Lost in Buenos Aires, Street Art Got Me Home

Alissa Guzman

On a recent vacation to South America, I accidently became lost in the middle of Buenos Aires. Separated from my partner who had the maps, money, hotel name and address, not to mention a command of the native language, I panicked.

Should I ask to use someone’s internet or phone? Instead I wandered the streets hoping I would somehow magically run across my travel partner, and as it turned out later, we were wandering the same five or ten blocks looking for each other. Finally, after asking for a map from a nearby clothing store, I tried to get my bearings.

I had already been in Buenos Aires for several days, and as I headed in the direction I thought my hotel was in, I found myself recognizing the street art that I had been seeing since my arrival. After each turn I could tell immediately whether I had made the right decision; a familiar colorful mural with the bright eyes of a devious child welcomed me as I turned onto a correct street. It was murals, familiar and eye-catching, that gave me the kind of assurance we normally get from knowing an exact address. Based only on the local street art, I was able to find my way easily back to the hotel.

Street art in Buenos Aires has a very different history than graffiti in the States. Graffiti began in Buenos Aires back in the 1950s, when the dictatorial government coming into power paid people to write slogans and spread what was essentially political graffiti. In the 1970s all forms of self-expression came to a halt, and nothing appeared on the streets again until the 1990s, when hip-hop reached South America and spawned it’s own brand of tag-like graffiti. The street art movement first took shape in 2001, however, during the economic crash. With so many Argentineans out of work and living on the streets, the rise of street art was seen as a people’s movement, and continues on today with the same popularity and enthusiasm.

While it is illegal to paint murals on public buildings in Buenos Aires, it is legal if you have consent from the building’s owner. While the owners are not always asked or grant permission, the implicit police co-operation with the art form makes it a very different environment for artists to work in.

Most street artists work under the constant fear of arrest, but in Buenos Aires muralists take their time and paint in broad daylight. When you’re used to other laws, graffiti artists painting quickly and at night, Argentinean artists’ total comfort is strange to see, like people drinking on the street. As the Argentinean muralist Jaz Grafitero says, “painting with total freedom turns us into muralists not vandals.” Interestingly, most Argentinean muralists regularly show in local galleries, apparently unaware of the common distinction between illegal and commercial art.

These images are some of the murals I came across during my week stay.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

This photo essay was originally published here by Hyperallergic, a Williamsburg-based art blogazine covering Brooklyn and beyond, on December 16^th 2011.  

Alissa Guzman is a freelance art critic who contributes to publications such as Hyperallergic Blogazine, Whitehot Magazine, and the Times Quotidian. She also writes and edits the art blog Escaping Artist. She lives and works in Brooklyn.

You can view a documentary on street art in Buenos Aires at Vandalog.

Owen Dippie Gallery Opening Video

The following short film showcases the work that went into getting the studio and gallery space of New Zealand graffiti artist Owen Dippie ready for its opening in September 2011.

http://vimeo.com/30362793

Owen Dippie is an acclaimed graffiti artist based in the sunny city of Tauranga, New Zealand. His photo-realistic style has taken the graffiti world by storm, with his famous portraits of rapper Notorious B.I.G. gracing walls from New Zealand to New York. His portrait “Two Kings of Rock & Roll,” featuring Michael Jackson and Elvis, was published in British newspaper The Telegraph, and has received critical acclaim from The Source, the most esteemed hip hop culture magazine in the world. His artwork and style continue to break down traditional perceptions of graffiti, providing a bridge between graffiti and contemporary portraiture.

Nick Stevenson is a recent entrant into the world of filmmaking, first picking up a still camera during high school and later moving onto to moving image using a basic DV camera and tripod, filming his friends skating at the skatepark making small edits. Based in Wellington New Zealand, He has refined his production and cinematic capability working with global clients, producing documentary films that capture the true essence of the characters and environment in front of the lens.

Dose DV: Straight Out of Retirement

Dose DV started vandalising walls and trains at the tender age of 14 following the explosion of the graffiti scene in the UK brought about by the cutting edge documentary Style Wars and Henry’s book Subway Art. He says, “Suddenly everything made sense. I had to paint, it was my destiny and my fate to paint and get caught.” In the 1980s, he was a Dedicated Vandal with the likes of Skore and Petro until the inevitable early knock on the door that forced him to choose between quitting or going to jail. Now middle aged, he has come out of a retirement of 23 years. An old man with a need to paint his name on walls for the sake of doing it.  Below are some of his 80’s pieces along with ones that he has created since emerging from retirement.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

You can find Dose DV‘s work at http://dosedv.wordpress.com/ and read his full story at http://dosedv.wordpress.com/my-story/.

Warning

Rio de la Plata (Photo credit: Melissa Lunden)

by Inés Fernández Moreno

translated by Andrea G. Labinger                                                

By the sea she still feels young. She doesn’t exactly run, but rather trots briskly, at a pace she’ll be able to maintain without too much effort, covering the entire beach to its northernmost tip, where the rocks begin and it becomes more and more deserted, wilder, and unpopulated:  no people, no umbrellas, no scent of suntan lotion.  She walks, eyes half-closed, trying to preserve that dreaminess brought on by the sea without losing sight of the surf as it hypnotically breaks against the shore – the initial fury of the wave, its fall, the gentle residue of foam – that perfect, inexhaustible spectacle. In spite of everything, or maybe precisely because of the sea, its vastness, her thoughts turn to the fragility of life, to her fifty years and her fear of old age. That past winter she had studiously observed old women, considering possible models, as if senescence were a garment she would soon change into. Because it’s a comfort, she thinks, it might be a comfort to find women who have finally rounded that final curve with elegance and joy, without overdoing their makeup, hair color, or clothing, women who have found their own style, a sign that they’ve remained on good terms with life. Women who still have interests, loves, imagination.  On a daily basis she’s confirmed – in the streets, on the subway, in the plaza or at the movies, standing in line at the bank – that as one advances toward old age, the most common trait is inertness, as well as an unyielding melancholy, a certain expression, eyes dully fixed on the ground, like an anticipation of death.

But every so often, like a rare gem, an old woman appears who pleases her (she’s elated whenever she discovers one of them, imagining for a moment that she can choose). She remembers one she saw walking along Calle Florida, dressed in a dark raincoat, whose bold eyes scrutinized her with the same curiosity with which she stared back, though certainly for different reasons. From the vantage point of that woman’s apparent seventy years, she had thought at the time, her own fifty would seem enviably youthful. She also remembers that Doris Lessing character in Good Neighbors: the languid bubble baths she took, the time she devoted to choosing her silk shirts, her exquisite clothing.

That’s where she finds herself right now. A still-young woman, her senses keenly attuned to the smell of iodine, the fine salt-water mist on her face, the contact of the sand as it yields, crunching softly beneath her feet.

But fifty is also an age when threats lurk. Her dear friend Inés, struggling with cancer. Laura’s sister, with her convulsions. The routine tests, increasingly frequent, increasingly cruel. The horrific specifics of what the damn body is capable of. What were a few wrinkles compared to that?

Then there would be a moment of sense, of awareness. (Death’s practicality, extinguishing all pretensions of beauty, inflicting health concerns, comfortable shoes, loose clothing). A moment of relief when one might finally give up that monotonous, fruitless war against wrinkles or flabbiness, when, one might stand back and look upon youth’s burning desire to please men, to please oneself, with tender indifference. To face the mirror and accept the daily disappointment of no longer seeing that familiar, beloved image, the perplexity and rage of discovering that we’ve been robbed of what had always been our own. (And it was that – that betrayal – which filled women with resentment, the secret source of their malevolence or bitterness). Suppose, then, that the moment had arrived, that she was already mired in old age:  Which old woman would be acceptable to her? Which one would she choose? In the distance she saw someone exercising on the beach. She imagined that the still-blurry image was destined specifically for her. Although she couldn’t distinguish her clearly, she was able to follow the rhythmic sequence of a pair of arms stretching skyward and then reaching forward and down, touching the sand; she thought she could discern a black two-piece swimsuit, and on the woman’s head, a kerchief or a bathing cap. As she drew nearer, she could see that the bathing cap was actually a head of very short, white hair that contrasted with her bronzed complexion. She stopped short. Hadn’t she been looking for an old woman to help her come to terms with life? There she was. The sea had brought her in, like those unexpected objects deposited on the shore by the tide.  How old was her mermaid? Seventy-five? Seventy-eight? Could she possibly be eighty? In any case, she was very old, but she was tall and erect.

