We hope that art and literature can provide a much-needed diversion from the realities surrounding us, if only for a mere few moments. Through the innovations of /One/’s contributors, readers can also find some insight into what it means to be human–which, after all, is what compels us to make art. Individuals are often unable to fully comprehend large-scale human suffering. The artist helps us understand the larger narrative by sharing a specific story that we can relate to via our own experiences.

Thank you, readers, for giving the works of our contributors their deserved attention. We at /One/ wish you healthy and happy days in this new decade.

The editors
/One/

Interviewed by Anthony Rhoades

/One/: You often explore dissociation in your photographs.

Sarah Small: Yes, I’m fascinated by themes or characters that are entirely separate from each other brought together into the same space. I contrive scenarios that combine people with distinctive visual personalities and then look for the tensions between the ordinary and the implausible. I photograph a lot of animals, too, particularly in close interactions with humans. This ongoing series of work is titled The Delirium Constructions. Usually I work with sets of models who might never meet in real life—constructing unsettling fantasies, like the elderly with people in their physical prime—who are experiencing one another’s presence in an intimate context for the first time as I shoot and direct them together. When my perception of a scene shifts all around without landing, when I see an undetermined dynamic that seems endlessly explorable, I know an image has been made. I enjoy dynamics that are hilarious and serious simultaneously. I’ve experimented with this dynamic—this feeling that cannot quite be identified—in still photography, singing, and in performance in a recent Tableau Vivant, held last winter. I brought 35 models together in various states of undress and in interactive narratives as a centerpiece for a party.

/One/: What makes this an interesting subject for you?

SS: Thinking about my upbringing, much of what occupied everyday family conversation was observing and analyzing all the absurd and mysterious contrasts within the human condition. And to this day, most casual family conversations revolve around this topic. Ideas and human themes that can contain both seriousness and silliness are endless sources of empathetic connection and laughter in my family dynamic. My mother’s father was a psychoanalyst and she grew up on the grounds of a mental institution. Through her observations in these surroundings, as well as her immersion in her own immediate and extended family, she has countless stories that are at once tragic, mysterious, and hilarious. My father’s family upbringing was also unique. His mother was a jazz pianist and his father was a colonel in the army as well as an opera fanatic. My parents are both musicians, my dad a pianist/modern composer and my mom a Renaissance lutenist. I grew up with few emotional boundaries but a long list of structural and practical rules that made little sense to me but had to be followed. I was taught by my mom to be deeply empathetic to all humans around me and not to judge anyone, while simultaneously I was offered the tools to make light of everyone and everything around me. We love to laugh. We also tend to study our surroundings closely.

/One/: What about the human condition inspires you when making photographs?

SS: Humans are unpredictable and layered with surprises at every turn. I very much enjoy working with the passion and unpredictability of human subjects. Unlike some photographers who use storyboards, I do not work with preconceived ideas. Instead my work is created through improvisation and unpredictable outcome. With or without a camera, this is what I enjoy most about being around people. I love navigating the search for truth and being a witness to all the in-betweens. I love observing people on the subway or on the streets. And I also love watching people watching other people. This is where I gain most of my personal and photographic inspiration and this is one of the reasons I love New York so much.

When shooting, my subjects and I theatrically improvise, collaborate, and experiment together. I talk a lot—sometimes nonstop—and ask a lot from my models. It is important for me to create a playful environment so that experimentation in any form is emotionally cushioned and safe. I direct models into spontaneous interactions and try to encourage the idea that anything goes. I move my subjects and myself around in the space until something sparks my attention. When an experiment takes life I start to shoot faster. The rhythm of my shoots tend to go in waves, moving from slow and deliberate to fast and frenetic, and back again.

I am just as interested in graphic expressions in humans as I am in thematic ones. I love working with models with unique facial or body structures, interesting skin textures or other textural elements which to explore.

/One/: If you weren’t an image maker, what might you be doing?

SS: I actually do spend quite a bit of time not being an image maker, and I don’t think I’d feel happy or complete without creating both photography and music. When I’m not photographing, I spend my time singing, performing, and composing vocal arrangements with my a cappella quartet, Black Sea Hotel. When I discovered Les Mystere Des Voix Bulgares in college, I became entranced immediately and started playing the one album I had all the time. Shortly after moving to New York, I saw an ad on Craigslist about auditions being held that same day for a start-up Bulgarian Women’s Choir. I was the last remaining founding member of that choir before forming into my current band, Black Sea Hotel. Now we rehearse out of my kitchen and perform at rock venues, bars, parks, and the occasional concert hall. We create contemporary arrangements of traditional Balkan folk songs (mostly Bulgarian, but some Macedonian, Romanian, and Greek). I recently realized that my sonic compositions are not so far away in intent from my visual constructions in photography—uneasy, sensual, and on the edge of dissonance, while also being simultaneously playful and densely harmonic.

If I wasn’t image or music making, I think I would be doing some form of social work or psychology. No matter what, I’m sure it would involve interacting and collaborating with other people in some capacity. I have also considered acting. I took an improv class last year, but it was more challenging that I could have ever expected. I was sort of terrified in class, trying to come up with catchy methods on the spot for captivating myself and those around me. I thought I’d be great at it because I’m rarely nervous around people in real life, but I was wrong. If I wanted to go into acting, that would be a vastly different professional trajectory.

/One/: I’ve read that you go into a photo session with only a vague idea of what you wish to get out of it. Essentially creating an atmosphere, setting the stage so something interesting may transpire. In the end, how much is you and how much is the collaboration of your subjects and the environment that you’ve created for them to interact in?

SS: It really is a collaboration. I create the environment in which to explore my models interacting and I set the tone through a combination of directing and simply waiting and watching.

I love my models so much. It is their trust in me and our trust in our collaboration that make my work possible. And the more I work with the same subject, the more synergistic our collaborations become. Generally my repeat models become close friends.

/One/: Your parents are artists and musicians. Do you think that your upbringing has had an effect on your art, or exposed you to a side life, so to speak? If you were raised by an accountant and an insurance salesman, how might your images be different?

SS: I’m sure my images would be totally different had I been raised by different parents. I may not have even become an image maker or musician. They instilled in me curiosity about people and generated in me an openness to endlessly explore human behavior. Also, my mom and grandmother were both photographers, so maybe the passion is in the genes, too. I think my mom is an amazing photographer and wish she still took as many pictures now as she did when I was growing up. Like me, she loves observing people and capturing emotional moments.

It’s funny to think of someone in my family as an insurance salesman. I don’t know anyone who does work like that in my entire extended family. I kind of wish I did… I think.

/One/: Tell us something we don’t know about Sarah Small.

SS: In Fall 2010, I will again bring to life The Delirium Constructions as a living, breathing image. This will be my second Tableau Vivant of The Delirium Constructions, preceded by several work-in-progress mini tableaus with question and answer sessions. etc. for which to workshop the final vision.  As referenced above, last spring, I arrayed 35 models in various stages of undress into interactive narratives on platforms as a centerpiece for a party I threw in Brooklyn.

I brought the models together into improbable, close interactions to examine the social and graphic contrasts of youth and experience, hysteria and discipline, tragedy and hilarity, and sexuality and desexualization. The next tableau vivant will continue on the same path but will be on a grander scale and with new axes of experimentation. Tableau II will feature 120 models, a larger audience, and will introduce musical elements in collaboration with singer Shara Worden and my a cappella group, Black Sea Hotel. Using original vocal arrangements, we will provide live soundscapes interplaying harmony and dissonance within the visual experience. I am so thrilled for this event.

I wear black and gray mostly but I have a bubblegum-pink bedroom with a chandelier and frilly pink things everywhere. My sister Rachel has red hair and freckles and is going to school for forensic mental heath counseling. I’m kind of scared of dogs but love cats. I will travel to Tanzania at the end of the month. I dream about bears a lot and collect them around my house. I’ve taken a self-portrait Polaroid every day for 13 years.

—

Sarah Small

Sarah Small was born in Washington DC in 1979 into a family of musicians and writers. She fell in love with photography when she was 13. In 2001, Small graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design and currently lives and work in Brooklyn, photographing, singing, and teaching at Parsons School of Design.

The Delirium Constructions is her current and ongoing body of still photographs exploring disassociated characters brought together into the same space. Small brings her models into improbable, close interactions to examine the social and graphic contrasts of youth and experience, hysteria and discipline, tragedy and hilarity, and sexuality and desexualization.(www.sarahsmall.com).

In Fall 2010, she will gather together 120 models in various stages of undress into suspended interactions to create a large scale Tableau Vivant of The Delirium Constructions. (www.livingpictureprojects.com).

Since 1997, Small has taken a Polaroid of herself everyday. She plans to pursue this project for life.

