Dead and Alive, page 9
For me that time came last Tuesday, at 10.19 a.m. on the corner of Mercer and Third. There, a young white woman with a baby was trying to get over the kerb to cross the street when something disintegrated in the undercarriage of her stroller; a wheel rolled away, the stroller lurched, collapsed. The baby remained strapped in, but its huge and heavy carrier was being held at the horizontal level only by his mother’s efforts. Having had this happen to me, many winters ago, I sympathized and took a step towards the woman, but if I thought I was doing something special in this I was soon disabused, for now I found myself a provisional member of a small group – a half-dozen people – who had all stepped forward at the exact same moment. We were white, black, Asian, tall, short, male, female, young, very young, and old. One of us was in a custodian’s uniform. I was wearing a denim jumpsuit. Two of us were dressed for real jobs. One had a skateboard. We were ‘a cross-section of the population’. Three held the stroller up; one ran after the wheel; two got on their knees and examined the mechanism. One came back with the wheel. During this operation the very minimum of speech occurred, so little that perhaps a visitor from another planet would wonder whether communication in our city was largely telepathic. ‘That’s on now?’ ‘Put it there.’ ‘Let me just get this back…’ ‘OK?’ ‘OK.’ ‘Yep. Back in.’ It all happened very quickly and ‘Thank you’ dispersed everybody in a shot – as if the phrase itself had propulsive force, sending each of us scurrying back to our routines, heading uptown or down, into classes or offices or gyms, unconnected to this mother and child or to one another.
Then it happened again. Exactly seven days later, same time, same place, but now it was an old Chinese lady, with a long pole over her shoulder, at either end of which she’d strung two huge plastic bags, filled with old cans. She tripped on that same bit of kerb and landed flat on her back. She cried out, howled, and this was a sort of beacon, drawing in more people than the previous event, although what happened next was structurally identical. One went to collect her missing shoe, several others gathered the fallen cans and put them back in her garbage bags, another retrieved her hat. Sub-teams either side took the lady by her arms in preparation to lift. I re-tied her shoelaces. ‘Ambulance?’ ‘Looks OK.’ ‘One…two…three…’ ‘There we go.’ ‘OK?’ ‘OK.’ Then, once again, at the very moment gratitude was expressed, we all swiftly vanished, the only thing these twelve or so citizens of New York having in common being the urgent need to be elsewhere. As I walked briskly to my next appointment, I kept trying to think of a phrase to describe this Tuesday’s experience and the previous Tuesday’s, too. What do you call a group of people like that? A coalition of the willing? A loose conglomeration of citizens? A community of strangers? An improvised task force? I thought about the rural world, from which my husband, Nick, hails, in which such incidents would involve long, interconnected, interpersonal conversations. (‘Aren’t you Carol’s son – the one who went off to England?’ ‘Where do you live, love? Are you local?’) And there would be shared jokes and extended sympathy and maybe even Sit yourself down, dear and I’ll put the kettle on. I see how that version would look preferable to many people. It’s hard to defend the city in the face of the country.
The Tuesday of the old Chinese woman was also Halloween, and therefore the day of the Lower Manhattan bike lane terror attack near Stuyvesant High School, which I heard about while dressed as Maleficent (cartoon version) and shepherding a Stay Puft Marshmallow Man and a mini-vampire through the Third Street Children’s Halloween Fair. People checked their phones and whispered the news to each other so as to hide it from the children. We were standing precisely where the old Chinese woman had fallen down a few hours earlier. I thought of those two mild non-emergencies I had recently witnessed, and wondered what happens when real tragedy strikes. Does one staunch the blood while the other finds the limb? And once the bodies are removed – some to the morgue and others to the hospital – does everyone else go about their day? Later that night, watching the news and the late-night shows, this by now familiar trope of New Yorkers carrying on with their routines got full play. It was widely noted that we did not cancel our Halloween marches – neither the kid-sized one nor the adult version – and that we still got crazy-drunk on a Tuesday, and woke up the next day and went straight back to our routines because ‘that’s what New Yorkers do’. Which was all nice to hear, even if some of the praise came from people we might, here in New York, consider fair-weather friends, the kind who celebrate us in our tragic moments but affect to despise us in our everyday mode. The same people who claim to believe that the only meaningful societal bonds are fixed and solid and unbroken – blood, nation, faith – and so can never truly comprehend a city like New York in its everyday mode, in which bonds gather and dissipate with a dizzying fluidity and yet, for the brief duration that they are in place, can display a mighty strength.
