by André Aciman
So let me return to Freud’s cigar and suggest—and I do so with all the hesitation in the world, because I do hate this sort of thing—that the cigar I’ve been toying with throughout is a phallic symbol.
But as Nietzsche said, I am giving you the moral before giving you the tale.
So let me propose an example.
It is taken from my own experience as the only Jewish boy in a 97-percent-Muslim school in Egypt (the other 3 or so percent were Christians). We are about to take swimming lessons and I complain to the teacher that I am feeling sick—and for all I know at that moment, I must be sick, because fear will do this to you. The reason is not hard to imagine. I didn’t want to undress before the other boys because if I did so I’d reveal to the Catholics who thought I was Catholic, to the Greek Orthodox who always suspected I was one of theirs, or to the Muslims who assumed I was soon to convert to their religion, since I was the only European boy who attended Islam class every week, that I was—to all of them—a sham. You may not feel Jewish, but Judaism is—pardon the metaphor—cut into you, as though to make sure that, however you quibble over your Jewish identity, you are branded with it for life. You—and others—would never have a doubt. But as every Elizabethan and Jacobean playwright knew, that’s precisely the tragedy of impostors. Even when they are totally alone they no longer know where their truth lies. And their awareness of this paradox resolves nothing at all.
But when I explained to some of my relatives why I hated swimming class—I who loved the sea and who loved the beach enough to wish to spend my entire life in the water, because if I am ambivalent about all things, I am certainly the most amphibian man alive—they responded with a totally different tale. During the Armenian massacre, when a Jew was mistaken for an Armenian by the Turks, all he had to do was pull down his trousers and he was given his life back.
So let me be totally blunt now and ask questions whose purpose is really not so much to arrive at answers but to give a sense of how confused I, the writer from cosmopolitan Alexandria, am on this question of the Jewish identity in a cosmopolitan world. To this end, let us assume for a split second that Freud is in fact holding a phallic symbol in his hand.
What is he saying about that phallus? Is he holding out a Jewish member and saying, “Look, ladies and gentlemen, I may be a totally cosmopolitan man, but I can never—nor do I ever wish to—forget I am Jewish”?
Or is he saying the exact opposite? “Look, stare, and observe: here is proof I am not and have never been Jewish.”
Or, “Would I even allow you to raise the question if I thought you’d come up with this?”
Or is he saying something totally different? That is: “This is just a cigar. And only a Jew from Alexandria who has never understood Freud or confronted his own anxieties about being Jewish would think otherwise. This, sir, says more about you than it ever will about me.”
And without hesitating a second I’d say that he was right, that it is all about me and my own reluctant Judaism, which desperately wishes to find similarly reluctant Jews around the world, if only to nurse the illusion that there are other Jews like me, that Jews like me are not alone, that perhaps all Jews are like me, in the sense that all Jews are other, lonely Jews, that no Jew can ever be authentically Jewish once he steps out of the ghetto, that all Jews have the diaspora branded on them so profoundly that feigning they are not Jewish is perhaps the surest way for them to discover they are nothing but Jewish, and that, in this strange new world that reminds them they are free now, some part of them is forever skulking in the dark dying to scream to another Jew: Ceci n’est pas un cigare.
A Literary Pilgrim Progresses to the Past
What my dentist cried out one day after finally removing an unsuspected fourth nerve from one of my molars comes to mind each time I try to understand myself as a writer. Do I, as a writer, have what he called a “hidden nerve”?
Don’t all writers have a hidden nerve, call it a secret chamber, something irreducibly theirs, which stirs their prose and makes it tick and turn this way or that, and identifies them, like a signature, though it lurks far deeper than their style, or their voice or other telltale antics?