Her work has appeared in publications including Life Magazine, Rolling Stone, and The New York Times. It has been exhibited at Exit Art, The Corcoran Gallery, and The Australian Center for Photography. Small has also been the recipient of several awards and was recently named by American Photo as one of the “ Top 13 Emerging Photographers” working today.

When she is not photographing, Small sings, arranges music and performs in Brooklyn’s Balkan Vocal Quartet, Black Sea Hotel (www.myspace.com/BlackSeaHotel).

In between these clouds
coming together like hands and parting like ships,
she stands at a brook of beige leaves,
thinks of three friends who made
a monastery in the woods.

Stag moves through the hillside.
Everything, every tree falls in love with its neighbor.
It’s chaotic and messy — springtime    nothing to be done

Quick — Name three people who make you feel

pure
and special
and extraordinary.
Name them now —— go.

She arrives, sets down her luggage, and smiling, asks,
What kind of soul is mine?
And accepts whatever answer is given.           Jibes
and jealousy go right over her head,
used as she was
to living with them in the other house.
Like a mermaid learning to live on land, she explains
on the stairwell, I was blind as to who to trust.
(Though he loves her, he doesn’t believe her.  None of them do.)
Until

four years later

when she’s

“getting over” her little love affair, it occurs to her.  Comes rising up
like a lake of dark pain.  She begins to see.  Not just about him, but about the other   the                                                                                                                               first man

It was so beautiful, she writes.
He was beautiful but then  totally crazy.  And ugly  bitter
ugly.  Vile.

Crazy love.  We even looked like twins, people said.

But you know  even while it was happening and good, way out          there
I would leave him, inside I would leave, and go flying away
To the outside windowpane of some universe   eternally caught in the furies at Act Two

— and so but I cared, I did —
but I was also there,
barely hanging on
(I mean, I was there when Mother Mary said, “Go to the outer edge of your greatness”)

eternally rush-rush-missing my other-century companions so—
my broken down-on-their-luck bohemians, ragged soul brigade
I barely stopped to look for them anymore—
(it was the one thing I accepted as a constant in this life, my missing them)

And anyway with this wild wild wind raging shaking
the window pane and the universe
its curved howls banging.  Me
in coattails hanging on
and looking in             big-eyed

“The outer edge of your greatness,” she said.   I was there —

Then I wake up and say, Oh, it’s my own Spirit
scares me so.  My own Self.  I have been that mutable and reckless,
streakful and open too.
Like driving in his car the very first time, I knew.
I just knew.  Like magic, he’d showed up at my door.
He said things about dreams, but I already knew.    I knew about the Light.
He held disappointment — my twin
Of some kind — So
my reckless leaving into the Sea of Light.

Always, I knew:  That was the whole triumphant ordeal.

Now, remembering.
Now bleared with tears and love that just won’t go away — it exposes me —
Like a love for those beautiful cryptic ghosts who tell me they love me back

Reckless like stars of joy.
Need I be?

Three swallows just flew overhead.

—

Katayoon Zandvakili

Katayoon Zandvakili’s collection of poetry, Deer Table Legs, won the University of Georgia Press Contemporary Poetry Series prize, and the book’s title poem was awarded a Pushcart Prize. Her work has been anthologized — American Poetry: The Next Generation, A World Between: Poems, Short Stories, and Essays by Iranian-Americans, Let Me Tell You Where I’ve Been: New Writing by Women of the Iranian Diaspora, Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from the Middle East, Asia and Beyond, and The Poetry of Iranian Women — and published in journals such asLumina, caesura, Five Fingers Review, Rattapallax, Arte East, Private Photo Review, and narrativemagazine.com.

Katayoon has completed her novel, In the Lap of the Gods: My Eight-&-A-Half-Month Marriage to an Impostor, while working on a second volume of poetry, The Girl King Sings Songs of Epic Leaving, Red-Leafed Shame & Yellow Uprising, and the screenplaysWonderful Her and To Live As I Like: The Marie B. Story.

She is also a painter.

I remember his body, the drops beaded across his pale belly, the dark hair plastered in web-trails across his chest, how he tousled his gray head with a towel; how he leaned over me, close and warm, to pat smooth an overturned pail of sand. We shrieked with laughter when he tossed us into the waves, the chill water that stung our eyes and left our bodies gritty with salt.  Afterward we wrapped ourselves in towels and walked to the concession stand, where he bought us red and blue slushes in paper cones.

At the end of the day, when the sun was low, he packed up our sun-lotion and sandwich wrappers and told us it was time to go. But I was never ready to leave; I didn’t want the day to end.  So I ran, laughing, a tall shadow across the sand, and plunged into the cold water, taunting him to come and pull me out, to drag me home.  I believed I would be able, always, to grasp his strong hand just as a wave came plummeting down on us.  I can still see him there, blurry above the water-line, a distant golden figure coming closer; I can see what he meant when he promised that even without his arm under my belly to hold me, I could stay afloat.

Hank Feldman looks nothing like my father. Daddy was a tall man with dark eyes and broad shoulders who never got old. Hank is tiny, at least 70, hunched and wrinkled. His eyes are a vacant, wintry blue. He sits quietly in the window seat as I shove my duffel into the overhead and collapse into my place on the aisle. He waits a few moments, until I fasten my seatbelt, lean my head back and close my eyes, before tapping my shoulder.

I am tired, but agree to give Hank my seat when he explains he will need to rise repeatedly to use the restroom during our two-hour flight from Chicago to Boston. I like to be near the window, anyway, to look down on clouds.

When we are settled into our places he asks, “Are you coming or going?”

“Coming,” I reply, resigning myself to a few moments of small talk. “Coming home.” I will tell him I live in Boston, that I am a piano teacher, that I grew up on the north shore of Massachusetts. I will not tell him this was my first visit to Chicago, or that the so-called specialists at the hospital there can’t help me.

But he asks nothing else. He tells me he lives in a small Illinois town called Palwaukee, and is going to his granddaughter’s high school graduation. “She’s off to college,” he says, his voice wavering. “I can’t believe it.”

During the safety demonstration Hank watches, alert and interested, as the flight attendants explain how to breathe, how to float, how to escape in case the plane should catch fire or plummet from the sky. I look out the window to the paved runway, where men in brightly colored jumpsuits are scurrying about, as if searching for something.

“You know what?” he asks, as the plane lifts into the air. “Things have changed since I flew myself. I was a crop duster in the sixties.”

I am half-listening, thinking instead about the oncologist I’d met the day before, the experimental treatments, waiting lists, the unpredictable nature of what lay ahead.

“It’s different technology,” Hank continues. “It’s all done with computers.”

Out the window the ground spirals away from us, dissolving into atmosphere. I close my eyes, in awe of this technology, of the miracle that carries me 30,000 feet into the sky; of the measurements these pilots make, using instruments of time and wind.

“Flight attendants, prepare for landing.”

I wake to lights below; they blur and waver as though I’m peering through the glass at the iridescence on a sea floor. Hank shuffles down the aisle, and returns to his seat beside me.

When he smiles, I notice his face droops on one side—the effect of a stroke, perhaps. I hadn’t seen it before, as that side was turned away from me. His pale eyes are cloudy behind their glasses. He says, “You, know, the worst thing about getting old is the surprise. You’re just surprised all the time by what your body does to you!”

I laugh as politely as I can. Not knowing how to respond, I say, “Well, I think you look great.”

“That’s nice of you,” he says. “Don’t listen to me, anyway. You’re young and beautiful. You have a lot to look forward to.”

The lights in the cabin shut off, then, and a bodiless voice intones, Ladies and gentlemen, we’ve begun our final descent. I turn to the window and feel myself floating, submerged in a futuristic womb, staring not into the sockets of my eyeless reflection but out to the night silence. The plane circles Boston Harbor where a peninsula juts like a crooked finger. Around it the blackness of the harbor joins the blackness of the sky, and I try to imagine Hank and I are adrift in space, ageless and untouchable.

But Earth ascends; the world comes back to us. Now I can make out illuminated stadiums, lawns lined with streetlamps, freeways of white headlights streaming in one direction, red taillights in the other. As the plane lowers billboards and office buildings glow into focus. Hank says it’s nothing like when he landed in the cornfields of Waukegan Illinois, where two rows of light were the only thing marking the solitary runway from surrounding darkness. It was like landing in a jungle, or an African plain, he says; some wild, undiscovered country. Even now, as an old man, he feels the same slight tensing of his muscles, the same inner steadying of himself, as if he grips the yoke in his own age-mottled hands and prepares to touch down.

You’re taught where to focus when you land, he says; to look ahead at the horizon and the end of the runway, rather than down at the ground. I have spent my recent life afraid to think of what is coming; able only to glance back, occasionally, at the receding landscape of places I’ve been. I wonder if my father can still see me; if he would even recognize me now. It seems a lifetime has passed since I knew him. But maybe that’s better. I like to think he remembers me as the child, sun-warmed and laughing, who learned how to swim at Good Harbor Beach.