She lay down on the sand, about fifty feet away, so that she could watch her more closely. Now the woman was twisting from the waist, swinging her arms from side to side. Yes, it was true, the body, if slender, more and more resembles the corpse it will one day become. The skin, loosened from the bones. And yet, beneath that dry, flaccid skin, the muscles can still retain some elasticity. That’s how she imagined herself: old, but flexible. But most impressive of all was the woman’s determination to exercise alone by the sea, totally unconcerned with what others might think of that aged body. Being her own center. She smiled. And the old woman, with each twist to her right, also revealed a smiling face with pale eyes and an angularity that contained no rancor or melancholy. What could her name be? She imagined something foreign-sounding, an actress’s name like Marlene or Yvonne.

At last Marlene or Yvonne declared the exercise session over, took two or three deep breaths, and bounded into the sea. None of those pitiful, tentative dips that old people take in water up to their knees, no splashing herself with pathetic little handfuls of water on her shoulders, abjuring the joyful play of the waves. No, her elderly foreigner (yes, she’s definitely a foreigner; she must have come to Argentina as a very young girl), frolicked in the sea, tossing about almost like a child. She watched her move, churning foam with her hands, like blades against the water, dipping her head beneath one wave and then another, running forward to mount the waves just as they reached their apex, and then, from behind the break, body-surfing, her face extended toward the sun. Watching the woman was soothing, a balm that drove away her dark thoughts. If only she could negotiate the danger zone between fifty and sixty, she might become an old woman like Marlene. Was it possible to choose? To make a secret pact before that sea and that sky? Her heart leaped. Why did the idea of becoming someone else terrify her so? It meant taking a risk, of course. But what about those shadowy old men and women she had been observing all year long? A cavalcade of horrors. This woman, on the other hand  . . . there was vitality and joy in her. More than that. She must have been beautiful once, with a resilient kind of beauty, capable of retaining a touch of grace till the very end.  Well then, why hesitate? She might not get another chance. She would take her, as one takes a spouse. She would accept any kind of death in exchange for this version of old age. Elated, she watched Marlene emerge from the sea and pause at the water’s edge to arrange her hair in a manner that seemed unique: it might have been her long, elegant hands, that special way she had of lifting them above her head and then forward, first displaying the back and then the palms, and of raising her head at the same time, as in a ceremony, offering her entire body to the sun.  Just like that, she said very quietly, addressing the old woman or perhaps announcing it to the world in general, to its indifference or its cruelty: That’s how I will be. She looked at her with pride, like something she’d just acquired. And with an owner’s unembarrassed eye, she allowed herself to stare at certain details a little more shamelessly. She observed Marlene’s two-piece swimsuit, plastered to her body by the water.  Something was wrong with the ensemble. The consistency of the fabric, its bagginess, the too-high bottoms, or maybe those overly narrow straps . . . Could it be a slightly old-fashioned two-piece swimsuit? Or was it actually underwear? The idea disturbed her. No matter how similar the garments might have been, even if it was just a social convention, who would ever think of going to the beach in a bra and panties? Unaware of her observer’s distress, Marlene headed away from the shore toward the rocks. There was a moment of uncertainty. The sky was no longer such a perfect blue, and a few gusts of wind chilled the air. She discovered a tiny golden spider on her leg. It was as minuscule as a grain of sand, and it determinedly climbed up her thigh, a colossal effort for its size and strength. She thought that if it were ten times larger she would feel terror, rather than that naïve admiration of its minuteness. She picked it up with one finger and deposited it on the sand. Then she rose quickly and began walking in the same direction as Marlene.  Like her Chosen One, she took the sandy path that led to the next beach, avoiding the rocks. She continued following her at a discreet distance, so that she could see her appear and disappear intermittently. Now that she had found her, she was reluctant to let too much space come between them.  Not because she needed more evidence. After all, if Marlene wanted to go swimming in a bra and panties, so what? A swell of pride drove away her initial alarm. How could it possibly matter to Marlene? For a moment she felt undeserving of her; she imagined herself still a little too stupid and slow-witted to understand the independence and humor that might have influenced Marlene’s decision to dress for the beach any way she wanted. And if at that very moment Marlene were to peel off her swimsuit – or whatever it was – behind the rocks and wade naked into the sea, so much the better. She would stand on the highest rock and give her a round of applause.

The voices she heard in the distance startled her from her reverie.

It was Marlene. Her voice! She’d probably run into some acquaintance or friend – a woman like her would have so many – and most likely she was chatting with them. From where she stood, only isolated words or syllables reached her, distorted by the wind. “Hey,” “nooo,” “when?”, “lovely,” “Juan”, or maybe “gone.”

She decided to stop stalking and walk right past Marlene and her friends and be done with it. After all the most important connection between the two of them had already been established. Then she advanced, her eyes on the path so as to avoid the protruding rocks, like the tips of icebergs beneath the sand. After walking a few more yards, she sees her. She’s sitting with her right shoulder resting against a rock. Her long hands gesticulate as she speaks, exclaims, asks and answers spiritedly, as in any normal conversation. Only it’s not a normal conversation, because there’s no one with her. An imaginary conversational partner who must be responding with very few words, just enough for her, Marlene, to become offended and launch a long diatribe that changes from a hissing, threatening tone to a falsetto, culminating in a brief, hard burst of laughter. She walks by without raising her eyes from the ground, although she hears a whistle; surely it’s not directed at her, but rather at Marlene’s imaginary interlocutor, with whom she seems to become more and more irritated, because now she’s shouting at him harshly, and she picks up her pace, it’s not easy with so many stones on the path, but she no longer cares if she gets injured, she’s so desperate to reach the next beach where she’ll be able to trot briskly, almost running, so that old age, already treading on her heels, won’t catch up with her so soon. And so that the solemn pacts she’s made by the sea will dissolve, like foam on dampened sand.

Inés Fernández Moreno, the daughter and granddaughter of renowned poets César and Baldomero Fernández Moreno, respectively, was born in Buenos Aires in 1947.  She graduated from the Facultad de Filosofía y Letras of the Universidad Nacional de Buenos Aires and completed graduate work in Semiotics at the Sorbonne.  Since 2002 she has worked as Creative Director in an Argentine advertising agency.  She currently resides in Buenos Aires, where she organizes and directs literary workshops.

Fernández Moreno has contributed to notable periodicals such as Clarín, La Nación, and Revista Ñ. Among her published titles are the short story collections La vida en la cornisa  (Emecé 1993), Un amor de agua (Alfaguara 1997),  Hombres como médanos (Alfaguara 2003), and Marmara (Alfaguara 2009). Her novels include La última vez que maté a mi madre (Editorial Perfil 1999) and La profesora de español (Alfaguara 2005).  The English translation of her short story “Carne de exportación” (“Argentine Beef,” trans. Andrea G. Labinger) was published in in The Argentina Independent.

She is the winner of many literary awards, including the Primer Premio Municipal de la Ciudad de Buenos Aires for La vida en la cornisa and La última vez que maté a mi madre, as well as the Premio Max Aub and the Premio Hucha de Oro in Spain for her short stories. Inés Fernández Moreno’s work has been translated into several languages and appears in numerous anthologies.

