Consider my parents’ first date, sharing
what they have in common: a history of being possessed

My parents’ first date shows up in my poem ‘Ancestry.com Has Nothing on Me’. It’s vague on the details, although I considered painting a more robust scene: a little cha chaan teng in Hong Kong where they shared milk tea and egg tarts, or perhaps a stop by a street vendor selling chai and samosas in India.

The truth is, I don’t know what my parents did on their first date, or even what country it was in. What I do know: my father’s family spent much – or perhaps, all – of his childhood in India, my mother grew up in Hong Kong, and somehow their paths crossed before they moved overseas to start a family in Canada. Both my parents knew the taste of samosas and jalebi, of rice and lap cheong, of chilli chicken and Hakka noodles. They shared these foods with me during my childhood in Vancouver, where I grew up in-between cultures, constantly trying my best to fit in. What they didn’t share were the details that surrounded their childhoods, how they met, their migration to Canada, and the toll it took on them.

I first came across the term ‘shadow histories’ in Jenny Banh’s essay ‘Chinese Restaurant Kids Speak about Labor, Lifeways, and Legacies’. Banh refers to a ‘shadow history’ of her family’s time in Southeast Asia that ‘would never be discussed’. Banh writes:

here is a lot of silence and misdirection in [my mother’s] statements to me. Dare I say resistance? She withholds many things from me, and I have to guess or imagine what she means. I think my family history consists of many imaginaries within and between the generations. Maybe within me as well…

Though this was my first time encountering the term “shadow history,” I immediately understood what Banh meant. A shadow history is an unspoken past that lurks in the background, often entangled in trauma, always actively haunting, yet never discussed or confronted head on. This was familiar to me in my lived experience with my family. Like Banh, I also had ‘a silent and evasive family,’ and I, too, learned ‘to not ask questions or talk too much.’

As a writer, I write to understand myself, to process experiences and emotions, and to connect with others. Like many aspiring writers, I was taught the adage ‘write what you know’. It’s sound advice that often produces interesting writing from different lived realities. While writing my poetry collection Familial Hungers, however, I found myself returning to what I didn’t know – aspects of my family’s past that had grown entangled into my life. How and where, exactly, did my parents meet? What were their childhoods like? What buried memories do they carry every day? Over time, my relationships with my family origins have amassed fractures resulting in ongoing breaks in communication. As such, I found myself unable to ask about details from my family’s history.

How, then, do you write about what you don’t know?

As it turns out, writing what you don’t know is made up of research, speculation, and imagination. I wrestled with the incomplete – and possibly inaccurate – facts presented in my poem. Research provided context to some of my questions – Hong Kong was a British colony, then occupied by the Japanese, then a British colony again, before finally becoming a Special Administrative Region of the People’s Republic of China. There was, in fact, a sizeable Chinese community in India, specifically in Kolkata. India was an official British colony from 1858–1947. The Sino-Indian war occurred in 1962. I also had bits and pieces I remembered from my childhood: my mother had a British passport, her father was a sailor who would bring home gifts, she once talked about her family needing to escape India to go back to Hong Kong; my father had a ‘difficult’ childhood. These memories allowed me to begin questioning and speculating: Did my father spend his entire childhood in India? Did his family stay during and after the Sino-Indian war? How did my mother meet my father if she was living in Hong Kong? Did my mother also spend time in India? Could I make up a fake first date for them in my poem? Was it disingenuous to do so?

I found myself attempting to fill in the blanks of what I knew about my family history. Memory is famously unreliable, and my memories of what my mother did share with me in my childhood might be wildly inaccurate. What is the difference between truth and accuracy? How much do the details matter? My parents may never have even had a traditional first date, not the way I ask readers to imagine it in my poem. I ask the reader to imagine a whole host of probabilities whose details I myself don’t know: what it might have been like for my grandmother living through the Japanese occupation of Hong Kong and the subsequent British re-establishment; the realities of being Chinese in India during the Sino-Indian War; my parents’ emigration and their sense of unbelonging in Canada. These imaginaries float between fact and speculation, uncorroborated stories pieced together from bits and pieces that approximate and become a personal history. They’re held together with research, memory, and imagination. What I initially considered controversial – imagination – serves its purpose in revealing an emotional truth. The poem, then, is an imagined family history that may or may not be accurate, studded with interruptions from the history of British colonisation and its lasting effects.

