Folk Knowledge in Farah's Secrets

Folklore, legend, proverbs and magic are all swelling underneath the surface of Nuruddin Farah's Secrets--both in the lives of the protagonist, Kalaman, and in the prose, itself. Set in Somalia as the civil wars are beginning to rear, there is a tension (again, on the surface and below it) between the modern and the old, the empirical understanding of modernity and the more intuitive knowledge of generations past. 

Kalaman wants desperately to be an ordinary, successful man--but this is not the fate that he has been cast. His grandfather Nonno says to him, "I named you Kalaman because it is a cul-de-sac of a name." He goes on, "Commonplace names need propping up." His grandfather Despite his moving into the capital, despite his technology job and his relationships with ordinary women, Kalaman is inextricably tied to people--Nonno and Sholoongo--who live in part in the extraordinary realm of the world. 

As a boy, Kalaman, too, was interested in the stuff of legends. 

"In those days I was interested in the origins of things, how rivers came into being and why they ran and where. I put a legion of questions to Nonno about where babies began and how, where the dead end up, and whether, once interred, the buried awoke in the dark of their tombs and were immediately reborn, and if so in what form, child or another grown up, or did they stay curled up, like baby snakes knocked senseless in the head?"

These are all questions that are the source of legends, questions from which emerge cosmology and myth. It is this same curiosity about the ways of the world that makes him infatuated with Sholoongo who, in the words of Kalaman's mother, "is forever digging, without a moment's break. Kalaman says, "At least Sholoongo and I shared a keenness of spirit, a genuine interest in the beginnings of things. She unravelled mysteries..." Yet Kalaman, as if gleaning too much into the layers of secrets contained in the answers to the questions he had as a boy, leaves them behind altogether and moves to the city where, he hopes, things are more simple.  

Tales and proverbs abound in the story and in Farah's prose. Sholoongo tells Kalaman a folktale that "her father had learnt from a Nigerian fellow seaman." This folktale, then, is not specific to Somalia but partakes (Farah seems to tell us) of a more fundamental and universal human truth. The punch line of the folktale is the words of an unburied dead head saying to another skull, "Divulging secrets got me here, dead." Secrets, in this world, are something to be protected. Digging for them is a dangerous game. 

These secrets, too, are tied to the impending doom of the war in Mogadiscio. Kalaman's mother, a scolding, attention-deprived woman, is terrified of the war. "My mother held the view that we were approaching a collapse. It was as if someone had sold an idea of doom to her and she bought it as offered, wholesale. And she started to acquire all manner of weapons, preparing herself and her family for the worst." His mother's knowledge of the war is not knowledge in the empirical sense, but something that she feels based on rumors and her gut wisdom. The war, then, exists in both the physical realm and the realm of the non-physical. 

The non-physical wisdom is what is contained in these proverbs, folktales, legends and episodes of magic. Farah artfully weaves them into his own prose and that of his characters to reveal both the tension of the physical and non-physical realms, and the extent to which his characters live in both (whether they like it or not). This weave gives insight into the culture of Somalia generally, speaks to the context of the war itself in which old ways are colliding with new pressures, and creates a beautiful and fantastic backdrop against which to watch the personal fates of his characters unfold. 

Tense and Time in Breece DJ Pancake's "Trilobites"

Breece DJ Pancake's story "Trilobites" (from Trilobites and Other Stories) is a story about time and its passing. Though it is told in the first person present tense, much of this story is spent remembering. The story begins,"I open the trucks door, step onto the brick side street. I look at Company Hill again, all sort of worn down and round." This is a very immediate and elongated present tense, as we are meeting the character/narrator through his slow, mundane actions. And yet, despite the now quality of the prose's action, Pancake introduces the passing of time through the details of the Company Hill being "worn down and round," evoking images of wind and slow erosion through the ages. And the narrator looks at the Hill "again," thus lashing these small details of his movements to his history with this mountain, this place. The story continues, "A long time ago it was real craggy and stood like an island in the Teays River. It took over a million years to make that smooth little hill, and I've looked all over it for trilobites." Here, we're moving from this very immediate personal experience into the past tense and expansive geological time--and the narrator's relationship to time. "I've looked all over it for trilobites," written in the past tense, reveals that the narrator is searching for something, and that he has not found it. We move back into the present tense reflecting upon geological time-- "I think how long it has always been there and always will be, at least for as long as it matters"--and then into the narrator's slow and quiet reflection of what's happening right now-- "The air is smoky with summertime. A bunch of starlings swim over me." The starlings, a kind of bird, "swim" over him; the choice of "swim" accents this paragraph's quality (and the narrator's experience) of being almost suspended underwater, both inside and outside of time and its passing. The first paragraph continues: "I was born in this country and I have never very much wanted to leave. I remember Pop's dead eyes looking at me. They were real dry, and that took something out of me. I shut the door, head for the cafe." This section reverts to the past tense, and to the narrator's personal beginnings as related to this land, to Company Hill, to the trilobites he can't find. And then it moves to his dead father, the source of his (the narrator's) own life and how his passing through and out of time "took something out of [the narrator]." The paragraph ends in present tense, like it started, shutting the door that was opened, heading away from Company Hill, away from this questions about time, and to the cafe. 

