Windows on the World

by Matteo Pericoli

  She learned that if you are lucky enough, they would be the ones owning you.

  JOUNIEH, LEBANON

  2011

  Alaa Al Aswany

  I open my window and this is the house, in the depths of central Cairo, that looks back at me.

  The people who live in the city’s working-class neighborhoods are not ashamed of being poor. Instead, in this house I look at from my window, I see heroic efforts in the fight against poverty. For the most part the residents are tradesmen or public employees. There was a time when they earned enough to enjoy a comfortable life, but the waves of hardship rose suddenly and they drowned.

  Originally the window on the house’s first floor was ornate glass. It was broken and repaired more than once. The last time, to keep costs down, the house’s owner put up a piece of wood in place of the glass.

  In prosperous times the members of the family would pass pleasant evenings in the open air in the house’s entryway, relaxing on fine wicker chairs. The chairs broke and the father did not have the money for a new set, but he kept the shattered ones along the walls inside the entrance nevertheless. Another dream postponed, never to be realized. Just nearby is an opening in the wall for an air conditioner. The house’s owner sealed it up and painted it over because he knows that he will never be able to buy an air conditioner.

  The most beautiful things in this scene are the housedresses hanging on the second-floor clothesline. The cloth is plain and humble, but their owner did not give in. She put simple designs on their bodices and sleeves . . . they certainly seem more beautiful . . . and this is something I admire about resistance in the face of poverty. Poverty is wretched, but resistance to it brings forth a certain nobility. I have only to open the window and see this house to be overcome with a fierce compassion.

  Despite the poverty creeping without pause or pardon, I see dozens of instances of humanity. A teenager writes his first love letter and hides it in a chemistry textbook so his mother won’t see it. A girl locks her bedroom door and dances naked in front of the mirror. Young lovers exchange urgent kisses in the darkness on the roof. Nights of clumsy lovemaking in the first days of marriage. A baby’s startled scream upon entering life and a haggard old man’s voice shuddering a final time before he dies.

  All windows, no matter the variety of scenes, convey to us nothing other than life.

  (Translated from the Arabic by Geoff D. Porter.)

  CAIRO, EGYPT

  Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

  When my writing is not going well, there are two things I do in the hope of luring the words back: I read some pages of books I love or I watch the world. This is my view when I am at home in Nigeria, in the port city of Lagos. An ordinary view, with houses close together, cars crammed in corners, each compound with its own gate, little kiosks dotting the street. But it is a view choked with stories, because it is full of people. I watch them and I imagine their lives and invent their dreams.

  The stylish young woman who sells phone cards in a booth next door, the Hausa boys who sell water in plastic containers stacked in wheelbarrows. The vendor with a pile of newspapers, pressing his horn, his hopeful eyes darting up to the verandas. The bean hawker who prowls around in the mornings, calling out from time to time, a large pan on her head. The mechanics at the corner who buy from her, often jostling one another, often shirtless, and sometimes falling asleep under a shade in the afternoon.

  I strain to listen to their conversations. Once I saw two of the mechanics in a raging but brief fight. Once I saw a couple walk past holding hands, not at all a common sight. Once, a young girl in a blue school uniform, hair neatly plaited, looked up and saw me, a complete stranger, and said, “Good morning, ma,” curtsying in the traditional Yoruba way, and it filled me with gladness. The metal bars on the window—burglaryproof, as we call it—sometimes give the street the air of a puzzle, jagged pieces waiting to be fit together and form a whole.

  LAGOS, NIGERIA

  2010

  2013

  Rotimi Babatunde

  The green giants looking down at my writing table through the window must regard me with some affection because, till now, they have refrained from crashing down on my head.

  Colonialist narratives would have had savages, noble or otherwise, beating drums all night long under their canopy, and international news channels would have had child soldiers or refugees materializing out of their undergrowth. However, in harmony with the fundamental drabness of human existence, nothing so dramatic ever happens here, except for the daring leaps of the squirrels from branch to swaying branch and the swiftness with which talons snatch skywards their unlucky prey, and, occasionally, a noise like the universe’s thunderous obituary which rocks the earth when one of my green giants falls.

  Against that verdant backdrop, only a run-down generator and two water tanks, reminders of the nation’s contemporary challenges, strike discordant notes.

  Perhaps the trees tweet in floral ciphers about the migratory patterns of birds or are Facebook friends with the creepers clinging to their trunks. And who knows if, for some curious reason, their boles course with arboreal bile against the Los Angeles Lakers or if they secretly root for North London’s Gunners? And could it be possible that they dream of one day walking a dog down a deserted lane? One cannot be sure of these things, as one cannot also be sure if the trees will continue regarding me with affection, since the giants just keep standing there, regal and mute.

  In this pocket of the vanishing rainforest nestled amidst the urban sprawl of one of Africa’s most populous cities, sitting behind my writing desk which might be an ancestor to one of the trees observing it, I am thankful for the surrounding silence of the trees.

