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Ivoirians Dream of America, Undeterred by Trump

November 8, 2016 Essays, In House

cabs

In Abidjan, the principal city of Côte d’Ivoire, Africa’s fastest-growing economy, the air is black and nauseating on the Boulevard des Martyrs in the upscale Deux-Plateaux neighborhood at morning rush hour. My mouth tastes of diesel already. The light changes. Orange taxis, yellow taxis, trucks, busses, vans belch exhaust in unison. Traffic surges; two lanes fracture into four as drivers maneuver anarchically to break through, and the jam gets worse. When the cab I’m in reaches the chokepoint, I see a man lying on his back on the pavement, head to one side, the wheels of a stopped car inches away. His overturned motorcycle blocks a lane. When I pass a half an hour later, he’s still there, and traffic is backed up to the Boulevard François Mitterrand.

Every Month is Black History Month

November 1, 2016 Essays, Issue 12, Issue 12 Essays

By SUSAN STRAIGHT
When my youngest daughter began her freshman year of high school, I said casually to her, “Do you ever see Christian?”

She gave me an incredulous and dismissive look. She replied, “Why would I see him? He doesn’t go here. He’s probably not in school at all. He probably fried his brain dying his hair all those colors.”

And then she was done. She talked about something else. But I kept picturing him. Forever to me he will be the boy who called my child a nigger and spat on her when she was ten.

Beautiful and Splendid

October 14, 2016 Essays

When I speak to Dave on the phone the first time, he tells me his father died from cancer, that what he’s selling is part of his Dad’s huge collection of vintage stereo equipment. I’m sitting in the parking lot of an animal hospital in Northern Virginia, where I’ve just dropped off my dog Swayze for palliative radiation for her own cancer.

I tell him I’m sorry to hear it.

“He didn’t do anything but sit in a chair for two years while they kept him alive. He’s better off dead,” Dave says. “He was 82. He lived his life.”

I’d driven to Virginia from Maryland’s Eastern Shore where my wife, Susan, and I live and was trying to arrange a time to visit Dave back in Maryland so I could look at a few things he was selling on Craigslist: two reel-to-reel tape players and a vintage 200 watt Kenwood receiver, all listed far below their value. I’d buy the stuff from him, and then sell it at market value on eBay. The money would help pay for Swayze’s chemotherapy. I didn’t want Dave to know that though.

Love in the Absence of Persephone

October 1, 2016 Essays, In House

By JAMES ALAN GILL

Do you remember when we’d go walking in the rain, and your coat was too big for you so that I couldn’t see your face under the hood? And we’d lean against one of the giant cedars growing among the graves in the Pioneer Cemetery, tree and stone planted over a hundred years before by ancestors unknown to us? And when we went to kiss, we bumped teeth because all sense of space had been lost? It was then I started falling in love with you.

Like an Eggplant Parmigiana, Like Layers of Rock

September 17, 2016 Essays, In House

Sicilians build things like they will live forever and eat like they will die tomorrow.

—Plato

1. Four of us are here, in mid-Sicily, waiting for something that will lead us to make art. The life of Akrai Residency for three weeks. Two of us speak partial Italian. One of us has never been to Italy. We come from Poland, Iran, America, and New Zealand. This non-touristic town is now our food, sleep, air, conversation, and confrontation.

Palazzolo Acreide is a small (8,000 person) town built of rock. The streets are cobbled, the buildings are ancient brick, the churches rise solid and baroque from rock. Much of it is limestone, soft, shapeable, and light; it gives the town a yellow glow. People here seem to grow from a desire to be full—not just of food but of color, taste, feeling, and sound. Church bells punctuate each quarter hour, in our central neighborhood and in all neighborhoods; the slightly staggered ringing echoes throughout the town and valley below. Two fifteen, fifteen, fifteen. Two thirty, thirty, thirty.

Beyond Eboli

September 10, 2016 Essays

By DOMINIC PREZIOSI

slope on island

I liked to climb to the highest point of the village, to the wind-beaten church, where the eye can sweep over an endless expanse in every direction, identical in character all the way around the circle.– Carlo Levi, Christ Stopped at Eboli

When I was a boy, my grandfather, Domenico Preziosi, lived on Route 110, a double-barreled commercial strip in Huntington, New York, on Long Island, its cacophony a rousing anthem of people engaged in the business of living. Seemingly oblivious to the commotion, my grandfather tended his modest lot with a rustic’s stoic care that revealed his origins in one of southern Italy’s most remote regions. There was a small garden where he planted tomatoes, cucumbers, and peppers. There were pear trees, cherry trees, and apple trees, and where two had grown close together he had wedged planks between the trunks to serve as benches. Grapevines twisted through the piping of an iron trellis. He also made his own wine, which he bottled and stored in his cellar, its color closer to black than red.