That said, I still worry about the accuracy of details, what my family might think when or if they read my poem, whether they might get caught up in the inaccuracy of the details, whether the emotional truth I am presenting rings true for them in the way it does for me. Whether that same truth will still resonate with me years down the line. As I worry, it occurs to me there are multiple definitions of worry: there is the commonly understood meaning of worry as related to anxiety, but there is also the way worry is used as a verb to describe repeatedly touching or disturbing something. A dog might worry at a bone, or a child might worry the edges of a blanket while falling asleep. While I write, I worry about the impacts of my imagined details while also worrying at the details – changing the location of a first date from a cha chaan teng in Hong Kong to a street vendor in India to something else entirely until the scene feels right. Maybe this worry is part and parcel of writing what I don’t know: doing my best to present an emotional truth while holding onto uncertainty, worrying the details, contemplating their fuzzy edges, and hoping what emerges rings true.

The post Shadow Histories: Writing What You Don’t Know appeared first on English PEN.

It resembles a border crossing rather than a regular control point. A large, semi-secluded zone has been erected from concrete blocks and barbed wire. Within this zone, there are tracks like those you encounter at border crossings. They have even labelled them: Track 1-Cabin, Track 2-Cabin, Track 3-Cabin, Track 4-Cabin. At the entrance to the zone, female and male police officers first carry out a body search. Then our identity cards are collected for a criminal and administrative record check through GBT, the General Information Gathering System. Fifteen minutes later, our identity cards are returned and we enter the zone, pass through the tracks and the concrete blocks, and finally exit. It is at this precise point that I notice a fabric banner hanging across the entrance to the city: ‘Şırnak is a Turkish province.’

I begin to walk uphill towards the city centre. Soon, I meet up with a friend, a local. We pass through demolished neighbourhoods. Şırnak is a city I know very well, but I cannot see a single street, park or building I recognise. A while later, there is only emptiness left around me – a flat emptiness that at its very end meets the grey sky. I am walking in emptiness. Then I ask my friend, ‘What about the marketplace? Where is the marketplace?’ ‘This vacant spot, here, this is it,’ she responds. ‘This is exactly where the marketplace was.’ I am horrified. I collapse onto a rock on the ground. The tears I have managed to hold back since the morning begin to flow. ‘Gone! Gone!’ I cry. “Şırnak is gone!’

Şırnak was only one of many Kurdish cities destroyed during the curfews and clashes of 2015 and 2016. The city has – or perhaps I should say had – twelve neighbourhoods, of which eight were completely destroyed. Şırnak, as we once knew it, was no more. The same can be said for Sur, Nusaybin, Yüksekova, Cizre and Silopi. Ancient Kurdish towns and cities, centuries, even millennia old, destroyed within the space of a few months. We were no more.

This was not only a physical destruction. After August 2015, Kurds, as a people, were erased from many fields of social life in Turkey – from local administrations and civil society to culture and arts. The Kurdish issue suddenly became ‘an issue of terrorism.’ We, writers and human rights defenders who made known the rights violations taking place in the area, were ‘supporters of terrorism.’ Kurdish politicians and activists were ‘members of a terrorist organisation.’ We had gone back 40 years. Kurds no longer existed; instead, there were people who, when they walked on snow, made the sound ‘kart-kurt.’ There was no Kurdish issue; there was a terrorism issue. A place called Kurdistan had never existed. Not only mainstream media, but many others, from publishing houses to art galleries and theatres, began to censor Kurds and work related to the Kurdish issue. Suddenly, they acted as if a people that form a quarter of Turkey’s population – 20 million people, 20 million citizens – had disappeared. As if they had been cast into a dark well. Life went on, as if the curfews didn’t exist, as if there was no destruction and violence in the Kurdish provinces, as if fires weren’t raging across Kurdish land, as if people weren’t dying every day.

Once upon a time, when the Kurds did exist

Of course, this was not our first ‘disappearance.’ According to the ups and downs of the state’s Kurdish policy over the past century, we have sometimes existed, and sometimes we haven’t.

In the late 80s and in the 90s, we did not exist. One of the first sentences we heard from our teachers at school was ‘There are no Kurds, they are all simply mountain Turks.’ And we, too, after all, wanted to be ‘Turkish and happy’ as our Oath proclaimed, mandatorily read out and repeated every single day at schools across the country before lessons started.

Thus, Kenan Evren, the general who came to power with the 12 September 1980 military coup d’état and was President throughout my childhood years, declared from our single-channel TVs: ‘There is no such thing as a Kurd. This word is in actual fact a concept that derives from the sounds of “kart, kurt” which our people in the southeast make when they walk across the snow on the ground.’ We were children then, and we listened to the sounds we made as we walked on snow, and we tried our best not to make those ‘kart, kurt’ sounds. Tansu Çiller, a Prime Minister in the 90s, confirmed our non-existence, and often said on TV ‘There are no Kurds, there are terrorists.’

