word.

We took it from the Arabs, he explained. It means move.

#

As an American, I have the benefit and the curse of not having to pay much attention to my culture, my language, my identity. I do not have to fight to hold onto it, to make sure my language doesn’t die or my rituals are preserved—the US is ubiquitous, and knowing English is (unfortunately—but that’s a whole other essay) considered a necessity for success in most countries. My language is the language on T-shirts and products from Shanghai to Paris. Israel, a country just over 60 years old, had to create fluency in a relatively short period of time in order to unify a culturally and linguistically diverse citizenship. The Ulpan system was created as an easy, quick way to teach immigrants Hebrew, and it seems to work: though it doesn’t make people immediately fluent, it does provide an “in” to the culture that isn’t always offered in other countries.

My Ulpan class isn’t traditional. No olim chadashim (new immigrants), and Zach and I are probably the oldest people in the class. The majority of us are non-Jewish. We consist of three Chinese students, four Americans, and half-dozen Polish students who seem to have an uncanny ability to pick up the language but don’t seem to recognize the Jewish religious songs that Chava sings, which makes me think they didn’t get the basics of Hebrew through a synagogue. I’m not sure if they’ve studied before (Zach’s theory) or if their young, elastic brains make it easy for them to learn another language compared to my older, less flexible brain (my theory).

The Polish students speak Polish to each other and English to Chava. They turn to each other sometimes and speak perfectly easy, fluent Polish, and it makes me wonder at fluency at all: how do we all learn to navigate our native language so easily? I wish that I had access to their language, too. Compared to Polish, I have a good start in Hebrew. I know over 25 verbs. I can request to go to the bathroom, ask for food, and tell somebody that I want to shop or speak or walk. I know nothing about Polish. There are so many languages I will never know, books I will never read in their original languages, and people I will never know as deeply as a native speaker of their language could. There simply isn’t enough time to understand more than a few languages in one lifetime.

#

In my opinion, the saddest Bible story is of the Tower of Babel. Once, there was a universal language that everybody spoke, and we all understood each other. Since we all understood each other, we could organize, and soon, people began to build larger towns and higher buildings, which angered God:

And the LORD said, ‘Behold, they are one people, and they have all one language; and this is only the beginning of what they will do; and nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them. Come, let us go down, and there confuse their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech.’

Note here what the problem really is: it’s the fact that humans, when they understand each other, can work together, which creates so much promise that even God is jealous

I’ve been studying Hebrew for two months, and I’m amazed at what I still cannot say. I can’t explain in Hebrew why studying languages ultimately depresses me, though I need and love to do it and could never live in a country without at least trying to understand the language(s) spoken there.  I can’t explain in Hebrew why I am a writer, why I don’t miss the United States, or why I don’t know where I’ll live after we’ve left here and why am happy about that fact. I can’t say anything important yet—but compared to Russian, German, Cherokee, Swedish, Icelandic, Japanese, and on and on, I can make due. Making due, at least when it comes to language, never feels like enough.

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: ALLYSON KWETT

Posted on by asitoughttobemagazine

Two A.M.
by Allyson Kwett

But there’s no darkness, at least
No Country Darkness
No Fords on Highway One
No tires packing salt into pavement
No dim headlights shining back off yellow signs

But the glow is the same
                          Toxic orange
And the same weeping strings
             Cries of smoke and whiskey
Leech through headphones
Leech into the sky

Yellow streetlights and
Endlessly blinking neon
Bounces off slick wet pavement

             And the bay
Is white and yellow
With Atlantis sunk
Office buildings and sky-rise apartments
Bleeding to the shore

No stars, no moon
Under a ceiling of burnt fog
And the porch light is off
But still I wonder

Wonder if the smoldering ash
Faint red glow and
Release of gray smoke and flesh
Covers the stratus and cosmos of night
Behind sheets of melancholy

Fighting to bleed through the edges
With violent ferocity


Allyson Kwett is a San Francisco Bay Area native currently completing her BA in Rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley. She enjoys parlour games, trivia, crosswords, and cucumber-flavored soft drinks, and abhors people who say “for all intensive purposes”.

Editor’s Note: Allyson Kwett has a nice handle on the use of sound in poetry. Moments like “No tires packing salt into pavement” hit the ear in the same way the mind’s eye pictures the tires packing salt into the ground. Beginning the poem mid-moment, “But there’s no darkness, at least,” we as readers experience the poem as a scene carved from time. We are dropped in, a world opens up for us, we inhabit it in all its detail, and we exit “with violent ferocity.” It is a quick and intense experience, alive with images and sound along the way.