Andrea G. Labinger  specializes in translating Latin American prose fiction.  Among the many authors she has translated are Sabina Berman, Carlos Cerda, Mempo Giardinelli, Ana María Shua, Alicia Steimberg, and Luisa Valenzuela.  Call Me Magdalena, Labinger’s translation of Steimberg’s Cuando digo Magdalena (University of Nebraska Press, 2001) received Honorable Mention in the PEN International-California competition. The Rainforest, her translation of Steimberg’s La selva, and Casablanca and Other Stories, an anthology of Edgar Brau’s short stories, translated in collaboration with Donald and Joanne Yates, were both finalists in the PEN-USA competition for 2007. The Island of Eternal Love, her translation of Cuban novelist Daína Chaviano’s La isla de los amores infinitos, was published by Riverhead/Penguin in 2008.  More recently Labinger has published The Confidantes, a translation of Angelina Muñiz-Huberman’s Las confidentes (Gaon Books, 2009) , Death as a Side Effect, a translation of Ana María Shua’s La muerte como efecto secundario (University of Nebraska Press, 2010), and Ángela Pradelli’s Friends of Mine (Latin American Literary Review Press, 2012). Forthcoming titles include Shua’s The Weight of Temptation (University of Nebraska Press) and Liliana Heker’s The End of the Story (Biblioasis). Please visit Andrea’s website at:  http://www.trans-latino-trans-lation.com

Happenstance

Noelia Díaz

This is not a job anyone ever thinks about doing. A fireman is on the top of the list for little boys, even a garbage collector is ahead of what I do. I suppose big, loud trucks, are the common denominator for young lads, although I myself never cared much for the noise and the lights. I guess I must have been well suited for what I do from an early age, since I always preferred lonely endeavors. Looking at the ants busily gathering food, laying under the sun with the grass under my body, still slightly damp, while I tried to decipher and separate the sounds of life into individual particles.  A cicada, the water sprinkler next door, the tires of bikes against the pavement racing up the street, the hissing of the pressure cooker in the kitchen mingle with the voice of the news reporter. I tried to stop the flow of things, to concentrate on the small parts. The notion that the minute could be swept away, unnoticed, bothered me terribly. Attention to detail I suppose it is called, although less optimistic views might label it eccentric tendencies from a young age. Anyhow, my parents were terribly disappointed by my choice, and permanent employment did not appease their uneasiness.

But honey, how are we supposed to explain when people ask? Is it something we did? Maybe you should have attended summer camp, like the other kids your age. I shouldn’t have listened to your father, telling me to leave you alone if that’s what suited you. Now look where we are, oh dear…

It pained me to know my mother felt this way, but there was no point in trying to explain her, so I just went along with my business, knowing myself, on this matter at least, to be right. Let me get this out of the way, so no further misunderstandings can arise, I DO like my job. Well, maybe like is not the right verb for this, enjoy maybe? No, that does not seem right either…let’s say I am proud of the service I perform and I take pleasure, no, no, not pleasure…, amazing how difficult it becomes to deal with language sometimes. So, again, I am proud of the service I perform and I take comfort in knowing I do it well, and with care. Care. That’s it, care.  I think of myself as the last person providing care for those who are no longer with us, that’s right, I am a mortician. Surprised? I understand, most people are, so I don’t talk about it much. It suits me, not to talk about it, since I am a quiet and private person. I lie when strangers ask on a train what I do for living: “I sell life insurance.” or “I am a counselor.” I figure if I told the truth it might make for a weird ride, with whoever is sitting next to me imagining I’m some sort of creep, which I am not, I can assure you. The fact is, most people don’t think about their deaths, preferring to believe, on an unconscious level at least, that mortality is something that happens to others, like rape, robbery, or the misfortune of having a child that is very sick. Death is just one of those things that gets magnified on the news, the more casualties the more air time, but bluntly ignored, swept under the carpet really, for the everyday dealings.  Anyhow, on this particular Thursday nothing seemed out of the ordinary, one job ahead to perform so far, the first of the week and nothing else lined up.  Lined up? I keep struggling with the verbs here, they all seem disrespectful, but how is one to express routine in my business? Even business sounds crude and unfeeling, when so much sorrow engulfs what I do. Oh well, one does get a bit numb to the pain of others, not immune, of course not, but encountering it as often as I have (I have been doing this for 30 years now) helps you understand the process of grief a bit better.  This much I know, a year from now, most of the people I see, stricken with this apparently unbearable void and pain, will feel better; not great maybe, but better. I keep losing track of my thoughts here, just wandering away from my tale, let me see if I can regain some control.

Mural in La Boca, Argentina (Photo credit: Melissa Lunden)

A Thursday in May, rainy and grey, it could have been April, but the seasons in the last few years have gone a little off and it is hard to figure out what time of the year we are in unless you listen to the radio, or check the date in the newspaper. I arrived early, as it is my habit, to the funeral parlor, since I prefer to take my time with my job, not to feel rushed and pressure to finish with my tasks. I changed into my work uniform, a clean and sanitized garment, easy to move around in, similar to a doctor’s gown. I made sure that everything I needed was ready, since once I start I don’t like having to stop.  It usually takes a few hours to get a body embalmed, longer if the death is due to a trauma, or if the deceased has passed away without being noticed and decomposition has set in. It does happen, more than one would imagine, for someone to die in their apartment and a few days to go by without anybody noticing their absence. I live alone myself, not having ever married, and since I no longer have parents, and never had siblings, I ponder who will find me when the time comes.  I have led a quiet, private existence, and don’t have many friends or acquaintances, so I make a point of always having the same routine. I have breakfasted at the same diner for the last twenty years, and when my work hours allow it (which, it goes without saying, can be a bit erratic), I attempt to shop, visit the library, and perform my menial tasks in an orderly fashion.  I anticipate that once I die I will be missed, however briefly, by those I greeted every morning, rain or shine.  Well, I would have never considered that putting my thoughts into a coherent manner would prove this difficult, but here I am again, rambling on about nothing.

I washed my hands carefully and gazed through the window, to the forlorn parking lot, almost empty, until tomorrow, when the funeral was scheduled. I pulled the body out of the refrigerator into the middle of the room, under the bright fluorescent lights, and carefully removed the sheet. I know the dead cannot be awakened, but even after all these years I remove that sheet gently, as if they were only sleeping. My heart stopped for a fraction of a second, my throat tightened, and I could barely breathe.  I had to rest my hands on the gurney to steady myself. I felt dizzy and a bit nauseated.  I reached towards the tag in the wrist, and there it was, clearly printed: Clara Wells. 1947. Stroke.  A death to be wished for all of us, brief, barely painless, and discreet, like Clara had been. Her auburn hair was now grey, shortly cropped, and her lovely skin marked by the ridges of age. Here she laid, right under my gaze, for the last time, the love of my life.  I mentioned I never married, and that I have indeed led a lonely life, but I loved once, furiously, with a passion I did not know I could harbor, the woman under this sheet.

I was in my last year of school, residing in a small college town in upstate New York. I had already conducted some work within my field and was getting ready to seek permanent employment. I wanted to relocate from where I had grown up, in part to avoid some shame to my parents, who could not comprehend my choice of career, in part to see something else. I have not had many impulses in my life to pursue the unknown, to wander into uncertainty, but choosing a new town to live in was one of them, Clara was the other. Clara arrived at our library in my last semester, having recently relocated in our town, due to her husband’s job. She was small and shy. It seemed fitting she should work among books and silence, undisturbed as she went about filing things, walking through the aisles pushing her cart while she restocked the shelves, the lightest scent trailing behind her, a mixture of soap and a soft cologne. Her hair reached down her back, full and luscious, secure in a pony tail. I used to run my fingers through it, when we lay together in bed, resting after having made love. I could stroke it for hours, the softness and weight of it always surprised me. She let me do it, and would sometimes fall asleep, briefly, since we never had much time, in one of the cheap motel rooms we rented. It has been so many years now, my youth gone, our youth gone, and yet, as I think of those hours,  I can still feel the texture of the coarse sheets under me, the slow, circling fan above us, and the exact shape of her breasts under my hands.

I rearranged her head, setting a block under it, which would allow me later to apply the make-up more easily. I uncovered her fully, and I could not help but to look at her aged body. I have wished many times, in my lonely life, that I had been granted the opportunity to spend my days with Clara. To see her wake up in the morning, to anticipate her wishes and observe her when her mind fluttered away from mine. I still don’t know why she chose me, why among the many boys wandering around her library she picked me to be her lover. She was shy, and yet, it seemed that a hunger she could not fill rested quietly, but unrelenting, under her skin. I must have been a clumsy lover, in retrospect, her being the first woman I had ever been with, but it did not seem to bother her. As I flexed and massaged her arms, trying to ease their stiffness before I dressed her, I noticed that among the jewelry I had removed there wasn’t a wedding ring. I wondered if her husband had found out about us, or if there were others that replaced me, had I been a unique act of infidelity in her existence, or one among many that followed her into dismal motel rooms with soiled carpets and dripping faucets?

