refugee2

<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/essays/dont-live-like-refugee-metaphors-narratives-displacement/"></div>The boat is full. So goes the Swiss refrain used to turn away refugees when Nazi Germany threatened to undo an entire series of national borders. Metaphors for refugeedom have recently been dominated by a different image — that of a wall that will stay the influx of unwanted peoples.
If the boat is full, how might we find or even create more space? Today, on World Refugee Day 2019, this question seems especially urgent. It is also the very question that three (relatively) recent fictional works attempt to tackle. Each in their own way, Mikhail Shishkin’s Maidenhair (2005), Jenny Erpenbeck’s Go, Went, Gone (2015), and Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West (20017) ask us to reconceptualize the refugee narrative. In doing so, these authors explore how these stories might best be crafted, while the novels themselves embody the process by which the long-brewing refugee crisis, which really has no beginning, continues to shape literary themes and forms.
Shishkin’s book, partly based on his time working as an interpreter in Switzerland and the most technically complex of the three, incorporates interview (read: interrogation) sessions with Russian-speaking refugees applying for asylum. These Q&amp;A sections — only one of various primary narrative threads — feature horrific accounts of the violence waged in 1990s Chechnya. The book begins by documenting these anecdotes in the most neutral form imaginable: through questions and answers standing in for living people. The layout of the pages imitates the kind of cold, calculated report generated in offices charged with dealing with asylum-seekers. The refugees’ words, too, ring as somehow clichéd, just more graphic descriptions skirting the line between appropriation and exploitation.
But, then, something changes. Gradually, with ever-increasing fervor, Shishkin’s semi-autobiographical narrator begins to alter the “facts” of their stories. They begin to blur and interpenetrate with his reading of Greek history and his recollections of other tales from disparate eras. The technique paints the refugees and their stories as only one chain in a long series. There appear Biblical figures, Ancient Greeks defeated in battle now aim for the sea, Jews escaping the 1905 pogroms in Russia.
Shishkin’s refugees take on mythic proportions, as he suggests the timeless nature of their manifold plights. The author investigates what it means both to narrate the stories of refugees and how to do so in the first place. However, he does not go about this in any straightforward manner, crafting a complex narrative that weaves together multiple storylines, including the memoirs of the famous Russian singer Izabella Iureva (1899–2000) and his own accounts of travels in Italy. The result is a dizzying novel that constantly disorients the reader, not unlike what a refugee must undergo when shuttled across borders, through different cultures and languages, and, indeed, among competing narratives — historical, political, social, and personal — about the experience.
Perhaps more provocatively, Shishkin argues that it does not even matter whether the answers a desperate refugee provides during an interrogation are, in fact, true to his or her life in a traditional sense. What truly matters is that someone somewhere has gone through such pain, and therefore, we must extend ourselves to help those who do make it. The controversial 1981 Swiss film The Boat Is Full — a source for Shishkin, of course — presents a similar dilemma. In it, a band of people thrown together during World War II find themselves in neutral Switzerland and must attempt to piece together a cohesive narrative about their relations to fit the criteria for asylum established by the Swiss government. The alleged truth of the situation matters a great deal less than the prospects that await them if they must return to Nazi-occupied territory, so they exploit storytelling to save themselves. Shishkin likewise generalizes the plight of the proverbial refugee by underscoring its universality and by probing the limits of truth in such morally convoluted scenarios.
Erpenbeck’s Go, Went, Gone takes a different tack. It details how a retired academic’s experience volunteering with African refugees in contemporary Berlin upends his worldview. The recently widowed former professor Richard discovers the men entirely by chance one day as he passes by a hunger strike, though he fails to recognize what is taking place on the city square. Initially, his response is anthropological in nature: he knows hardly anything about Africa and develops a lengthy questionnaire for use in his conversations with the highly diverse group of refugees. He struggles to keep everyone straight, even mentally nicknaming one of the refugees Apollo, as he meets numerous men from Nigeria, Burkina Faso, Chad, and other countries. While Richard comes to know them — and, in the process, himself much better — so too does the reader experience the clash between bureaucratic and individualizing narratives. The men are shuttled between centers and lodgings as they await judgement: can they remain in Germany, where they have begun to adapt, or must they return to their point of entry into Europe, Italy? The plot allows the reader to feel the tension of knowing the tragic details of another person’s life and escape from terrible conditions, and yet being unable to do anything about it. It all comes down to this tension between how a story is told and which elements are granted primacy. Richard may be transformed, but the political machinery is impervious to compassion.
