Rasha Abbas, Dan Boehl, Maxi Obexer, Sînziana Păltineanu, Anzhelina Polonskaya
Texts about Work
Rasha Abbas
Miserable Work Chronicles
When I was invited to take part in a workshop on “Chronicles of Work,” the first idea that came to me was to write about the experience of working under circumstances that strip work of its productive value and transform it into an instrument of enslavement and domination. This has happened frequently throughout history, with work being one of the favorite values dictators use to harness the workforce in constructing a repressive state. Until the day I left Damascus, the following statement could still be found on the walls there: “The working hand is the mightiest hand in the Baathist State.” This phrase has been one of the elder Assad’s famous quotes ever since he seized power 40 years ago. Of course the worker’s hand was not actually the powerful one; the punching fist was always the mightiest hand in the Baathist state. But it was crucial that people be anaesthetized with words like these in order to motivate them to work silently, without so much as a whimper of complaint. [Please click for more]
My second thought on the subject concerns a problem that has long dogged those engaged in creative affairs. How can you accomplish purely creative work without the specter of your need to make a living looming up in front of you? This question is not really tied to a specific era, even though it is true that cultural work has evolved in such a way as to make the creative process less difficult in some societies – these days it is possible to be employed in jobs that neither stray too far from the cultural concern of a writer nor necessarily exhaust his or her creative imagination, such as working in cultural research institutions, in academia, or as an editor in a publishing house. Unfortunately, this seemingly ideal solution is not on offer in the same form in all societies.
Let’s look at the two issues together, and see how writers were able to carve out a living from absurd press work in the shadow of a despotic regime that stripped all and any work of its original value, subsuming it into the mass of authority so that work became both part of the tyranny and utterly devoted to it. As part of this process, commercial arts’ work no longer served its original creative values in any way, with standards slipping and quality getting so degraded in the quest to maintain the work’s authoritarian function that it was no longer worth paying any serious attention to at all.
When I began my university studies, I found a job in a local tabloid newspaper and discovered that my role consisted in making up exciting crime stories for the newspaper, as well as writing horoscopes, a detective series about the life of a spy, and of course letters from readers. I was 19 years old, and I thought that this was normal. In a context with fixed work standards or quality-control mechanisms, all of these acts would be considered clear press crimes (“terrorizing the community,” for example). After that job I moved on to the student union newspaper, where I worked on conducting and writing up opinion polls. It turned out that here, like in my first workplace, my veteran colleagues had become accustomed to dreaming up the results of these supposed surveys. The reports considered the best were those that included a crude tribute to the government, such as an imaginary interview with an exchange student from China or Australia in which the student confirmed that “Syria is a beautiful country and its people are hospitable and generous.”
I then moved on to work in television, in the cultural section, an area not widely liked by television staff, because they saw it as boring and pointless – most of them were more interested in working for the drama department, where the staff was allowed to meet actors, or the politics department, which people took more seriously and treated as if it had more relevance. This broad disinterest in our work meant that it was not even subject to censorship or control; the station’s director was more concerned with making sure no one dared to cross lines in the politics department, and overseeing how the technical department dealt with the actors according to their opinions on the production company he ran alongside the channel. This basically meant that I could broadcast whatever I wanted in the cultural bulletin and the “new publications” program I used to prepare. I could have easily invented a completely fictional character – or one with a friend’s name – and broadcast news of their publications and the international awards they had won at literary festivals. (This is the seed idea for a novel I may write at some point.)
So how did it all end? In March of 2011, a popular revolution erupted in Syria. I was still working at an official television station belonging to the Syrian government. We were following the news on the foreign news agencies, which showed bound prisoners being trampled on by men from the security forces. Right behind us the newsreader on the official channel came on the air for the news bulletin and said that these images were fabricated, and that the effects of torture on the detainees’ bodies as shown in international media photos were all done with makeup. At that point I resigned from the station. It wasn’t fun anymore, and I was no longer just an anaesthetized person. There was hope that the era of degradation and deceit was coming to an end: it was as if our eyes had suddenly been opened. When human beings are not valued, their presence at work is not treated as having any value, either, unless they are being employed to build and support authoritarian governments – and so they do not feel productive. Three years ago, the hope and the consciousness awoke in us to ensure that all of this must change.
Translated from the Arabic by Alice Guthrie.