The second paragraph reads, 

"I see a concrete patch on the street. It's shaped like Florida and I recollect what I wrote in Ginny's yearbook: "We will live on in mangoes and love." And she up and left without me--two years she's been down there without me. She sends me postcards with alligator wrestlers and flamingos on the front. She never asks me any questions. I feel a real fool for what I wrote, and go into the cafe." 

The loss in this paragraph is direct and unhidden, but there are wonderful subtleties such as the word "without" repeated twice in close proximity, and the word "never," as juxtaposed with what he wrote in her year book, the affirmative and hopeful "We will live on..." Like the first paragraph, the story continues with this fluid flux between the plodding present and the memories of the past. Like we imagine Company Hill once was, the story is strewn with kind of artifacts of Colly's life and loss--the trilobites, of course, Ginny's yearbook, the turkle, the depot, the nails that pop used to build the shed, the sliver of metal from Pop's war wound that migrates to his brain and kills him. All of these artifacts are packed with memory and are symbols of what Colly doesn't have in his life anymore.

Ginny is a big loss. She has left him behind, moved on, and their connection is severed. He waits for her to come back, hopeful about their reunion. "I wonder what it will be like when Ginny comes by. I hope she's not talking through her beak. Maybe she'll take me to her house this time," Colly wonders into the future. "If her momma had been anybody but Pop's cousin, her old man would let me go to her house. Screw him." Here, we learn that Ginny and Colly are related, and we find out an inherent barrier to their being together. But I can talk to Ginny. I wonder if she remembers the plans we made for the farm. And we wanted kids. She always nagged about a peacock. I will get her one." The tenses are so beautifully complicated in this section: Colly is actively wondering into the past about what Ginny does and doesn't remember about their imaged future together, now that she is back and things have changed. This paragraph is hopeful, reminicsent, but also doomed. There is a dark tension between the past and the future, tangled up in the stasis of Colly's present. 

Ginny says, "'He taught you everything. What killed him?" Colly replies, "Little shell fragment, been in him since the war. Got in his blood." What killed his father, then, is something from another time. The war killed him, but retroactively. Again, here, tenses are ruptured in the physical/action dimension of the story. 

The loss of the farm contains the loss of Colly's father (or vice versa). "Me and pop built this barn and I look at every nail with the same dull pain." The farm is the physical memory of his father. "His neighbor, who wants to buy the farm from Colly and his mother, says, "This is about the last real farm around here." This is something in which Colly's father would have taken pride, but it makes Colly feel guilty.  

"It can go now; the stale seed, the drought, the blight--it can go when she signes the papers. I know I will always be to blame, but it can't just be my fault. 'What about you?' I say. 'Your side hurt all that morning, but you wouldn't see no doctor. Nosir, you had to see that your dumb boy got the crop put proper in the ground.' "

Colly's mother will sell the farm and move to Ohio, he's sure, because he cannot take care of the farm anymore. Colly's father took care of the farm so much that he ignored his health (at the expense of his death) to tend to the farm. That Colly cannot manage the farm is like losing his father all over again. 