Erpenbeck’s book goes about its deconstruction of Richard’s peaceful, privileged existence and of political expediency with clinical precision. She contrasts a man who recently drowned in Richard’s neighborhood lake with the plight of a refugee whose children drowned while crossing the sea by boat. Her writing is lucid, candid in its descriptions, and frank in how it chronicles the most distressing events in the refugees’ lives. (And for as much as my brief description unfortunately lumps them into a single category, Erpenbeck’s book does the exact opposite, granting distinctive traits to these characters, whom the author based on many people she actually interviewed). Formally, the text is rather simple with one remarkable exception close to its ending. The refugees receive letters ordering them to leave Germany. One responds by pouring gasoline over and attempting to light himself on fire. Even this dramatic act is recounted by the narrator in the driest of tones. Then, on the following two pages, Erpenbeck repeats the same question, once per page with plenty of white space surrounding it: “Where can a person go when he doesn’t know where to go?” It’s a shocking turn in many respects, as the plot, the emotional content, the thematics, and even the print layout of the words all come together. These pages express a graphic shift away from what has come before in the book. The purity and intensity of these narrator’s question and its very depiction on two opposing pages stress the immense sense of displacement felt by Richard’s friends. Erpenbeck isolates this existential problem faced by any refugee with subtle bravado, and she does so by forcing the reader to grapple with it head-on, emphatically stripping all excess words from the pages. To put Erpenbeck’s question differently, how can a refugee’s story be told when its limits remain unknown, and what can words offer in the face of profound fear?
In Hamid’s Exit West, the uncertainty embodied by the symbolic white space of Erpenbeck’s pages unexpectedly become more manageable. Its author wonders what happens when doors are literally opened for refugees. Magical thresholds that lead to England or to California, among other locales, appear across the globe, allowing for easy, if not always safe, passage. Connections are forged, and previously held prejudices dissolve, but conflict remains. Hamid alternates the story of Saeed and Nadia, two young lovers who flee their unnamed Middle Eastern city, with brief vignettes of several other door-crossers. The reader both spends a great deal of time investing in a moving account of these two individuals and encounters several more schematic ones that run the gamut in terms of focus. His prose, perhaps in keeping with the magical realism of the plot, feels somehow lighter despite the not infrequently exacting subject matter. It treats the brutality of civil war and a city bombing with the same straightforward narration as it does the miraculous portals that provide potential escape to thousands.
Hamid’s choice of plot device — the doors — also speaks to the astonishing features of a refugee’s daily existence: to be thrust into an alien land, to transition from one state of being to an entirely new one. Is reality too far off from these strange passageways that appear at random? The political levers of escape are difficult to identify, to be sure; chance and luck, Hamid seems to suggest, cannot be underestimated.
In tandem with the climate crisis that will only exacerbate the number of refugees worldwide in the coming decades and the attendant conflicts that will, at least partly, set them on their path, the question of how the global refugee migration will affect and shape narrative fiction is a fascinating, grim one. What tales will be told? How will the thematic and moral weight of the displacement of millions alter the form of literature itself? Already in these works we see three attempts to make sense of the chaos of geographic dislocation. On the surface, what they imply — that narrative shapes perception, that how a story is told can mold opinions or sway allegiances — isn’t altogether revolutionary. Yet, these authors’ innovations and their quietly profound prose do move the genre of displacement narratives. They are far too subtle to be didactic, but they represent alternative ways of framing a global dilemma that is only growing worse. Their greater value — beyond their ability to appeal to readers’ sympathies — lies in showcasing how new forms and approaches are necessary, and in a sense inevitable, in responding to the refugee crisis. As Richard’s arc in Go, Went, Gone exemplifies, it’s easy to look away now, but the plight of millions will not go ignored by anyone forever. Whether it is Shishkin’s mythical documentarianism, Erpenbeck’s deconstruction of the distanced anthropological view, or Hamid’s fantastical take on the vagaries of refugee status, all three works offer revitalized metaphors for understanding what is now taking place around us. In their plurality of approach and thought, too, they demonstrate the need for multiple points of view. Together, they counter the domineering narrative of the wall. There will be no singular solution; rather, the combination of the boat, the drowned man, and the door, along with unexpected formal moves, unveils new vistas.
In an <a href="https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/features/mikhail-shishkin-a-revolution-for-russias-words-8546366.html">essay</a> on his language, Shishkin adapts his favorite metaphor to an entirely different purpose: “The novel is a boat. Words must be revived in order for the boat to be genuine, so that I may climb aboard and sail out of this solitary life to a place where they love us and are waiting for us all. Save myself. And take all of my characters with me. And the reader too.” Here, too, we see the humanistic element of his poetics. For him, as it seemingly is for Erpenbeck and Hamid, reader, writer, and refugee alike can find common ground through words, not, of course, through physical barriers. “Words must be revived,” he writes, suggesting that the way we talk about the familiar, including the theoretical or the concrete refugee, must be defamiliarized in order to spark clearer understanding and, hopefully, compassion.
“The boat is full” is no less a story that they tell themselves than any other. Can art engender more room?
<div class="at-below-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/essays/dont-live-like-refugee-metaphors-narratives-displacement/"></div>