Place Love

August 27, 2016 Essays, In House

By JULIA LICHTBLAU

This is a falling-out-of-love story and an old boyfriend story, though I was never in love with him, but that’s another story. I was in love with a place and an idea of where I could live that was incompatible with who I was becoming, though it took a long time for me to accept it.

The place was Maine, and the love wasn’t a mad passion but an achy, nostalgic, security-blanket attachment. I’d spent my early childhood summers on one of Maine’s most remote islands in the Penobscot Bay, and had idyllic memories of kerosene-lit cottages, beach-combing, berry-picking, and unsupervised roaming with other children for hours. The sight of granite cliffs, shingled houses, lobster boats, and pine trees brought forth a powerful rush of dopamine and nostalgia. When my family moved to Côte d’Ivoire, West Africa, we put island rocks in our sea freight. I reconnected with Maine after we returned to Washington, D.C. Once I started college, my parents moved overseas, and Maine became a touchstone, a place I returned to as often as possible, an imaginary home.

Un Walker en Nuyol

August 5, 2016 Essays

“Exaggerate to exist.”
―W. H. Auden, The Age of Anxiety (1948)

[1] From El Gueto

Friday, January 4th, 1985. It is 7:50 am. The temperature outside is below freezing.

“The city” isn’t altogether alien to me. I have seen it featured in a thousand movies. As a boy I came with my father, a theater actor, to buy Broadway plays. I am familiar with its grammar. Indeed, I make my way through conversations, although, in all honesty, my English is still precarious.

This time around, though, I am alone and I am learning to cope with it. I barely have any money. The $67-a-week I make shelving books at a local library are barely enough. Collect calls are expensive. I used to write long letters while I lived in the Middle East, but I have lost practice. Plus, for now I don’t feel like sharing my thoughts with others.

I have landed in a small apartment on Broadway and 121st Street, next to The Jewish Theological Seminary. They have given me a scholarship to study philosophy. I share the apartment with three other young men, one called Francesco from Italy with a heavy accent, Arno from Canada, and Ritchie from the United States. It has taken us time to get acquainted with one another. I understand what they all tell me, though I am at a loss every third or fourth word, especially with Arno’s lingo. He speaks fast and uses strange words. He says I talk English like a “primitive.” Franco’s syntax isn’t good either. His accent is heavy. He helps me when I fumble.

Grands Travaux

July 23, 2016 Essays, In House

By MARIAN CROTTY

I’m at an arts center in Brussels, waiting to see a movie and trying to look Belgian. Or at least not American. Or at least not like an American who’s here without purpose, floating through this city for a few days because, for the first time in many years, she happens to be in Europe. Because I know almost nothing about actually beingBelgian, though, my strategy is basically just to look bored. As if, like the other theatergoers, I’m here simply to support the arts festival that’s taking place, not cataloguing the hip crowd of people chattering around me in French and Dutch, nor analyzing their sensibly edgy way of dressing, nor contemplating the drizzling rain outside the wall of windows that covers the tourist pubs and designer clothing boutiques with a faint gray haze. As if everything is vaguely pleasing but ordinary. There’s something childlike both in my desire to hide and the belief that it is necessary and possible to do so, and I find myself wondering if the skittishness that comes over me when I travel is a version of what everyone feels when she is alone and in a foreign place, or if this feeling speaks to some larger weakness specific to me.

The Hands That Touched It Last

June 11, 2016 Essays, In House

By ELIZABETH WITTE

Our flight to Boston had been delayed five hours for operational reasons, we were told. The Istanbul airport was hot and thick with people, a hectic crossroads from which we all hoped we’d escape, eventually. We’d been there three hours already—essentially nothing, judging by the quantity of sleeping bodies slumped against each other on the ground, splayed across chairs, face down on tables. We paced the warm corridors, sticky with traveler sweat, past the food court, mosque, flooded bathrooms, Victoria’s Secret. We slumped over a table eating savory pastries, watching others in similar states of surrender.