I thought, candidly, that she would leave the town with me once I graduated, or join me later, when I had secured a job for both of us. I did not mind the prospect of not having children; in fact, I preferred the idea of having a life, of having her, only to myself.  I rarely thought about her husband, or the life she led with him, away from our motel room. She would touch my forehead, and then follow the profile of my face, slowly with her fingers and whisper: Don’t worry about him. It’s just us here and now. No one else. And I believed her. I guess she had been married a few years, but she did not like to talk about it. She did tell me right away not to worry about contraceptives, since she could not have children, and for the slightest moment her gaze wondered towards the window and did not meet mine. I held her and told her it was ok, that I would not mind a thing like that, but she pulled away and turned her back to me.

Let me shower quickly, she said, the ride here was hot and I need to refresh myself.

The last time I saw her it was inside her car, the day after I had graduated. My parents had offered to come and pick me up, but I told them I would rather take the train on my own. We sat quietly, her smoking, inside her sedan, and I wanted so badly to cry I had to focus on the separate leaves of the trees near me to stop the mounting pressure I thought would choke me inside of my chest.  She had not been feeling well the last couple of days, a bit dizzy and tired.

It must be the heat, I am used to cold weather.

To my plans for the future she only nodded and gave me a remote smile, but I was too eager to notice the aloofness of it.  I told her I would send her a letter once I was settled at my new address and then she could join me there. I did. I never got a reply, and when I found the courage to phone the library I was told Miss Clara Wells had left the job shortly after my departure. Her husband had once again been transferred, the new, chatty librarian informed me. May I ask whose calling though?

I looked at her, so different from then, and wondered how the years that we had spent apart had been filled. Here she laid, a complete stranger, and yet so dear to my heart. Of all the things I have ever imagined, it never once crossed my mind that I would be, indeed, the last person to hold her, to carefully seal her lips and apply the lightest color to them. I might have misspoken when I said she was the love of my life, since after all we only spent four months together, and in reality just a handful of hours in those various motels, and twice, outdoors, in a secluded area in the public park a couple of miles from the school. My love, passion, or whatever you want to call it might not have been more than the sexual awakening of an inexperienced boy with a woman a few years his senior, and yet, it has been hard to think of those times without the softest ache when I have recollected them, on undisturbed evenings in my one bedroom flat. I suppose part of it is how contained both in time and space our relationship was. It was not polluted by everyday affairs, no dirty dishes to clean in the sink, no small resentments about petty stuff, neither did boredom had a chance to dilute our passion, my passion, the time being so precious. So here I was, a few hours gone by, ready to switch again into my suit and perform the rest of the ceremony. I was curious to see who would come to her funeral, what kind of friends she kept, who would mourn her and miss her presence in the days to come.

The room had been set up with a single garland of flowers, simple, not too ostentatious, from one of our regular suppliers. My business partner usually handled that end of things, being better suited for conversation and helping people make the right decision under the circumstances. Bereavement leaves families adrift, unprepared to take care of the material things one must attend to, in spite of the pain. Oh, and there are so many things to consider, to establish and make choices about, when most of us would want to crawl into bed and hide under the sheets. It is good though, to have this ritual, and it has given meaning to my life to know that what I do is so crucial, and yet often so invisible, to so many over the years.  I have often wondered about how we celebrate births, the doctors always receiving Christmas cards from the families they meet in delivering babies, and no one ever even considers writing the undertaker, the mortician, me, a single brief note acknowledging our contact. I am not resentful , don’t get me wrong, who wants to remember me? After all I am the last person to touch their loved ones, a stranger intruding in one of the most difficult times in their lives. The intimacy of my job is both unavoidable and disturbing to many, so is not surprising, just curious you know, how the idea of touching, of being touched, even when we are no longer ourselves, is filled with so much anxiety and shame. Over the years I have felt myself slowly disappear, becoming  barely a presence, and I think that’s what has made me successful, the ability to cease to exist for those few hours when people mourn.

About twenty people or so turned up, a quiet affair, some coworkers (apparently she remained a librarian), a handful of friends, how or when she met them I could not gather, and her son, a tall, unremarkable man, that had inherited her auburn hair. He disclosed how his father had died a few years earlier, in a car accident.

Probably for the best, since it would have been so devastating for him to be the last to go. She managed, even though she missed him, but women are stronger and can find their way back to life more easily.

By four the affair was finished, and after briefly arranging the time for the burial the day after, everyone departed.  I slowly made sure everything was in order before leaving, but somehow I could not manage to return home. The thought of Clara there, alone, on her last night on this earth unsettled me, who would have thought I could be bothered by this? So I sat for a few more hours in the room where the light was fading, in a golden hue, the clouds having been dispersed and the rain now gone. I suppose we all struggle with the meaning of our existence at one time or another, wondering if we have done enough in our brief time here, if the bonds we created were significant or merely loose threads without a pattern. I guess at times one also reconsiders how the role we played, who we thought we were to ourselves, and to somebody else comes unhinged. All my life I have focused on the details, the minute is my place of solace, where I find comfort and belonging. I am not interested in the completed puzzle, but in how each piece has a precise match, a unique suitable place within its community, unalterable, and fixed. So as I closed the casket, ready now to finally leave Clara to herself, I did it without resentment, but also without unbearable grief. I had come to understand why I had been chosen among the many, and the knowledge was both disappointing and liberating. As I walked to the bus, enjoying the freshness in the air, the mingled noises of the city, and the events of my day, I looked forward to returning home, to my quiet, undisturbed life. I might not have been the love her life, but, and of this I have no doubt, she remembered me, everyday, in all the hours and years we spent apart. This unexpected gift, so randomly accorded, filled me with something close to happiness, and I was able to lose Clara, a second time, now permanently, without regret or sorrow.

Noelia Diaz grew up in Madrid but has lived in New York for the last 17 years. She is currently working towards her PhD in Comparative Literature at the Graduate Center of CUNY. Her areas of concentration are contemporary Irish and Argentine theater. At the moment she is teaching Latino/a theater in the U.S. in the Communications & Theatre Arts Department at John Jay College of Criminal Justice.

Winnie’s Smile (The Joy of Samuel Beckett)

James Nikopoulos

The first time I read Samuel Beckett’s play Happy Days I was bothered to no end by a seemingly minor detail in the stage directions, the first instance of which comes just after the play’s heroine has brushed her teeth and spit out the results behind the mound that has her swallowed up to the waist:

She spits out. She cranes a little further back and down. Loud.] Hoo-oo! [Pause.  Louder.] Hoo-oo! [Pause. Tender smile as she turns back front, lays down brush.]  Poor Willie- [examines tube, smile off]

She will do this – smile that is, not brush her teeth – another thirty-seven times, a remarkable amount considering that she is buried up to the waist within a mound of scorched earth. This is Winnie, a woman of about fifty who whiles away the time in an almost uninterrupted monologue as her partner Willie, a man of about sixty and the play’s only other character, squirms around and behind this mound, uttering only a small handful of words during the entire piece. Not much else happens. Happy Days can boast of no real plot and of very little action. At most, Winnie will rummage through the shopping bag by her side, pulling out various mundane objects, such as a tube of toothpaste, and she will insist on speaking to the senile man nearby, who only rarely responds. The most startling development the play has to offer occurs at the start of the second act when, with no explanation why, we find that Winnie is no longer buried up to the waist. Now she is buried up to the neck, which means that all that’s left to her is her words, no more shopping bag to keep her occupied, nothing but her words and the same old partner she can only hope to catch a glimpse of as she darts her eyes around the room.  It is bleak indeed, this allegory of the human condition that Beckett gives us. As if to say the world will swallow us up in the end just as it has swallowed up Winnie, and there’s not much we can do about it. And yet despite the dismal tableau the play depicts, the heroine at its center continues to shoot off one grin after another. And each one confounds me.