You Don’t Have To Live Like a Refugee: On Metaphors and Narratives of Displacement

259941-_uy630_sr1200630_

<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/essays/difficult-lessons-remembering-andrei-bitov-1937-2018/"></div>Andrei Bitov loved fools. Which other kind of heroes would allow a writer of his insightfulness to deconstruct not only the Soviet system’s contradictions but also more general human follies? He did not appreciate the violence that can stem from foolhardiness and faith in twisted ideals, but he loved the everyday kind of fool. The fool who cannot see beyond his nose, yet believes firmly and with absolute certainty in the objectivity of his knowledge.
The source of this theme has its roots in his biography. Bitov, who died a week ago in Moscow, was born on May 27, 1937, in Leningrad. While studying at the Leningrad Mining Institute in the late 1950s, he began writing after joining the poet Gleb Semenov’s famed literary circle there. Bitov would soon go on to develop his own particular style, a curious mix of intensely psychological portraiture and postmodern structural and stylistic playfulness. By 1965 he was a published author, a member of the Union of Soviet Writers, and one of the forerunners of the Youth Prose movement, a group of writers who contributed to the magazine Iunost&#8217; (Youth) and whose heroes sought freedom in a corrupt and all-consuming system.
The publication of his most well-known novel, Pushkin House, in America by Ardis in 1978 and his participation in the almanac Metropol, which its contributors did not provide to state censors in advance, in 1979 led to a decade-long ban on his works. Unlike many of his peers, however, he did not seek refuge in emigration. The advent of glasnost&#8217; permitted his reentry into the Russian literary sphere, and since the fall of the USSR, Bitov became a major cultural figure, amassing numerous major prizes both abroad and at home and founding the Russian branch of the PEN Club in 1988, of which he became president in 1991.
Bitov thus came of age in an uncertain era. Born at the height of the Great Purge, his generation witnessed both the end of Stalinism 20 years later and of Communism in Russia another 35 years after. He felt the shock of these changes and in the process came to understand the relativity of cultural values. What was permissible one day could just as easily disappear the next day. The reverse also held true: with perestroika and glasnost&#8217; came a wave of writers who had never been published in the Soviet Union. Suddenly Bitov became a contemporary of Vladimir Nabokov and James Joyce alike, competing with them on the newly revamped Russian literary market.
Even before these dramatic shifts, however, Bitov diagnosed his generation’s precarious position, perhaps better than many of his contemporaries. They had been stripped of access to entire swaths of both western and Russian culture deemed dangerous by the regime. As such, any real understanding of history was severely limited.
This theme — that of the fool who mistakes his incomplete perspective for objective knowledge — came to define much of Bitov’s work. His masterpiece Pushkin House takes up this dilemma head-on. It attempts to tell the story of Leva Odoevtsev, a young Soviet intellectual. After devoting the first third of the book to Leva’s early years and his relationships with family members, Bitov turns the narrative back on itself, revisiting early moments in Leva’s life but now focusing on his friends and girlfriends. The effect is dizzying — a kind of Cubist kaleidoscope that allows the reader to see Bitov’s hero from multiple perspectives. The ending is no less surprising, as Leva dies in a duel with his frenemy Mitishat&#8217;ev over the honor of Russia’s greatest poet, the eponymous Alexander Pushkin. Pages later, though, he is “resurrected” in an acknowledgement of the flexibility of fiction’s artifice.
One of Leva’s early encounters with the unknown comes in the form of a visit to his recently rehabilitated grandfather, Modest Platonovich. In one of the greatest drinking binges of Russian literature, the latter explains to Leva the essence of his generation’s folly: “It seems to you that you’re spiritual and therefore free. But even your protest and your courage and your freedom are measured out to you, as if by ration cards. As a chorus, you all discuss the bones they fling to you from above. … The idea of your dependence is beyond you.” (All translations are my own.) Modest Platonovich, in other words, excoriates Leva for believing that any of his minor acts of rebellion have not already been considered and tacitly approved by the state system. Pushkin House in this way gave voice to the greatest challenge faced by Russian writers of the mid-century: how to make sense of the world when only a fraction of that world is available to you.
Elsewhere, in the novella Birds, Bitov’s semi-autobiographical narrator visits a research station at which biologists study avian migration patterns. There, he considers a photograph of an ecologist depicted on a magazine cover:
The priest of science is illuminated by fluorescent light; he looks profoundly at something he supposedly has some knowledge of, while we have no clue. … And really, why does he make such a knowing expression in the photo on the universal cover? A true scientist’s expression (according to my naïve conception) should be frightened, shocked, confused. For he knows everything in his field that was known until now, until this day, until this second—but he knows nothing further. … So why did he stand frozen in the photograph with that face, as if he has some clue about what’s there, beyond, in the next moment? … For he is in the dark, he should have the inspired face of a blind man, a Bruegelesque blind man falling into a hole…
He rejects the clichéd pensive face of the scientist at work in favor of the unknown, the moments of panicked uncertainty that lead innovators to entirely new arenas.
Something similar takes place in Bitov’s brilliant travelogues, Lessons of Armenia and A Georgian Album. The largely autobiographical narrator presents his account of his travels through the Caucasus, but at each turn, he stumbles. He recognizes that he cannot understand (“translate”) everything that he sees into flashy prose vignettes. On a further level, Bitov deconstructs the Soviet imperialist attitude typical of many travel accounts of the era. The hero bares his folly for the world to see. (Incidentally, upon Bitov’s death, both Armenia’s current president and acting prime minister sent letters of condolences and praised his travelogue.)
And so, reading Bitov becomes a process of unlearning. If Pushkin’s poetry, as Nabokov puts it, expands his reader’s lungs, then Bitov’s prose causes the reader’s eyes to dilate, to peek into the corners of the world that they didn’t know existed. It is no coincidence that a number of his works feature an education theme, whether explicitly or implicitly: Pushkin House, Lessons of Armenia, his final novel, The Symmetry Teacher. He helps make clear just how little we know — as readers, as teachers, as individuals. He unmasks the pretensions we all hold. But rather than fear the abyss that opens up when we acknowledge our limitations, Bitov suggests we should embrace it. Instead of deluding oneself for the sake of convenience or self-preservation, Bitov advocates owning up to delusions of grandeur and unpleasant realities. If all this makes the writer sound pedantic, then it bears emphasizing that his art is subtler than that. Lest we forget, in a move that brings to mind his fellow Petersburger Dostoevsky, he places some of Pushkin House’s sharpest criticisms in the mouth of a vicious, if dazzling, drunk.
As others have noted, it would be difficult to say that a Bitovian school of post-Soviet literature has developed, despite the major praise bestowed upon him by writers and critics alike. This curious situation might be explained by his peculiar writerly habits, which prevent a single stable image of Bitov as paterfamilias to emerge. Never content to settle into one form or method, he constantly recycled and repurposed his texts by incorporating heroes from one story into another or by recombining stories to formulate new collections. Much as Leva’s biography is reset at least twice in Pushkin House, he constantly reframed his art, giving it new life in the process.
His passion for experimentation can likewise be felt in the sheer diversity of subject matter he took up. From the early works that explore the minds of young men grappling with burgeoning sexuality and the Soviet mentality to his later experimental works, Bitov evinced an eagerness to test new ground. “Pushkin’s Photograph,” in which a group of scholars sends a young colleague back in time to capture the father of Russian poetry on tape and film, plays with science fiction tropes. The Symmetry Teacher’s “View of the Trojan Sky,” which is part of a novel-within-a-novel purportedly half-translated and half-recalled by Bitov years after a chance reading, in turn playfully reverses the stakes of “Pushkin’s Photograph.” Here, a photograph from the future torments the protagonist, the writer Urbino Vanoski.
This diversity also speaks to his desire to always reach into the abyss. Only by testing the limits of one’s prose, Bitov seems to suggest, can one understand what one hopes to say. The very process of writing generated meaning, as if he did not know where he was headed while composing. This tendency is partly what lends his many stories and books a sense that things are just slightly off.
Although Bitov’s ultimate canonization is all but inevitable, he may have resisted such a prediction; he was, after all, an author whose writing aims to destabilize hierarchies and traditions. Nonetheless, it seems as if many of Bitov’s lessons have yet to be unraveled.
<div class="at-below-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/essays/difficult-lessons-remembering-andrei-bitov-1937-2018/"></div>

