Novakovich

Review Notation: Mixing It Up

APRICOTS FROM CHERNOBYL
by Josip Novakovich

Published by Graywolf Press

I began to write stories in the States out of nostalgia when I dodged the Yugoslav Federal Army and could not go home. Nostos-algia, the Greek components mean return + pain: the pain that drives you to return. But I could not return, because in addition to the politics, time banned me. I missed the times and places and people of my boyhood. I thought I could stay in touch at least with the people and the place, if not the time. I wrote a long letter a day, under the illusion that I was reaching beyond the ocean and plugging my spirit into my native soil, through that bit of a tree, the page, which contained traces of being rooted in a moist black soil. In return for the long letters, if I was lucky, I'd get a few postcards. I thought I might just as well give up on the lousy lot of my friends and brothers. But by then I was addicted to remembering through writing, and so I wrote to the wall in front of me. I described the places of my childhood in more than a hundred pages, and my fingers walked and ran, barefoot, as I used to in summer days...
--Josip Novakovich, from his essay "Revising Memory"

The yearning in Novakovich's collection of essays envelopes land and sea, language and thought, faces and facades, with a bitter humor almost sweet at its core. Although writing in a time when xenophobia has become an absolute madness in Western nations all over the world, this author's clever sleight-of-hand turns each bruising of the psyche into an opportunity for ripening, like the "stunted apricots" in the title essay of this book. Novakovich is, above all, an ascerbic optimist. Having fled his homeland in the former Yugoslavia, leaving behind kin and community, the author here significant portraits of what is lost, what is remembered, and what remains. Within those moments of fresh clarity of the past are the instances of repeated culture shock that never seem to lose their harsh edges. "Almost whichever border I cross," Novakovich reports, "the police take out their books and search for my name among the names of terrorists, murderers, rapists; and, not finding it, they look at me as if meaning, 'All right, not yet, but we'll catch you some day!'" And yes, this treatment is most certainly racially-motivated: "Whenever I am tired -- and after bumming through Europe for two months I certainly am--" we learn, "I think I look very much a Slav. These 'free-world policemen are like dogs trained to smell us out, which in many cases quite literally should prove possible! I am the only one dragged into the police station, while others admire what a free country Switzerland is, where nobody even bothers so much as to look at your passport" (from "Crossing Borders"). A variance on the theme of immigration purely from hardship, Novakovich takes a broader stroke at the issue of passage:

Many people enter illegally, through fraud -- buying passports, green cards, copying visas, or plainly crossing the borders where they are least attended, risking a not-so-gentle treatment by the U.S. border patrol. People are driven by poverty, or by the desire for wealth, or by hardship of one sort or another, greed of one sort or another, to move to another country and seek a new life. Even where life is not hard materially, it may be hard spiritually. You can run into many Dutch, Swedish, German, Japanese, and other immigrants in the States and other countries. It's not that materially they didn't have good chances at home, but they just needed a throwing away of their strict upbringing in a country where different customs rule -- a breakthrough into a new life, through borders not as obstacles but as thresholds to imagined freedom. --from the essay "Crossing the Border"

Insights here take into pointed regard the changes cultures of many European and U.S. cultures. The humor, anger, nostalgia, and wisdom of this first collection by Novakovich mark a splendid entry into U.S. multicultural literature. A necessary book for the shelves of every informed reader.

Review by Canéla Analucinda Jaramillo

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writing characters

Apparently character is plot and plot is character when writing - according to Henry James (1995). "Building a strong sense of your main character or characters, then add a dilemma, challenge or conflict, you will automatically be generating your plot" (Open University).

And that I realised, when writing about Miriam, was pretty difficult. It's already a vast subject for discussion just from my first few lines about her.


First drafts .....

Miriam loathed the idea of being labelled by others. She enjoyed being thought of as different, not fitting into the usual mould. She really was quite quirky and unique without really needing to try. If only she knew that. Perhaps she did really. This conflict within her is frustrating to get to grips with and she is so changeable too. Does she even realise she is battling with an internal rivalry? It's not external but watching her it sometimes seems as if she is battling the world. She is a story all by herself but there isn't room to go into that detail here.

Phoebe had longed for a simple life away from the hubbub and to live off the grid. Yet she loved her gadgets and occasional trips into town to visit a gallery. And her car was an essential! With all her protestations within herself and to her friends, here she was with a low income, living in housing association accommodation, scaling down. Now the conflicting discontent. Not having enough money to do and possess all the things she wanted.  And so she sat sometimes for hours grieving the loss of her former self, the adventurer, the risk taker, the high-flyer. That person and that lifestyle were long gone. These days Phoebe had to be cautious when considering an evening at the cinema or a meal out with friends. Oh yes, she was still socialising but carefully selecting which she could afford. Sometimes she didn’t choose and impulsively did them all. That part of her hadn’t changed, the throwing caution to the wind attitude lived on despite the financial insecurity. But this meant something else had to be forfeited, such as food.