The trilobite is the primary metaphor for all of Colly's loss through time. The trilobite is something Colly looks for over and over and cannot find. His father told him about the trilobite, and his father's friend can name any fossil Colly finds Colly keeps a collection. "Ginny helped me find most of those," Pancake writes. The nature of a trilobite is that of a time capsule, a relic of the past and how things used to be in a particular place, a sliver of survival and history. And a trilobite is the rarest one. Colly never finds a trilobite, the rare and beautiful thing he always wanted, and no one can help him do so.  Pancake ends the story with Colly thinking of the places he might move once the farm is sold. "I've got eyes to shut in Michigan--maybe even Germany or China. I don't know yet. I walk, but I'm not scared. I feel my fear moving away in rings through time for a million years." Like a fossil, Colly sees himself and his experience as not singular or immediate, but part of time on a massive scale. He feels connected to a larger Universe and ready to move on (though we also have to believe that not all of his fear moves away from him--that he holds on to some of it as part of his experience in this lifetime).

Telling the Story from Different Angles-Louise Erdrich

Last semester I read Love Medicine by Louise Erdrich, and this month I read her subsequent novel, Tracks, published four years after Love Medicine but set at least a generation prior to the stories of Love Medicine. Tracks' stories and personalities provide answers to some of the character questions in Love Medicine (the sinister Leopolda/Pauline character, for instance) and retroactively complete a complex history upon which the action of Love Medicine emerges. What is remarkable is how the novels stand alone in spite of their reverse-sequel relationship and their narrative similarities, and both imbued with the palpable texture of a community unraveling with history.  The novels employ a similar method of telling a complex story: alternating narrations. While in Love Medicine, there are four narrators that alternate throughout the novel, Tracks only uses two narrative voices: Nanapush and Pauline. Because the core of the story is about the changing Indian community and the loss of the past way of life, the story is complex with many villains and heros, all having both lost and betrayed in their own ways. Pauline and Nanapush are opposite poles, in a way, of their own stories and of that of the community. Thus, Erdrich's use of both of their stories--told from their own points of view--to tell a more round and complete version of the story of the community's loss and change. 

When considering the use of this narrative structure and how to describe it in words, I kept conjuring mental images of Fernando Botero's paintings of round, swollen people who, as he explains, are not fat but whole. Botero, like earlier cubist painters and, I think, like Erdrich, paints all sides of a figure into dwo dimensional space. They appear swollen because their painter is showing more sides of them than we are able to see all at once. In this way, the story of the subject is, though perhaps unreal, more complete. We feel their texture of the dancers, pictured above, because Botero has represented their volume onto a flat page.  In this 

image of a guitar (by Bracques) the guitar's "story" is constructed using pieces that come together as something with elements of a common guitar, but perhaps with more emotional resonance connected to a guitar and the sounds it makes than would a realist picture of the instrument.

Erdrich builds Tracks with pieces like this, using the technique, first and foremost, of multiple narrations. Piece by piece, personal and collective histories are built throughout time, both in the world of the reservation and in that of the reader. Nanapush, the elder character, begins his story (all addressed to his estranged daughter, Lulu) by talking about the way it was. This sets the tone for: things have changed. Nanapush says, "My girl, I saw the passing of times you will never know." He talks, too, of those that had died: "Their names grew within us, swelled to the brink of our lips, forced our eyes open in the middle of the night. We were filled with the water of the drowned, cold and black, airless water that lapped against the seal of our tongues or leaked slowly from the corners of our eyes." Nanapush's story is one of loss and having watched a long process of death and change unfold. Because he is speaking to his granddaughter, who has left the reservation at a young age and knows little about the world of the reservation and what has passed, he is able to explain things to her that we, as readers, also need to know. Nanapush gets the first word, and the reader feels the loss that he feels, and the betrayal. At the end of his section he writes, "I was never one to take notice of the talk of those who fattened in the shade of the new Agent's storehouse." There are people to blame, villains of Nanapush's story. And then comes Pauline.

Of course, Pauline is not one of those who directly profited from Nanapush's and the rest of the tribe's loss. She is a villain, however, in her rejection of her past and her desire to wipe out the old ways and their proponents in the name of Christ and the Church. Because of her love for Fleur and her inability to possess her (and later the same with Fleur's husband Eli) Pauline attempts to destroy them. Later, in her incarnation as Leopolda the Nun in Love Medicine, she is one of the most thoroughly evil and terrifying creatures I've ever encountered in literature.