It is not the fact that she is smiling that offends some sensibility of mine but how this smiling is described. The logical objection to make here is that this is a play, not a novel, so I’m supposed to be seeing Happy Days, not reading it, thereby leaving me ignorant of the stage directions. But it is too late, because I read the play first, as most people read the great plays before they see them, if they ever see them performed at all. Plus, Beckett must have known that people would be reading his plays and therefore be subjected to such a flagrantly un-literary means of describing the comings and goings of moments of happiness. For though they are not always described as “tender,” these smiles always appear in the same matter-of-fact manner and then disappear with only the sparsest of attention: “smile off.” They arrive seemingly out-of-nowhere, instantaneously, with little indication in the preceding moments that Winnie’s mood is tending towards the jolly, only to vanish as quickly and mysteriously as they appeared. They are like the light that is emitted from sheer darkness at the mere flip of a switch, leaving one less with the image of an actress allowing an upturn to emerge and fade from her lips than of one of those forced, awkward smiles that plague so many childhood yearbook photos.

My point in bringing all this up is that these smiles, more than fifty years after they were put to paper – Happy Days was written in 1960 and first performed at New York’s Cherry Lane Theater in September of 1961 – are capable of saying much about how we respond to happiness and joy, and how we perceive them in others. A smile, after all, is one of the most elemental ways we communicate non-verbally. For those of you who are parents, just think back to that first smile you spied on your adorable one’s little face. Is there any other movement so slight, so seemingly inconsequential, which can produce such joy in another? Even that flirtatious smile of a stranger’s. What could be more natural? Which is what irks me so much about Winnie’s not-so-sly grins – they seem to defy all that is natural without coming across as intentionally deceptive: Smile on, smile off, Beckett writes, and leaves it at that. But can a smile really come and go so mechanically? The answer is yes, but what kind of smile you’re talking about needs to be qualified.

If you go to the Science and Nature section of the BBC’s website, you will find twenty brief video clips of faces that quickly smile and then return to their previous expressions. The point is to test your ability to delineate between “fake” and “genuine” smiles. That the two are distinguishable at all derives from the fact that a “fake” smile is a conscientious movement by the brain that lifts the corners of the mouth outwards. By contrast, a “genuine” smile is unconscious and automatic. “When people feel pleasure, signals pass through the part of the brain that processes emotion. As well as making the mouth muscles move, the muscles that raise the cheeks… also contract, making the eyes crease up, and the eyebrows dip slightly.” Scientists distinguish between the two through the Facial Action Coding System (FACS), developed by Professor Paul Ekman and Dr. Wallace V. Friesen.

So yes, it is plausible that a middle-aged woman’s smile would appear and disappear quickly. But can the truly felicitous inspire such a phenomenon? Are Winnie’s smiles supposed to be sincere representations of her happiness? For a “genuine” smile is one of the ways we physically represent our happiness and our joy, and by definition it appears unconsciously, thus when “genuine” it is automatically something heartfelt.

So what to make of a woman whose companion is barely capable of interacting with her, who is physically incapacitated? What does she have to smile about? To some extent all her smiles are “fake,” for Winnie is a fictional character and the actress wielding them allows them to appear on her face because of the exigencies of each moment in the scene. Our suspension of belief, though, makes this a moot point. What matters is whether or not they are genuine to Winnie and whether or not an audience reads them as such.

The problem with attempting to interpret a grin of course is that it is so ambiguous. This is not laughter we are dealing with, nor the stern finality of a scowl.  A “fake” smile can be interpreted as insincere or polite at best, and duplicitous at worst. The anatomical differences between the smile of a Falstaff and that of a Iago are small and not always easily detected (I guessed the correct authenticity of the smiles in the above-mentioned test twelve out of twenty times). I do not mean to imply that Winnie is trying to deceive her audiences, but I am saying that her smiles are not as tidy as a “genuine” smile. And since “genuine” smiles are not always read as such, even they represent a potentially difficult form of human communication to assess. This is especially so when we look at smiles in any form of art. As an obvious example, consider how much has been said about the Mona Lisa’s enigmatic grin. With Winnie at least, we have some other evidence – her words and accompanying gestures – from which to wring an interpretation.

Winnie’s third smile appears after she has removed a bottle of red medicine from her bag. She puts her spectacles on and begins to read the label:

Loss of spirits…lack of keenness…want of appetite…infants…children …adults…six level…tablespoonfuls daily – [head up, smile] – the old style! – [smile off, head down, reads] –

Here her smile feels like the aftereffect of a eureka moment. Part of this has to do with the way she looks up from her reading before she smiles, and part involves the statement that links the moments in which the smile appears and then disappears: “the old style!” This will be something that she repeats over and again throughout the play, and always accompanied by her smile. Beckett elaborates on this statement, but he never diverges too far from the simplicity of its initial wording. For example, several pages further into the script, Winnie contemplates the possibility of Willie’s death – “Whereas if you were to die – [smile] – to speak in the old style – [smile off]” – and then a page after that, when she is discussing how she puts all her possessions back in her bag at the end of the day, she interrupts her train of thought with her usual interjection: “[Smile.] To speak in the old style. [Pause.] The sweet old style. [Smile off.]”

Alan Schneider, who directed the first production, wrote to Beckett that he assumed Winnie’s smile on “old style” was indicative of some fond memory of the past. Ah, but things aren’t so simple. This was Beckett’s response: “‘Old style’ and smile always provoked by word ‘day’ and derivatives or similar. There is no more day in the old sense because there is no more night, i.e. nothing but day. It is in a way an apologetic smile for speaking in a style no longer valid. ‘Old style’ suggests also of course old calendar before revision. ‘Sweet old style’ joke with reference to Dante’s ‘dolce stile nuovo.”

Whatever one wants to make of this explanation – I can’t make much of it myself – at the very least it allows us to see the complexity Beckett was going for in his use of this stage direction. This particular smile seems to be multivalent – regretful, apologetic, perhaps nostalgic. But purely joyful, an unconscious reaction to pleasure? Or perhaps her smile is simply lying to us.

In the end, though, a smile’s most traditional and still most dominant association is with happiness. The motivations that produce the smile may be various and completely at odds with the idea of “happiness,” but the initial message of a smile is always one of happiness/friendship. The fact that a smile may be used as a means towards deception does not alter the initial message conveyed. As anthropologist Fabio Ceccarelli points out: “The capacity to lie has nothing to do with the message that the smile communicates. Only because it has an invariable signification can I use it in order to lie.”

Beckett utilizes this association of happiness directly when he associates a smile with laughter. Shortly after the moment cited above in which Winnie contemplates Willie’s death, another smile appears, one that threatens to expand into laughter. She asks herself what she would do all day if Willie were to leave her, “Simply gaze before me with compressed lips… Not another word as long as I drew breath, nothing to break the silence of this place…” There would be nothing but this silence, she says, save for

a sigh into my looking-glass. [Pause.] Or a brief…gale of laughter, should I happen to see the old joke again. [Pause. Smile appears, broadens and seems about to culminate in laugh when suddenly replaced by expression of anxiety.]

Here we recognize the smile among one of its familiar associations, as the prelude to laughter. Beckett utilizes this association in order to build up the tension of possibility, in order to make the arc of the fall down into “expression of anxiety” that much more steep. This threatened laughter initiates a gradual escalation of anxiety, as Winnie begins to worry about her hair, interspersing fractured comments concerning the presence of her comb and brush with the lines “Human weakness” and “Natural weakness.” The build-up reaches its apex once she has begun to question Willie: “What would you say Willie? … The hair on your head, Willie, what would you say speaking of the hair on your head, them or it?” Willie, as he is wont to do, provides Winnie’s long speeches with a fleeting instance of relief in the form of the barest of responses: “It,” he says.

Winnie’s reply to his welcomed communication is telling:

[turning back front, joyful] Oh you are going to talk to me today, this is going to be a happy day! [Pause. Joy off.] Another happy day. [Pause.] Ah well, where was I, my hair, yes…

She turns to him, “joyful,” and just like the smiles from earlier, the expression of this sentiment on our heroine’s face vanishes as quickly as it appeared. I am left wondering. Should we construe that first sentence to be a hopeful one? My initial response is yes. Her next comment, though -“Another happy day” – feels anything but, for it is delivered with “Joy off.” Is she being sarcastic now, or has her previous “joy” merely been dampened? If this is sarcasm, I wonder how strong that initial joy could have been if it is so quickly replaced by such irony. A statement Beckett made to the actress Billie Whitelaw supports reading her “joy” as sincere: “I don’t think [Winnie] knows herself what kind of woman she is. She’s a mess. An organized mess. Her strength is through her unawareness.”^[i] If it is merely a lessening of joy we are dealing with then, I cannot help but see Winnie’s situation as sadly pathetic, for can she truly believe that it will be a happy day now that Willie has uttered one more of his minimally syllabic phrases? Can that be enough?

