Feminist

I’m an immigrant because I’m a feminist. But more about this later.

            Let me start from the beginning: growing up with censorship, in socialist Romania. In practice, it meant that you could always say something wrong in front of the wrong people and then… then there would repercussions, as threatening as they were mysterious, at least for us kids. It also meant that we grew up with very little television; instead we had books, which were supposed to be fun, except that the books were strictly censored. State-owned printing presses endlessly churned out the works of the “classics”, nineteenth-century novelists, mostly French and Russian (good luck trying to learn something about sex from those!), the greats of Romanian literature, socialist realist novels—with a good communist and a traitor and a girl that the communist got at the end (they held hands)—and the discourses of Nicolae Ceausescu, our prolific dictator.

            Somehow, in the mishmash of books that my father brought home every three months or so (he had a friend who worked in a bookstore; she selected the books for him from whatever was available) I found one day a copy of Christa Wolf’s Cassandra. Being from socialist Germany, Christa Wolf—who passed away in 2011—had probably been deemed safe enough to be translated. Cassandra: Four Essays and a Novel (1984) is a re-telling of the story of the Trojan war from a feminist perspective. Cassandra, high priestess in her native Troy, and one of King Priamus’s many daughters, had, according to the Illyad, Aeneid and a few Greek tragedies, predicted the fall of Troy; prior to that, she had been cursed by Apollo that no one believe her prophecies. Christa Wolf tells the story from the perspective of Cassandra—a woman seer who refuses the illusions those around her hold dear.

            I loved the book. I may have read it ten times while in college. I loved Cassandra—that’s how I wanted to be, regardless of the fact that she ended up alone and a slave in Christa Wolf’s version. Wolf recreated Cassandra as a model for the female / feminist intellectual, someone who is unable to relinquish her understanding, her vision, when it becomes uncomfortable to those around her.

            As an added bonus, the book introduced me to what for me at that time was a new form of literary creation if you wish, a feminist retelling of one of the founding epics of Western literature. What they were teaching us then in school was to read, read as much as possible, memorize and perhaps interpret with small audacities. That one could re-write, change perspective, reorganize the hierarchy of characters, do all that to a venerable tradition and then simply tell the same story again, but how different! seemed at once an enormous task and also very liberating.

            I know of few feminist rewritings as powerful as Wolf’s Cassandra. There are many books I’d love to see retold with the same compelling vision. Among them, probably the first would be Nabokov’s Lolita.

            But more about this later.

The Realm of the Near-Friend

            My mother-in-law, a few friends from high school, my niece, two (or three? actually three) ex-boyfriends, friends from graduate school, friends from Romania, from Buffalo, Michigan, and Houston, my husband, a couple of students, some of my husband’s friends, a few colleagues from work, what do they all have in common? They’re my friends on Facebook.

            What? Under normal circumstances, my mother, who married her high school sweetheart, should never see two, not to mention three, of my ex-boyfriends in the same context (she knows them). I imagine them in the same room, what would they talk about?

            But it doesn’t matter: on Facebook, we’re all near-friends. It’s the endless happy ending: I loved his person when I was in my twenties, we argued and fought and betrayed one another, and now we’re friends on Facebook. Or: this is a person I met at a party and thought she was smart and it would be fun to talk more with her. Or: I cheated on this person, he liked me a lot, and now we’re friends on Facebook. Some of my students are my friends on Facebook (mercifully, not many), what must they be thinking of me? My mother is my friend on Facebook: I love her now and I used to seriously hate her when I was in my twenties. Or: this co-worker tried to hit on me and she was so damn neurotic that when I wasn’t too welcoming she ruined one of my projects, but somehow we ended up on Facebook together and now we’re friends.

            On Facebook, we’re all polite: no dislike button. No love button either. This may have something to do with the atmosphere of an elite college, which is where it all started; its ethos shapes the options that we have (the like button) and how we interact. We don’t hate each other, we don’t absolutely love each other, we’re all smart and cool and noncommittal and passive aggressive and we write well. Mr. Zuckerberg, please go to grad school at least.

            On Facebook, we don’t betray one another: how could we? We’re all friends, no strings attached. We’re actually not friends-friends, which back home used to mean a rather small circle of confidantes, we’re not the high school gang either, we’re not acquaintances. We’re near-friends. In real life, real friends betray one another, are annoying, call at the wrong time, borrow money and don’t return it, flirt with your significant other. They can’t do that on Facebook. They can’t be extremely generous or hug you. They say “that’s so funny” instead. They’re near-friends.