 Spending on binge foods thus resulted in not only a financial dilemma but more erosion of self esteem. Not to mention a self berating session.  The need for binging always felt like a real need for the food but intellectually she knew that it was something deeper, some emotional trigger, no doubt contributed to by the sense of distress at her now small world. Phoebe had reached across the spectrum of the haves and the have nots. When she had and was receiving in abundance she craved a simple life without the high-powered stresses. Now she has little, there was a sense of loss and shame. What got her here?

How do these two come to be friends? What brought them together? Crisis! A rock bottom. Emotional fall out and a long lasting supportive friendship was borne out of adversity and gloom. From thereon a different set of adventures ensued. The same underlying people bringing a new dynamic in their togetherness and adventure unlike anything in their individual former lives ....

More envy

jaundiced

Affected with or exhibiting prejudice, as from envy or resentment.

I had been chewing a bitter cud of remembrance, so bitter that it engendered the gall which, in the end, jaundiced my vision of things that were past and things as they then existed.

-- Mary E. Waller, The Windmill on the Dune

And yet with jaundiced eye I gaze upon all the beauty and wonder about me, and with jaundiced brain consider the pitiful figure I cut in this world that endured so long without me and that will again endure without me.

-- Jack London, John Barleycorn

Jealousy

With reference to my own recent ramblings about jealousy and envy I thought I would add this Blog to my Blog. Interesting.

What Can Jealousy Teach You?

Your jealousy can inform you about your relationship with yourself.

Published on February 25, 2011 by Mary C. Lamia, Ph.D. in Intense Emotions and Strong Feelings

The emotion of jealously feels so terrible that it might seem counterintuitive that you can learn anything from it. The fear, anxiety, and anger about a potential loss that jealousy evokes can be experienced as negatively as the loss itself, and sometimes worse given the torturous nature of the unknown.
Jessica, for example, always bristled when her partner would comment about another woman expressing interest in him, and she didn't like his lunches with female business associates. She had a hard time trusting that he was truly loyal to her, and found herself occasionally looking for evidence that would confirm her fear.
First of all, a woman or man in Jessica's situation should learn that jealousy is not always about you. It is entirely possible that the personality characteristics of a partner may lead him to provoke you to become jealous, and, in doing so, he secures his tie to you. Such behavior is typical of people with personality disorders. Narcissistic and borderline personalities are so fearful of abandonment that they evoke jealous reactions in a partner and then blame their partner for being jealous. In this case, Jessica would become so preoccupied with her own security that she wouldn't consider her partner's own abandonment fears.

There are other variations on the theme of jealously not being about you, but instead belonging to a partner who evokes jealousy in you. A partner might be jealous about his previous partner, but instead evoke that jealously in his present partner. Jealousy, as you may have experienced, tends to cause intense negativity or anger in a person toward the object of that jealousy. How convenient it is when someone can evoke rage in a present partner about the behavior of a previous partner, all the while remaining neutral and even sympathetic toward the previous partner.
However, in Jessica's case, her jealously wasn't limited to her partner. When a female friend talked about a shared experience with a mutual friend of theirs she felt jealous as well. It could very well be that Jessica's choice of friends unfortunately resembled the personality disordered characteristics of her romantic partner, but let's assume that not to be the case. Thus, we are assuming that Jessica is prone to have jealous responses when people in her life express closeness to anyone else.
Jealousy, when it does belong to you, represents a threat to your connection with another person that is experienced as anxiety and fear that someone else can and will take your place. In evolutionary terms, securing your tie to a partner would have enormous benefits, and thus, jealously and the responses it evokes serve to protect one's self-interest in a partnership. A rival, in caveman days, might meet a dreadful fate. But in contemporary society, for the most part, jealously tends to make the jealous party appear and feel weak, insecure, inferior, needy, and lacking in self-esteem. The jealous person is often plagued by uncertainty and quietly lonely. However, sometimes a jealous partner is aggressive and offensive. In any case, one who is jealous has a few things to learn.
Jealousy does trigger a negative, self-protective response, but it can also inform you. So if you experience jealousy you have an opportunity to learn about yourself by asking yourself some questions: Are you perceiving that you are lacking in some quality that you would like to develop for yourself? Are you experiencing jealously because, actually, you want something more from your relationship that you are unable to obtain from that person, whether it is passion, intellectual stimulation, or intimacy? What do you think of yourself and who do you want to be? What experiences of loss and abandonment in your life have led you to fear that it will happen again? Being close to others can trigger the emotion of jealousy, especially if you do not value yourself or have experienced childhood loss or abandonment. However, you must recognize that your feelings have more to do with your relationship with yourself than your relationship with someone else.
Like jealously, envy is a social emotion that is evoked in relationships. Where jealousy is evoked in three-way relationships, the experience of envy involves your relationship with another person