Immortal Muse

Tamerlan Tsarnaev, right, lost at the Golden Gloves championships in 2009. A year later, a new citizenship rule blocked him. From the New York Times, April 27, 2013.

When I politely informed this imbecile of his mistake, he shamefully retracted his statement, but I had neither the money nor influence to bribe that great Gogolian gatekeeper, Google, who ensured the blogger’s ridiculous libel topped its index for the next five years. Thus my Kamal entered the world with a distinctive club foot, and only a very kind Elif Batuman, who wrote an appreciative review, offered him any cuddling whatsoever.

Kamal is a parable of sorts, a “satire” I’ve been told by some of its handful of fans. It involves the eponymous teenage hero — of “bedouin brown” — raised on his family’s beautiful estate in Bel Air. Kamal is passionate about life; about his Hollywood parents, his butterfly collection, his paintings, his books, and the self-help teachings of his mother’s fitness trainer. But Kamal has one passion which surpasses the rest, and when this passion causes his paradise to fall apart, our distraught young hero is sent into exile, on a journey across America, following the fitness trainer’s wisdom to “always pursue the greater happiness.”

But the novel is also about the struggle of a poet, its narrator (himself a cultural exile from America), to contribute his New Zealand-generated song to a loud and rancourous American discourse. Last year, because so few people had actually read the book in the five years since its birth, I decided to post episodes of Kamal on this site.

I began posting one episode every Tuesday, chronologically, starting from the opening lines — “Be clear, unthrottled throat!” — and due to end, not far off now, with the closing couplets of Book One:

…one thing it is to write,
to finish a great work, but quite
another to ensure the work is read
and understood before its author is dead.

By March 12 I’d reached the scene in Canto Three, written in terza rima, where Kamal is sitting in a private box in a crowded Houston Astrodome, watching something called “Fame-Fest VII” — a kind of reality show extravaganza. On Tuesday, April 1, I posted the scene (episode 33) where a young pilot of Libyan extraction attempts to crash a small plane into the stadium. On April 8th I posted the scene where — the plane having been shot down in the stadium’s parking lot — armed security forces begin storming the Astrodome, with chaos and panic breaking out inside.

It was the morning after my post of April 15th — a scene where bullets begin to fly, a grenade is thrown, and a young woman with a blonde ponytail sees her fiancé shot dead — that a friend told me about the Boston bombings.

A few days later, as the chase for the bombers unfolded in Boston, and we learned more about the suspects, I read this headline in the New York Times: “Suspects With Foot in 2 Worlds;” and, later, numerous articles linking homegrown terrorism with the failed assimilation of immigrants. Now compare this idea with the lines from Kamal that I posted on April 22 (“A Touch of Libya”), as the woman with the blonde ponytail, standing beside the bleeding corpse of her husband, begins to reflect on an aquaintance who, unbeknownst to her, is the suicide pilot who’s been shot down outside.

They’d gone to school together. They’d been neighbors, in fact. But she hadn’t realized he was born in America; nor had she realized that he was in love with her.

Recently, when meeting him on a bus, she’d said to him:

‘…you came to Riverview
Estates from Egypt . . . no? From Libya? You’ve seen
the world! Lucky you. Oh is that so?
At Northeast Med? . . . Me too . . . That’s right, nineteen
on April twenty-fifth, how did you know? . . .
Well, even if you haven’t traveled much,
it’s like, your foreignness will never go.
I mean, not quite a foreignness as such.
I mean to say – I’m sorry, lately I
can’t think! – your parents gave you just a touch
of Libya . . . Did you ever learn to fly?
When we were kids, fifth-grade, or sixth, you swore
you’d be a pilot . . . Here’s my stop . . . Goodbye!’

It turns out that her very rejection of this man is what prompted his suicide attack on the Astrodome (where he knew she’d be that day). On April 23rd I added this comment to my post:

…Having not read the lines in many years, I’m often struck by their content — but especially these lines, this week, given the recent events in Boston. That “Touch of Libya” could easily have been a “Touch of Chechnya” — as America seeks out the right sketch artist to draw its enemy’s face. And now everyone wonders about motive. Was the bomber inspired by some faraway fanaticism? A radical Australian cleric on YouTube? Some Mujahideen in some mountain hideaway? Heavenly virgins?