Now I press my forehead to the glass, watching the pavement below whiz past like a gray river, and my breath catches in anticipation. “This is it,” Hank says. Reaching for the armrest between us, he accidentally touches my arm, and for a moment I feel his fingers cold against my skin. We sit watching, waiting, knowing at any moment we’ll feel the lurch and rumble of the plane’s wheels touching ground—that always surprising jolt of reconnection.

—

Meaghan Mulholland

Meaghan Mulholland’s writing has appeared in The Colorado Review and Southwest Airlines’ Spirit Magazine, among other publications, and her writing awards include a Fulbright Fellowship to Italy.  She worked for several years at National Geographic and is currently hard at work on a novel set in Sicily while completing her MFA in Fiction at the University of Arkansas. To learn more about Meaghan’s writing, visit her website at meaghanmulholland.com.

Photo: Timothy Greenfield-Sanders

Chai Vasarhelyi is a director and producer with Hungarian, Chinese, and Brazilian roots. She grew up between New York City and Rio de Janiero and graduated from Princeton University in 2000 with a B.A. in comparative literature. She made her film debut with A Normal Life, which she co-directed and cowrote with Hugo Berkeley – and this hour-long documentary about young Kosovars who came of age during the recent war won the 2003 Tribeca Film Festival’s Best Documentary award. Chai has received grants from several foundations including the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, and the William and Mary Greve Foundation. Chai has worked with Emmy Award-winning teams documenting the 2007 Paris-Dakar Rally, girls’ soccer in post-Taliban Afghanistan, and a New Orleans high school basketball team that emerged from the devastation of Hurricane Katrina to win the 2005 All-State Championship. She has received an Achievement Award from the Creative Visions Foundation. I Bring What I Love marks Chai’s first feature-length documentary film.

Interviewed by Sara Goudarzi

/One/: How did you first learn of Youssou N’Dour?

Chai Vasarhelyi: I grew up with world music but it was mostly Brazilian; my father’s Hungarian and grew up in Brazil. I was interested in making an uplifting film in Africa, and a film called Amandla! had come out which looked at the events in South Africa through music.

Also, someone had given me a mix tape with a West African artist on it, so it made me like West African music. At the same time I had this premise of looking at Africa through music. Youssou is the most celebrated living contemporary musician today in Africa, and the first time I heard him perform at Carnegie Hall was kind of a life-affirming experience. I didn’t understand a word of what he was singing about, I didn’t understand the context, but there was something so emotionally honest about him and it really touched me. So I wanted to meet him and see if this was the right story.

/One/: Did you just approach him?

CV: Yes, how the film came to be has a lot to do with how I approached him. The first time was through a Senegalese friend of a friend who owned a bar in New York; he introduced me to Youssou briefly after that concert. I mentioned that I wanted to make a film, so we met the next day on the street for about 10 minutes, and then I met with his management and his record label, and at the end I heard that there is this other album, that it’s something very special. Youssou is very hard to pin down. I knew he was playing in Europe and I was working in London, so I went to Spain and literally snuck backstage at a concert. He looked at me like, “What are you doing here?” and invited me to eat with them. That’s when he gave me a burned copy of the Egypt album.

/One/: Was the album already out?

CV: He recorded it in 1999 and was going to release it in 2001, and then 9/11 happened. So he held the release. When I met him in late 2003/early 2004, he was thinking about finally releasing it. He burned me a few tracks from a laptop, and I followed the band in my car as they drove to Grenada for the next show. I’ll never forget driving into this city that symbolizes everything—the east and west and the religious persecution and the call of the Moors—and listening to Egypt. I just knew that I had to make this film, because I was flustered with the situation with America and here was someone actually standing up for something he believed in and presenting a tolerant face of Islam, which is not what we saw in the media.

/One/: How many years did it take to make the film?

CV: I filmed for two-and-a-half years and edited for about two years. Later in the editing I had to go back and do a few more things, so it was on and off for four years, and then a year to release.

/One/: This movie is a departure from your previous documentary.

CV: The team is consistent: I have the same editor and I would say the films are very close to each other although very different in subjects. My first film is called The Normal Life, and it’s about six friends after the war in Kosovo. We were all the same age when I began making my film. It’s a very sincere film, and part of my heart still lies in the ground in Pristina. Both films are very similar in terms of the heart that’s in them and both are stories that you would not necessarily have heard but that do pertain to our lives. They’re similar filmmaking style. The gaze is similar.

/One/: How do you find your subjects? Chance, or are you always looking?

CV: I think you know when you find them and as you get older, you tend to become more discerning. I really wasn’t sure about Youssou as a subject. I was very tentative and it was the Egypt album that just turned me. I knew at that moment this was the film I had to make. It’s a very idealistic way of looking at it, but it was that important to me. Similarly, with my first film, I knew there was a story there in Kosovo; I couldn’t understand how it was possible there was a war and ethnic repression going on in 1999. I thought we’d resolved this stuff and here it was happening in the middle of Europe. It was very idealistic to get on that plane. I was in college and I was like, “Let’s go to Kosovo.” I met the subjects of that film—all translators for places like The New York Times and Washington Post, who were exactly like me except where they were born. These individuals are extraordinary and grew up waiting for war. The understanding that so little, yet so much, separated us blew my mind. I didn’t know it would take four years to make the film and I didn’t know how hard it was. I’d never gone to film school. I’d directed plays, but that was very different.

/One/: Why film? You’re in college and you want to tell this story—why decide on film as a medium as opposed to, say, writing about it?

CV: Film relays the most amount of information in the least amount of time. Also, it brings to life emotions in a way that will allow people to identify with the subject.

/One/: Did you have a prior knowledge of the Griot tradition before meeting Youssou?

CV: I actually did. When I was growing up I’d learned about the Griot tradition from a book we had to read in a French class about West Africa. I wasn’t intimately acquainted with it, but I had since eighth grade discovered what Griot was. The Griot tradition is fascinating and relates to the idea of the epic tradition, and that was another connection between the Kosovar Albanians and the Senegalese. Albania is one of those places that the idea of epic poetry is still alive and that people recite their poems. There was something I found very compelling about that type of storytelling.

/One/: How does Youssou manage to keep true to the tradition and yet be so popular?

CV: I don’t think that popularity and the Griot tradition are in conflict with one another. The Griots were popular musicians; the Griot was for the people. As a pop musician it’s a different issue.

How does he stay true to it? I think it’s in his blood. It’s all he knows. What he actually sings in In Your Eyes is “If you want to educate your people, build a school.” His art has always been his activism. His activism has always been his art. He has devotionals and he does have some love songs. But even the songs that are about women are things such as “respect your aunt.” There’s a social message to everything he does but it doesn’t feel like medicine because of the Griot tradition. It is the role that he plays and there’s a place in that society for that type of music.

/One/: Youssou has been referred to as the Bono of Africa. Other than the activism apparent in his music, what other type of humanitarian work has he been involved in?

CV: Youssou has been a tireless humanitarian. He became a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador in 1987. His first time going international was part of Amnesty International “Human Rights Now!” tour alongside Peter Gabriel. He’s very much into the rights of children, including education and health. Malaria is also something that’s very close to his heart. He’s even testified before Congress about the disease. What’s fascinated me is that he’s really asked to speak on behalf of a continent, and that’s a very strange thing. I mean, who are we to ask one guy because he happens to be from Africa to speak on behalf of a continent?

Youssou insists on living in Dakar. He says there’s an airport, and that he can fly anywhere. He insists on bringing a lot of these things that he sees abroad in his development at home and I think it’s got to do with his roots, it’s got to do with the Griot tradition and staying close to the issues that pertain to the lives of everyday Africans.

/One/: You are quoted as saying you are a “change the world” kind of person. What is your definition of “change the world,” and what do you think is the responsibility of individuals in communities to try to achieve that?

CV: I think Youssou is a really good example of what you can achieve. I don’t know if what I can do will have any effect on other people’s lives. For me, I saw a story I thought was very inspiring and maybe a film showed that story to more people and touched their lives. We all have a responsibility to stand up for what we believe. My mother is Chinese and fled oppression in China. My first film was set in Kosovo, where people didn’t have basic human rights. It’s very easy to say, Everyone stand up for what you believe in, but at the same time you also want to live to see the next day. It’s nuanced. At the time I made the film—after 9/11, war going on in Iraq—I felt helpless: Here I am going to Kosovo making movies, and does it mean anything?

/One/: Why did the Egypt album grab you so much?