At two o’clock on Monday, a person appeared in the middle of the parking lot, as if from nowhere. He was wearing an orange jacket and ordinary blue jeans. He stared at the little green tree in front of him and touched one of the leaves – it was probably his first contact with spring that year. He then went to the next tree, which was a little leafier, and circled it in wonder. He had nothing of the scientific curiosity of a botanist. He was not staring at the tree to conquer or to know, but merely to sense. A white and red braiding hung from a bough, but it remained unnoticed. The man was not familiar with the fluttering Bulgarian symbol of spring. It did not bother him, nor did it make him think of the wishes someone may have ceremoniously muttered in secret when attaching the symbol to a blossoming branch. Had he been interested only in linguistics, Saussure’s tree might have completely overshadowed his spring experience. But, fortunately, the man in orange genuinely responded only to colors and textures. [Please click for more]
The fact that it was already late spring made his demeanor seem strangely anachronistic. Either he had just arrived from a wintry Nordic country, or he was one of those people for whom weekends started on Tuesdays and ended on Fridays, leaving the rest of the days for proper work. And indeed, the explanation was that a different cycle spun his life. He took his predisposition to observe obscure details as a sign of alertness, and he was proud of it. By contrast, others interpreted it as useless daydreaming or worse, shameful mental laziness. In all truthfulness, he was most at peace with himself when he successfully induced a state of laziness followed smoothly by boredom. He had no desire to explain to anyone why he sought laziness and boredom while others got an adrenaline rush from bouts of productivity. He put a stop to such inquiries with a shy smile, goading his condescending interlocutor to a game of table tennis. That way, he could at least prove his physical alertness. He understood these games as some sort of territories of compromise into which he could lure others. As the ball pinged and ponged, he forced his adversaries to admit – if only to themselves – that it was more rewarding to expand the meanings of words than to match a person with a definition. The dictionary-minded others would never even have a chance to understand his double game at table tennis, because the person in orange was nearly silent during these games. Only the empty sound of a plastic ball punctuated the interaction. He never shared his conclusions about different kinds of alertness or his inner monologues about concepts or labels with his opponents. At the tennis table, the points scored never came in sentences or arguments, but only in numbers, which he arranged like eggs in egg cartons in one corner of his mind while on the main stage he triumphed in both games, graciously concealing his double victory. Such was his imagination; such was our character in springtime.
In winter, his field of curiosity was frozen. In the mass of ice that was the city, he conceived of the public bus as a warm, moving tunnel. He felt safe there, making sure to always occupy a seat next to a heater (when available) and close to a window. This is where he liked to experience winter; in his projection of a warm continuum, protected by windows. From his seat, he enjoyed watching the schoolchildren playing their winter games and carrying their heavy satchels. They threw snowballs at each other from positions on both sides of the street, but often the snowballs’ trajectory intersected that of the bus, their smashing sound on its windows causing his face to break into an instantaneous smile. Under no imaginable circumstances would he have traded his sheltered seat on the bus for the glorifying moment of hitting the bus with snowballs. In his moving tunnel, whose retired captain he was, he felt safe and protected, almost untouchable. Or so it seemed, until one day in late winter when his comfortable soap bubble burst.
At a crossroad, the bus window, colored by red traffic lights, seemed to blush and smile back at him. But the passenger’s mind was busy with memory flashes, so this outer detail slipped by, unobserved. A few moments later, the bus continued its journey with a squeaky turn to the left, his head carelessly leaned in the same direction, as if approving the change of course. At three o’clock – the direction, not the time – he noticed a picturesque humpbacked woman, born in another century, waiting at the pedestrian crossing. She was leaning against a shopping cart with a human dignity that not many old people now possess. He was enthralled. And while she waited, he began searching for details like a mouse for cheese. Soon enough he noticed that her frozen red nose was dripping. Under the magnifying glass of his imagination, this mysteriously translucent blob began to gain grotesque proportions. The woman’s contours seemed to explode in billions of pixels while he concentrated on the flickering and enlarging, but not yet frozen, drop. It happened in a second, like all edifying things: his tunnel disappeared, and he found himself mentally trapped in a merry-go-round of questions and doubts.
How could this drop of mucus shatter his heart’s contentment, his pleasant and sheltered journey? Why was a mucus blob more powerful than his soap bubble? Winter, or rather his lack of understanding of winter, had made him create a tunnel for himself as best he could. He was not an architect; he was not a construction engineer. He had a strong personal distaste for concrete. So all he could do was to create a safe and warm tunnel on which he had worked every single day since the first snow fell. And now, all of a sudden, he felt a cold winter shiver on his spine and realized that a mucus blob had undermined his hypnotic construct. He saw no other way than to let his body slowly sink into the irony of the situation. Who else could he blame but himself for underestimating the power of a translucent mucus blob? He usually wiped it off, with a handkerchief and a quick move, just like anyone else would do.