Or could the act of terror — to use the term generally — come less from politics and ideology and more from a cultural offense, a sense of personal hurt or failure or detachment, and is there really any difference between these potential triggers of extreme violence? (“Oh, he was actually born here,” Lisa suddenly realizes in the lines above; “He has the same right to pursue happiness that I have.”). Whatever the motive, America would benefit by revisiting its definition of terrorism — or scrapping it entirely.

Four days later, on April 27th, I read an article in the Times with the headline, “A Battered Dream, Then a Violent Path.” The article explores how the imigration status of one of the Boston bombing suspects, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, thwarted his boxing career, and how perhaps it was this inability to continue boxing in America that led him down the path of violence. “From one year to the next,” according to the article, “the tournament rules had changed, disqualifying legal permanent residents. His aspirations frustrated, he dropped out of the boxing competition entirely, and his life veered in a completely different direction.”

I published the latest episode of Kamal last week, on April 29th. A few days before, again in the Times, I had read that after the bombing, Dzorkhar Tsarnaev “favorited” a post on Twitter that said, “The sad part about the events in Boston today, is that some bs Hollywood director is gonna try n make a movie n profit from tragic events.”

And here came my latest episode, “Like Thieves Who Frisk the Dead,” in which Kamal — remembering to “choose the greater happiness” — decides to die in the massacre rather than flee to safety. Because…

…what choice exceeds
in pleasure that of dying in a fight,
a royal massacre, a great stampede
of carnage which, someday at least, just might
be made into a film by grave old Stone,
or what’s his name, that Michael Fahrenheit,
or Spielberg, Clint, those brilliant cicerones
of history’s House of Horrors, showing tourists
how a head would really look when blown
apart in ways the military purists
deem ‘authentic’ – and seen while eating
popcorn in a seat! – and Oscar jurists
call ‘artistic?’…

Now here’s the thing: On the one hand I wondered if my readers, the few I have, might not realize I’d written the verses many years earlier, that I was just posting the episodes on a weekly basis. Would I quickly go from a handful of readers to no readers at all?

Perhaps I’d be accused of lacking taste. Who would write poetry about terrorism at such a time? Or perhaps they’d think I was using tragedy to personal advantage — especially if I drew any notice (as I’m doing now) to the coincidence of the events?

The writer, essayist, and commentator, Adam Gopnik

Or was I making connections that don’t really exist; the way, after purchasing a pair of new shoes, we suddenly start noticing every brand on every foot we see around us? Was it worth noticing that many years ago I wrote a scene about a terrorist attack in Houston, and that I happened to post it online at exactly the same tiem a terrorist attack occurred in Boston? So what? Does it mean anything? And was it moral for me, as people grieved and lives were destroyed, to be desperately seeking some evidence to confirm an elusive mimicry between reality and literature? And even if there was a litmus test for artistic honesty or merit, why would it have anything to do with the powers of prognostication?

I wondered, I questioned myself, I despaired. Was I making this all up? What was I trying to express? And then, two days ago, I discovered a blog posted by Adam Gopnik of the New Yorker Magazine. Its title: “Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, Lost and Found.” In it, Gopnik writes:

…we already had a glimpse of how this might be a tragedy of assimilation and its discontents. A well-liked student at a good public school, a Golden Gloves boxer—somehow they had transformed their souls in ways that made it possible for them to casually drop devices meant to rip human flesh apart next to an eight-year-old boy and his family.

“Assimilation and its discontents.” This, indeed, was the theme I was addressing in those episodes from Kamal. But, more astonishing and affirming to my eyes, Gopnik goes on to write:

Experts tell us the meaning of what they haven’t seen; poets and novelists tell us the meaning of what they haven’t seen, either, but have somehow managed to fully imagine. Maybe the literature of terrorism…can now throw a little light on how apparently likable kids become cold-hearted killers.”

I tried to contact Gopnik to express my gratitude for what seemed a clear confirmation that I wasn’t alone in my thoughts. I wanted to let him know that yes, poets can indeed tell “the meaning of what they haven’t seen.” But we don’t often realize it in the process of writing. We don’t always trust our own interpretation. And sometimes the Muse comes from so far outside the conversation (across the Pacific!), in a voice or accent or style so different from what people are used to, that it simply can’t be heard through the din.

In fact, in the constant commentary, in the furious tumult of Twitter that never allows anyone to pause and muse and reflect (and sit in the Takapuna library for months on end) in a way that produces any insightful, clarifying literature that can “throw a little light” on current events, perhaps it’s unlikely that Gopnik — or America, or anyone else — will ever hear this point of view.

Yet I write about it anyway. And Kamal, as we know, is about that, too.