Day 16: Wisława Szymborska, Flannery O'Connor, Lur Alghurabi
Poem: Wisława Szymborska - The Onion
The onion, now that’s something else.
Its innards don’t exist.
Nothing but pure onionhood
fills this devout onionist.
Oniony on the inside,
onionesque it appears.
It follows its own daimonion
without our human tears.
Our skin is just a coverup
for the land where none dare go,
an internal inferno,
the anathema of anatomy.
In an onion there’s only onion
from its top to its toe,
onionymous monomania,
unanimous omninudity.
At peace, of a peace,
internally at rest.
Inside it, there’s a smaller one
of undiminished worth.
The second holds a third one
the third contains a fourth.
A centripetal fugue.
Polyphony compressed.
Nature’s rotundest tummy
its greatest success story,
the onion drapes itself in its
own aureoles of glory.
We hold veins, nerves, and fat,
secretions’ secret sections.
Not for us such idiotic
onionoid perfections.
I am amazed at how the translators could have achieved this. There are so many English-specific onion puns, and while some are invented, you have ones like "daemonion", a word from Socrates which means the mysterious inner voice which tells you what to do.
Oniony on the inside,
onionesque it appears.
It follows its own daimonion
without our human tears.
This poem itself is like an onion - every layer, every stanza, returns again and again to talk about the onion's babushka doll segments. Even when the poem talks about humans, it is really talking about onions.
Story: Flannery O'Connor - The Displaced Person
I love hearing Flannery O'Connor's stories read aloud in all the accents, and this Southern preacher's reading was really good
Flannery O'Connor has been my favourite writer for over a decade. I have reread many of her stories countless times, but had never read her longest story, The Displaced Person.
This is an unusual story for O'Connor in that it deals with something outside the familiar class, race and religious struggles within the rural South. Instead it approaches the subject of refugees; the story being about a family of Polish refugees coming to stay as workers on a rural farm.
The main character, Mrs. McIntyre, is a classic O'Connor character, being most likely based on her mother, a respectable southern lady whose airs of goodwill are underscored with selfishness, ignorance and barely-concealed bigotry. As usual, O'Connor is funny as hell in her vitriol...
On first meeting the Displaced Person and his children:
"The first thing that struck her as very peculiar was that they looked like other people. Every time she had seen them in her imagination, the image she had got was of the three bears walking single file with wooden shoes on like dutchmen and sailor hats and bright coats with a lot of buttons."
Mrs McIntyre and the other white characters repeat the very same rhetoric you still hear about refugees in all the time. "I am not responsible for the world's misery" she repeats. Everyone has hardships, but the extremity of the suffering under the Nazi occupation only makes the Polish family more alien to the characters. They see something malicious in these people having survived:
In the mind of Mrs. Shortley: > "Like rats with typhoid fleas, [they] could have carried all those murderous ways over the water with them directly to this place. If they had come from where that kind of thing was done to them, who was to say they were not the kind that would also do it to others?"
Overall, this story is dark, funny and wonderful in its understanding of how xenophobia works and spreads. As always in O'Connor's stories, the story takes the most subversive ways in telling a Catholic lesson, but you don't need to know much about the Bible to love the world and language and humour of her writing.
This is quite a long story (50 pages) so I definately recommend listening to the audiobook version, free here
Essay: Lur Alghurabi - You Either Die a Refugee or Live Long Enough to See Yourself Become the Diaspora Writer
There is a nice chain of themes running between the texts today; a Polish writer and Polish character in O'Connor's story, and the story and essay being about the perception of refugees.
Lur Alghurabi's parents fled from Iraq to Australia after terrible events, and the essay begins with:
Have I ever told you that my mother only speaks about the things she loves? The only thing she will tell you about, all you ever know about her, are the times when she wore a beautiful dress, or made a beautiful dress, or put a beautiful dress on one of us.
As you can gage from the essay's title, Alghurabi is very cynical of the role of the diaspora writer...
We look at the monsters in our suitcases. We unpack them, from our hearts and from our luggage, and we write a story. A good, award-winning story about 'survival' in the face of adversity. We're awarded a check and half a publishing contract. Our ordinary is someone else's extraordinary. My greatest literary fear remains, to this day, that an Iraqi person who's lived through the war will read that "award-winning' story and see all the emptiness inside. We don't need refugee writing as much as the Nancies need it from us.
Another interesting point made in the essay comes from Helen Razer on "intellectual apartheid". That people of colour and other oppressed groups are expected to write "accounts of lived experience", meaning they are usually confined to autobiography and "misery-lit", whereas a white guys are encouraged to write whatever they want. Looking at the books that get published in Australia, I would say this is very true.
The essay ends with "I'm never writing another essay again". She is taking the side of her mother's silence.
I agree that I am not too sure what speaking publicly about trauma really does, and am not sure it brings catharsis. As Alghurabi suggests, some wounds - those that cause one to seek asylum - cannot be healed without still leaving a big ugly scar.
I am not so pessimistic about diaspora writing, but then again, I am probably one of the Nancies, offering their tears as if that is enough. The few refugee memoirs I have read, all about Australia's offshore detention centres (this country's biggest ongoing sin) have filled me with more rage and despair than I have known what to do with. The books did inspire me to volunteer and donate to asylum seeker charities for many years, but I still don't know if it was enough. I don't know what enough is, and the bad fact is, I now avoid reading those kinds of stories as they fill me with too much pain. How much pain should you take on board, knowing you cannot change anything? It an answer no one has satisfactory answers for.
But I hope this great writer DOES write more essays, with the freedom to write about anything else in the world.
(This essay was in the 2022 anthology Against Disappearance)