In any case, all along, we ‘terrorists’ were being physically destroyed. Our homes and neighbourhoods were emptying rapidly. Young Kurds were taking to the mountains in large numbers, and every day our number was on the decline. Some of us died in murders committed by ‘unknown assailants.’

After a lengthy period for us in limbo, Erdoğan, who came to power in the early 2000s, acknowledged our existence and called us his ‘Kurdish brothers and sisters.’ We were surprised: out of the blue, we existed again. The official Kurdish TV channel TRT Şeş was launched with a grand ceremony, departments of Kurdish language were opened at universities, and we regained the banned village and street names that had been changed in the 90s. Turks and Kurds together, we danced the halay, accompanied by Kurdish music. Hadn’t we been brothers and sisters for centuries, after all?

That brotherhood and sisterhood didn’t last long. When the peace process abruptly ended in July 2015, the time of non-existence began for us once again. Erdoğan began by announcing that ‘There is no Kurdish issue,’ adding ‘It would be discrimination to use the phrase “Kurdish issue”.’ Eventually he, too, ended up declaring, ‘There is no Kurdish issue, there is a terrorism issue.’

The war waged by kayyıms on Kurdish language and culture

Once the state decides you do not exist, it naturally has certain implications for your life in all its aspects.

On the morning of 11 September 2016, on the eve of a religious holiday, a new word entered our vocabulary: kayyım. Kurdish mayors were sent to prison, and the appointment of the first kayyıms – essentially unelected government officials replacing elected officials, – began. On 11 September 2016, kayyıms were appointed to two provincial municipalities and 25 district municipalities, and within a matter of a few months, kayyıms were in charge of 95 of the 102 municipalities won by representatives of the Kurdish movement in local elections.

Once the kayyıms were appointed, they set about destroying all that belonged to the Kurds. They began by demolishing symbols and monuments of Kurdish culture and history. From Orhan Doğan to Ehmedê Xanî, from Roboski to Uğur Kaymaz, all the sculptures and monuments in the region associated with Kurdish culture, or which referred to massacres committed by the state, were demolished. Then it was time, once again, to change the names of our main streets and side streets. All Kurdish names, including those given to parks, were replaced with Turkish names. Women’s centres were closed, cultural centres were closed, all that we were proud of in our cities was destroyed in a few months. Theatres, multilingual nurseries, libraries, music academies – all institutions that sought to keep Kurdish culture alive – were shut down. At the local elections held on 31 March 2019, the Peoples’ Democratic Party HDP once again won 69 municipalities, including three metropolitan municipalities. A few months later, kayyıms were appointed in Kurdish provinces and the newly elected mayors were sent to prison. The votes of millions of Kurds were ignored. Those kayyıms are still in office today.

This non-existence is reflected in our language, in our land, in everything about the Kurds. A piece of land, Kurdistan as a geographical territory, was made to disappear, just like the Kurds. The word Kurdistan, used in the Grand National Assembly of Turkey (TBMM) without causing any controversy during the peace process, was banned once the process was shelved. When the word was used, it was not taken down in parliamentary minutes and instead recorded as ‘X’. Members of parliament who used the word faced disciplinary investigations. Erdoğan, who in his speeches during the peace process had acknowledged the ‘existence of Kurdistan,’ now did not hold back from regularly telling Kurds who criticised him to ‘clear off to Kurdistan.’ In March 2019, in a speech he made in Gündoğan, he addressed HDP Co-chairperson Sezai Temelli with the words, ‘There is no Kurdistan here. If you are so desperate, there’s one in the north of Iraq. Clear off there.’

The situation is no different in parliament. Right after the end of the peace process, in November 2015, Leyla Zana’s speech in parliament was X’d. Since that day, no Kurdish has been allowed into parliamentary minutes. The mother tongue of at least 20 million citizens has become a language that gets X’d in the parliament that is supposed to represent those citizens.

From the days in the 40s, when Musa Anter was beaten up for whistling in Kurdish, we have arrived at the present day, when Dicle University students are jailed and prosecuted for precisely the same offence. From the 90s, when the great singer Ahmet Kaya was physically attacked for stating at a music awards ceremony that he planned to record a song in Kurdish, we arrive at the present day, when wedding-hall singers are detained for singing in Kurdish. In the last decade, Kurdish-language schools, Kurdish-language newspapers and magazines, Kurdish-language nurseries and Kurdish-language institutes at universities have all been closed. It is the 1940s all over again.