 And yet, every villain has her sorrow. And every villain also has her own villain. For when we first meet Pauline, it is her retrospective account of herself as an admiring young girl in the nearby town of Argus, while those stayed on the reservation are dying from consumption. She says, "Sometimes in my head I had a dream I could not shake. i saw my sisters and my mother swaying in the branches, buried too high to reach, wrapped in lace I never hooked. I tried to stop myself from remembering what it was like to have companions, to have my mother and sisters around me, but when Fleur came to us that June, I remembered." Pauline, too, had lost a great deal and was alone in the world. She loved the mystical Fleur, who acted toward her once with the tenderness of a mother, and when Fleur hustled the men in a poker match and they went after her, the little Pauline struggled in her defense. To avenge Fleur, Pauline locked the men in the icehouse during a tornado, where they froze. Pauline carried this grief, and the loss of Fleur's love, with her through her life. It is smart on Erdrich's part that she uses two names for Pauline, who later becomes Leopolda. If she were to introduce the young girl as Leopolda, anyone who had already ready Love Medicine would not be able to find tenderness for the character. But when a new character is introduced, we want to have compassion for them, and we do with Pauline. And when we find out that it is she who becomes Leopolda (though this became apparent to me earlier on than the final revelation of this fact), we find retroactive compassion for Leopolda the lost, the broken, the loneliest soul on God's earth. 

These characters differences (age, gender, spiritual centers, personalities) mean that they experience the changes that occur very differently, which of course makes the story more complete. No one person's version of loss is the whole story--and sometimes it takes their foils or their counterweights to complete it. Having the two oppositional characters telling the story certainly makes the world of the reservation more vivid and complicated. Through Pauline, we have direct entry into the world of the convent and the role that Christianity plays in the unraveling of the community, and through Nanapush, we learn about the spirit world, referred to as "the old ways", that guides so many in the reservation world. 

Eli's affair with Sophie is a perfect example of the manner in which Erdrich rounds and swells her story using multiple narration. Sophie is the young daughter of Bernadette, the woman who has taken Pauline in. When Fleur's husband Eli rejects Pauline's bony advances, Pauline hatches a plan to use Sophie to tempt Eli, thus spiting Fleur and living vicariously through Sophie's affair. Using charms and "medicine", Pauline uses the two as puppets for her whims. Fleur immediately knows what happens and casts a spell on Sophie and shuts Eli out. Pauline realizes what she's done, and says, "I work[ed] my mind back and forth on the problem like a saw, until at last I had it all in pieces and I understood that I couldn't put it back together." From Pauline's point of view, we see the event of betrayal itself, and her own repentance and subsequent move toward the church. She also sees Eli as he comes to Fleur, and says, "...he pumped himself full of false bravery. It was visible, the way he did this...perhaps I had watched something change in him, right there, from boy to man, from man to deceiver of women....when he stepped near and laid his hand upon her arm she simply moved her arm away. That's when he knew. He turned and retreated, left the door hanging open behind. We didn't hear which way he went through the woods." Where he goes is to Nanapush, for guidance and for sympathy. At Nanapush's, we see Eli as no more than a foolish boy--whereas through the eyes of Pauline, he is a man, a tough deceiver of women, an object of sexual desire and a symbol of masculinity that does not notice her. Nanapush says, "After six days I could not bear to hear any more from Eli. Each day of snow seemed endless, trapped with a sulking boy."With these two visions of Eli, he becomes a complete person, his character is filled with complications and contradictions endemic to the human psychic anatomy.

Erdrich's use of multiple narrators allows for a piecing together different elements of a story, different versions of what happened, different significances of events passed, different understandings of fellow characters and different relationships to the changing community. Like this, the story is both unreal (like the swollen dancers or the patchwork guitar) and in some ways more real, in that more sides of the story are told. Story, this way, or community history, is nonlinear and centered more around feeling than it is around fact. 

Backstory-Only What We Need to Know

The backstory is often a place where the story gets lost. There feels a need (I find this in my own writing process) to explain everything into being: "But before I tell you that, you should know…" and "And the reason she was like this is because when she was a child…" This may be a necessary part of the writing process, for some writers, but it also, in the words of Xu Xi, must be revisted and "slashed and burned." Writing "This had happened once before" is often more powerful alone than with a subsequent paragraph that begins, "The first time it happened had been when she was seven…" Amy Hempel is a master of this. She shows how a frontstory and backstory can work together to create a whole story, how a backstory can be used succinctly to inform the character and the reality in which she (or he) lives.

