23 Can silences be resolved by words?
I don’t think resolution is possible as something besides an aesthetic gesture.
Silences and words continue in dialogue, as dialectic. Carmen Bugan uses the text to dialogue with other writers, and to study the silences where the writer’s responsibility to witness exists alongside the commitment to art by “taking denatured language and turning it into a language that cleanses the wounds.”
Quotation is central to how Bugan brings the files to bear on the poems; what she calls “a poetics of quotation marks” tugs the language of oppression into the poem, using one language “in order to stare down the other,” as described in her book, Releasing the Porcelain Birds: Poems After Surveillance. The writer is bracketed by quotations—by the identities ascribed to her based on ethnicity, national origin, and immigration—but she is also conversant with them.
The “poetics of quotation marks” encompasses the experience of exile as well as the bilingual self in translation. Quotation enacts the impossible possible by transforming the page into a space for dialogue between texts and speech acts, between speeches and notebooks. In committing to this space, Bugan expands both time and place, enabling her to write into silences marked by the sins of the father, as the daughter of a political prisoner, or dissident.
“The persecution which my parents and we children endured as a result of my father’s protest forms the background to my poetry,” Bugan explains. She identifies as “an immigrant working at what might be called the confluence of languages,” in the spaces where languages meet in the mouth of a river. Ultimately, however, Bugan’s academic essays, poems, and memoir offer a life built from poetry – not because poetry would make her a poet, but because poetry is the space in which the self could be rendered whole.
The Romanian pseudo-communist regime drew its authority from documentary writing. Or rather, all writing became a form of documentary writing in that it reflected the new reality. From the beginning, it was known that history needed to be rewritten. The single, absolute reading needed to exist in order for the church to determine which reading was heretical. The heretic loses access to god and community if he reads his life, his body, and the text differently.
As a writing genre, Socialist Realism emphasized the transformative power of realism. Investing in the power of positive thinking, the regime insisted that what was spoken by citizens would be manifested in politics. Because every individual act influenced the national destiny, to express skepticism about state policies was sabotage.
“In writing, I had both silence and words,” Carmen writes, revealing silence as a structural element of dictatorship, as in, for example, the power of the pause—the caesura—and how it creates a sticky space in which associations and lined works are allowed to connect and cohere.
On the second page of North China Lover, Marguerite Duras says of the protagonist, “She is the one who has no name in the first book, or the one before it, or in this one.” Duras narrates memory from the perspective of a moving camera lens. She refuses to inhabit the self to whom she owes allegiance: the character so closely modeled on her childhood self, the body that carries her wounds. The writer cannot avoid being seen in the way she looks at her characters, in the discourse of that particular way of looking. For Duras, any pain can be salved by a man’s sexual desire for the protagonist. “All the books you write will be about the camera’s eye mistaken as the look of longing, the eyelash of love.” (I think those were her words.)