CV: Here was an artist standing up and essentially celebrating a tolerant face of Islam, which was not at all the story we saw in the mainstream media, and I thought that was brave. Islam is a very diverse religion—why are we only hearing one version? Youssou’s Egypt project brings that to life: He was a black West African reaching out to North African Egyptians. They didn’t speak the same language but were celebrating a common tradition in a very old Arabic musical style about the Senegalese Sufi brotherhood. It just raises questions, and that’s what I was interested in. It wasn’t dogmatic, he wasn’t on a soapbox, he wasn’t preaching to anyone—he was truly just celebrating and telling the stories.

/One/: Were you and Youssou surprised at the negative reactions to Egypt given the fact that he was so popular?

CV: I think Youssou definitely pushed the envelope when he released an album during Ramadan. I think that no matter where you are that was definitely new.

/One/: Why did he do that?

CV: Essentially because he was implying that this is spiritual music, why can’t you listen to it during Ramadan? What happened was that it was misunderstood for many different reasons and the reaction was so extreme, so fast that there were debates on the radio, people were calling in raising objections, and the TV station pulled the ads off the air without letting them know. Overnight 20,000 cassettes were returned by street vendors.

/One/: If he had released it in another month, not Ramadan, do you think the reaction would have been as negative? Was that the reason for the negative reaction or was it him singing sacred verses?

CV: I think it was definitely a combination. I think in releasing it during Ramadan he was introducing it into the sacred space and that brought it to a head. Ramadan is a time of spiritual reflection and Youssou was introducing this music as a way of spiritual reflection, and so it just illustrated his point in a particularly clear, black-and-white way. I think no matter when he released it, it would have raised eyebrows and been a topic of discussion, but doing it this way was very intentional.

/One/: Has his popularity been restored?

CV: It was such an extraordinary thing that happened around the album: the Grammy and the endorsement from religious singer Mustapha M’baye. What you see in the film when they go into that studio to sing about the Prophet Mohammad, it’s the first time that a religious singer was in a recording studio. You had music in the spiritual realm but it wasn’t recorded and it certainly wasn’t released. It was recorded in a tape recorder and when you walk the street you hear it but Mustapha, by crossing that line, lent his support to Youssou, which was a very big deal because he’s one of the most celebrated religious leaders in Senegal. And the Grammy was like winning a gold medal—that’s the only way to think about it. No one knew what a Grammy was. Kabou Gueye, the assistant composer turned to me once it happened and asked, “What’s a Grammy?” I said, “It’s a big international award.” It was the first time a Senegalese had ever won it. I think Senegal was such a tolerant society that allowed that reconciliation, when do you see the media admitting they’re wrong? No one does that. In Senegal they said, maybe we were wrong. Now, there’s a whole genre of sacred recorded music. There’s a woman who was one of Youssou’s backup singers that is now a famous Sufi recorded artist.

“Are you still living in New York?” Noboru asked me.  I told him yes.  “I’ll never go back there,” he said.   Before Noboru lived alone in Maine, he was in New York.  He worked as an architectural designer, subject to a fast-pace, stressful life.  He developed cancer.  Attributing the disease to his lifestyle, he moved to Maine, and recovered.  Morning walks, a macrobiotic diet, and making birdhouses were part of that process.

Noboru told my father and me he hadn’t been making birdhouses lately because not enough people were buying them.  But he agreed to show them to us anyway.  Gingerly he turned the door handle of the bright red shed, giving it a gentle push.  The door made a high-pitched squeaking noise, as if caught by surprise.  The birdhouses had a layer of dust over them, and cobwebs had begun to envelope them like fishnets.

Noboru makes his birdhouses with all “found” materials— door hinges and tiny pieces of tin roofs and driftwood.  Many of his birdhouses have branches extending from, or even enshrouding them like vines.  One birdhouse is a triptych—a red house, a blue house and a white house, stacked one on top of the other, and secured by thin iron rods.  Another is made from layers of birch bark.  The word “peace” is inscribed on a number of the houses, written sideways in white paint, and engraved on a square of bronze hidden behind a tiny wooden door that opens like a mailbox.

As we admired the birdhouses, a van pulled up into the driveway.  No one ever comes to visit Noboru.  The van door slid open and a woman in her late fifties emerged.  She wore glasses, a black shirt, and a long skirt with streaks of blue and pink across it.  Her light brown hair moved buoyantly around her head.  She walked towards the house, carrying a blue pocket-sized Bible and a folder that said “The Watchtower” on the front.

“Good morning,” the woman said cheerfully, like a neighbor delivering banana bread.  “Do you live here?” she asked Noboru.

“Yes.”

“I’m visiting folks around these parts this morning, and thought I’d stop by.”  She paused.  Noboru made no reaction.  “May I ask if you belong to any religion?”

“Yes I do.”

“Which one?”

“Buddhism.”

The woman smiled.  Noboru’s face was motionless, as if he were wearing a Japanese mask.

“Do you believe in God?” asked the woman.

“I’d rather not talk about that.”  Now, he looked a bit disturbed.

“And how about you?” she turned to my father, whose forehead was covered in small beads of sweat from our earlier jog.

“I am an atheist,” he said, with an audible leftover accent from his Southern upbringing.

“Oh, right…what is that, that you don’t believe in God? Or that you’re not sure?”

“I’m 90% sure that God doesn’t exist, and 10% unsure.”

The woman nodded her head up and down, up and down, curls bouncing.

“Have you felt that way since you were a little boy or did something happen to make you feel this way? Or is it the wickedness argument?”

“I am a scientist.” The room was still.  “I believe that all natural phenomena can be explained by science.  And yes, I do also believe that if there were a God, he or she would not allow all the wicked things that happen in our world to take place.”

“Uh huh. Well I tell people the God we believe in is one who is working to make things better real soon.”

The room breathed out a musty, damp wood smell.  I studied the intricate patterns on the floorboards.   Noboru looked out the screened window, towards the street.  The woman looked at Noboru, and my father looked at the birdhouses, which suddenly felt like human presences that had been intruded upon.

“I think that if God were to exist, he or she would live in these birdhouses,” said my father, gesturing in their direction.

“Yes, I think God encourages everyone to find his or her own creativity.”  The woman looked at Noboru.  “He doesn’t want to talk about what he believes in, does he,” she said, with a smile that bordered on sadness.

“Thank you for coming this morning,” said my father.  “I know you are committed to what you do.”

“Thank you,” she said, still smiling.  “Enjoy the day.”  She turned from her spot in the doorway and got back into her car, joining the group waiting for her.  The door slid closed, clicking with a certain finality.

Noboru absentmindedly ran his hand across the roof of a birdhouse.  We all faced the birdhouses now, which stood silently like upright monks.

—

Photo: Anthony Rhoades

Elyse Lightman holds an MFA in Creative Nonfiction Writing from the School of the Arts at Columbia. When she is not writing about Maine she writes about Cambodia, which is where she helps run a non-profit to empower a new generation of women leaders. She lives in Brooklyn.

Illustrations by John Dermot Woods

Painting by Andrea Chung

Text by Joshua Korenblat

We have an intimate relationship with sugar; its taste often evokes sweet personal memories. Yet in her painting, Agatha Barton III, Andrea Chung imbues sugar with a resonance far beyond the family kitchen.  For Chung, sugar and spice, its twin ingredient, evoke memories bitter and sweet, epic and familiar: Houston, her childhood home, and the colonial West Indies, the Caribbean island home of her ancestors. Chung paints a portrait of her grandmother, who lived in the West Indies, and mixes sugar into her paint medium. Many people identify cane sugar with the Caribbean, but colonizers imported it from India, its native land. Slaves and indentured laborers sent to the Caribbean worked in service to imperial economics afforded by sugar.

“Sugar contains the history of the Caribbean and with it, the history of cane plantations, slavery, indentured servitude, the history of rum and piracy and on a more personal scale, the history of black cake and tamarind balls and the history of family gatherings and holiday sweets and dessert,” Chung says.

In Agatha Barton III, medium and meaning intersect. Unlike many Western figurative painters, such as Jan Van Eyck or Vermeer, Chung’s paint does not purely create an illusion of other surfaces and textures: jewel-like, light as fabric, smooth as enamel.

Instead, the seemingly incongruent paint medium of sugar becomes a metaphor for history, “With my work,” Chung says, “I encourage my viewer to look for the paint, or rather the ingredients that stand in place of the paint.”

In the West Indies, cultures intermingled like the ingredients of a flavorful dish. Similar to other members of the nomadic Hakka people of China, Chung’s paternal grandfather left China for economic opportunity; he came to Jamaica as a stowaway on a boat. Meanwhile, Chung’s paternal grandmother was from the West Indies. Chung notes that Chinese laborers were denied immigration to the United States by an act of Congress in 1882, and that in part most West Indian Chinese owe their legacy to this exclusionary act.