All of these issues are dramatized by the language of the play’s protagonist in conjunction with these very odd stage directions, which seem to be conveying more of the emotional pathos of the moment than the words. Notice how the direction “joyful” appears and clicks “off” the same way that Winnie’s smiles do. A similar thing happens with Winnie’s “happy expressions,” which are almost as numerous as her smiles. Just earlier we see Winnie look out towards us in the audience and make her familiar remark: “[She turns back front, gazes before her. Happy expression.] Oh this is going to be another happy day! [Pause. Happy expression off.]”

That an actress could convey these abrupt shifts in emotion so quickly is more than plausible, but I wonder what constitutes a “joyful” and a “happy” expression according to Beckett considering that he delineates them from smiles and laughter, and I wonder how the “joyful” and the “happy” themselves differ. It seems that all must be, at least partly, made up of a smile. The difference then must lie in the degree. Maybe it is just a bigger smile that is needed for moments of “happiness” and perhaps an even bigger one for that lone moment of joy. If so, then the drop from expression of joy to “joy off” is far steeper than the “smile off” of earlier.

It is precisely the steepness of this drop, the speed with which Winnie goes from happy to not, that makes her joy suspect. But this suspicion has less to do with an inability to believe that Winnie is, in fact, not faking her joy and more to do with our inability to reconcile Winnie’s version of joy with our own idea of it. Because Happy Days is doing something to the idea of joy. It is making it less familiar to us by disallowing it the possibility of duration. Gone is the possibility of a happiness that persists. Yet the idea that joy and happiness can last is what separates them from the idea of mere pleasure, be it physical pleasure – as in the enjoyment of a sugary sweet or the sensual delight of lovemaking – or emotional pleasure – as in our laughter at a joke. Pleasure may create a feeling of happiness, but it is not in and of itself happiness. Pleasure is about the momentary. Joy and happiness too may come and go, but the idea of joy and happiness is an idea associated with what gives our lives meaning. To see what I mean, we need only add a rather sentimental qualifier to one of our terms. What is “true” happiness?  It cannot be just pleasure. It is not usually associated with a good laugh or a good lay. “True” happiness is much different. For some it may involve family, for others career, and still for others something different. It is a type of philosophical pleasure that we form in light of our outlooks on the world, one that is defined in part by its relevance to the entirety of our lives.

In Happy Days, though, joy comes and goes, hauntingly, and in the process conveys the idea that Winnie’s momentary “joy” cannot be anything more than wishful thinking or hollow posing. If one were optimistically inclined, then perhaps these moments could be read as moments of true joy, though this might be the most pessimistic of readings in the end, for what does it say that they come and go so quickly, and that this affective transition is rendered so unemotionally?

This is part of what makes Happy Days so powerfully ambiguous. This is why, despite the fact that Beckett himself calls Winnie a “hardened sorrower,” she is so often referred to as “optimistic.” A Google search for “Happy Days Beckett” will reveal Sparknotes interpreting her statements that today will be a “happy day” as almost “constant[ly] optimistic.” Likewise, the description of Winnie for a 2009 production by the Philadelphia-based Lantern Theater calls her “the optimist against all odds.”

In the end, what these moments of happy expressions do, being that they come and go so mechanically, being that they form on the face of a woman mired in a miserable situation, is play with an audience’s natural expectations of what the human expression of joy entails. Is it that Winnie is manipulating us? Perhaps she is merely too proud to admit her frailty or unwilling to show true sadness in front of her companion. There is also the simple explanation that she really is an “optimist against all odds,” and that no matter what she has encountered and continues to encounter, she refuses to be bogged down by the weight of fatalism. If this is the case, then one could interpret her as heroic or foolish, a conscientious protestor against the tyranny of life’s misery, or a clueless half-wit.

Happy Days is a kind of examination, a woman examining the reality of her life: past, present, and future. What emerges is a play that asks us to reexamine the validity of our emotional responses to our lives. In consistently calling into question the type of smiles and happy expressions we are witnessing on the face of this woman, the play is asking us to examine why it is that the act of expressing joy and happiness both to others and to ourselves is such a fundamentally important aspect of human existence. Because the showing forth of joy cannot just be a construct. Fake smiles are physically detectable, and the “genuine” ones, even if they blink on and off, still must come from somewhere, whether it be a place of long-untapped hope or unavoidable rancor. It’s like singing. As Winnie says: “One cannot sing…just like that, no. [Pause.] It bubbles up, for some unknown reason, the time is ill chosen, one chokes it back. [Pause.] One says, Now is the time, it is now or never, and one cannot. [Pause.] Simply cannot sing. [Pause.] Not a note.”

But what if one can sing, and one does, before anyone and everyone to behold, even despite a miasma of misfortune others might perceive as inescapable? Would such a person come across as brave or ludicrous, full of child-like hope or jaded irony? Roland Barthes once said that joy is never undeserved. Happy Days asks if it is ever unjustified. “Ah well what a joy in any case to hear you laugh again,” Winnie tells Willie after they share in a chuckle. “I suppose some people might think us a trifle irreverent, but I doubt it. [Pause.]”

There is, of course, another interpretation to all this, one that refuses to harp on the pessimism of Winnie’s situation. It notices less the rapidity with which Winnie’s smiles disappear and more the speed with which they form along her lips. Could Happy Days not be an exercise in true joy, in the joy that can be culled from the dullest of bright spots, from the smallest of gestures? Consider how the play ends.

As Winnie nears the finish of her second act monologue, she is greeted with a surprise of sorts. Willie emerges from behind the mound, for the first time dressed as a proper gentleman, or as the play describes him, “on all fours, dressed to kill – top hat, morning coat, striped trousers, etc.” Winnie’s enjoyment of this unexpected pleasure increases when her companion begins to crawl up the mound towards her. He is described as “Gleeful” and Winnie responds with enthusiasm, encouraging the ascent that will culminate in Willie’s slithering back down to the foot of the mound. But this over-the-top assay, which is so visually dramatic, does not represent the climax of Willie’s attempt to connect with Winnie. That comes moments later. After having slid down to the foot of the mound, he lifts his face from off the ground and rises to his hands and knees, and he responds to his excited companion: “[just audible] Win.”

Another ambiguous statement. What it means exactly…? There is something recognizable in it though, its possibility as a verb, its resemblance to the name of the play’s heroine, who responds:

[Pause. Winnie’s eyes front. Happy expression appears, grows.]

Win! [Pause.] Oh this is a happy day, this will have been another happy day!

Beckett wrote to Alan Schneider that “Winnie [is] happy [at this point] because Willie has answered. Doesn’t matter to her what he says, as long as he speaks to her.” Yet like all of Beckett’s directions denoting delight, the “happy expression” soon clicks off. We hear Winnie sing the words, “It’s true, it’s true / You love me so!” only to have them punctuated with the familiar interruption: “[Pause. Happy expression off.]” That something has happened, that something has changed now within Winnie’s mind, cannot be denied.

The play ends with the staccato disruption of Winnie’s most protracted showing forth of glee, which then morphs into nothing other than a smile. This concluding smile is perhaps the most ambiguous of them all. After Winnie’s “happy expression” clicks off, she closes her eyes:

Bell rings loudly. She opens her eyes. She smiles, gazing front. She turns her eyes, smiling, to Willie, still on his hands and knees looking up at her. Smile off. They look at each other. Long pause.

Here it is. The smile, protracted now. Her eyes meet ours, then her companion’s, then…a pause.

It is an ending fitting with everything that has come before, one that asks us to determine for ourselves whether or not such a smile, no matter how slight its reason for appearing, could be anything but genuine, as though asking if our joy could be so fragile.

---

^[i] This is reported in Gontarski, S.E. The Intent of Undoing in Samuel Beckett’s Dramatic Texts. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985. All other correspondences with Beckett are cited from Harmon, Maurice, ed. No Author Better Served, The Correspondence of Samuel Beckett and Alan Schneider. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998.

