Freeman Freeman's Home

The Best New Writing on Home
Main
ISBN: 978-1-61185-946-1
Verlag: Grove Press UK
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 320 Seiten

The third literary anthology in the series that has been called 'ambitious' (O Magazine) and 'strikingly international' (Boston Globe), Freeman's: Home, continues to push boundaries in diversity and scope, with stunning new pieces from emerging writers and literary luminaries alike. As the refugee crisis continues to convulse whole swathes of the world and there are daily updates about the rise of homelessness in different parts of America, the idea and meaning of home is at the forefront of many people's minds. Viet Thanh Nguyen harks to an earlier age of displacement with a haunting piece of fiction about the middle passage made by those fleeing Vietnam after the war. Rabih Alameddine brings us back to the present, as he leaves his mother's Beirut apartment to connect with Syrian refugees who are building a semblance of normalcy, and even beauty, in the face of so much loss. Home can be a complicated place to claim, because of race - the everyday reality of which Danez Smith explores in a poem about a chance encounter at a bus stop - or because of other types of fraught history. In 'Vacationland,' Kerri Arsenault returns to her birthplace of Mexico, Maine, a paper mill boomtown turned ghost town, while Xiaolu Guo reflects on her childhood in a remote Chinese fishing village with grandparents who married across a cultural divide. Many readers and writers turn to literature to find a home: Leila Aboulela tells a story of obsession with a favourite author. Also including Thom Jones, Emily Raboteau, Rawi Hage, Barry Lopez, Herta Müller, Amira Hass, and more - writers from around the world lend their voices to the theme and what it means to build, leave, return to, lose, and love a home.

John Freeman was the editor of Granta until 2013. His books include How to Read a Novelist and Tales of Two Cities: The Best of Times and Worst of Times in Today's New York. He is an executive editor at the Literary Hub and teaches at the New School. His work has appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, and the Paris Review.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Freeman, John

Leseproben

Introduction

JOHN FREEMAN

For much of my life home has been elsewhere. Both of my parents grew up in cities they felt compelled to leave, so for a decade my family lived elsewhere: in Cleveland, where my parents met, then on Long Island, where my father found work, and later—for the longest stretch of time—in a small Pennsylvania town called Emmaus, where my mother and father made a home. There I walked to school on cracked sidewalks beneath maple trees so large my fearless brothers thought twice about climbing them. The Lehigh Valley rose above and around us like a smoke ring. Night felt like a well.

We lived in Emmaus for just six years but until recently it was the only home I’d known. It had the moody, memorable rhythms of a home. On clear afternoons our high school pep band marched the streets belting out songs, tossing batons. On snowy winter mornings my brothers and I curled around the radio, listening for school district closings. Upon hearing East Penn Schools, we bolted into the yard to build castles from chest-high drifts carved by snowplows. Summers, the soft June air would be pierced by the whine of far-off drag races.

I never knew there could be a difference between where you are from and what you call home until my family left Pennsylvania in 1984. My father had a new job in Sacramento. We were going home—to his home, and like almost every trip my family took, we drove. The United States unpeeled before our station wagon packed with coloring books and our springer spaniel Tracy, who curled up into a ball the size of a danish and slept most of the way. Everything else we owned was stuffed into a moving van driven ahead of us by a guy named Kool. As Ohio opened up into Iowa and then to the broad terrifying expanse of Kansas, I thought, this is where I’m from.

I didn’t know it then but California would become where I was from. My family adapted to long, even seasons and shallow nights and hot lungfuls of valley air. It would be a decade before I felt again the lonesome hollow in my chest a fall day can give you. I lost my nickname and my brothers reinvented themselves too in minor ways. It wasn’t odd to see palm trees or to think about everything east of us as “back there,” to not even think about the past at all. To just get in a car and drive somewhere alone to see how fast the machine could go.

Movement is a particularly American metaphor because agency is one of the nation’s obsessions. It is part of America’s mythology that you make your fate. You can decide, and then become, whatever or whoever it is you wish to be. In a country which takes such poor care of its weak—which has been and continues to be so hostile to visitors—it feels especially cruel to play this dream song. And yet everywhere the tune hums: in presidential speeches, advertisements, church services, in pop music and books and films. It is the melody of American life.

I have come to believe that home is the antidote to myths such as this one, myths that hover outside the reach of so much human life, creating a low pressure system of unhappiness in between the ground and sky. Perhaps we truly need to become in order to be, but however speedily or sluggishly that evolution proceeds, we need a narrative space in which we tell and live the story of our lives—and that space is called a home. In this sense, a home is not a fixed place, or even necessarily a stable one. The last decade of migration ought to tell us that. Rather, home is a space we have exerted ourselves against to make a corner of it ours. Home is a place we claim or allow ourselves to be claimed by.