The people of this ‘unknown language’ have no value in public policies and public services either, of course. Today, the Ministry of Health publishes its brochures in six languages besides Turkish to provide better services. Those languages are French, Arabic, English, Russian, German and Persian. No services are provided in the language of its Kurdish citizens that form at least a quarter of the country’s population. In a similar manner, the Women’s Emergency Support App (KADES) of the General Directorate of Security provides services in six languages but not Kurdish. This is how the directorate introduces its KADES app on their official web site: ‘In six languages, only a single click away, in support of women.’ Even in an application aimed at protecting the safety of and preventing violence against women, there is no Kurdish, the mother tongue of citizens that form around a quarter of this country’s population.

We Kurds have not existed in the brochures of the Ministry of Health, in the announcements made on aeroplanes, in services provided at court houses. But it goes beyond that: we seem not to exist at all. Our language does not exist, our culture does not exist, our songs do not exist, our holidays do not exist, our elected officials do not exist. We Kurds don’t even exist in that single click offered by the app of the General Directorate of Security. And to be frank, it is painful to know all this.

Now, in the last few months, a new process has begun between the state and the PKK. The state calls it the process ‘Turkey without terror,’ while we Kurds prefer to call it the ‘peace process.’ Following the PKK’s decision to lay down arms and dissolve itself, we Kurds expect the state to take steps towards democratisation and, most significantly, the recognition of our existence, language and culture, with protection provided through constitutional guarantee. To be frank, we are tired, after a century of struggle between existence and non-existence. But we wish, at least, to leave our children a future where they won’t have to struggle to prove that they exist.

Ew Dibêjin ‘Hûn Tunene’; Em Dibêjin ‘Em Hene!’

Despite the policies of non-existence that have continued for the past 100 years, the fact is: we do not suddenly disappear when the state claims we do not exist. When our language is banned, we try other ways to keep it alive. When our political parties are closed, we open new ones, and choose new names for them, with acronyms formed of new combinations of letters. When our songs are banned, we whistle them. When our holidays are banned, we light our traditional Newroz fires within the safety of our gardens, or a secluded corner of our neighbourhoods. When our culture is prohibited, we become dengbejs, folk singers who keep alive Kurdish stories old and new, and we transmit our culture from one generation to the next through kilams, our songs that tell our stories. When our homes are burned down, when our villages are forcibly evacuated, we stubbornly and persistently – and sometimes despite knowing that our homes may be razed to the ground over and over again – return to our villages, and rebuild. When our trees and forests are burned, we feed the roots that remain, water them, strive to make them grow again. When our towns are levelled to the ground, we weave back their texture from scratch, knot by knot. It takes years, it takes decades, sometimes even a century. But we do not give up on ourselves, our language, our culture, our roots.

Although the Kurdish policy of the state has varied over the past century, in a sense, there has been continuity on the Kurdish side. In the face of all these policies of oppression and intimidation, Kurds continue to sing their songs, celebrate Newroz, dance the halay and speak their languages. Although there have been various challenges that have forced them to withdraw and regroup, the Kurdish people have never forsaken their identity, language and culture. The type of struggle may vary, but their demands do not. Those demands have been there for a century. The Kurdish people won’t step back from their demands, because without the fulfilment of those demands life will not be worth living.

It doesn’t matter within which country’s borders they live. The story of the Kurds has remained unchanged for the past century. This is a story that has been kneaded with blood, persecution, pain and struggle. A century-long denial continues. Yet neither the Kurdish issue nor the Kurds disappear simply by saying ‘they don’t exist.’

For Kurds, this is a matter of existence.

Let me end this piece with a phrase often used by Kurds:

Ew Dibêjin ‘Hûn Tunene’; Em Dibêjin ‘Em Hene!’

They say ‘you don’t exist’. We say, ‘we exist!’

This phrase is, I guess, the summary of the past century for us Kurds.

The post Kurdishness: A Matter of Existence and Non-Existence appeared first on English PEN.

Over the years, my writing has shifted and evolved: I have written about the impact of learning about Burmese trans identities for East Side Voices, about the violence of the LGB Alliance for gal-dem, and about the relationship between my bereavement and queerness for Letters from the Grief Club. I also founded an online platform – oestrogeneration – to highlight transfeminine voices in the UK. I feel pride in knowing I’m producing all this work, and yet that Love Island Google Doc remains one of the pieces I feel proudest of and most passionate about.