James Nikopoulos writes on modern literature and film. He lives in New York City.

A Lick of Heaven

Lauren Villa

Some see a lake of fire at the end of it, others a ring of isolation.

The fire had begun nibbling at my heels but

I hurried away unscathed.

I tasted the lick of heaven

and it drips with ease

like a cool IV.

Floating back down, I swayed in the wind

of miniature blue and white feathers,

parakeet’s wings motioning me

back and forth but always forward.

No one

walks in heaven,

I came back gently and quietly.

And the fire began to nibble at my heels again.

San Telmo, Buenos Aires (Photo credit: Melissa Lunden)

Lauren Villa was born and raised in Los Angeles, where she proudly resides. Once an aspiring astronaut, found her calling with words when she could not reconcile the torrid relationship she had with Physics. She loves penguins, the Dodgers and vodka.

Global Graffiti No. 6 – Graffiti and Street Art – Submissions DUE Jan. 15, 2012

For Issue No. 6, at long last, we here at Global Graffiti will be devoting an issue to graffiti and other forms of street art.  Inspired in part by current popular movements taking place in cities and towns across the US, we are interested in exploring public art in all its variations.  We will consider creative and scholarly work that engages with street art; submissions that we will consider include but are not limited to: essays, short stories, poetry, journalism, novel excerpts, photography, painting, music, and mixed media. We welcome work that considers both national and international examples of these art forms.  We will accept submissions for this issue through January 15, 2012.  We prefer Word or RTF files for text; JPEG files for images; and MP3 files for audio. Remember to send your resume or short bio along with your submission. For any questions about submissions, contact us at globalgraffmag@gmail.com.

Issue No. 5 – October 2011

Monica Hanna

Argentinean folk singer and poet Facundo Cabral was murdered in Guatemala this past summer, apparently a casualty of organized criminal assassins who were attempting a hit on the music promoter with whom the singer was traveling.  Cabral was famous for his protest songs and political commitment, particularly during Argentina’s military dictatorship in the 1970s.

Guatemalans ask the world for forgiveness after the death of Facundo Cabral - July 2011

The assassination of the legendary Cabral, along with the example provided by his lifetime of advocating for peace, got us here at Global Graffiti thinking about how music both reflects and affects change in individuals and societies.  The pieces included in this issue tackle this question from a variety of perspectives.

In “Waltz for Siglinda,” a short story by Italian author and activist Clara Sereni (translated by Giulia Po and Monica Hanna), an estranged mother and daughter are brought together by the folk songs that recall not just the daughter’s childhood but also the mother’s political engagement as part of generation ’68.

In the essay “Something in the Key of A,” Anastassiya Andrianova explores how  the various phases of her lifelong love of music intersect with larger questions related to her native Ukraine and her family’s migration to New York.

Michele Nascimento-Kettner writes on the Mangue Beat movement in her piece entitled “Hybridism and Carnivalization in the Mangroves.”  In her essay, Nascimento-Kettner explores this musical form’s origins in the Brazilian town of Recife as well as its culturally hybrid nature.  The author analyzes the possibilities of social change glimpsed by the impact of the Mangue Beat movement in the Pernambuco region in the 1990s.

Angelina Muñiz-Huberman’s essay, “The Legacy of Orpheus in Twentieth Century Art Forms,” translated by Andrea G. Labinger, explores the legacy of Orpheus in poetry, painting, literature, music, and dance of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

We are also happy to present “Carolina,” a musical, bluesy poem by Los Angeles poet Angela Peñaredondo.

Finally, we have a special treat from visual artist Fabio Sassi, who has shared two of his intergalactic Elvises.

Enjoy the issue!

The editors at Global Graffiti are also very excited to announce our theme for issue 6.  At long last, we will be devoting an issue to graffiti and other forms of street art.  Inspired in part by current popular movements taking place in cities and towns across the US, we are interested in exploring public art in all its variations.  We hope to include visual art, critical essays, personal essays, fiction, poetry, and other creative and critical work that explores the phenomenon of street art.  We welcome work that considers both national and international examples of these art forms.  Please submit work that you would like to be considered for inclusion in this issue by January 15, 2012.  As always, you can contact us about submissions or to let us what you think of the issue at globalgraffmag@gmail.com.

Waltz for Siglinda

By Clara Sereni

Translated from Italian by Giulia Po and Monica Hanna

The velvet suit fits her well. Out of place, if it wasn’t for the jacket with the frogs and the Chinese-style collar: the only possible concession to her usual style, but not out of sync with what is expected from the mother of the bride. The purse with the embroidery and the silver handle is Aunt Clotilde’s, some of its threads torn by a century of history, and so much the worse for those who wouldn’t understand the preciousness of memory.  The expensive shoes that Diletta inspected carefully don’t look like her.

She couldn’t choose: she couldn’t, otherwise the conflict with her daughter would have been irremediable.

She applies her makeup with more care than usual, but not differently: almost invisible powder, some blush on her cheeks, eyeliner around the eyes; no chance of tears, since for her uneasiness seems more likely than emotion at this wedding.

Long gone are the days of their complicity and friendship, when Diletta used to call her by name and not just mom, when they played and sang nursery rhymes and poetry together; in the pictures strewn throughout the house they wear the same flower skirt hand sewn of the same fabric, made with love and to save money,  images that don’t go past her daughter’s adolescent years. Never afterward did they take part in a protest, attend a discussion, or go to a movie or a book presentation together. Diletta studied cello at the conservatory, her mother’s accordion was left in the closet, the music in the house entrusted to recorded tapes.

In the passing time, Diletta often had a frowning and teasing face, and her mother’s friends moved her to jealousy and irritation. She mocked their feminism, and it was very clear that she didn’t want to have anything to do with it in her own life. With the men that came to the house she was pretentious and charming, with her mother she was bitter first, and scornful after they had disappeared into the horizon.

Nadia thought that her daughter needed to cut the umbilical cord, she let her go and forced herself to wait for her to grow, hoping to find her again sooner or later next to her, an adult and a companion. Similar.

Today’s wedding gives the coup de grâce to her hopes: Diletta will get married in a very expensive white dress, a renowned makeup artist will do her make-up, the bridesmaids will carry the train of her dress, in that frame of trivial appearance that her mother has always opposed.

She would like to blame it all on the man Diletta is about to marry, but she knows that she can’t say that to herself: that man, rich, handsome, with a nice car and nice clothes, politically apathetic and sufficiently ignorant, is an integral part of the choices Diletta has made. From the Bible readings to the clothes to the baptism required to get married in church to the wedding registry filled with crystal and silverware. Step after step, until she became unrecognizable to her mother’s eyes.

The good thing – one needs to search for all the good on a day like this – is that the expensive shoes are high quality, comfortable although overly shiny; Nadia puts them on, and nothing can keep her home anymore, no turning back.

In the church full of flowers, the air feels stuffy: the perfume of the profusion of lilies is too strong, and the heat is up too high. Nonetheless she hugs the groom’s parents with a little bit of forced emotion: he is wearing a comical tuxedo, she is glowing with jewelry and fabric. Between the fringes and the drapes, she looks like a lamp. Nadia allows herself a little smile and a slight sense of superiority.

But when Diletta enters, with the halo of light at her back, and the music begins, holding arms with her best friend, she is beautiful. Moving. The groom’s mother dries a tear with a silk handkerchief gently removed from her rhinestone-encrusted clutch.

Moving? It looks like a movie, and this is what prevents Nadia from being moved. She would like to smile at her daughter, though, but Diletta never looks at her, maybe because she is too careful not to stumble in the many folds of her dress.

The ceremony starts, almost everybody makes the sign of the cross. Nadia’s hands remain still, crossed on her lap.

The service seems endless.

Flashbulbs go off and Nadia grows stiffer and stiffer. Stranger. Far away, because she would like to be miles and miles away from there.

The conclusion of the mass takes her by surprise, when the priest invites to exchange the sign of peace: many people around her take her hand, they shake it, and surprisingly those gestures warm her up, giving her vigor back. But then the ceremony continues, and it is so long that Nadia gets lost in contemplating the clothes, the faces, the church decorations disrespecting the severe architecture of the building. She stands up and sits down every time the others do, and now feels the cold from the marble floor.