But this time he carried on his analysis, and weighed her blob and his soap bubble. He was well aware of how much time he had invested in creating this warm, comfortable zone for himself. From the beginning of winter, he had expected that the demise of his tunnel would come from within, from drunk, aggressive passengers or possibly from a curious rat. He had even prepared an imaginary shield against such prosaic, subversive agents, keeping it at hand, in his trousers’ left pocket. On a couple of late-night trips he really came within a whisker of using it to defend his construct, but then he always decided against it. It wasn’t yet worth it, he thought. He carried around this imaginary shield – a combination of burning magnifying glass and blinding mirror – with the ease and reassurance that some other people walked around with pepper spray in their bags. And the fact that no one had ever seen or felt the effects of his shield didn’t mean that he couldn’t have used it in case of emergency. Had this moment come? The image of the dignified old woman, with a dripping red nose, freezing in the street, had left him completely puzzled and his imaginary shield useless. And as he ruminated over the question of how fragile and vulnerable the constructs of his imagination were, it finally occurred to him that maybe he could not stand the fragility of his never-ending stories anymore. One option was to end them himself, and to blow them away like soap bubbles, or one’s nose, for that matter. What bothered him most was that an exterior element was powerful enough not only to interrupt or alter his imaginary projection, but to terminate it completely. But he knew he was playing hide-and-seek with himself. The force that undermined his own tunnel construct was just another product of his imagination filter. Ending his tunnel this way was a mildly vengeful, but most definitely liberating act for the man in orange. After all, he had become unacceptably numbed by the pride and comfort he took in his tunnel. Under these circumstances, which he considered averagely boring, he thought of the mucus blob as encapsulating the entirety of humanity with which he’d lost touch. He decided to subtly implode his construct. In his cocoon-world, he equated the blob with a terrorist bomb in a metropolis. So he planted it and got off the bus.
It would be unwise to judge the man’s mental maneuverings, since his business was his alone. If some deemed his formulations, and most likely his character too, incongruous, they must have misunderstood him in the first place.
The text is an excerpt from the first chapter of Paltineanu’s book Elephant Chronicles, forthcoming with the experimental publishing project Fiktion, in early 2015, http://fiktion.cc/.
Anzhelina Polonskaya
Blacker than White
Could it really all be in vain,
and the snow’s crape will meet you again and again –
no color ‘s blacker than white.
You set down your bags,
you see the dog covered in blood,
and you think, “I’m home.”
Your mother stands in the doorway, kissing
your tresses, at the thin line of your forehead,
missing the spot and slipping –
tiny, like a little girl.
And the snow drifts down, as if not noticing you,
but someone is looking through the shutters,
someone is looking through the shutters,
silently staring.
And each return
“was it really all for naught”,
gets less painful – it barely burns.
The crape of fresh snow.
How fitting for a land
you entered off the gangplank.
Tell me, why is there war
if not to leave buckles in lumps of clay?
The potato field sleeps. At night you can’t guess
who’ll be lying down in the blue leaves by morning.
A cold year. The train cars smell
of rubber boots, bodies, and exhalation.
A distant port wanders with ships
and in the crowd it’s easy to pass as a refugee.
Time marches on. The clock face strides
with metal arrows, like a crane in the lagoon.
The bazaars are filled with traders,
while the moon’s saber edge slashes the cigarette smoke.
The house is like a white fish diving into the mist.
It’s been a long time since there was light in the window.
At the edge of the field a female figure freezes,
hiding potatoes in the folds of her skirt.
In the leaden air, where there’s no place for lungs,
you hear only the clang of a gate’s hasp.
For an instant the face looks out into the night,
then hides its grief behind sticky fingers.
Snow Within
But should anyone ever tell you that
snow has fallen …
Snow on the black battlements
on the sidewalks
screaming with the voices of arches –
don’t believe it.
An autumn forest redolent with animal blood
and the pounding of feet (in a dream perhaps?)
on the flattened paths of veins.
The taste of your saliva on my tongue –
the unsaid, un-
penetrated.
A hundred thousand “no’s” of faithless fire
and the two of us fated.
Eye to eye –
You must believe them:
it’s not outside, the snow is within.
While My Mother is Still Alive
While my mother is still alive, things somehow hold together.
Patchy sunlight illuminates the walls,
and light falls on the spines of books.
The criminals who have come to power forever
are not so murderous, and you live with someone
side by side, on the stripped threads,
trying somehow to share a bed.
The asters are in flower.
Two teary furrows of dryness.
But the main thing, that connection, is not love,
it’s bigger and stickier, addictive as morphine,
ready to explode and destroy you.
Appels
Gray branches, dull thuds.
Apples falling in late November, and we
gather them with frozen hands.
Am I wrong?
or did you say something,
not tearing your eyes from the ground?
Something like “evil will triumph,”
you said quietly.
As if the tundra is beyond us. As if we’re gathering stones in our skirts.