A hidden nerve is what every writer is ultimately about. It’s what all writers wish to uncover when writing about themselves in this age of the personal memoir. And yet it’s also the first thing every writer learns to sidestep, to disguise, as though this nerve were a deep and shameful secret that needs to be swathed in many sheaths. Some don’t even know they’ve screened this nerve from their own gaze, let alone another’s. Some crudely mistake confession for introspection. Others, more cunning perhaps, open tempting shortcuts and roundabout passageways, the better to mislead everyone. Some can’t tell whether they’re writing to strip or hide that secret nerve.
I have no idea to which category I belong.
As for a sheath, however, I’d spot mine in a second. It is place. I begin my inward journey by writing about place. Some do so by writing about love, war, suffering, cruelty, power, God, or country. I write about place, or the memory of place. I write about a city called Alexandria, which I’m supposed to have loved, and about other cities that remind me of a vanished world to which I allegedly wish to return. I write about exile, remembrance, and the passage of time. I write—so it would seem—to recapture, to preserve and return to the past, though I might just as easily be writing to forget and put that past behind me.
And yet my hidden nerve lies quite elsewhere. To work my way closer to it, I’d have to write about loss and feeling unhinged in provisional places where everyone else seems to have a home and a place, and where everyone knows what he wants, who he is, and who he’s likely to become.
My Alexandrians, however, have an unsteady foothold wherever they stand; they shift time zones, life passions, loyalties, and accents with the unwieldy sense that the real world swims before them, that they are strangers in it, that they’re never quite entitled to it. Yet peel this second sheath, and you’ll find another.
I may write about place and displacement, but what I’m really writing about is dispersion, evasion, ambivalence: not so much a subject as a move in everything I write. I may write about little parks in New York that remind me of Rome and about tiny squares in Paris that remind me of New York, and about so many spots in the world that will ultimately take me back to Alexandria. But this crisscrossed trajectory is simply my way of showing how scattered and divided I am about everything else in life.
I may never mention dispersion or evasion by name. But I write around them. I write away from them. I write from them, the way some people write around loneliness, guilt, shame, failure, disloyalty, the better to avoid staring at them.
Ambivalence and dispersion run so deep that I don’t know whether I like the place I’ve chosen to call my home, any more than I know whether I like the writer or even the person I am when no one’s looking. And yet the very act of writing has become my way of finding a space and of building a home for myself, my way of taking a shapeless, marshy world and firming it up with paper, the way the Venetians firm up eroded land by driving wooden piles into it.
I write to give my life a form, a narrative, a chronology; and, for good measure, I seal loose ends with cadenced prose and add glitter where I know things were quite lusterless. I write to reach out to the real world, though I know that I write to stay away from a world that is still too real and never as provisional or ambivalent as I’d like it to be. In the end it’s no longer, and perhaps never was, the world that I like, but writing about it. I write to find out who I am; I write to give myself the slip. I write because I am always at one remove from the world but have grown to like saying so.
Thus I turn to Alexandria, the mythical home of paradox. But Alexandria is merely an alibi, a mold, a construct. Writing about Alexandria helps me give a geographical frame to a psychological mess. Alexandria is the nickname I give this mess. Ask me to be intimate, and I’ll automatically start writing about Alexandria.
> I’ll write about diaspora and dispossession, but these big words hold my inner tale together, the way lies help keep the truth afloat. I use the word exile, not because I think it is the right term, but because it approximates something far more intimate, more painful, more awkward: exile from myself, in the sense that I could so easily have had another life, lived elsewhere, loved others, been someone else.
If I keep writing about places, it is because some of them are coded ways of writing about myself: like me, they are always somewhat dated, isolated, uncertain, thrust precariously in the middle of larger cities, places that have become not just stand-ins for Alexandria, but stand-ins for me. I walk past them and think of me.
Let me turn the clock back by a few decades.
It is October 1968, and I’ve just arrived in New York City. Mornings are nippy. It’s my second week here. I have found a job in the mailroom at Lincoln Center. During my rounds at 10:30 every morning the plaza is totally empty and its fountain silent. Here every day I am always reminded of my very early childhood, when my mother would take me for long walks along a quiet plantation road far beyond our home.