Many men and women in the West Indies are now prone to diabetes and fibroid tumors, perhaps because of the omnipresence of sugar in their diet. Chung herself has also suffered deleterious health effects related to this genetic legacy. The story of sugar, that glittering good packed away in cane fields and baked into so many Caribbean dishes, quietly becomes a human story. Other edible goods tell the same story, such as the curry brought over from South Asia to the West Indies, with its mellifluous blend of spices: coriander, tumeric, and cumin. Each spice tells us a story in its own voice, and ultimately food becomes the currency common to our bloodlines.

In her art, Chung reveals how the past can visit us even with our eyes closed—maybe in a spoonful of curry—its taste and smell pleasing and powerful, its rich, familiar nature at once embodying past, present, and future.

—

Andrea Chung was born in Newark, NJ 1978, and raised in Houston, Texas.  She received a BFA at Parsons School of Design in New York and a MFA at the Mount Royal School of Art at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, Maryland. She also attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2008 and was a recipient of a 2008-2009 Fulbright Scholarship to Mauritius. Chung’s work as has been featured in the NEXT exhibition at Art Chicago, Off Color, curated by Hank Willis Thomas and Kalia Brooks at RUSH Arts, ACADEMY 2008 at the Conner Contemporary in Washington, D.C., the Arlington Arts Center in Virginia, the Sonya Hayes Stone Center at UNC Chapel Hill curated by Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum, the Gateway Gallery at the Maryland Institute College of Art as part of Transformations, the 3rd Annual Conference on African American Art hosted by MICA’s Center for Race and Culture and Harvard University. Her work was featured in the academic journal, Small Axe and was most recently displayed at Le Flash in Castleberry Hill in Atlanta, Teachers College at Columbia University and in the 2009 Verge Art Fair at Art Basel.

a rearview mirror
cracked /
shock of an ice-cube biting liquid

Heard the sound / didn’t know yet
where it was coming from

That mirror / gave up our ghosts

This fine clear summer morning / a line from Chekhov:
it would be strange not to forgive

(I in my body now alive)

All are human / give / forgive
drop the charges / let go / put away

Rage for the trusting
it would be strange not to say

Love? yes
in this lifted hand / behind
these eyes
upon you / now

©Adrienne Rich 2007

…it would be strange not to forgive: “Essentially all this is crude and meaningless…as an avalanche which involuntarily rolls down a mountain and overwhelms people. But when one listens to music, all this is: that some people lie in their graves and sleep, and that one woman is alive…and the avalanche seems no longer meaningless, since in nature everything has a meaning. And everything is forgiven, and it would be strange not to forgive.” (Anton Chekhov, Themes, Thoughts, Notes and Fragments. Tr. L.S.Koteliansky and Leonard Woolf.)

—–

Photo: Lilian Kemp

Adrienne Rich’s most recent books of poetry are Telephone Ringing in the Labyrinth: Poems 2004-2006 and The School Among the Ruins: 2000-2004. She edited Muriel Rukeyser’s Selected Poems for the Library of America. A Human Eye: Essays on Art in Society, appeared in April 2009. She is a recipient of the National Book Foundation’s 2006 Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters among other honors. She lives in California.

“Open the window, Tavi,” Donato calls out as he shapes the fade. The client’s shoulders react: Relief is near.

Tavi opens the window because the fan isn’t working. The shears, the clippers, the lathering machine will be all the music this afternoon. The boom box isn’t working, either. The television hasn’t worked in years and stares blankly from the corner of the room. It’s the shop’s only useless mirror, although Tavi can see the bright window’s miniature version on the screen, his stick-thin body bending down to let the airplanes in.

“Let the airplanes in,” his father says at home, meaning “Open the window.” Both at home and at work, opening the window lets in the same noise. Home is less than a block away. LaGuardia not far from the neighborhood. The neighborhood right under the path each airplane takes to the landing strip.

Tavi wants to greet the first airplane, but then Donato says, “How’s that?” And the client answers, “That’s fine. Thanks, man.” Another buzz cut completed, another wipe across the chair damp with sweat.

“Tavi,” Donato says, pointing to the seat.

Tavi rushes over, reaching for the rag stuffed into his back pocket. From the corner of his eye, he catches the brief exchange of money, the handshake, the client posing in front of the mirror one last time before he heads outside to charm the world.

“Come-mierda,” Donato says when he pockets the money. It means the tip is low.

Donato yanks the boom box cord out of the socket and wraps it around his hand like a bandage. “I’m going to get this piece of crap fixed,” he says.

“What about the fan?” Tavi asks, and then immediately regrets it.

Donato glares at him. “Just keep the window open,” he says. “I’ll be right back. If a client comes, sit him down on the goddamn chair. Coño.”

Donato walks off with the boom box beneath one arm, the other reaches for the cigarettes. Tavi sticks his head out the window and watches him turn the corner. On hot summer days like this no one’s out on the streets and men are least likely to come in for a cut.

Across the way, the old woman with a wrap around her head props a pillow on the sill and leans on it. She’s keeping watch over the street as well. For one brief moment she makes eye contact with Tavi, but quickly moves on. She has seen him as many times as he’s seen her. Nothing new here.

Tavi wishes his father could do the same at home. The reason Tavi lets the airplanes in is because his father can’t come out. The wheelchair’s too heavy for him to maneuver, so he sits in the kitchen with enough food on the table to get him through the day, until Tavi comes home to take him to the toilet. It’s like taking care of a cat that will look after itself for extended periods of time. The small television on the counter keeps him entertained, even though most of the time his father just dozes off. In case of an emergency, the phone’s within reach; the shop’s number on speed dial. If it weren’t for the back pain he’d rather stay in bed all day.

If it weren’t for the stroke, Tavi’s father might still be cutting hair at his old shop instead of sending Tavi over just to get his son out of sight. But Tavi takes his job seriously anyway. It’s the only place he ever gets to go.

The shop door opens and a man walks in. “Are you available?” he asks.

Tavi’s too stunned to speak.

“Okay,” the man says to himself. “Are you all right, buddy?”

Men are not supposed to be this beautiful. Or rather, beautiful men don’t come into Donato’s shop. Usually kids with acne, multiple piercings, and tattoos on their napes. Usually old men with weak dentures, who have been coming in for so many years they still remember the previous barber, Tavi’s father, and ask about him. Usually the random man in his forties, like the one who was just here, who walks in on impulse. But not men like this with perfect lips and perfect skin, the cheekbones and eyebrows perfectly matched and even. Tavi runs his tongue along his crooked set of teeth.

“Donato will be right back,” Tavi says, shaken out of his spell.

The perfect man nods his head.

“You can take a seat,” he says, motioning to the barber’s chair.

The perfect man nods his head again and sits down. He considers himself on the mirror and then notices Tavi staring. He turns around. “Octavio,” he says, holding out his hand.

“Yes,” Tavi says, extending his own hand. “But everybody calls me Tavi.” He’s embarrassed suddenly that he’s still carrying around the nickname the old men gave him when Tavi was the unfortunate son of the barber who lost his wife when his son was only 5 years old.

“That’s funny,” the perfect man says. “I meant, my name’s Octavio. But I guess yours is too. What a coincidence, right?”

Tavi freezes again. Octavio and Octavio, like the matching pairs on a domino tile. Tavi, with the scent of tonic and disinfectant; Octavio with the scent of cologne as strong as solid wood, his skin taut and glowing with the pores of an athlete.

“When’s your birthday?” Tavi asks.

“What?” Octavio says. He lets out an uncertain laugh, but then adds, “July 12.”

“Mine’s on July 21,” Tavi says. His eyes widen.

“And what does that mean, that’s we’re like twins or something? Crazy.”

Before Tavi can explain what it means, Donato comes back, excited to have a client waiting on the chair. He comes up to shake Octavio’s hand and swats Tavi away. “Give the man some breathing room, will you, Tavi? Sorry about that, muchacho.”

“Nah, it’s cool,” Octavio says. “We were just shooting the shit. It turns out we have the same name, and that we’re born in the same month. I think we’re twins separated at birth or something.”

Both men burst out laughing. Tavi reddens. But then Donato says, “Tavi, go dig out some more neck strips, will you? I’m running low.” The business at hand continues.

Some clients shut their eyes during a cut, others keep a close eye on the barber’s job, and still others let their eyes lock on any movement they can catch through the mirror, except those who come in wearing glasses. Those men are usually near sighted and stare helplessly into space. Octavio is the eyes-shut type, though he keeps a conversation going with Donato the entire time.

“So do you think De la Hoya’s really going to hang up the gloves for good, or is he bullshitting again?”

“Who knows? Well, he can always go back to that singing career he put on hold.”

“Coño, I hope not!” Donato says, and they laugh.