We hear a lot about our coastal media attitude towards the so-called ‘Deplorables’. But this contempt is echoed by the not-insignificant numbers of Americans who make no secret of their disgust for this city and cities in general. I will never forget the first time I heard an American say that those degenerates in New York had it coming. (It was just after 9/11, in Jamaica.) It was shocking to me because it was the first time I’d ever heard such a thing, but these days that sentiment is easy to come by, multi-purposed for every kind of disaster. Online you can read Americans telling other Americans that the West Coast deserved its wildfires and the East Coast its hurricanes. In the face of such hatred those of us who live in these supposedly godless, decadent, morally degenerate urban hellholes should, I think, do a little more to defend the structure of our arrangements, not just in times of tragedy but at all times. Yes, we ‘carry on’, after disaster and attack, but that’s not all we do. We also function pretty well day-to-day, with our multiple gods and none, with our graven images, and our Babel of languages. We may not know our neighbours’ names but we know the name of every dog in the dog-run, and that’s OK, too. Despite rarely cooking and often drinking, despite never mowing lawns (but usually recycling), our souls are not uniformly headed to eternal damnation. We can often be found screaming at strangers in the street but we just as frequently pick them up off the floor. And then there’s also the food, art, music, theatre, film, literature. But they know all that.
Like many a New Yorker right now I talk a good game but my mind is scattered, disordered. To me, the city itself feels scattered, out of sorts; certainly carrying on like London, like Paris, but also, like those places, newly fearful, continuing with its routines while simultaneously wondering whether it still wants to, considering decamping to the countryside while being repulsed by that same thought – oh, and a ragbag of other random thoughts and anecdotes that will now converge in the next paragraph like a half-dozen strangers united for a moment on a street corner. For on my desk, between keyboard and screen, sits Nick Laird’s new poetry book in manuscript – he gave it to me to read this morning. The morning after the night before. To give it my full attention, I switched off the Internet, so at the time of writing I don’t know anything more about this morning’s murder and attempted suicide in Cooper Square than what I overheard on the school run this morning. But you can get a different kind of news from poetry:
New York Elasticity
When the hand is red,
some of the walkers pause
and others continue,
some of the vehicles pause
and others continue,
and I am no longer that
clerk to the heir of etc.
and something of this city’s
brute capacity for gathering
is like a shining in my head.
The valleys of glass and re-set
stone have softer, smaller
forces pushing through them
with shopping bags like pollen
sacs attached to their bodies.
Happiness is only a state
of utter absorption,
so why not take an island,
not large, and see the people
of the world live together there?
I notice first they put the brown
people in brown shirts
and made them stand behind
the counter in Starbucks as
the customers are played by whites
and east Asian girls. Each
consciousness enacts its own
drama in the silence of
a breathing mind till Ahmed,
our barista, calls out another name.
On Mercer the jackhammers answer
and a rising siren answers
but what I’d like to listen to is rain,
no? The plainness of its thinking,
the fat splatter of the first ripe droplets
on the hot sidewalk, its hiss,
its consistence, its soft-shoe shuffle –
the grid clearing and darkening
as the Atlantic rolls in.
This city’s brute capacity for gathering! Yes, that is what shines in my head, in all New York heads. Of this we are rightfully proud. New Yorkers choose to gather under the banner that says ‘New York’ – which is so elastic it really means nothing at all – and that is exactly what I love about this place. The capacity to gather without precise definition I experience as a form of freedom, here where we do not have to be the clerk to the heir of wherever, where we can be unattached to our old European pedigree, or lack of same, and loosened from the bonds of distant villages, with their strictures and demands, their ideas regarding our sexuality or gender, their plans for our future. But if the first two stanzas of the poem concern the utopian city, the happy-clappy, multicultural, green-juice-drinking, you-decide-your-own-story city, the last two are its proper corrective. The racially divided city. The socially inequitable city (from which decamping is only possible for a privileged few). The lonely city, in which each soul is trapped in itself, answering to a name but unconnected to the person who calls it out. And oh God, those rising sirens. No rational person can deny that you would hear those sirens much less frequently in rural Ireland, in rural France, in rural Jamaica. But dreams of ‘escape’ are also the luxury of city-dwellers who still have cities to turn their backs on. The many citizens of Aleppo and Mosul can only walk away from rubble. Some of the ex-dwellers of those cities and many others will inevitably make their way to our city. What will they see here? It is possible to live among us and not see us at all – also to see what you want to see. It is possible to live among us and be mentally ill or to have your mind warped by ideology. It is possible to look at the rain – as our original New York lunatic, Travis Bickle, once did – and see a holy scouring, a cleansing away of all the filth:
‘Thank God for the rain which has helped wash the garbage and trash off the sidewalks…All the animals come out at night: Whores, skunk pussies, buggers, queens, fairies, dopers, junkies, sick, venal. Someday a real rain will come and wash all this scum off the streets.’
Or you can just see the rain. The plain, prosaic rain, falling on everybody. Cities are full of all kinds of people. Some of them watch ISIS videos all day long. Others read conspiracy blogs and hate-filled online screeds. Such material acts as a screen between citizen and reality; it functions like virtual-reality headsets. You slip them on and they allow you to walk into a Charleston church and see only ‘scum’, or drive along a downtown bike lane and see only ‘scum’. We can tighten visa laws and build our walls, but they will be poor defence against such ideologies, which are free-floating and borderless and whose goggles can be worn by anyone. Most of the terror attacks in America have been committed by Americans. (Some of the most terrifying have been committed by gun-toting Americans with no obvious ideological commitments at all, employing a different kind of mask between citizen and reality: narcissism.) It’s amazing what a narrative can make someone do. We cannot give up on offering alternative stories. Here’s one about the people of New York: we are not scum. We are every variety of human. Some of us voted for a government that caused the destruction of cities far away. Some of us didn’t. Some of us are dopers and junkies. Some of us are preschool teachers and nuns. None of us deserve to be killed in the street. We are a multiplicity of humans in an elastic social arrangement that can be stretched in many directions. It’s not broken yet. I have no idea if it will break soon – but it’s not broken yet. And here comes the rain, clearing the streets, for an hour maybe, even for a whole afternoon. We’ll be back out tomorrow.