There is something serene and peaceful in this memory. I go out every morning knowing that as soon as I get a whiff of a nippy Manhattan breeze, I’ll encounter the memory of those plantation mornings and the hand that held mine along these long walks.
Fast-forward more than two decades. It is 1992. On certain warm summer days at noon I go to pick up my mother on Sixtieth Street, where she still works as an office clerk. We buy fruit and sandwiches on Broadway and walk awhile until we find a shady stone bench at Lincoln Center’s Damrosch Park. At times I bring my two-year-old son, who’ll scamper about, eating a spoonful, then run back to hide in between raised flower beds.
Afterward, he and I walk my mother back to her office; we say goodbye, then head toward Broadway to catch the bus across from a tiny park where Dante’s statue stands. I tell him of Paolo and Francesca, and of cruel Gianciotto, and of Farinata the exile and Count Ugolino who starved with his children.
Dante’s statue still reminds me of the tales I told my son then; it reminds me of this park and of other small parks I’ve since written about, and of how I felt guilty as a son, letting my mother hold so menial a job in her seventies, taking her out for a walk when it was clearly too warm for her, and how, to write a memoir about our life in Egypt, I had hired a full-time babysitter who was only too glad to have the time off whenever I’d take my son to lunches that I resented sometimes because they’d steal me from my desk. I think back to that summer and to my explosive snubs whenever my mother complained I’d arrived too late again.
One day, after losing my temper and making her cry at lunch, I went home and wrote about how she would sit on our balcony in Alexandria smoking a cigarette, and of how the wind had fanned her hair on the day she came to pick me up at school after someone had called home saying I had been suspended that day. Together we rode the tram downtown, naming the stations one by one.
Now, whenever I look back to those hot afternoons at Lincoln Center, I see two boys, me and my son, and I see my mother both as she was during those summer lunches in the early nineties and as I remembered her on our walks along the plantation road two and a half decades earlier. But the one mother most clearly limned on those stone benches at Damrosch Park is the one riding the tram with me: serene, ebullient, carefree, catching the light of the sun on her face as she recited the name of the stations to me.
I did not lie about the names of the tram stations, but I did make up the scene about her coming to school that day. It doesn’t matter. For this scene’s hidden nerve lay somewhere else: in my wanting to stay home and write, in not knowing which mother I was writing about, in wishing she could be young once more, or that I might be her young boy again, or that both of us might still be in Egypt, or that we should be grateful we weren’t.
Perhaps it had something to do with my failure to rescue her from work that day, which I’d inverted into her rescuing me from school; or perhaps with my reluctance to believe that an entirely invented scene could have so cathartic an effect, and that lies do purge the mind of mnemonic dead weight.
I don’t know. Perhaps writing opens up a parallel universe into which, one by one, we’ll move all our dearest memories and rearrange them as we please.
Perhaps this is why all memoirists lie. We alter the truth on paper so as to alter it in fact; we lie about our past and invent surrogate memories the better to make sense of our lives and live the life we know was truly ours. We write about our life, not to see it as it was but to see it as we wish others might see it, so we may borrow their gaze and begin to see our life through their eyes, not ours.
Only then, perhaps, would we begin to understand our life story, or to tolerate it and ultimately, perhaps, to find it beautiful; not that any life is ever beautiful, but the measure of a beautiful life is perhaps one that sees its blemishes, knows they can’t be forgiven, and, for all that, learns each day to look the other way.