Tavi suspects Octavio keeps his eyes shut because he’s getting looked at. Octavio is the perfect man; he should be used to it. The shape of his head is perfect. His hairline is perfect, the backs of his ears—beautiful, symmetrical ears, not alien looking appendages like on most men—perfect. Every once in a while Octavio opens his eyes and notices Tavi. This excites Tavi, getting noticed by the perfect man.

“Tavi,” Donato says, waving him over.

And then an airplane coming in stops Tavi in his tracks and he rushes back to the window. The magic of the engine cuts through the sky loud and long. It will not be ignored.

“He’s never been on one. Can you believe it?” Donato tells Octavio. “Thirty-five years old and never been on one.”

Octavio doesn’t respond, though he probably understands the code. Donato’s telling him that Tavi isn’t like normal men. Even if Octavio has never been on a plane either, it’s not the same as Tavi never being on a plane. Perhaps Octavio never goes anywhere by choice, but Tavi, he never will.

“Tavi, go get me some water from Chong’s, will you?” Donato says. Tavi is devastated that he has to leave on an errand. To Chong’s, of all places, where the pace is slow and where hardly anyone hurries in or out.

Reluctantly, Tavi takes the five-dollar bill from Donato and walks out into the heat, away from Octavio. He glances back one last time and sees the perfect man sitting there, becoming more perfect still each time the razor caresses the surface of his perfect scalp.

Out on the sidewalk he considers walking faster, but the heat’s holding him down. The old woman looking out the window follows him with her eyes all the way to the corner. Chong’s.

When he was younger, Chong worked the register himself, but then he grew old, and then he died and then the bodega was sold to the Koreans, but everyone still calls it Chong’s. The Koreans don’t care. They didn’t even bother to change the name on the sign over the awning.

“Go get me a pack of cigarettes from Chong’s,” his father used to say. “Go get a beer for Emilio.” And Chong would hand over the cigarettes and beer to little Tavi without any money changing hands.

Tavi’s father would take care of the debt eventually.

That was a different time, when kids could be entrusted with chores like those. When a man like Emilio could sit on the extra chair all day and everyone knew he wasn’t waiting in line for a cut. If he ever needed a cut, Tavi’s father simply walked over and clipped the sideburns, which were the only parts that grew anymore. Now Emilio was dead, and so was Chong.

Tavi walks in and out of the bodega, heads back to the shop, but by the time he steps inside, Octavio’s gone. Tavi stands there with his armpits damps, a row of salty beads over his lip, which he sucks into his mouth. The crumpled cape over the chair looks like a cocoon that has just released its butterfly. Tavi has the urge to hold it, smell the ghost of the perfection that has walked away.

“Here’s your water,” Tavi says, begrudgingly.

Donato takes the water with one hand. With the other, he slaps Tavi across the face.

It takes a minute for Tavi to orient himself again.

“What are you, a pato?” Donato says.

For a second this confuses Tavi. He hasn’t heard the word in a while. Puerto Ricans say pato. They mean maricón, what his father would say, because he’s Mexican. “Maricón! Puto, mama-huevo!” every time Tavi had to bathe him.

Pato: quack-quack. Fag, the kids say.

“Why did you keep staring at that guy? You were making him nervous. He’ll never come around here again,” Donato says.

The severity of the statement sinks in. Octavio will never be back. He has lost his perfect double. It stings more than the slap across the face.

“Go home and check in on your father,” Donato commands.

Tavi wobbles out of the shop and heads left. The old woman across the way is also gone. The window gapes out onto the street like a toothless mouth.

When he enters the house, Tavi expects to see his father asleep, but he’s wide awake for a change.

“What did you do this time?” his father says without turning away from the television screen.

Tavi doesn’t need to answer. It doesn’t matter. It’s just another day he has disappointed his father.

“All this shit on the news,” his father says. “Makes me want to roll the chair to the middle of the street and be done with it.”

Tavi turns off the television, clears the table and without having to ask he guides his father’s chair to the bathroom, where he will help him onto the toilet and wipe him clean after he’s done. When Tavi gets closer to his father, the odor of urine and rancid breath assaults his nose, kills the last traces of Octavio’s scent.

Tavi’s father wants scrambled eggs for dinner. He’s limited to soft foods now that most of his teeth are gone. When he still had a full set and the paralysis was new, Tavi’s father bemoaned the fact that he never taught Tavi how to cook, that he spent most of the evenings swatting his son out of the kitchen. For many years afterward, Tavi taught himself through trial and error. Mostly error, which his father threw off his plate for Tavi to clean.

“Put more mayonnaise on it,” his father says as soon as Tavi places the plate in front of him.

“Cholesterol, Papa,” Tavi says.

His father reaches down to the plate, and then splatters a handful of scrambled egg at Tavi. He started doing this when he could no longer spit.

Tavi lets the egg run down his shirt as he sits to eat.

“Anything exciting down at the shop,” his father asks, taking a spoonful of egg.

“The boom box broke,” Tavi offers.

“Goddamn Donato,” his father says. “He pushes the buttons too hard.”

They eat in silence after that. His father chews with his mouth open and licks his lips clean when he’s done. He then belches, farts, and belches again before slumping down on his seat like a deflated balloon.

“I wonder if Emilio’s coming over to play dominoes,” his father says. “Goddamn Donato, the boom box.” He’s sleepy. He becomes disoriented when he’s sleepy. Tavi rolls him over to the bedroom.

His father’s body feels weightless now. Or maybe Tavi has done this so many times that it’s like breathing, no effort at all. He lifts him up to the bed, stretches his legs out and pulls off his sweatpants. The underwear is slightly soiled, but Tavi will wait until tomorrow to change him, just in case he wets the bed.

Tavi expects his father will play dominoes in his dreams, resurrecting his old playing buddies—Emilio, Rorro, Santi, and sometimes Chong, who used to live a few doors down. All of them reaching into the center of the table to mix the tiles, the sound of bone striking bone. The sound of bone scratching wood as they claimed their playing pieces. And then the faces pairing up, the domino snake coming together inch by inch. But now the domino box sits neglected like a closed coffin, buried in a drawer somewhere, because Tavi’s father is the only player left.

Back in the day they stayed up until midnight or until someone’s wife sent a death threat of “get back home or else” to one of the players—whichever came last. They all had sons, but none was interested in coming over to play with Tavi. They all had daughters and all of them were afraid of him. Loco Tavi, Looney Tavi, Lelo Tavi. So he sat around mostly, just watching the game, startled whenever one of the men slapped a tile onto the surface too hard.

Once in a while one of the men would take pity on him and hand him a dollar, tell him to go buy himself a candy bar. But as soon as Tavi grew too old for candy bars the old men ignored him, except when they needed him to fetch a beer from the fridge.

Since Tavi can remember, his life has been constrained to this block. Even the school, where he flunked three times and was able to drop out as a 16-year-old eighth-grader, was less than a block away. The only time he ever moved beyond the block was when his father had the stroke, and Tavi had to sit in the hospital waiting room until his buddies arrived.

That night was also the only time he didn’t sleep at home. He slept at Emilio’s house, in his son’s room. Donato was kind then, embracing him in the dark while Tavi cried for his father. And then, years later, when Donato took over the shop, Donato stopped loving him. A decade of lovelessness.

Tavi pulls the covers over his father and backs out of the room, closing the door. He goes all over the house and closes every window. It’s time to keep the airplanes out. What a surprise then, when he gets to the south window facing the back street that the young people own when the day ends. It’s Octavio, standing under the streetlight with two kids in front of him.

When Octavio suddenly looks back, Tavi blushes but doesn’t hide. Octavio motions to his cohorts, who turn around and snicker.

“Hey, Tavi!” the black kid says. “Come here.”

Tavi’s body spasms. In all these years of watching the young men congregate he has never been invited. He has been teased, whistled at, and a few times they threw rocks or empty beer bottles in his direction, but never this.

The other kid, Santi’s grandson, waves. “Come here!” he commands.

More snickering. Octavio smiles his perfect smile, his teeth sparkle like jewels.

Tavi looks over at his father’s bedroom. The door is shut. The old paralytic is out and won’t wake up, even if he pisses on himself. Suddenly his heart starts to beat faster. He’ll go outside and join the guys.

Something new moves through his body, as if he’s pumping different blood. It pushes him out the front door that much quicker, and before he realizes it he’s standing a few feet away from Octavio and the two kids.

Octavio nods. Tavi recognizes this nod. It is friendly, it is beautiful. He gets closer.

“Hey, Tavi,” Octavio says. “I didn’t get to say good-bye earlier.”

“Good-bye,” Tavi says, and the kids laugh, Santi’s grandson covering his mouth with his hand.

“Yeah,” Octavio says. “Anyway, I was talking to Darryl and Manny here, and we were thinking about going on a little trip.”