Throughout my writing career, I have found that, whether I’m pitching or being commissioned, the focus of my writing always goes back to the identities I hold. They have ended up being my selling point, my USP. As someone who ticks a few of the diversity boxes that allow organisations to feel better about themselves whilst doing little to no uncomfortable work, this is a game I’ve got used to playing. But I feel resentful playing it.

This resentment feels complicated: all the identities I hold do inherently affect the way I navigate the world, the way I think, and, as a consequence, the way I write. I want to discuss my identities because I think they hold power and because they feel inherently political. An existence that challenges the status quo – whether that’s because of a queer, ethnic, class or other identity – has the potential also to disrupt it; that’s why it feels important to promote writing, and art at large, that’s embedded in this existence. What feels frustrating is that, just like white/straight/middle-class/able-bodied/cisgender/etc. people, those of us who hold marginalised identities also go through “mundane” experiences and feelings: we fall in love, we have beautiful friendships and friendship break-ups, we lose people, we hate our jobs, we cry at films, and we get obsessed over Love Island. These aspects of our life affect us emotionally and socially, just like the systemic identities we hold, but our art and creative expression rarely get the chance to delve into them.

When I watch Love Island, the fact that I’m x, y and z inevitably affects the way I watch and perceive the show. On the surface, there’s no reason for me to relate to Megan, Faye or Liam, but I find myself doing so. I find myself relating to the way Megan feels like giving everyone who’s into her a chance, after growing up feeling undesirable. I find myself relating to the way Faye feels paranoid and insecure in her relationship, despite receiving regular validation and affirmation. I find myself, begrudgingly, relating to the way Liam acted like a fuckboy only to then sit in his guilt for days.

My obsession with the show does not feel arbitrary: whilst Love Island presents itself as an apolitical show, politics are central to it. Class, race, sexuality, disability and other socioeconomic characteristics are rarely explicitly discussed, but, deep down, they shape every single interaction. From a working-class contestant feeling anxious about how they’ll be received by a partner’s middle-class mum, to the racialised politics of desirability that ultimately sit at the foundation of the show, Love Island reflects many of the current issues in British society.

Across creative industries, we’re witnessing a heightened demand for “diverse” voices. But what these voices are allowed to discuss feels limited. We might see a Black journalist interview a Top Boy actor, a queer writer publish a think-piece about queer raves, or a disabled activist discuss the latest abhorrent Tory policy, but we will rarely see any of them cover something not directly tied to their identities. The way people with socially dominant characteristics consume marginalised voices is still rooted in voyeurism, rather than relatability. They will appreciate our talent whilst seeing it as less legitimate than theirs, because they don’t think they can empathise with what we’re saying or going through.

The starting point for a true commitment to coalition needs to be one where our humanity is seen in a holistic way, and our voices are seen as worthy in all their facets – not just when discussing topics that we embody.

I recently wrote an article for i about the ways I make sure to celebrate and honour my dead brother on his birthday. One of my trans sisters messaged me, congratulating me on the article, saying how nice it was to ‘see a sis being allowed to put out non-trans-related articles, to remind people that we also experience everyday human problems’. I’m hoping that the next step in the creative industries will allow us to do that more and more: I hope we’ll shift from a movement that pigeonholes “diverse” voices, into one where, instead, we get to speak about all the experiences we go through – including friendships, loss and Love Island.

June Bellebono is a London-based cultural producer, writer, educator – but also a party girl, fashion enthusiast, and lover of friendships. June founded and runs oestrogeneration, an online magazine platform highlighting transfeminine voices in the UK, and founded and hosts Queer Good Grief, a peer support by and for bereaved lgbtq+ people. They have been featured in gal-dem, i, and daikon* and are one of the contributors in anthologies East Side Voices and Letters from the Grief Club. 

The post I Want to Be Commissioned to Review Love Island appeared first on English PEN.

Translated from the Portuguese by Daniel Hahn

Anybody would advise caution to a critic of narrative fiction who claims that a work has successfully used recent historical events as a vital component (and also as a backdrop) of its unfolding plot, in particular those events that relate to political positions. Books of this kind run the risk of becoming quickly dated – and there are few things considered worse for a work of literature.

It is undoubtedly the case that historical events, particularly recent political events, are inevitably susceptible to re-readings and mutations. It does not, however, follow that a novelist ought to worry that his own personal – and therefore decisive – reading of a certain socio-political landscape (even if it is a barely examined one, and whether or not he is writing a predominantly realist narrative), might perhaps be capable of jeopardizing the durability of his story.

