Hello,
Travel and life has kept me from writing here for a while. All of August, I was in Portugal, and for many weeks after, I was deeply missing Portugal. Each time I go, the place leaves a deep impression. There is a quality to the light there that enchants me, that forces me to take my glasses off even on the sunniest days, because the shades mutate the light too much. We spent most of the time at my husband’s aunt’s house in a town near Coimbra. The children fed the chickens and collected tomatoes from the garden. We walked to the town to send postcards of scribbled crayon drawings to family in the US and Germany. Each evening, as the sun slanted over the terracotta, I picked strawberries and ate them unwashed. If this sounds impossibly idyllic, it does to me as well, as I sit in the industrial wasteland of Newark, typing this two months later.
It was also lovely to be in Portugal and read about the continent. Every few months, I realize anew how deeply fascinated I am with Europe, all the strange, awful mess of it. To be fair, Portugal is peripherally Europe; certainly geographically it is on the outskirts, but also, it sometimes feels, on the level of vibes. They barely participated in the second World War, which, to me, is the litmus test for Real Europe. (sorry, perhaps this post should have come with a TW) They switched to the euro only at the turn of the millennium; my husband remembers the family using escudos during vacations in the ‘90s. Still, it felt particularly resonant to read books about or set in Europe this summer. An excellent one was Postwar by Tony Judt, a history of Europe following WW2 (to my point, Portugal makes few entries in the book). The book went a long way in making me understand where and why Europe stands today, and also, honestly, gave me a lot of respect for postcolonial nations hashing out conflicts of nation, language, and ethnicity today. Do you know how the Europeans worked out their conflicts? As my 2-year old has taken to curiously shouting at any opportunity, JESUS! Truly, in the most literal sense of the word, Europe is the most provincial place on earth.
I also read Jenny Erpenbeck’s Kairos, which was tremendous, and which I highly recommend for anyone who feels like the American literary machine keeps lauding one dud after another. I have a lot of feelings on this, most of which I will keep to myself except to say that the widespread availability and acceptability of psychotherapy in the US has been tremendously detrimental to the quality of fiction championed here. Anyway, Kairos is decidedly not that; give it a try. I am currently reading and highly enjoying States of Emergency by Chris Knapp. I also dipped into Quarterlife by Devika Rege which seems very promising as well.
A prose poem of mine, a tribute to the great Lebanese-American artist Etel Adnan, was just published in Acacia. Please read it; it’s good.
On the phone today, my grandmother told me that the weather in Islamabad is neither hot nor cold. For about ten days or so, she said, it has felt like “mausam khara hua hai” (the weather has been standing still). With 14 days to election in the US, it feels like things here are standing still too, reminiscent of a bated breath.
Until later,
Dure