“To Brooklyn?” Tavi says. The kids mock him, but Octavio protects Tavi, shushes them.

“Actually, to the islands,” Octavio says. “Ever been to the islands? To the D.R.?”

Tavi shakes his head. His father only longed for Mexico, a country he left long before Tavi was born, and which he never returned to.

“You want to come along?” Octavio says. “We’re flying there.”

Tavi’s struck numb by the magnitude of the moment. Not only might he leave the block, he might even leave the country. By plane. But it’s the possibility of keeping Octavio’s company that overwhelms him the most. This is too much for him. He feels as if he’s just gotten slapped across the face again. He stumbles a little and this only incites more laughter.

“I have to go home now,” Tavi says.

“Okay,” Octavio says. “But think about it. It’s a weekend trip. Meet us here tomorrow by 6 if you want to come along.” Octavio stretches his hand out and Tavi takes it. It’s the perfect arm and the perfect hand. Octavio is the perfect man. Tavi walks back to the house, euphoric. Not even the cackling from Darryl and Manny can bring him down. When he gets home he immediately runs to the back window. Octavio’s still there with the two kids. It’s not his imagination, it’s real. The invitation’s real. Even when they don’t turn around to look at him the rest of the time they stand under the streetlight, he believes it happened.

When Octavio and the kids walk away eventually, Tavi feels the pang of abandonment, so he lies down on his bed and presses his fists to his chest. This is how he coped during recess all those years, when no one would ask him to play, when he wanted to play but was denied entry into the circle of friends. The only time he stood at the center was when those circles of laughter were circles of ridicule: Loco Tavi, Looney Tavi, Lelo Tavi.

Tavi rolls over on his fists, giving his back to the memory hovering above him. Octavio will protect him. Octavio will stop the teasing. Octavio will bring out the Octavio in Tavi. A familiar stirring in his pants makes him grind his hips into the mattress.

Tavi still feels high the next morning as he dresses his father and props him up on the wheelchair. He hums while cooking breakfast.

“What the hell happened to you last night?” his father asks. “Did you finally get laid?”

“Actually,” Tavi says. “I got invited to the D.R.”

His father laughs. “You? You don’t even know where the fuck that is. Or what the fuck that is. Who invited you?”

Tavi shakes his head proudly. “A friend.”

“You have a friend?” his father says. “I see. What’s his name, Rockefeller? Rockefeller’s taking you to the D.R. on his private jet? Is that it?”

“Say what you will, Papa, I’m going.”

His father’s mouth drops. “What the—you’re completely out of your mind. I know you’re stupid but you can’t be this stupid. How the hell do you think that’s possible? You’ve never even been on a plane before. You’ll have a heart attack before it even takes off. Do you realize how terrible it is to ride an airplane?”

Tavi stops in his tracks. He hadn’t considered that point. “What does it feel like?” he asks.

“It’s like getting shot through a cannon,” Tavi’s father says. “And you better pray that the plane doesn’t splatter you all over the runway when it lands.”

A chill runs through Tavi’s veins, but he refuses to let his fear show.

“Do-do-do you want some more eggs for breakfast, Pa-pa-pa?” he says in a dry voice.

“No,” Tavi’s father says. “I don’t want you to be late to the shop. You go on and yank this nonsense out of your head. You’ll get hurt.”

Tavi shakes nervously the rest of the morning: at home while he’s setting his father’s lunch and adjusting the television; at work while he’s cleaning combs and shaking the neck dusters.

“What’s the matter with you?” Donato says. “Open the window, will you? Before it starts to get hot in here again.”

But Tavi doesn’t want to let the airplanes in. So he hesitates.

“Open the goddamn window, coño!”

When Tavi opens the window, the noise of a plane flying overhead floods into the room, knocking him down.

“Carajo, what has gotten into you this morning? Are you on drugs?” Donato nudges Tavi up with his foot. “Get up before someone comes in and sees you lying there like a tecato.”

Tavi stands up and stares down at his feet.

“What’s the matter with you, huh?”

Tavi rubs his eyes. The gesture softens Donato a bit, so he asks again, lowering his voice this time: “What’s going on, Tavi? Someone’s been mean to you?”

Tavi shakes his head.

“Then what? Come on, let’s have it. I don’t have all day.”

“What does it feel like to fly?”

Donato furrows his brow, and then just as quickly he stretches it open in amusement. “Now who would be cruel enough to put something like that in your head?” he says. “No use worrying about something that’s never going to happen, Tavi. No use worrying about it.” Donato shakes the capes off and begins to fold them.

“Does it feel like getting shot out of a cannon?” Tavi persists.

Donato rolls his eyes. “All right. If I tell you, will you promise not to bother me the rest of the day?”

Tavi nods.

Donato sighs. “Well,” he says. “It tickles the stomach a little bit, especially the first time around. But it’s just like riding in the backseat of a car going fast.”

“Like on a bus?” Tavi says.

“Faster,” Donato says. “Like maybe an ambulance. It’s bulky but it gets somewhere fast. And it’s safe because nothing gets in the way.”

“And how about when it lands?” Tavi asks.

“Just like coming to a red light with plenty of warning. No surprises there either. There. Are you happy?”

Tavi nods.

“Good, now get to putting all these things away, I’m going to get a cup of coffee.”

For the rest of the day Tavi’s satisfied with Donato’s answers. But a strange sensation still gnaws at him about why his father would want to keep him from going on a trip. And then it dawns on him: because Tavi takes care of him. If Tavi leaves, who will take father to the bathroom? Who will make his eggs in the morning?

The day goes by quickly for a change. Tavi keeps to himself, which pleases Donato, and all the while as he sweeps hair and wipes off razors, Tavi comes up with the perfect plan to fly away to the D.R. with Octavio, the perfect man. The plan is this: to leave someone in charge of Papa for the weekend. He’s got it all figured out.

When 5 o‘clock rolls around, Tavi doesn’t even bother saying anything as he walks out of the shop before closing time, and neither does Donato ask for an explanation.

“You’re home early again?” his father says as soon as Tavi comes in. “Don’t let me find out you’re getting in Donato’s way. If he stops paying you, you stop eating.”

Tavi rolls his eyes.

“Don’t you roll your eyes at me, faggot. I’m still your father.”

Tavi grabs his father’s wheelchair and jerks it away from the table.

“What the—”

“You’re going on a little trip too, Papa,” Tavi says.

“A trip? Where? Where are you taking me? Let go of me,” his father says, flinging his arms back. Tavi dodges the knuckles. When they get to the bed, Tavi’s father tries to resist even more. “It’s too early for bed! It’s too early for bed!” he protests. But Tavi doesn’t put his father to bed. He brings his father’s body down on the floor.

“You’re crazy! Someone, help! Help!”

Tavi bends down and covers his father’s mouth. “Quiet, old man,” he says. “Look. You let me go on this trip or I will never come back—and then who’s going to wipe your ass?”

The threat calms his father down.

“Where are you going? What are you going to do with me?”

“I told you, I’m going to the D.R. for the weekend. And you’re going to the hospital.”

“The hospital? No, don’t send me to the hospital. They’re mean to me there. They won’t take good care of me there.”

“Just for the weekend, Papa,” Tavi says. “I promise.”

“Please! Please!” Tavi’s father begs, letting go of tears this time.

“Stop it!” Tavi says. “You owe me, Papa. You owe me good, and you know it. Don’t think I don’t know about the money you get from the government.”

“And how else am I supposed to take care of you?” his father stammers. “Your mother abandoned us, you know. Drunk herself to death. Even drank when you were still inside of her, which is why you were born a retard.”

“I’m not a retard, Papa,” Tavi says. “It’s because you never let me go anywhere.”

“There’s nowhere to go,” his father says. “Where do you want to go?”

“To the D.R.”

“Don’t be an idiot! Pick me up!” His father bangs his fists against the floor. “Can’t you see someone’s playing a joke on you?”

“No one’s playing a joke on me!” Tavi says. “Shut up!” Tavi raises his hand and his father covers his head in protection.

“Now you just lie there,” Tavi says. “It’s my turn to enjoy some time with my friends. So you better keep your mouth shut for a change. You better not tell the ambulance people that I put you on the floor. Tell them that you fell, that I’m out of town. I’ll come to the hospital and pick you up when I return. Will you do that for me, Papa, just this time, pretty please?”

After a brief silence, Tavi’s father closes his eyes and nods in resignation. Tavi leaves him there, the door propped open so that the paramedics can see him right away as they come in. He then goes to his room and packs a few items—an extra pair of shorts, a shirt and socks. His toothbrush. And then he goes over to the cupboard beneath the sink and pulls out his father’s cash box. He spills everything into the backpack. If this is going to be the only time, it might as well be a good time. He already sees himself in the D.R., wherever that is, standing underneath the streetlight that pours over Octavio like a rain of gold. And Tavi will be the envy of all the other kids on the island.

