by André Aciman
And then I do what we all do when we’re standing in high places. I strain my eyes and ask: Can I see my home from here? Can I call my old phone number and see who answers? Do I see myself here?
* * *
With friend E all this takes a far more complicated turn. E hates nostalgia, he doesn’t get it.
You’ve never loved either Paris or New York or Alexandria.
You love all three.
You hate one because you can’t have the other.
You love one but wished you loved the other instead.
You love them all.
You hate them all.
You don’t hate, you don’t love, you don’t even care, because you can’t love, can’t hate, wished you cared, wished you didn’t, don’t know, can’t tell.
Is there identity in dispersal?
* * *
Finally, there is the sixth person in this equation: Me.
In my definition of the move I’ve been describing, it is not cities that beckon us, nor is it even the time spent in those cities that we long for; rather it is the imagined, unlived life we’ve projected onto these cities that summons us and exerts its strong pull. The city itself is just a costume, a screen wall, or, as the painter Claude Monet said, an empty envelope. What counts and what never dies is the remembrance of the imagined life we’d once hoped to live.
* * *
One more move, call it Me1. When I wanted to buy my eldest son, who is American, his very first history book, I did something that seemed so natural, it almost baffled me: I bought him a book I’d once owned as a child, called Ma première histoire de France. My First History of France. When I showed him a richly illustrated scene of the battle of Agincourt, it occurred to me that never once in my life had I decided whose side I was on, the French or the British. On Saint Crispin’s day, on whose side was I—a Jew born in Egypt who speaks French, English, and Italian all with the wrong accent?
In fact, I couldn’t even decide how to spell the name of the battle: Agincourt with a g as the English do, or Azincourt, with a z as the French do?
* * *
Final, final move. Me2: I don’t even know how to pronounce much less spell my surname: the Turkish way, the Arabic way, the French way, the Italian way, the American way? Come to think of it, even my first name is a problem: Does one call me André the accent on the second syllable, or the American way, with the accent on the first? And how do you pronounce the r? Is my name Andrea, Andreas, Andareyah, Andrew, Andy, or is it André as spoken by my father, who named me after a scorned Protestant aunt to spite his family and who spoke my name with a Turco-Italian accent in a family whose mother tongue was neither French nor Italian, not Turkish or Arabic, but Spanish—and even then not really Spanish either, but Ladino?
The fact is, I don’t know. I have shadow names, but I don’t have a name.
* * *
I tried to give an account of all this in Out of Egypt when I described my childhood visits to my two grandmothers, both of whom competed for the kind of attention that often passes for love. As was the custom in my preschool years, every day I was taken to one grandmother in the morning and to the other in the afternoon. This was not a difficult thing to do since both grandmothers lived exactly across the street from each other—which is how my parents met. What was a bit more difficult was to visit one grandmother without ever letting the other know that I would later visit, or had just visited, the other. Each was supposed to feel privileged. What thrilled me—correction: what thrilled the adult writer remembering, i.e., imagining, i.e., inventing all this—what thrilled me was the thought that, while visiting the house of one in the morning, I would peek out the window and look at the spot across the street, where I was already anticipating I’d be peeking back later that day. I was in the morning rehearsing what I’d be doing that very afternoon, except that the rehearsal was incomplete unless I could anticipate thinking back on that morning’s rehearsal. I was trying to be in both places at one and the same time—like Marcel Proust reading his byline in the newspaper and trying to enjoy both first-person and third-person perspectives. The cunning that had been exercised at first became a precondition for a second form of cunning as well. I was not only disloyal to both grandmothers but I was ultimately shifty with myself as well. And what about the writer who pretends to remember this episode but in reality is making it up, and, by admitting he’s invented it, hopes to come clean with this clever loop and access a third-degree alibi?
Perhaps, when I looked out of one grandmother’s home in the morning I was trying to second-guess whether I’d be happier across the street later in the afternoon. Or perhaps I was already fearing that I wouldn’t be happy there and was thus already sending across the street the comfort I’d need that afternoon. Or perhaps I was afraid that no sooner would I have been taken across than I’d forget the grandmother of the morning, and so I was already sending myself a care package containing the picture of the grandmother I’d left behind that day. Or perhaps it was much simpler: fearing that changing places might change who I was, I was in effect consolidating one identity by grafting it onto the other, except that each was no more stable than the other.
To hark back to Merleau-Ponty’s example, I was touching a leg that within hours would no longer be mine. I was already touching to see what it would feel like to reach for a limb and find nothing.
Caught between remembrance and memory anticipated, the present does not exist. The present does not exist, not because—recall my grandmothers here—the boy in the present already foresees the past before the future has even occurred, or because there are essentially two hypothetical homes, neither of which is the real home, but because the real inhabited space has literally become the street between them, or call it the transit between memory and imagination back to imagination and memory. The loop is the home—the way shame and treachery and the desire to recover from shame and treachery are the primary emotions here, not love. Our intuitions have become counterintuitive, our instincts are thought-tormented, our grasp is counterfactual.