Egypt: Laughter in the Dark
This piece was written as part of a 2016 campaign to bring attention to the situation of Ahmed Naji, a young Egyptian novelist who had recently been charged with indecency and sent to jail. The campaign was ultimately successful; Naji was released early. Soon afterwards he moved to America, where he presently lives and works.
I first heard the name Ahmed Naji at a PEN dinner last spring. I looked up from my dessert to a large projection of a young Egyptian man, rather handsome, slightly louche-looking, with a Burt Reynolds moustache, wearing a Nehru shirt in a dandyish print and the half-smile of someone both amusing and easily amused. I learned that he was just thirty and had written a novel called Using Life for which he is currently serving a two-year prison sentence. I thought: good title. A facile thought to have at such a moment but it’s what came to mind. I liked the echo of Georges Perec’s Life: A User’s Manual – the coolness of that – and thought I recognized, in Naji’s author photo, something antic and wild, not unlike what you see when you look at pictures of Perec. You could call it judging a book by its cover: I’d rather think of it as the readerly premonition that this book might please me. If he had written a book called Peacocks in Moonlight and posed for one of these author portraits where the writer’s head is resting on his own closed fist, I would have been equally shocked and saddened to hear he was in prison, but perhaps not as keen to read it.
As I was having these unserious thoughts the contents of the novel were being roughly outlined for us all from the stage. It sounded intriguing: a kind of hybrid, with certain chapters illustrated as in a graphic novel, and with a comic plot concerning a dystopian Cairo, although it was in fact the novel’s sexual content that had landed its author in jail. Though the novel had been approved by the Egyptian censorship board, a sixty-five-year-old ‘concerned citizen’, upon reading an excerpt in the literary weekly Akhbar al-Adab, had felt so offended by it that he made a complaint to the local judiciary, who then charged Naji and the editor of the weekly with the crime of ‘infringing public decency’. (The editor is not serving a jail sentence but had to pay a fine.) There was, to me, something monstrous but also darkly comic about this vision of a reader who could not only dislike your prose but imprison you for it, although of course at the dinner the emphasis was necessarily on the monstrous rather than the ludicrous. But when I got home that night I found an online interview with Naji in which the absurdity of his situation was not at all lost on him:
I really enjoyed the dramatic statement of that plaintiff reader. He told the prosecution that he buys the journal regularly for his daughters, but that one time, his wife walked into the room showing him my published chapter and ridiculing him for bringing such writing into their home. He said his ‘heartbeat fluctuated and blood pressure dropped’ while reading the chapter.
Naji seemed bleakly amused, too, by the months of semantic debate that had led to his prosecution, in which the judges sophistically tried to separate fiction from a non-fiction ‘essay’, determining finally that this extract was in fact the latter, and so subject to prosecution as a kind of personal revelation:
According to their investigations and official documents, my fiction registers as a confession to having had sex with Mrs Milaqa (one of the characters in my novel), from kissing her knees all the way to taking off the condom. They also object to my use of words such as ‘pussy, cock, licking, sucking’ and the scenes of hashish smoking. Ironically, this chapter speaks of the happy days of Cairo, as opposed to the days of loss and siege dominant in the remaining chapters. This specific chapter is an attempt to describe what a happy day would look like for a young man in Cairo, but perhaps a happy life feels too provoking for the public prosecutor!
Which sounded even more intriguing. A few days later I’d managed to contact Naji’s friend and sometime translator Mona Kareem, who sent me a PDF of Using Life (itself translated by Ben Koerber) to read on my Kindle. It opened with a beautiful line of Lucretius, and I felt immediately justified in my superficial sense of kinship: ‘Forever is one thing born from another; life is given to none to own, but to all to use.’ And as I read on, the novel’s title took on a different resonance again, for here was a writer not content to use only one or two elements of life, no, here was a guy who wanted to use all of it:
In September, as the city’s residents were just beginning to recover from the most traumatic summer of their lives, there came a series of tremors and earthquakes that would be known as ‘The Great Quake’. It resulted in the destruction of nearly half the city. Then there was an eruption of sinkholes that swallowed entire streets, and distorted the flow of the Nile…The sinkholes did not spare even the pyramids, and nothing could be done for the Great Pyramid itself, which was reduced to a simple pile of rubble. All that was left of our great heritage – our civilization, our architecture, our poetry and prose – would soon meet a fate even worse than that of the pyramids. Everything collapsed into the earth or was buried under oceans of sand.