Next, the call. He clears his throat, picks up the phone and dials 9-1-1.

“Hello,” he says in the raspiest voice he can muster. “I’ve fallen off the bed. I need help, por favor.”

The dispatcher asks him to confirm the home address. Yes, that’s correct.

“And please hurry,” Tavi pleads.

His father keeps his head toward the open bedroom door and simply watches wide-eyed as Tavi runs back and forth.

“The ambulance will be here soon,” Tavi says. “Remember: play sick.”

Tavi looks at the clock. It’s still early. He steps out of the house and is about to run to the back street to meet up with Octavio, when suddenly a pang of guilt stops him. Perhaps he should wait for the ambulance to show up, to make sure he sees the paramedics take his father away to safety. He scurries over to the side of the house. By the time he presses his body against the wall, the ambulance sirens announce its arrival.

Unlike what he’s seen on television, there doesn’t seem to be much of a rush here. The paramedics take their time walking up the steps and walking in. Minutes later, Tavi’s heart stops when he actually sees the gurney get rolled out of the house, his father strapped tightly to the metal frame, an oxygen mask over his mouth. His father looks more frail among the able bodies that surround him. Tavi thinks his father spots him as he’s hoisted up into the ambulance, so he jerks back. No, he couldn’t have seen him, not that far away. The lifting of his hand, the twitching of his fingers, just so, could have meant he was waving good-bye to the house, not to his son, who was standing just out of reach.

Tavi looks around for signs of Octavio and nothing. It’s already 6 o’clock. Two minutes pass, then another two. That’s when he spots Manny, Santi’s grandson, walking out of his house. This is it, he thinks, but then Manny starts to bounce a basketball on the sidewalk. And then his cell phone rings and he sits down on the steps, both feet rolling the ball as if he’s got nowhere else to be.

Tavi attempts to wave at him, to let him know that he’s waiting, that he’s made it, but Manny doesn’t see him. Tavi’s afraid to yell because the ambulance is still parked in front. And then Manny goes back into the house, leaving the ball to roll on its own for a few seconds before it stops cold at the fence. It simply sits there and will likely stay there all evening, motionless and without life. Empty house, empty street, and Tavi the lonely black line on la cajita, the domino with the two expansive blanks. Another minute passes, then another.

Suddenly everything speeds up: the closing of the ambulance doors, the paramedics climbing back into the cabin, the driving away. And that’s when Tavi hears it: an airplane flying above him, a harsh, invasive noise that collapses the entire sky on top of him. That’s his airplane. He missed it. Octavio has gone off to the D.R. by himself. And now his father, too, is flying off without him.

The siren cries out again and this disorients Tavi. It’s like another slap on the face and all he can do is run out and chase the ambulance down the street, calling out, “Papa! Papa! Papa!” while the old woman, who leans on her comfortable pillow on the sill, shakes her head as she goes along for the ride.

—–

Rigoberto Gonzalez

Rigoberto González is the author of eight books, most recently of the young adult novel, The Mariposa Club, and a story collection, Men without Bliss. The recipient of Guggenheim and NEA fellowships, winner of the American Book Award, and The Poetry Center Book Award, he writes a Latino book column for the El Paso Times of Texas. He is contributing editor for Poets and Writers Magazine, on the Board of Directors of the National Book Critics Circle, and is Associate Professor of English at Rutgers—Newark, State University of New Jersey.

Laila Lalami was born and raised in Morocco. She studied Linguistics at Université Mohammed-V in Rabat, University College London, and the University of Southern California. Her work has appeared in The Boston Globe, The Los Angeles Times, The Nation, The New York Times, The Washington Post and elsewhere. She is the recipient of a British Council Fellowship and a Fulbright Fellowship. She was short-listed for the Caine Prize for African Writing (the “African Booker”) in 2006 and for the National Book Critics’ Circle Nona Balakian Award in 2009. Her debut collection of short stories, Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits, was published in the fall of 2005 and has since been translated into into six languages. Her first novel, Secret Son, was published in the spring of 2009. She is currently Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at the University of California Riverside.

Interviewed by Sara Goudarzi

Laila Lalami: I grew up speaking both Moroccan Arabic and French, but my earliest exposure to books came through French because I received a semi-colonial education that emphasized French more than Arabic. Nearly all of the children’s literature that I was exposed to as a child was in French, so when I started writing fiction, it was in that language. While I could read and write Arabic competently enough, I found it very hard to write fictional narrative in Arabic. My use of French in fiction isn’t at all that unusual for a Moroccan writer of my generation (witness, for instance, the work of Fouad Laroui, or Abdellah Taia, or Nadia Chafik, or Driss Ksikes).

However, once I left Morocco to study abroad, I started to question the bilingualism with which I had grown up. In my country, French and Arabic did not always have a harmonious relationship; rather, they were often in competition in the public sphere. I started to feel really uncomfortable with the idea of writing fiction using the colonial tongue. At the same time, I had been working on my dissertation at USC, and I had to use English daily. That’s how the idea of writing fiction in English came about. Ideally, I would have written in my native language, but since I could not, it seemed that English was my only other option. And between writing in English and not writing at all, I made the choice of writing.

/One/: How does it benefit or detriment your readers, if at all?

LL: I would hope that good fiction, by which I mean fiction that tells us a truth about the human heart, is of great benefit to readers, no matter what language it is told in.

/One/: In many ways, you are acting as a translator before you even put words on the page—meaning you’re translating ideas in your native Moroccan culture into something we can understand. How important do you think this is in our understanding of other people/cultures?

LL: I don’t know if the role of the novelist is to translate a particular culture. It is enough that the novelist try to tell the most specific, the most complex, the most truthful story she can tell. And it is that specificity, that complexity, and that truth which eludes us so much in our perceptions of other people.

/One/: Do you consider yourself particularly inventive with your usage of English? How is it different from the typical translation where the original text, written in a native language, is translated by someone else?

LL: I do play with language in my work, but in ways that may be invisible to some readers because this playfulness is characterized by absences. For instance, I try to excise from my text any American idiomatic expressions because they are often culturally specific and my characters wouldn’t be using them. I also add in words from Moroccan Arabic that are hard to translate in simple ways. For example, it is easier to use “tagine” than to say “a stew of meat and vegetables cooked in a clay pot.” I don’t know whether my process is similar to or different than one involving a translation because I haven’t had experience with translation myself.

/One/: One’s nationality can certainly differ from how one identifies culturally. How do you identify—Moroccan, Moroccan-American, African, other?—and how does that affect your relationships and the communities in which you work and live in?

LL: I identify as all those things—and others besides: woman, Arab, Muslim, progressive, and so on. I think one’s identity is fluid, and different sides of it can be reinforced depending on the social, political, or cultural situation.

/One/: When you first started thinking about your new novel, Secret Son, were you intentionally trying to tell the story of the tension between classes in Morocco, or did you start with a character and the story took off from there?

LL: I remember clearly the moment, six years ago, when I started writing Secret Son. I had this image in my mind of a young man, walking back home in the rain to the shack he shares with his mother, having just watched a movie at a nearby theater. I followed that image for years, trying to figure out who this man was by putting him in increasingly intense dramatic conflicts with people around him. It turned out that the story was about Youssef, a young man from a slum near Casablanca. He has grown up all his life thinking he was the son of a respectable schoolteacher who died in a car accident, but at the beginning of the novel, he finds out that he is in fact the son of a wealthy businessman, so he decides to go find him. It’s this journey that frames the entire novel.

/One/: You’ve mentioned in previous interviews that you identify with the protagonist, Youssef El Mekki, a young man born into poverty, yet your own background isn’t similar to his. Whose story are you telling and why was it important to you to tell it?

LL: I am telling the story of my characters. Whether I have something in common with them is beside the point—the point is for the writer to use her imaginative empathy to create the most complex, most fully realized character she can.

/One/: In your opinion, does literature play an important role in promoting tolerance and awareness?

LL: Literature is the only art that allows us direct access to the minds, thoughts, and feelings of other people. So in that sense, yes.

/One/: Who were some of your influences? Can you recommend Moroccan writers or artists who have influenced you to /One/ readers? Who are some current writers that you admire?

LL: I think that perhaps it might be more appropriate for readers and critics to tell which influences are apparent in my work. All I can tell you is that everything I live, read, hear, and experience influences my work. I can of course recommend several Moroccan writers I admire: Driss Chraibi, Leila Abouzeid, Mohammed Choukri, Mohammed Khair-Eddine, Fatema Mernissi, and Abdellatif Laabi. Other contemporary writers I admire include J. M. Coetzee, Chinua Achebe, Ahdaf Soueif, Margaret Atwood, and the late Tayeb Salih.