Exile, displacement, and dislocation ultimately induce a corresponding set of intellectual, psychological, and aesthetic displacements and dislocations as well.
* * *
Home, if I may invoke the Hebraic tradition, is out-of-home. The word for Hebrew in Hebrew is originally ibhri, meaning “he who came from across (the river).” You refer to yourself not as a person from a place, but as a person from a place across from that place. You are—and always are—from somewhere else. You and your alibi are each other’s shadow.
This is my home. Unless the counterfactual nerve is stimulated, writing cannot happen. If writing does not force me to displace or reinvent what I believe, what I think, what I like, who I think I am, or where I think I am headed or am writing about—if writing does not unharness me—I cannot write.
There are writers who write by avoiding all fault lines. They sidestep all manner of obstacles, avoid what they do not know, stay away from dark areas, and, wherever possible, end a sentence once they’ve said all they’d set out to say with it.
Then there are writers who, without meaning to, position themselves right on the fault line. They start out not even knowing what their subject is; they’re writing in the dark, yet they keep writing because writing is how they grope, how they light the darkness around them.
For me to write, I need to work my way back out of one home, consider another, and find the no-man’s-land in between. I need to go to one André, unwrite that André, choose the other André across the way, only then go looking for the middle André, whose voice will most likely approximate the voice of an André able to camouflage all telltale signs that English is not his mother tongue, but that neither is French, nor Italian, nor Arabic. Writing must almost have to fail—it must almost not succeed. If it goes well from the start, if I am in the groove, if I come home to writing, it’s not the writing for me. I need to have lost the key and to find no replacement. Writing is not a h
omecoming. Writing is an alibi. Writing is a perpetual stammer of alibis.
I need to bicker with a language not because language is unsuitable or because I fear I may be unfit for it, but because I find myself saying what I think I wanted to say after, not before, having said it. Nothing could seem more dislocated. You do not write an outline first and then spill your words on paper; you write because you cannot write an outline. You write the way you do because the other kind of writing is unavailable to you. You write unnaturally not only because you do not have a natural language, but also because writing and thinking have become unnatural acts.
To parody Michelangelo, you do not chip away at marble in order to bring out a hitherto undisclosed statue; testing the marble, hiding its imperfections, covering up mistaken chisel marks is the statue.
You write not after you’ve thought things through; you write to think things through. You chisel in order to imagine what you might have chiseled with better eyes in a better world.
You turn on yourself, and turning gives you the illusion of having a center.
But turning is all there is. Turning is all you have.
Or to put it in different terms: you do not see things; you see double. Better yet: you see that you see double.
You wish to see one thing: instead, you see parallax.
You may want truth; but what you reap is paradox.
I turn on myself not only because I don’t know better than to turn on myself; I turn on myself also because it is part of being dislocated and displaced and reversed intellectually and aesthetically to do just that. You don’t know whether what you feel is what you feel or what you say you feel, just as you don’t know whether saying you feel something is actually a way of saying anything at all about it. You wing it. You hope others believe you. If they believe you, then you might as well copy them and believe the person they believe.
I could sum up exile by saying that I have made writing about exile my home. I could even go on and say that I’ve built my home not even with words and what they mean but with cadence, just cadence, because cadence is like feeling, and cadence is like breathing, and cadence is heartbeat and desire, and if cadence doesn’t reinvent everything we would like our life to have been or to become, then just the act of searching and probing in that particularly cadenced way becomes a way of feeling and of being in the world. Cadenced prose, for all its pyrotechnics, is also a way of hiding that I can’t write as plain a thing as an ordinary sentence in English.
But I’m quibbling and these are just words—and saying they are just words brings me no closer to the sort of truth that so many of us repair to at the end of the day, because truth, however unwieldy it is when there’s too much of it for anyone to bear or when there’s not enough of it to go around, is still something we hope goes by the name of home. And that, in exile, is the first thing you—or they—toss overboard.
ALSO BY ANDRÉ ACIMAN
FICTION
Eight White Nights
Call Me by Your Name
NONFICTION
Out of Egypt: A Memoir
False Papers: Essays on Exile and Memory
The Light of New York (with Jean-Michel Berts)
Entrez: Signs of France (with Steven Rothfield)
AS EDITOR
The Proust Project
Letters of Transit: Reflections on Exile, Identity, Language, and Loss
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
18 West 18th Street, New York 10011
Copyright © 2011 by André Aciman
All rights reserved
First edition, 2011
Portions of this ebook have appeared, in slightly different form, in The American Scholar; Condé Nast Traveler; The Harvard Review; Horizons; L’Espresso; The Light of New York; The New York Times; The New York Times Magazine; Partisan Review; The Sophisticated Traveler; Tell Me True: Memoir, History, Writing a Life; and The Threepenny Review.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Aciman, André
Alibis : essays on elsewhere / André Aciman.— 1st ed.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-0-374-10275-3 (cloth : alk. paper)
I. Title.
PS3601.C525 A79 2011
814'.6—dc22
2011010700
www.fsgbooks.com
eISBN 978-1-4299-9506-1
First Farrar, Straus and Giroux eBook Edition: September 2011