A concern about the durability of a piece of literary production even before it has come into existence – as though such things could be reduced to an engineer’s calculations – is not something that can be taken seriously. Durability is a condition that is disconnected from a writer’s efforts and from his control, though I admit that a misreading of a given political landscape can substantially shorten the life of a novel with settings of a socio-political nature. Readers tend not to waste their time on narrative premises that are flagrantly incorrect (or, even worse, which are exposed by an about-turn in recent events). What I do not see as credible is that the writer should become fearful and run away from any kind of risk, which sometimes is an inescapable dimension of the creative process.

The period of recent Brazilian democratisation (following the dictatorship that started in 1964), a period already within the gaze of Brazilian history, a period whose conclusion, depending on the criteria you use, ended in the second half of the 1980s, has so far failed to produce an even moderately impressive number of novels that manage to get away from the reality of white guys, living in the big urban centres, belonging to a middle class that is modernised and advantaged. Nor has it produced novels that risk a more substantial (and also more vertically-oriented) and challenging weighing-up of the social impact of recent political choices. There are, of course, people who claim that the country is still in a transitional phase towards true democracy, especially taking into account the demonstrations in June 2013, which triggered political repression that various levels of government considered perfectly acceptable in view of the greater freedom existing today as compared to the exorbitant restrictions in place during the years of the military dictatorship.

These contemporary novels describe the reality of a social class with access to education and culture in general, which the overwhelming majority of Brazilians do not possess. There is a certain modesty in the choice of narrators, of characters, of plots, of settings and spaces. There is a need to correspond to a contemporaneity dictated by literary production in Europe and North America, as though by reflecting them we might attain some of our own authority or greater visibility or even durability. There is a short-sightedness that is entirely unproductive and anti-literary, if we accept that literature is an important means of getting closer to the other. There is a fear of taking a frank look at Brazilian reality.

Of course, there are some contemporary writers (I shall not risk naming them) who do not deny the full breadth of Brazil’s culture, and who do not refuse a hard look at Brazilian identity – something that is undeniably interlinked with current events as well as with recent conflicts, with the period of democratisation (which for some people is still incomplete and is not being completed), with a tremendous difficulty in learning from our own mistakes – but they are names not present in any quantity that is reasonable and desirable; they are, in other words, few and far between.

From this perspective, contemporary Brazilian literature – even keeping in mind those writers producing literature that is original and facing outwards to a Brazilian social reality of relevance, though one as yet little explored – is still quite timid compared to what is being produced in the rest of Latin America, from Mexico to Argentina. Brazil is vast (so vast that whenever it responds as a State, as a Nation, it’s frightening), it has a plurality that is almost impossible to bind together, but this is no excuse. To my mind, taking on a bit more risk and being unafraid to write about what are actually the most pressing concerns within the seriousness that is today’s Brazil would not be a mistake.

Cultural expression, literary expression, can become dated for countless different reasons, so arranging things in such a way as to avoid the label of becoming dated, whether in theme, in the profile of the characters, in the events that propel the narrative, in whatever it may be, might be an unforgiveable error. Someone once said, and it is worth remembering, that if you are going to write governed by fear, even just with an eye to the little aspirations and vanities related to the illusion of durability, then you would do better not to write at all.

Paulo Scott is appearing in the UK at the following events.

He will also be appearing in the US.

Nowhere People is Paulo Scott’s first novel to be translated into English.

The post Identity and durability appeared first on English PEN.

To my surprise, all of the details of my own adolescence, complete with love notes I wrote to boys thinking only they would read them, have been faithfully recorded in my mother’s archives. My yearly letter to my father in prison, his postcards to us, and the conversations my father had with the men in his cell, are all recorded, sometimes paraphrased, as are the transcripts of our dreams that we used to share with each other in the mornings. There are notes with further instructions for monitoring us written on the side of the pages as well as glosses about our state of mind or feelings when we made certain remarks that they interpreted from our tone of voice, as well as transcripts of all of our telephone conversations.  To top it off, there are also records of when we couldn’t be recorded because there were regular power cuts affecting the village.

Now, of course, as my father correctly states, I don’t need to read the files of the Securitate to find out who he is, by now I know who he is.  But in light of having begun to read through these documents I am beginning to disagree. I am now developing a notion of his ‘archival identity’ and while this is happening, I am also going through a revolution of my own sense of identity as a member of a family with ‘archival past’.  I am beginning to make space in my own sense of identity for an ‘official’ version of myself, in other words, for a diary of my adolescence written by someone else.