One method Hempel uses to minimize the meandering backstory is the non-linear narrative. Hempel's stories are often constructed with disparate blocks of time, with fragmented memories or moments that congeal only toward the end, that are linked with only a few recurring words. Backstory pieces mixed in with frontstory pieces, so that they are all frontstory and backstory at the same time. In "Tom Rock Through The Eels", for example, the narrator separates her story with white spaces. First, we get the story of her mother and the bribe she gave her daughter to swim down for the Tom rock. Second, we see the grown daughter sleeping in her father's bed and remembering her dead mother. Third is her grandmother, and the grandmother's pain of losing her daughter. These are disparate, non-linear memories, but they are held together by the memory of the dead mother and the family members' singular and collective pain around the issue. But the story is also held together with other small details. The father section begins: "In California, you are not supposed to sleep beneath bookshelves or paintings or mirrors on the wall." In the grandmother's section (the entire fourth paragraph): "My grandmother sleeps beneath a portrait of her daughter." In this way, Hempel tells a far-reaching story but with incredible economy of words. The backstory and the frontstory are one. We feel the singular and collective pain of the mother/daughter/wife's loss without a long history of each of these relationships and the particular holes left. We don't need to—the small details we get let us know: these holes are present. We feel them.

The fourth section of the story is just this: "My mother said, 'What?' I said, 'I forgot. I forgot what I was going to say.' 'Then it must have been a lie," my mother said.'" This short paragraph gives us no backstory, but tells us a great deal. This is a paragraph about memory, and what it means to forget. The larger story is about remembering the narrator's mother, and other mothers, and about trying to remember "the good things". We are not told where they are when this event occurs, or how old either the mother or the daughter is. It could be on the mother's deathbed, it could be driving the car. Did the daughter ever remember? We don't know. Details are not extrapolated, here. Hempel doesn't tell us, because what she does is distil the moment. Details are extraneous: the point is only what she has left. Backstory, then, in both the story's form and figuratively in the daughter's life, is gone.

Another place we see this is in "Church Cancels Cow." In this short two-page story, the woman walks her dog in the cemetery across from her house. Another woman gets angry because she has found "faces"—feces—on her mother's grave and thinks it to be the woman's dog. They fight, and the other woman follows the woman with the dog. The woman with the dog lies and says that she has relatives buried in the cemetery, when she doesn't. "For peace of mind I will lie about anything at any time." This is where the backstory comes in. "In fact, she says, she has counted three dogs the other day from her car. Like counting cows, in the game I played in cars when the family went out on long drives. My brother and I were told to count cows in the fields we passed along the way…" The sister (after this short paragraph, she is grounded as a person with a relationship—she has a brother, and so is now not just a woman but a sister) remembers the game one way, but her brother reminds her: it was cemetery that cancels cow, not a church, in that counting game they played as children. So the backstory we are given leads us back to the present moment, in which the lying woman is making peace with the woman who found feces on her mother's grave (this character entered the story as a daughter, rather than just as a woman with a dog). The backstory paragraph, if we can call it that, does not give us a lot of information. Was the brother older or younger? Where were they going on the drives? Where did they live? Who would generally win the game? There was no specific anecdote, just a generalized "we would play this game." The specifics that are left out don't matter. What matters is: the cemetery cancels things, it erases, it makes the woman with the dog start over in her counting.

What do backstories add? Backstory seems to be a method useful for the writer to ground his or herself in time, in place, to explore where the character has been before he/she has arrived at the moment of import, that is, the moment that is the center of the story. Stories are stronger without a long backstory, and Hempel shows us how the necessary information of past can be communicated without the heavy-handed "And the other thing you should know,"s or the "One more thing I'd like to tell you"s to which writers (including myself) are sometimes prone.

This method if distillation of the backstory to the essential, the "need to know" information that propels the story forward, shows a great deal of trust in the reader. We don't have to know where or when the conversation happened, or what happened to the brother later, or where they lived, or what kind of sickness she had—unless we need to. The "information" of it is extraneous if it doesn't round the character; it is also extraneous if it pumps a character so full if rounding devices and complete histories that he or she pops. As readers, we are happy with what we are given, and happy when a writer like Hempel trusts us to trust her with the details she gives, and nothing more.

