51 Fake communities.

Not even relativism can be pure. Every text has a subtext. Every image has a subject. Every subject is depicted in pieces.

In Imagined Communities, Benedict Andersen noted that “print capitalism” helped sustain nationalism. Newspaper readers were prime raw material for the creation of an imaginary public community. The media, in this sense, produces a public—and defines its margins. Eventually, the public becomes a market, or what marketing professionals might call a target audience.

“My parents spend more time with Fox than they do with their grandkids or a family,” a friend said. Fox News has become an affiliation which is stronger than family for many Americans. Some people feel at home or among friends when watching Fox. Others feel at home when watching Oprah or Ellen. The absence of home makes us vulnerable to home-like feelings.

Why is nationalism dangerous? Because it defines itself as an imagined whole, a group that needs nothing outside of itself—a group that has no lack. Like the human with no lack or gap in which desire can enter, the nationalist group exists in relation to the height and density of the wall it erects against the outside world or the other. For the nationalists, all bad things are foreign. Bad does not exist within the nation itself. The nation is complete. Badness is the thing that crosses the borders.^[1]

The dictator stood before his captive audience and declared that Romania had only murdered its Jewish citizens due to external causes. In the communist regime’s story, the Romanian Shoah had nothing to do with anti-Semitism. For Ceaușescu, Romanians could not be anti-Semitic. The Shoah occurred due to outside influence.

All problems in socialist Romania had foreign causes.

But the most dangerous thoughts hide inside each of us: each could be the victim or the executioner, depending on the world we wake into. Poetry lets us speak to the monster within, and this monster is utterly human. This monster may brush its teeth and donate money to charities. This monster tends to resemble what passes for “normal” under a dictatorship.

Poetry rages against borders precisely because it exists in a borderless space—it moves fluidly across the page. This is why poetry becomes an alternative discourse that preserves Ion Bugan in the mind of his daughter.

One scene in the memoir gives us a teenage Carmen staring at her father’s portrait on the wall. There are rumors that he died in prison.

Something compels her to write a poem to him. When she shares the poem with her mother and sister, her father is permitted to exist. “The poem returns my dad to us,” Carmen writes:

From this moment on I never stop writing poetry, though I have to burn the poems that mention prison so that the Securitate don’t find them. Poems come and go like that—moments painted in images that in turn become their own reality mixed with the actual memory of Dad so that sometimes we remember my re-creation of Dad, not him; we idealize him because of his absence…. I discover a way to alleviate our family’s suffering even though when I read the poems to mom and my sister it seems that I create more pain at first.

Not only is poetry a way to keep her father alive, but it is also a site of reunion with him, a space in which it is possible to meet those who are missing. Bugan enacts these imagined reunions in poems about her childhood, about her hometown, about the holidays and feasts left behind.

Poetry imagines an alternate present, and the lyric is the daughter’s way of keeping her father alive, even as her mother is forced to divorce him in order to keep her job. Truth hurts, but silence is worse.