It is still cold outside, while the rice falls plentifully on Diletta’s opulent dress, on her bare cleavage. She should have a small sweater, a shawl, Nadia thinks, and she feels an old sense of protection in her gut, just like when taking care of her daughter was a duty and a possibility.  Someone gives her a handful of rice and Nadia throws it, without conviction, with the awkwardness of a gesture that does not belong to her, and some grains fall into her shoes, irritating.

Diletta has given her precise instructions: she will go with the in-laws, in the car that will be waiting outside the church.

Black, very long: Nadia thinks it looks like a catafalque, or maybe this is part of the movie too; in any case the comfortable seats are a relief to the terrible tiredness that she is feeling.

The groom’s parents sitting next to her appear lively and excited. They can’t stop talking, congratulating themselves on the money spent, commenting on the results. For a moment Nadia envies their ability to get enthusiastic about little things, then some bitter words between wife and husband remind her that all that glitters is not gold.

The silent car moves through a large swath of the city. Nadia doesn’t know where they are going; Diletta wanted it to be a surprise, or maybe she didn’t tell her to avoid any criticism that she might have expressed.

The car keeps moving, leaving the suburbs behind as well: now they are on a highway. Nadia rolls the blue-tinted window down and gets caught in the smell of the countryside, of hay.

“Excuse me, dear, can you close the window? My hairdresser, you know…” says the daughter’s mother in-law, touching her complicated hairstyle fixed in a wall of hairspray. “Should I ask the driver to turn on the air conditioning?”

Nadia shakes her head slightly and, conciliatory, closes the window rapidly; never mind, this day will end too, she thinks, and then I will go back to my cold and my hot, to the smell and the flavors of my life.

The car has taken a white street, a lot of dust around and the daughter’s in-law gets upset, protests: “I told you, this fucking street needed to be sprayed down! The cars will all get dirty, how nice for the pictures!”

Her husband tries to calm her down, he covers one of her hands with his. “If it makes them happy, everybody will be happy” he says, while his wife peevishly displays her hand full of rings.

Nadia is afraid that she is going to see a castle, but when the car turns there is a country farmhouse: restored, with no frills, some old tires hanging from the trees for the kids to play on, an old red tractor that some guests have climbed, a long table outside already full of food and drinks.

The tablecloth is white, with no lace or embroidery. In a corner plastic glasses and plates that cause the mother in-law’s eyes to widen. She only calms down when her husband, taking advantage of a sudden breeze, wraps a fur stole around her shoulders.

Nadia greets the people she knows and others she has never seen before or doesn’t remember: words, jokes, the smell of the hay and wood, something is less hostile to her now. The bruschetta crunches joyfully between her teeth and the oil is very good. The red wine that someone poured with generosity in her plastic glass goes well with it.

The bride and groom are not there yet, probably busy with a complicated change of clothes. Nadia doesn’t want to think about the next dress that her daughter will wear, she is content with the omelets and the unexpected rustic cakes of the menu. She feels at ease, the young faces around her seem so normal, so similar to others she has loved.

A noise from the street, the married couple is arriving: all the guests gather to welcome them. Nadia is not in the first row, and fears what will come.

He gets out first, agile: he has replaced his pants with a pair of jeans, and the bold combination receives a loud applause.  Holding the door open, he bends to give his hand to Diletta, and helps her get out.

The applause mingles with whistles: Diletta is wearing a flower skirt and an Indian blouse, her curly hair moves freely on her neck and shoulders.

Even from afar, Nadia can see the silk and the designer clogs that she is wearing. Yet she is surprised by the ensemble, drawing a big question mark over a day that she thought she already had figured out.

Diletta cuts short with the compliments and the hugs, declaring that she is very hungry.

The tasting becomes eating, with big tureens that come one after the other from the kitchen, raised as trophies by girls whose cheeks have been reddened by the stoves and the pride.  The main courses arrive, hand made noodles and grilled meat, organic salads: the right quantity, the right number, avoiding any excess. The bread is warm from the oven, big loaves that the groom cuts near his chest, with an old gesture. And his tux jacket is dusted with flour.

The groom‘s parents get nervous, embarrassed. They can’t find their space, the mother frowns and her face becomes stranger and spiteful. Nadia instead has found her rhythm, her pace.

Slowly, the physical distance between Diletta and her mother shortens: some exchanges of glances, even a little smile. Nadia feels good, soothed by the food and the atmosphere, and she likes her daughter’s sparkling eyes, her soft gestures, her cheeks reddened by a calm, intense excitement. Sometimes the bride and the groom touch each other, they hug, out of love rather than to show off.

When the cake comes – a big multicolor fruit tart – the couple cuts it together, under the eyes of all the guests, the first slice is immediately laid on a plate. Diletta grabs a fork from the table, then pushes her way through the small crowd, towards her mother.

Nadia blushes, and not because everyone’s stares inevitably converge on her. The unexpected gift, the attention, give her courage: her shy fingers gently touch her daughter’s cheeks, and she doesn’t withdraw as always, quite the opposite, she lingers, she feels her warmth on her hand.

But then she leaves, everybody calling her. There are laughing toasts, loving toasts, teasing toasts. It seems that they are never going to end, when a group of musicians appears from the back of the farmhouse: a guitar, an accordion, and a tambourine. Popular music whose roots nobody seems to remember anymore.

Nadia claps her hand in time with the others, sings choruses, hazards countermelodies she thought she had forgotten. Her voice and Diletta’s meet, intertwine with competence.

The musicians vary from Tuscan octave rhymes to southern saltarellos, from working songs to the sweetest and angriest lullabies. Every now and then someone makes a request, and Nadia is surprised by the groom’s knowledge of songs she had never thought he would know: like the serenade he alone sings for Diletta, including “Lèvati bela, traite a l’inferiada,” which Nadia sang to her little daughter to get her to sleep.

When Diletta takes the tambourine in her hands, and ask the accordionist to play “Waltz for Siglinda,”  Nadia’s heart skips a beat: for her that is the waltz of ’68, with the romanticism and the hopes of those years, only a few know it, but for her it is the meaning of her life, tugged and wounded but still with a music inside that cannot be erased.

The musician shakes his head, he does not know it: he offers his instrument around for whoever wants to play in his place.

Then Diletta points to her mother, who unexpectedly feels a sort of emptiness within herself: scared by her rusty fingers and by contact with her daughter that is too big, too sudden.

The accordion passes from hand to hand. Nadia places her arms, and instinctively manages to face chords and try sonorities. And the fingers move on the keyboard by themselves: no matter that the arthritis makes them sore, and how many years have passed without practicing, the melody unravels from her vehement memory, as if something had held it for too long. The few hesitations seem to be enclosed within the sense of a past hard to metabolize because still present.

Everybody dances, carried away, and Diletta moves in time with the tambourine, in semicircles, which take her closer to her mother: standing, one in front of the other, their gestures in unison, with similar looks, in their eyes and in their hands, in a memory that can be shared.

_________________________________________________________________

This translation is published with permission of the author and RCS Libri in Italy, which published “Valzer per Siglinda” (the  story in the original Italian) in Clara Sereni’s collection entitled Il lupo mercante.

Clara Sereni lives in Perugia, Italy.  She is an award-winning writer and translator, and a columnist forL’Unità and Il Manifesto. She is the author of many novels and short stories, and the editor of several books concerned with issues such as disability and mental illness. She is very active in the social arena, and is the President of “La città del Sole,” an organization in Umbria that welcomes families with disabilities. She also served as Deputy Mayor of the city of Perugia from 1995 to 1997. “Waltz for Siglinda” is one of the short stories from her latest book Il lupo mercante.

Giulia Po earned a Ph.D in Comparative Literature with a specialization in Italian Literature from The Graduate Center of The City University of New York.  She works as an Italian lecturer and lives in Boston. She has a monographic study of Clara Sereni’s work, which is forthcoming from the Franco Cesati publishing house in Italy.

Monica Hanna is co-editor of Global Graffiti.  She has published translations as well as critical work on contemporary literature in English, Spanish, and Italian.  She holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from The Graduate Center of The City University of New York and teaches literature in Annapolis.