  IBADAN, NIGERIA

  Binyavanga Wainaina

  I have lived in this cramped little cottage near Ngong Forest in Nairobi for the past year. After many winters abroad, I find myself unable to work indoors. Nairobi gets very cold in June and July, but I like to work free of the prison of the house. I love the tingling pullover of night sounds and forest sounds and the bite of cold breeze and distant cars and stereos. Sometimes I close my eyes and sway my arms into patterns to move with the sensations of the strong bitpieces banging about in my temples. The bitpieces are almost always word-based moods. They live and die fast. When the bitpieces catch characters or a probable course of narrative action, my fingers start to keyboard peddle furiously. If I stop, the whole world crumbles. If the bitpiece world crumbles, I stop. Days, sometimes bad-mood weeks, can go by before momentum is found again. Tennis helps. And fermented millet porridge. And my lover.

  NAIROBI, KENYA

  2012

  2011

  Nuruddin Farah

  Often I live in one place but write about another place very much unlike it. I wrote my first novel as a student in India, and I wrote my latest while commuting among Newcastle in England, Minneapolis, and Cape Town, where I reside. As befits a writer who lives more in the mind than in my physical surroundings, I base my work on memory, which I enrich with my knowledge of Somalia—where my novels are set—and supplement with my imagination.

  When I start a work, I first visit Mogadishu to do research, then return just before publication. During this time the attitudes of the city’s residents, their dress habits, and even their diet will have undergone changes, depending on the politics of the country’s competing factions.

  On a clear day, the beauty of the city is visible from various vantage points, its landscape breathtaking. Even so, I am aware of its unparalleled war-torn decrepitude: Almost every structure is pockmarked by bullets, and many homes are on their sides, falling in on themselves.

  From the roof of any tall building you can see the Bakara market, the epicenter of resistance during the recent Ethiopian occupation; its labyrinthine redoubts remain the operations center of the militant Islamist group Shabab.
Down the hill are the partly destroyed turrets of the five-star Uruba Hotel, no longer open. Now you are within a stroll of Hamar Weyne and Shangani, two of the city’s most ancient neighborhoods, where there used to be markets for gold and tamarind in the days when Mogadishu boasted a cosmopolitan community unlike any other in this part of Africa.

  So what do I see when I am in Mogadishu? I see the city of old, where I lived as a young man. Then I superimpose the city’s peaceful past on the present crass realities, in which the city has become unrecognizable.

  MOGADISHU, SOMALIA

  Lauri Kubuitsile

  I work in an office in the garden away from my house. My window looks out on a small patch of grass where our birdbath and bird feeder are located. I spend quite a bit of time staring out at the visitors to my small bird sanctuary. Birds, much like people, are unique. On a lucky day I’ll have a visit from a small goshawk, a sparrow hawk. When he comes all the other birds clear off in fear, and yet he is the most frightened of all of them. He so desperately wants to play in the water, but spends all of his time scanning the air for enemies. Or I’ll get the pair of Indian mynas, the neighborhood bullies, who fear nothing. Sometimes a crowd of blue waxbills will stop by, polite and accommodating, but too busy to idle long, or the clumsy Cape doves, one partner in the tree watching while the other takes a drink. My favorite is a crowd of joyful starlings that splash and play and leave soaking wet. It’s relaxing to watch the birds as I search for the right word or sentence or plot twist. In many ways they’re not so different from us I think.

  MAHALAPYE, BOTSWANA

  2014

  Nadine Gordimer

  The view from my window is my jungle.

  A green darkness of tree ferns, calla lilies, luxuriant basil, the great cutout silhouette leaves of what is known as a “delicious monster” plant, all overgrown their tubs. Four frangipani trees, with delicate gray limbs with leaves and discreet sprays of flowers just now at their height, are an open screen on the jungle.

  My desk is away to the left of the window. At it, I face a blank wall. For the hours I’m at work I’m physically in my home in Johannesburg. But in a combination of awareness and senses that every fiction writer knows, I am in whatever elsewhere the story is in. Two very different circumstances among my friends Mongane Wally Serote and Amos Oz come to mind as examples. Mongane Wally wrote poetry in solitary confinement in a prison cell during apartheid, work with a view far from prison walls; Amos Oz writes his illuminating novels of Israel within Middle East politics, history, and psychological states from a sort of cellar in his house.

  I don’t believe a fiction writer needs a room with a view. His or her view: the milieu, the atmosphere, the weather of the individuals the writer is bringing to life. What they experience around them, what they are seeing, is what the writer is experiencing, seeing, living.

  We don’t need a view; we are totally engaged in those views created by and surrounding the people we are getting to know.

  JOHANNESBURG, SOUTH AFRICA

  2011

  Lidija Dimkovska

  My late childhood and entire youth window. I began to write in front of this view, and while I am here, I still do, at a low, small table. On a typewriter then, on a laptop now, but preferably in a small notebook with lines.

  I look outside often; the pictures have become very familiar. Two brothers used to live in the building with their families and their old mother, a small, tiny woman in black who always was screaming at her grandchildren, often beating them or running after them. They also were screaming, and that noise was present in the air until the parents would come home from work. Later, I found out that they moved the grandma from the first floor to the cellar, where she died. One of her daughters-in-law was Serbian; once, the Serbian woman sent me and my friends to the shop to buy her a special orange juice, Fructal. She opened it, and for the first time in my life I tried this juice that my family could not afford.