For one thing, in these files I meet my young father – some nine years before he married my mother and she gave birth to me. It’s strange to have a ‘documented’ narrative of your young parent, indeed even younger than you are when you are reading about it.  It’s like reading a story about someone else entirely. I meet the man who survived horrendous prison interrogations and torture, even though the torture is not explicitly mentioned in these files: only the periods of solitary confinement are documented with dates and places. You find out about the beatings by reading between the lines. In my own experience my father is the man who told me to eat my tomato salad and dress well to avoid getting a cold.  He taught me to change light bulbs, car tires, build shelves, and made me cry every time he won at chess. In these files he is the man who attempted to hijack an aeroplane to escape from Romania following his public expression of anticommunist sentiments, the man who hiked all the way to cross the Iron Curtain with a backpack filled with lemons, chocolate, cognac and antibiotics, and slept in haystacks and coal piles to hide from armed police, the man who always did everything to ‘take the chain from around my neck’, as he still says. So it’s a bit like having two different men for one father.

How did he manage to survive it all? Today he is a man for whom there exists the ‘official narrative’ of his life as a dangerous political ‘criminal’, as well as his own personal identity as someone who sacrificed his best years for the benefit of everyone else. Yet at the same time he is a man who still struggles with his own identity, that of an old immigrant planting his tomatoes in a garden far from his birthplace, forgotten by everyone. In September 2012 I took my little children, husband, and mother-in-law to the United States for a publicity tour of Burying the Typewriter, my memoir about growing up in Romania, and to see my family in Michigan.  As we walked through the door to my parents’ house one night, my mother was bent over a stack of folders containing no fewer than 3000 pages of informative material on her and on us, then children.  Think of all of the things that we said for the microphones, precisely because we knew they were there! And think of all the things we said because we could no longer hold them inside ourselves however hard we tried. After one of the prison visits at Aiud, we went to visit my mother’s brother at the Black Sea for ten days. The files contain the transcripts of all of the conversations we had at my uncle’s house, including details such as the money he gave to us and the one kilogram of coffee, without the knowledge of his wife, since money was tight for him too!  It turns out that not only our house was bugged, but also his house, all the way across Romania, as were the houses of all of our friends, where we went to talk ‘freely’. We stood around the living-room chair where my mother piled all of those files, facing the hard evidence of what it meant to be the wife and the children of a political dissident in Romania in the 1980s.

I am reading strange things about myself in my mother’s secret files.  It turns out that I also had a dossier, I was followed and monitored closely. One of the pages in my file says that ‘certain international organisations and radio entities solicit freeing of Ion Bugan from prison’ and that the only people who could give these outsiders information about my father’s situation would be my mother and me.  So I am reading about the food I ate in 1985, the boy I kissed in the park in 1987 and about his parents going to my mother at work to raise hell about me getting their son in trouble by my association with him. There is my letter in which I reproach him for his parents’ harassment of my mother.  I was a feisty teenager and certainly one who was not easily intimidated: how did I manage to put that face on? But the ultimate figure of ‘Carmen’ that emerges from these files is of ‘a woman with troubles’ someone who tries to articulate some kind of personal independence out of the mess created by the Securitate, resulting in a string of fights with everyone about everything.

This literature written by the secret police is exacting, detailed, and also, in significant ways, a lie.  What is true is that we were normal people caught in the destiny of my father’s dissent and we were isolated, intimidated, hungry, and ultimately very tired.  It is not true that we constituted a danger for the people of Romania. We behaved the way the secret police dictated to us: my mother was forced to divorce my father, she had to ‘disagree’ with his politics of opposition, and I applied to be a member of the young communists league, only to be publically shamed because I was ‘unfit’ for membership. The language of the files, including notes and instructions for further monitoring of our family, highlighted paragraphs, and paragraphs blotted out in black ink constitute the language of the oppressor. The details that the oppressor selected to report, the particular gaps he selected to keep in our conversations, the specific meaning he wanted to give to what we were saying for their purposes of finding reasons to further intimidate and observe us aggregate into a specialized language that needs to be properly accounted for.