Part of making and preserving this space is telling it. The writers collected in this issue of Freeman’s are caught in the middle of that act. As readers, I invite you to eavesdrop on their narrative hammering, to watch them raise the roof beams. These are intimate, difficult, sometimes amusing, and beautifully textured stories—true and otherwise—poems, and photographs. For a child, a home is the original sensory map, and so several stories begin right there, with that first surveying of the territory.

Xiaolu Guo describes her childhood in a small fishing village in China, where she was raised by her frail grandmother and hard-drinking, cruel grandfather. For Thom Jones, home was the aisles of a general store which his grandmother ran during the Depression in Illinois. Passersby were so hungry she’d pack scoops of peanut butter to have at the ready for desperate visitors. Edwidge Danticat was born in Haiti and grew up in Brooklyn, and in her bittersweet essay she writes of something that happened in the interregnum between homes that instigated a crisis of faith in her life.

The building materials of home do not exist in a world of plain geometry; they are constantly changing shape and weight. Many stories here sketch out the quantum mechanics for living in a shifting field, when the need for safe space remains. Nowhere has this urge for safety and home been more powerfully under threat than in Syria and Libya. The novelist Rabih Alameddine travels in Lebanon and Greece where he witnesses the small and large ways Syrian refugees make a temporary space a home, and when conditions are too abject for this urge to take root.

A society is often defined by how it treats those seeking shelter, wanting to make a home. In her brilliant, furious essay, Herta Müller tells of her own migration into Germany in the worst days of Ceau?escu’s regime in Romania and the awful ways she was treated upon arrival. She warns of the amendments made to Germany’s sense of itself, of who counts as German after the war when exiles returned home. Then she compares this house of holes to the one Germany struggles with in the wake of mass migration into Europe from the Middle East.

Time and again the pieces here form a calculus of belonging, and wrestle with the ethics of addition. The poet Kay Ryan has a theory on home. It has to do with interior proximity, and a balance between our need for what is around us and for our ability to affect it. Emily Raboteau marries into a family and notes that when you become daughter-in-law to an immoveable object, such as a stubborn Ugandan mother, you take over the burden of channeling that tension into the creation of a new, larger home. In his elegiac short story, Barry Lopez writes of a lucky woman for whom the effort of maintaining a home has largely receded, and who funnels her remaining energy into preserving the health and vitality of a wider home, the natural world, which is home—she hopes—to all.

Would that there were more in the world who saw this way: sharing a home in many cases is a fractious, often dangerous matter. In his essay about life on the edge of Israel and Palestine, the novelist Nir Baram describes how a history joined by exclusionary definitions of home corrodes daily life along that border. In a chapter from his forthcoming novel, Viet Thanh Nguyen imagines the stories of people on boats coming from Vietnam to America in the 1970s, the terrifying Middle Passage of a huge wave of migration into the U.S.—and upon their arrival things will hardly get easier for them.

Whether it’s war or pressures too great to bear, home is so often the place one needs to leave. In an excerpt of his upcoming novel, A Natural, Ross Raisin conjures a gay footballer traveling the low-level club circuits across England on his first trip away from home. Marie Darrieussecq writes of the painter Paula Modersohn-Becker, and how she had to leave her husband and children behind in Germany to get space to work in Paris. Juan Gabriel Vásquez made a similar trip to the city of light some eighty years later, following in the footsteps of Latin America’s great novelists, only to discover home had followed him there. Gregory Pardlo signs up for the marines as a young man but spends most of his time not really wanting to leave where he is from.

Home can let you down more than any other place and still retain its hold over you. Kerri Arsenault comes from a paper mill town in Maine, a place created by its industry and then killed by the carcinogens that industry pumped into its air and water. Yet the town’s residents remain loyal. In his poem, Danez Smith writes of the way new connective spaces between unlike people are created by the cruelly exclusionary logic of a home that won’t let you in.

Since force is acting on it at all times, home must be claimed and arranged, catalogued and maintained. Adisa Bašic’s poem speaks in the voice of a neighborhood which lures no tourists but means everything to those it raised. Amira Hass lives in the West Bank and notes how signs of what was once Palestine litter Jerusalem, most notably in the stone houses which were built before the creation of Israel. Lawrence Joseph has lived in lower Manhattan for several decades and his poem chronicles the turns of light like a painter who knows his palette. Writing of his childhood Austin, Benjamin Markovits recalls how if it was your home, you reserved the right to rename its streets, to mispronounce its landmarks, to make it yours.

There’s a liturgy of home in these pages—a praise that goes beyond compliment and edges toward devotion. Aleksandar Hemon humorously describes the marathon singing sessions his family hosts at gatherings to keep their Ukrainian heritage alive. Rawi Hage describes how he began taking photographs during the civil war in Lebanon, hoping he might see a bomb dropping, an activity that may have preserved the trauma of that war for years to come. In a steamy prose poem, Stuart Dybek recalls driving home from a day at the beach, the tension of...