  The roof of the building was always in my view. In the mornings a stork would come to the chimney on the roof and look through my window. We looked each other in the eyes, and we understood each other. He was my sky, I was his earth’s friend. It was impossible not to write.

  SKOPJE, MACEDONIA

  2013

  Luljeta Lleshanaku

  I usually prefer to write in my bedroom at my childhood home in Kruja. Traces of the old living style are in the yard in the front of the window: the sheets hung for drying; the terra-cotta jars, or magrips, sixty-year-old objects once used by my grandfather as olive oil containers and now cut at the throat, transformed as flower vases; the ruined walls which once fenced in the tomato garden; the alembic, or lambik, which served, in the absence of running water, for washing hands after work. But also present is the invisible, the unseen: the erased objects and the missing human beings; the cut plum tree where my sister and I used to climb up during those beautiful summer mornings; the loud voice of my mother when coming back exhausted from her work; the mulberry tree which brought the insects and the good odor of pegmez, the syrup of condensed fruit; the liming thresholds before holidays; my uncles, my cousins, all those portraits and gestures which once populated this yard.

  On this inescapable, familiar stage, I can focus on the pelagic depth of a single and bounded situation. In my case creative freedom doesn’t necessarily mean hunting for a new landscape. This environment leads me toward something unmistakable, which is a kind of freedom, too.

  KRUJA, ALBANIA

  2013

  Taiye Selasi

  This summer I wrote my first ever article in Italian, considering why the Eternal City lures so many expat authors. In my limited Italian, I proposed three reasons—the beauty, the warmth, the unambitiousness—all of which come to mind when gazing at this view. When the sun begins to slip behind the gilded greens of the Janiculum, I’ll stare at the dome of St. Peter’s Basilica, breathless every time. The sheer beauty of this ancient city—the scale of its churches, the density of its trees, the pastels of its façades, the voluptuousness of its clouds—is on full display from here.

  My watch is the clock atop the Basilica of Our Lady in Trastevere, adding its chimes to the cheerful din of chatter, car horns, laughter. There’s never a dull moment in the Piazza of Santa Maria in Trastevere; one can sense as much as hear the joy of social gathering. But it is Rome’s imperfection that I find so beguiling, an invitation to play: seagulls squawking, nonne bickering, paint chipping from the walls.

  ROME, ITALY

  2013

  Tim Parks

  Do I pull up the shutter before my cappuccino or afterward? That’s the first decision of each new day. I need to see if it’s raining. The cord is worn and the shutter’s slats will jam if yanked too hard. The view scrolls up. “View” is generous. This is an ordinary courtyard in a sixties condo in working-class Milan; my small balcony hangs over the building’s main entrance, looking onto other small balconies above and to the left, some alive with plants, with dogs, cats, canaries, others storing old bikes, buggies, bits of furniture. In the middle of the space, a handkerchief of lawn and a tall horse chestnut, golden in midsummer, gaunt in winter, remind us of Nature. Otherwise it’s all cement, stucco, and tiling. Not unpleasant, not oppressive, not exciting. After ten minutes in the café (across the street) where recent Chinese arrivals serve excellent coffee and croissants, I work with my back to the open window which lets in dogs barking, a young man iPhoning on his balcony, some challenged creature who yells sporadically down the street. The portinaia sweeps fallen leaves and cigarette stubs, chatting to all comers with unremitting enthusiasm. But I’m wearing earplugs; her voice is muffled. About ten-thirty the sun hunts me down and a bright boil of light finds out how long it is since I vacuumed the parquet. Too long. I frown and turn up the brightness on this other window I’m typing into.

  MILAN, ITALY

 
2012

  Daniel Kehlmann

  I try to ignore this view. When I’m at my writing desk I turn my back to it. When I look up—though these days one no longer looks up from his work, but merely past the monitor—I see only the spines of books along their shelves. What I don’t see is the pitched window of the attic, the bend that the Spree, Berlin’s main river, makes behind me, the distant façade of the magnificent Bode Museum; above all I don’t see the three bridges with their streams of cars and pedestrians under which pass huge barges headed in both directions. Some of the barges carry freight, while others blast music as people dance and raise beer bottles on the deck, although on most of them sit tourists with their cameras, attentive as schoolchildren. I always wonder what they are photographing. The majority probably photograph the so-called Palace of Tears, that glass border-crossing station that once sat between East and West Berlin; today it is empty, although it will soon become a dance club. A few will also photograph the Berlin Ensemble, originally a theater founded and run by Bertolt Brecht; it is to the left of my window and visible only if I lean out. The most important thing, however, cannot be photographed: the invisible line where the Berlin Wall once stood. Absence can’t be captured, not even with the best camera, and so the tourists turn their helpless devices to the gray façades of the new buildings, to the rows of identical windows, one of which, high up near the roof, stands open, and behind it a barely visible figure quickly turns away and goes back to work at his desk.