            On the other hand, for someone who’s moved around a lot, being near-friends is much better than completely slipping into oblivion. It’s the equivalent of old handwritten letters, which announced births deaths weddings and other relevant matters, except that now, stuck into the ethos of twenty-something college kids, we communicate where we travel, what we see, what we cooked yesterday etc. –what we “experience”—and we hope that we can continue the polite and funny conversation we started a few years ago with someone in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

Nomads

            Immigrant. How long do I want to deal with this? It can be tiring at times. It has to end, there has to be some point in my life when I don’t have an accent anymore, when I fit in, when I’m just like everyone else, when I’m from here.

            But how can that be? And, anyway, immigrant as opposed to what? Living in the country of one’s birth? In the same state? The same county, town, neighborhood? Surely everyone’s moved at least once. The only difference, perhaps, is that the immigrants have crossed some border, a political one, unlike, let’s say, someone moving from Texas to Michigan.

            But then countries are strange entities: some times people move across borders, other times borders move across territories, surprising the locals. We know that the nation-state is a nineteenth century invention and that nations are imagined communities, to quote Benedict Anderson. Could we perhaps change the way we imagine them?

            But here’s the clincher: the fact that nations are imagined and culturally constructed doesn’t diminish their tremendous power: think of wars, for example. Or, even better, think of the last time your national team won the first prize in some sports competition that usually you don’t care about. It’s almost as if you recognize a lost love: “See, you did love me for a while,” says the nation, “Look how proud you are of me, how moved, how nostalgic, how ready to die for me.”

            But then, why do we privilege “staying” over “leaving”? Being tied to the land over moving, traveling? Nomads have always been part of the world; in the history of the human species, it’ only been approximately 10,000 years since the agricultural revolution. Anatomically modern humans, on the other hand, have been around for circa 200,000 years, gathering and hunting, a nomadic lifestyle.

            “My great grandfather was a man named Naki, and he was a sheep herder,” my father told me one day. He didn’t know anything more about that.

            But then in college I learned about transhumance, sheep herders travelling up and down the mountains with their sheep, looking for new pasture, depending on the season. Or else they travelled south through the Balkan peninsula in winter, with their sheep, across borders, rivers, mountain chains, in order to spend the winter in the south of Europe, where the weather was milder, and then to travel back north to their mountain villages in the spring. (“As a sheep herder, I have no country,” my great grandfather could have said, anticipating Virginia Woolf. But then I don’t know for sure whether he was actually a transhumating sheep herder, or if he just had sheep and let other people do the traveling for him).

            As late as the 1980s, transhumanting sheep herders were apparently still around. One of my neighbors managed to leave the country with their help.

At that time, Romanians lived in their country like in a prison: many dreamt of escaping, few dared to actually try. Beyond the border, in Hungary, a more relaxed political environment would have had border patrols turning a blind eye to the infrequent escapees. A few hundred miles away, after crossing another border, there was Austria, a free (read non-socialist) country, part of the western world, ready to embrace refugees or to allow them safe passage to wherever their dreams led them (usually farther west).

            My neighbor defied the Romanian border patrols ready to shoot defectors. He hid among the sheep, in a large herd, and crossed the border together with them. He called from Vienna to let his parents know he was ok. I imagined him, crouched for hours in the cold weather, or maybe he was crawling on all four (was it early spring? late fall?—he was a good athlete though, he was in the swimming team). He ended up in Paris, where he still lives.

Just Food

            Back from the supermarket, I try to remove the tag from fruits and vegetables. The white little oval tag that carries the PLU and a bar code and can be found on most fresh supermarket items, from tomatoes to watermelon.

            It bothers me. I hate the tag, it’s small and sticky. The only way to get rid of it is to affix it to something else. Plus, there’s glue and paper (or, even worse, plastic) on my food. Yes, of course, the glue is harmless. If I wash an apple or a tomato before removing the tag, it won’t come off easily. The pesky thing leaves a residue that blemishes the fruit.

            Why does it bother me so much?

            I don’t know.

            I hate it.

            “But they need to do that,” someone tells me. “They need to identify the food. Otherwise how can they keep track of where the food comes from?”

            Maybe that’s it. Maybe I don’t want my food to be identified. What’s going on, now the pears are carrying IDs? There’s something wrong with that.

           

            It’s Romania and it’s the 1980s and we have a garden. Every weekend, that summer and then many others summers, we go to Cuvin, a small village half a mile away from Ghioroc, a larger village where the train stops, fifteen miles away from Arad, where we live.