Difficult Lessons: Remembering Andrei Bitov (1937-2018)

Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster

José Vergara is assistant professor of Russian on the Myra T. Cooley Lectureship in Russian Studies at Bryn Mawr College, where he teaches all eras of Russian culture and specializes in prose of the 20th and 21st centuries with an emphasis on experimental works. His first book, All Future Plunges to the Past: James Joyce in Russian Literature (Cornell/NIUP, 2021), examines the reception of Joyce’s fiction among Russian writers from the 1920s to the present day. His writing and interviews have appeared on&nbsp;Literary Hub,&nbsp;Asymptote,&nbsp;Words Without Borders,&nbsp;Music &amp; Literature,&nbsp;and&nbsp;World Literature Today. He can be found <a href="https://twitter.com/thejosevergara">@thejosevergara</a>.

José Vergara

The Storykeeper: A Conversation with Svetlana Alexievich

"For a long time now I haven't been I."
— Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

Around the World

"You can't ignore politics, no matter how much you'd like to." — Molly Ivins

Politics

Dog Days: An Interview with Mo Rocca

"Life doesn't imitate art, it imitates bad television." —Woody Allen

Television

A Winner Over Time: An Interview with Martin Reiner

"I have nothing to say, and I am saying it, and that is poetry." — John Cage

Poetry

José Vergara is assistant professor of Russian on the Myra T. Cooley Lectureship in Russian Studies at Bryn Mawr College, where he teaches all eras of Russian culture and specializes in prose of the 20th and 21st centuries with an emphasis on experimental works. His first book, All Future Plunges to the Past: James Joyce in Russian Literature (Cornell/NIUP, 2021), examines the reception of Joyce’s fiction among Russian writers from the 1920s to the present day. His writing and interviews have appeared on&nbsp;Literary Hub,&nbsp;Asymptote,&nbsp;Words Without Borders,&nbsp;Music &amp; Literature,&nbsp;and&nbsp;World Literature Today. He can be found <a href="https://twitter.com/thejosevergara">@thejosevergara</a>.