Amy Hempel's Titles

Amy Hempel's The Collected Stories is a collection of her work since her first collection, Reasons to Live, was published in 1985.  

There's a lot to say about  Hempel's work but I'd like to start with her titles. Her titles are breathtaking. Some of my favorites: "Nashville gone to Ashes", "Tonight is a Favor to Holly", "Breathing Jesus", "Rapture of the Deep", "Beg, Sl Tog, Inc, Cont, Rep", "The Most Girl Part of You." Titles are something I sometimes stumble over in my own work, or overlook as particularly meaningful (from my own perspective as I write them). Titles have felt to me in the past, often, just like a label to remember them by. Of course my relationship to titles as a reader has always been something very different. Hempel's titles--and the particular way they tether her stories to themselves and also to their own exquisite unraveling--are lessons in how to take the breath away before a story begins, and then also once it has ended.

Because often, Hempel's titles emerge from only a small reference in the story, rather than the story's obvious center, and thus the titles do not take their full weight or clarity until the end.  The title "Beg, Sl Tog, Inc, Cont, Rep," seems like nonsense (though we trust the author that it will materialize into meaning). On the third page of the story, we learn that the title is most likely an abbreviated instructions code from the knitting books at Ingrid's knitting store. Not until the ninth page do we find out the translation for this code: "Begin, slip together, increase, continue, repeat." Finally, on the last page, we are given the closing instructions for the piece that the character--that Hempel, that the readers--have been creating throughout the story: "K tog rem st", or "knit together remaining stitches." Topically speaking, this story is about a woman who has had a difficult abortion with lasting physical and emotional effects, who is taking care of another woman who is pregnant. While she watches over her friend, she knits (there is little else to do). Once the baby is born, the woman knits feverishly without stop, and gives the new mother an embarrassing number of sweaters for the baby. "That was the great thing about knitting, I thought--everything was fiber, the world a world of natural resources." She knits her pain and her loss into sweaters for another woman's baby; she conceives of new beings from the fibers of yarn, rather than the fibers of her own body. The title is a code that the woman must figure out--a code of healing and of creation--but also a code that she wants to live safely within because codes are in a way safe in their secrecy. And the code's translation--"Begin, Slip together, increase, continue, repeat"--is both a metaphor for conception (the source of this woman's pain and loss), and one for the process of healing. The final piece of the code: "Knit together remaining stitches." Heal the pieces of yourself that are broken. The title unfolds its own code, its own meaning throughout the story such that it is not just a stagnant label but rather a pulsing part of the story and its arc of meaning. 

"Nashville Gone to Ashes" refers to the narrator/protagonist's dead dog, Nashville, whose ashes sit "on top of the dresser, next to the phone." Initially most readers recognize Nashville as a Tennessee city but the expectations are changed when this name is given to a dead dog. There is something lovely about this, about this subversion of expectations and naming. Names, (another word for "Titles")in this story, are critical--and Nashville is in fact mis-named because of her husband's misunderstanding. The narrator's husband was a Vet, nicknamed "Flea", and is now dead. Flea, of course, is a funny name (and an unexpected one) for a Vet who collects animals at home. Their home, even after flea dies, is awash with adopted animals and all their names. These animals both keep the narrator company, and remind her terribly of her dead husband, or rather, the fact that her husband is dead. "Here's a trick I found for how to finally get some sleep. I sleep in my husband's bed. That way the empty bed I look at is my own," she says. "Nashville Gone to Ashes," initially evocative of a place but then clarified to refer to the dead dog, ultimately reverts to including it's initial meaning of "A Place Gone to Ashes" because, we learn, it is not just the dog that's dead, or the husband, but the entire wild world the husband built at to which the woman, without Flea the husband,  is only allergic and in which she is terribly lonely. With Nashville gone to ashes, she tries to give away the other dogs. 

As I said, I'm toppled by some of Hempel's titles.  In thinking about why, with these two stories as case studies, it seems to me that the mark of these strong titles is that the title unfolds its meaning, its beauty, all the way through the story. The title is, at the beginning, a small peephole into the revelation that will come with the story (and for its characters), and it is also ultimately the foundation of that revelation.  Hempel's titles, in this way, are stories unto themselves. Her titles matter--all titles should matter. From this I have a lot to learn.