The Contrafactual Traveler
Other than money and means of transportation, the one thing a traveler needs is curiosity. You need to want to see, hear, and experience things, either for the first time or for the nth time. Those sights, that river, this or that small town, those strange ways of doing things that people in distant places have, this restaurant, that tongue, even the thrill of going to far-flung islands to shut one’s eyes and zonk out on placid foreign beaches—without curiosity you wouldn’t seek any of them out. True, one travels either for business or pleasure. But even the most hardened dealmaker will occasionally lift his eyes from his limousine with tinted windows, catch a glimpse of the Colosseum at midday, and say, “What I wouldn’t give to slip through those arches on such a beautiful spring day.” That same night he wanders down the narrow lanes of Trastevere, trying to catch a legendary whiff of Rome. As for those who travel for pleasure, the answer couldn’t be more obvious: the very expectation of pleasure feeds on curiosity.
What people omit to mention about the essence of travel is a small detail so obvious that one blushes to bring it up: namely, that every journey needs to start somewhere. A tourist leaves one country to visit another. A plane leaves one airport to land elsewhere. That the default setting on most online booking services assumes that you’re going to want round-trip tickets suggests that every starting point is like the shadow partner of every arrival: the two have to be different—quite different—and their difference is what gives every journey its purpose. But for this difference, there is no curiosity, there is no travel, there are no tourists. Home is what sets the course to our travels. Home is what we leave behind, knowing we’ll recover it at the end of the journey. Home is also what makes going away safe. To quote T. S. Eliot, “The end is where we start from.” An odyssey is just a return trip that’s taken too long.
By contrast, the travels of nomads or Gypsies belong to an altogether different category. Nomads roam the world, but their wandering is stirred not by curiosity but by practical survival. Nomads do not know where travel ends, inasmuch as none remembers where it started. There can be no voyage out, because there is no voyage back foreseen. There is no one place to travel back to. Traveling becomes the home, and errancy punctuates everything, from where nomads pray, wash their clothes, and seek food, to where they sleep at night and go to die. If a nomad pitches his tent in the exact same spot where he’d pitched it before, my guess is that it is either by coincidence or for the sake of convenience. The idea of returning to a particular place or of holding one place worthier than another for reasons that have nothing to do with material concerns seems a luxury if not a contradiction in terms. Nomads are indifferent to such things.
With exile, give both curiosity and indifference an extra torsion, then braid the two together, make sure both are thoroughly confused, and you’ll understand how (or why) I travel.
I am an exile from Alexandria, Egypt.
Like the nomad, an exile is so
meone who has no home to go back to. He has lost his home; it’s no longer there; there is no going back—Odysseus just got wind that Ithaca was entirely destroyed by an earthquake and that every person he knew there is gone. Unlike the nomad, though, an exile is not resigned to homelessness; perpetual transience feels as unnatural to him as it would to any tourist who’s lost his return ticket. An exile wants a home, not a provisional rest stop. But having lost his home, he hasn’t the foggiest notion how to go about finding a new one. He is even wary of having to “choose” a new home. Can one choose one’s home any more than one can choose the color of one’s skin? Anyone can build a house—but is it ever a home? Wherever he travels, he casts a wistful glance around, thinking to himself, “This is not how I remember things.” “All this is very nice,” he tells his traveling companion on glimpsing the Pacific Ocean, “but it’s not the Mediterranean, and it feels so strange.” He has no patience with the number-one rule of tourism: to seek the new, the unfamiliar, the different. “Of course it should feel strange and unfamiliar,” says his traveling companion. “If you wanted familiar, you should have stayed home.”
But this is precisely the problem. There is no home.
Home is altogether elsewhere.
Or, to use slightly different words, home is elsewhere in time—which is why exiles grow to like things that have erstwhile and elsewhere written all over them.
My wife, who was born and raised in the United States, travels with an exile when we go to Europe in the summer. She stares at this or that monument; I have no tolerance for monuments. She wants to stop by this or that small picturesque hill town; I care nothing for small picturesque hill towns. She visits churches and museums and is an inexhaustible font of curiosity. I am indifference personified. We walk the same streets but we might as well be walking on opposite sidewalks: she wants to see things she’s never seen before; I can’t wait to land on things I’ve known before.