No soldiers in the scenery

Radical Society, Jul 2002 by Emcke, Carolin

"No soldiers in the scenery, no thoughts of people now dead, as they were fifty years ago, young and living in a live air, young and walking in the sunshine, bending in blue dresses to touch something, today the mind is not part of the weather."

- Wallace Stevens

SOMETIMES A CERTAIN HOMESICKNESS TAKES HOLD even when one's home; sometimes a journey does not come to an end after one's return; sometimes one changes perspectives so often that one loses a sense of orientation; sometimes it is easier to unpack one's suitcase than oneself.

I am a professional traveler. I am a wanderer and I know how to change my clothes, my habits, my composure, my language, my gestures. I am a stranger whose strangeness becomes invisible, a mute who listens to the pain of others. I move into foreign communities, and discover a new world: I swallow different colors, and odors, herbs, textures, and lights; I join wedding ceremonies and joyous celebrations, or funerals and farewells; I am invited to classrooms and maternity wards I sleep in the tents of refugee camps, or in the iron huts in the favelas, or in a car on the road; I witness fights and battles, I look at cracked bones, burned flesh, open intestines, and putrefied parts of legs, I am welcomed by strangers who open up their hearts as few friends dare to do; I invite myself into unknown houses and ask for help and tea and patience and food as I would hardly dare toward friends; I accept gifts and generosities as if I could give anything in return. I give up the idea of symmetry, and I learn to say good-bye without exchanging addresses, without exchanging false promises of seeing each other again, and yet - without the fear of loss or death.

And then I return home, and then it is my turn to give - and I write....

But since September 11, I have not returned home. I came back to Berlin for a couple of days, and then I left for Pakistan; then I came back to Berlin for some time, and then I left again for Pakistan; then I went to Afghanistan, and then I returned; then I went to Pakistan, and then to Kashmir...and throughout all those weeks, and months, and throughout all those days and weeks that I was in Berlin, I never left downtown Manhattan, New York.

I thought I could come home, could unpack my suitcase and my memory, sneak back into the normalcy of a Western life in a metropole, reunite with my friends; I thought that I would be as always at first - stuck in this twilight zone between the different places, communities, lives, that I would overcome it by sleeping lots, being on my own, getting rest and music and food; that I would have to wait for the dreams of violence and despair to come, and then I would finally be able to put the images and the assignment to rest. That's the usual procedure, that's the ritual, that's my learned and appreciated form of traveling and returning, of breathing in and out, of listening and writing, of going away and coming back.

It didn't work this time.

new york - a wailer bemoaning his own death

Most friends of mine in my intellectual environment turned almost over night into Islam-experts, Central-Asia-experts, terrorism-experts, anthrax-experts (I have a conspiracy theory that all bioethics and cloning specialists were reprogrammed on 9/11, quasi overnight, as Islam-specialists). I was mostly speechless. I don't think I have had a single reasonable thought or analysis in months. New York has become such a virtual collective experience that it is difficult to write about it and pretend you didn't already know it all. Did you know that nothing is left of a body when it hits the ground after jumping from the height of such a building? Nothing but blood and water. Did you know that trauma may blind your memory? There is no sound in my memory of the moment when the towers collapsed: all I can recall is the image, but there is absolutely no noise, it is quiet in my memory; there is a dissociation of sound and image and with all rationality I erased that perception, which would be even more painful one for someone as acoustically sensitive as I am; the picture of the collapsing towers is only unreal, the sound would inscribe itself unbearably like that of the squeaking scream of chalk on a blackboard. Did you know that in the night of the 11th all of Wall Street was covered with sheets of papers from the offices in the towers: the contract someone had just been working on, the statistics of some investment, printed copy of an email written to a friend or a wife; briefings, memos, deals - all lying in this film of dust and asbestos.

In the first few hours, when we were all on the streets, and the towers were first burning, and collapsing, and everyone was fleeing northwards, and we, my friend Joanne and I, went in the opposite direction, and nobody knew what was going on, we saw groups of people around a radio that someone had placed on a windowsill, and people were gathering around a car, the owner had opened all four doors so that everyone could hear the radio, and someone had placed a TV on the fire escape so that everyone could see the coverage of the unbelievable, the incomprehensible. And in this way we found out that the Pentagon had been attacked, the White House evacuated, etc....and nobody knew what else there was to come, and whether this was a war, or a terrorist attack, and by whom, and whether it was over or not, and so people listened to the radio as if it could explain the world and make it meaningful and sensible again. And then I had this flashback about the refugees in the camp, called Piscina, or the out-skirts of Tirana, Albania. They were just the same, and suddenly New Yorkers looked just like these poor and dirty Kosovar refugees in Albania, sitting in the mud of the camp, groups of ten or fifteen around one small pocket radio, listening to the news, each day, waiting eagerly for the news that finally Milosevic would give in, would withdraw, would sign a peace deal, would be killed. The only difference in New York was that the people here did not share one language, and so the news from the speaker in the car was translated, it was handed over from one to the other like fresh bread and each could break a piece, and so the word was transformed into Chinese, Spanish, Vietnamese. While every New Yorker was shocked by the uniqueness, the incomparability of this event, of this disaster - I was mostly amazed by how similar they were and looked and behaved to victims of violence in other places of the world.