And then there is the language of the oppressed – of us – oscillating between showing solidarity (in conversations we had when we thought we were out of the range of microphones) and condemnation of my father’s dissidence (in the house) and his heroic act which he committed at our expense.  For me, reading these files and understanding them requires a supreme act of imagination: in one file, just three pages long, they say that the dialogue transcribed is ‘based on listening to ten audio cassettes’. This means that someone more or less wrote the dialogue pretending it was our own words.  No wonder that, in these files, I address my parents with the informal tu and my parents use technical secret police language, words such as filaj (to follow very closely) which they certainly didn’t know!  That is to say, our language is a mixture of ours and theirs so my fight now is to rescue our own words from the files with the help of memory. Even our speech had been stained by the way we were objectified.

Some 20 years after our exile, having received ‘official’ evidence that what we experienced as a family was in fact far worse than we ourselves understood at the time, I feel betrayed once again. I am reading a three-line transcript where they recorded: ‘At 1:32am someone is trying to open the door to the room equipped with listening devices.  The door doesn’t open, after which we record footsteps of someone going away and the insistent barking of the dog, as if to a person who is a stranger to the house.’  The transcript refers to the fact that the secret police were coming into our house at night in order to change their audio/video tapes. I wrote about it in my memoir Burying the Typewriter but there is something quite heartbreaking about reading the Securitate’s self-recording, whilst recording us.

For some, a sense of personal identity is a matter of evolution: you wake up in the morning, look in the mirror and know who you are.  Experience, family, friends, and the society in which you live shape you but in a manner which is cumulative – you build on who you know you are.  For me, as I read through an ‘official’ version of my parents’ identities, my own sense of self is changed again, into what exactly, it is too early to know. For 23 years now I have been working on overcoming the sense that we were victims of totalitarianism.  I have tried to blend into western society, living a life with all the normal joys and anxieties: I told myself I must start anew and succeed in a free world, am I not so very lucky I can do this? Think of all of those who died next to my father in the forced labour camps and think of all of those who died in the prisons where he sacrificed 12 years of his life. At least we could start all over again, like all the other immigrants; we could buy into the American dream. But now I read about myself as a two-year old child whom, according to an ‘informative note’, my father loves very much. Just what ghosts of beatings in a prison courtyard in the dead of winter were haunting him as he was making the colourful lights to place above my pram so I can enjoy a little bit of beauty? Here is a medical report file that says ‘the x-ray shows a fractured rib’ and below, ‘application of hammer to fingers.’ The past is the same and is not the same after reading this.

The Romanian poet Lucian Blaga said that literature is the tears of those who could not cry—and that is what I am after here, an acknowledgment of suffering, of feeling that somehow does not seem to fit into all of this mess. This is the transformative quality that my writing will need to impose upon the reality of these files. That we woke up at 5 every morning, that my mother came from work everyday exactly at 15:40, me at 18:20, and that we went to bed after eating our sour soup and polenta from the day before at 22hrs is a record of our flesh and blood struggle to live.  During the last spring that we lived in Romania, after we had applied for passports, we were recorded turning over the soil of our garden and planting vegetables.  I am moved by how much we still wanted our garden to blossom and bloom back then, to produce a harvest that we didn’t hope to, and did not in the end, eat. For better or for worse, this biography of my family written by the secret police is testimony to the fact that we existed then – we are a record of hope and dissent that was thought not to exist in my native country at that time.

About the author

Carmen Bugan was born in Romania in 1970 and emigrated to the US with her family in 1989 as political dissidents.  She has a doctorate in English literature from Balliol College, Oxford. Her publications include two collections of poems, The House of Straw (due out shortly from Shearsman) and Crossing the Carpathians (Oxford Poets/Carcanet), a critical study on Seamus Heaney and East European Poetry in Translation: Poetics of Exile (Legenda, Oxford /Maney Publishing), and the internationally acclaimed memoir Burying the Typewriter: Childhood Under the Eye of the Secret Police (Picador, UK; Graywolf, USA, 2012).  The American edition of this book has won the Bread Loaf Conference Bakeless Prize for Nonfiction and the English edition was BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week and shortlisted for the George Orwell Prize for Political Writing. Carmen Bugan was a Creative Arts Fellow in Literature at Wolfson College, Oxford and a Fellow at the Hawthornden International Retreat for Writers in Scotland.  She is currently researching the secret files that the Romanian Secret Police had kept on her and her family and is writing a book about having lived on both sides of the Iron Curtain.  She is also working with the BBC on a documentary about her family.  Bugan lives in France with her husband and children.

Additional Information

Burying the Typewriter: Childhood Under the Eye of the Secret Police Carmen Bugan will be talking during Le livre sur les quais, a literary festival in Morges in Switzerland, on the 7th and 8th of September.

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