            Now all the kids my age living in Arad have grandparents living in the countryside. Ours are far away, so in order to get some village experience my father rents for a mere nothing a plot of land at the foot of a hill. The land is uncultivated; it was recently parceled out and rented to city types like us (Arad has 130,000 people) to enjoy amateur gardening on weekends. We turn it into a garden.

           

            These days, the supermarket tomato can be from anywhere, from California to Argentina. Maybe that’s the problem: the tomato that I’m about to eat has already traveled more than my grandmother has in a lifetime. A scan of the pesky tag can tell the history of the fruit’s travels: where it came from, how it flew here…—flew? This creeps me out. Why on earth would I want to eat a flying tomato? I almost expect it to smell like exhaust gas, the vibrations of the plane engine engrained somewhere in the pulp of the fruit.

            To get to Ghioroc, we take the old train, one of the first electrified lines in Europe (before using it in Vienna, the wise Austro-Hungarian imperial administration tested electrified train lines in Eastern Europe, at the margins of the empire, and so in the eighties we were taking this one hundred years old train). Its wooden benches are made for shorter people, its windows open and close (or rather don’t open and don’t close) if you use a crank. The old train is called “the Green Arrow”, partly because it’s painted dark green and partly because it’s very, very slow: it takes more than one hour to travel the fifteen miles that separate Arad from Ghioroc. It stops every three miles or so, to gather all the farmers from the villages and offer them access to the town, where they go on Sunday to the market to sell their produce.

            On Sunday evenings, when we come home, strong middle-aged peasant women get on the train: they have wide hips and long dark skirts, pleated, with long aprons and white shirts. They cover their hair with dark colored scarves. And they carry big baskets with wide open mouths, two feet deep, three feet wide at the top.

            “How can they even carry these baskets?” I ask my mother.

            At a train stop, I see two men lifting a basket and helping a woman put it on her head. Then she walks away, back erect, carrying fifty or sixty pounds on her head.

           

            I remember them carrying strawberries, cherries, tomatoes, and apples to the market. The smell of the fruit filled the dingy wagon, where most travelers stood rather than sat (each basket could easily occupy two seats; some travelers grumbled). At the market, the same baskets, filled with eggplants, potatoes, peas, cauliflowers, strawberries, apples.

            “How much?” she’d ask.

            A kilo of this, half a kilo of that. Fruit flowed from the basket, a continuum of abundance, which she stopped with an expert gesture. Usually she’d be right, measuring with her eyes, a tiny bit less than the amount requested. Then, with a final gesture, she’d throw in the last apple, potato, or pepper, tipping the scale.

           

            Back then, fruit came from the hills of Siria, which gave good strawberries; cabbage from Comlos, which was known for its growers; apples from Santana; sheep’s milk cheese from a woman my mother knew, and so on. A continuous flow, from rain to earth to the peasant woman to the market to us. No PLUs, no bar codes. No individually-tagged-flying-in-the-sky-around-the-world tomato. Just food, and the woman with callused hands offering it to us.           

What’s in a Name?

Voichita

Vee-as-in-Victor-oh-i-see-eich-i-tee-as-in-Tom-ay

Nachescu

En-as-in-Nancy-ay-see-eich-ee-ess-see-as-in-Charlie-you

Strangely enough, they usually get it. By now, scores of overworked helpdesk workers, customer help representatives, operators, and office assistants have had to deal with this. I feel apologetic whenever I have to spell my name: my name is not that usual even in Romania after all. I dream of changing my name to something international and easy to spell, like Eva or Vera. These names are poetic in their own way, and they’re not spelling bee material.

But instead, I’m stuck with this: Vee-as-in-Victor-oh-i…

By the time I’m done, I feel like I’ve told them my whole life story. “See, it all begins in Romania, where in a small town in South West Transylvania my mother was trying to choose a name for her yet unborn baby, her first child, and wanted to match the uniqueness of her experience with the uniqueness of a name.” (I only know of two or three other Voichitas, all of them Romanian, of course.)

Because when I ask you, what’s your name? I ask many things. Ancient Romans believed that nomen est omen, that a name could predict the fate of its bearer. Let’s trust them for a moment, and say that names, all names, have a meaning and a history. But in this world, where within five minutes on the train to Penn Station, I see people whose ancestors lived on all continents, whose traditions encompass the history of the world, what meaning do their names have to me? Mine to them? What omens do we carry, unaware, for ourselves and each other?

Seoun Hyung Kim

Shawnkeisha Stoudamire

Vincenzo Mistretta

Taocho Wei

Sami Hanna

Tierney Malone

Charles Adair

Voichita Nachescu