"A mouth full of suffering": Loss as Renewal in Carmen Bugan's Crossing the Carpathians
When Carmen Bugan fled Romania with her family to the United States, along with leaving behind her home, possessions, and friends, she also left her native language. Bugan's ideas about poetry are informed by her choice to write in English rather than Romanian. In a short essay, "Why I Do Not Write in My Native Language," she says, "I certainly do not want to write in the language in which my family suffered interrogations, prison visits, threats of all kinds. I certainly do not want to remember all the times when we wrote to each other and burned our words" (9). Bugan, who has a doctorate from Oxford in Irish literature, is sensitive to how languages and cultures have suffered under colonialism; however, her own experience of immigration, specifically fleeing, is a theoretically under-represented in recent theories that regard difference. In her first collection Crossing the Carpathians (2004), Bugan's rich details of the forest, countryside, and domestic life bring a sense of loss, though not longing. Gaps in language are not represented as missing history but as what cannot be said in Romania, represented by static, lies, silence, and coercion. In this way, her poetry seems not aesthetically but theoretically akin to Gertrude Stein's project, The Making of Americans (1925). As Barrett Watten argues in "An Epic of Subjectivation: The Making of Americans," the novel is about loss of parents and an undoing of the Oedipus myth. Loss for the immigrant family, the Herslands becomes a productive new space for self definition. Similarly, Bugan's poetry shows no nostalgia but rather lets the story of the past guide the wish for the future, like the one that she gives to her sister: "Let health and fortune be / With you. I left you across the seas and you came to me / From the heart of love and gave generously" (Bugan).
When, at the age of 19, Carmen Bugan fled Romania with her family to the United States, along with leaving behind her home, possessions, and friends, she also left her native language. Bugan's ideas about poetry are informed by her choice to write in English rather than Romanian. In a short essay, "Why I Do Not Write in My Native Language," she says, "I certainly do not want to write in the language in which my family suffered interrogations, prison visits, threats of all kinds. I certainly do not want to remember all the times when we wrote to each other and burned our words" (9). Bugan, who has a doctorate from Oxford in Irish literature, is sensitive to how languages and cultures have suffered under colonialism; however, her own experience of immigration, specifically in the form of political exile, moves her neither in the direction of nostalgia nor nationalism. In her first collection Crossing the Carpathians (2004), Bugan's rich details of the forest, countryside, and domestic, rural life bring a sense of loss, though not longing. Gaps in language are not represented as missing history but as what cannot be said in Romania-- static, lies, silence, and coercion. In this way, her poetry seems not aesthetically but theoretically akin to Gertrude Stein's project, The Making of Americans (1925). As Barrett Watten argues in "An Epic of Subjectivation: The Making of Americans," the novel is about loss of parents and an undoing of the Oedipus myth. Loss for the immigrant family, the Herslands becomes a necessary and new space for self definition. Bugan's family story in Crossing the Carpathians shares a re-imagining of family as well as a modern re-configuration of time.
The way that death and loss inform life and growth begs for a resolution in Enlightenment terms, and, clearly, there are models in Western literature for re-growth, cyclical time, and newness. However, according to Edward Said in his essay, "Reflections on Exile," he stresses that there is no place in humanism for exile, that "to think of exile informing this literature as beneficially humanistic is to banalize its mutilations, the losses it inflicts on those who suffer them, the muteness with which it responds to any attempt understand it as 'good for us'" (174). Searching for such a resolution threatens to impose an order and scripts that silence expressions of multiplicity and complexity. According to Richard Ashley and R. B. J. Walker in their essay that introduces a special edition of a 1990 International Studies Quarterly issue, strong narratives that demand mastery, closure, centeredness, and Truth depend on ". . . the figure of 'man' who is understood to be the origin of language, the condition of all knowledge, the maker of history, and the source of truth and meaning in the world" (261). In matters of national politics such figures loom large, silencing and marginalizing voices along the way. Early to react against such a narrative in the United States, Gertrude Stein in The Making of Americans created an alternate story of nation that resists originary history, patriarchal authority, linearity, and closure, as many have pointed out, and it is marked by leaving a homeland and death. Barrett Watten says that the experimental novel rejects the "fantasmatic unity of the father" (112). In The Making of Americans the "new" is introduced as the modern moment, and it seems to be the agent that kills the grandfather, the patriarch, of the family: "It was alright, he always said it to them, and he thought it so really in him, but it was all too new, it could never be any comfort to him. He had been left out of all life while he was still living. It was all too new for his feeling and [. . .] at last he just finally left off living" (6). With death follows possibility of the future (or, as it happens in Stein's novel, the present), but what does this experimental expression of this idea hold in terms of a more explicit treatment of specifically grounded political, historical, and biographical events? In addition, what does it mean when a family is exiled rather than deciding to leave? In Julia Kristeva's essay, "A New Type of Intellectual: The Dissident," she says, "Exile is a way of surviving in the face of the dead father, of gambling with death, which is the meaning of life, of stubbornly refusing to give in to the law of death" (qtd. in Ashley 259). The language of exile, then, she notes, occurs in thought, and "[t]he ruthless and irreverent dismantling of the workings of discourse, thought, and existence is. . . the work of a dissident" (qtd. in Ashley 259). In Bugan's Crossing the Carpathians, which tells the family's story of life under and her parents' resistance to the rule of Nicolae Ceausecu, it is the regime that becomes the father or patriarch whom the text kills. The regime's brutality and control, commanding lies from its subjects, are fully rejected. For instance, when police come to search for evidence of sedition, the speaker, then a girl "was pruning tomato plants when they came to search / For weapons in our garden," and when they found nothing but stored bottles of oil, buried for preservation, "when the oil spilled on the ground, shiny over crushed tomatoes / They asked [. . .] about weapons [. . . that] might have [been] kept" (Bugan 15). Her reply is not what they want to hear. There are no weapons of the kind for which they are searching. Rather, she responds, "Oil. . . You eat and live. / This alone makes me dangerous" (15). Her parents' only weapons are thoughts, shared on a typewriter buried in a hole and loaded with "stacks of papers / Hidden behind tools in a box," and at night her parents produce "hundreds of pages darkened with communal / demands: / Hot water, electricity, freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom / to assemble" (11). The next morning, "[p]osing as farmers, they left for / distant towns / Where he filled mailboxes while she watched for informers and police" (11). This, the family's father, is imprisoned, tortured, starved, and cast out. He is set in the poems as a loved one rather than a patriarch. In the structure of the collection, his activities, abduction by police, and absence make him significant to the speaker and the family, but he is represented as a person, who works along side the speaker's mother in political activities. The father of the family resists the fatherland, the state, and he is betrayed by his countrymen and not just by the leaders of his country when "[f]ists met at the market and in the store, / Churches were demolished, and no one said a word: Those waiting in eternal lines, or those who saw the crosses kneel / In the rubble of saints and chalices" (11). The title of this poem "In the Silent Country," expresses the isolation of the parents. It also marks, like the poem, set in the garden, "Fertile Ground," the silencing of the speaker, her family, and those who think like them.
The speaker's father returns in dedicated poems and in memories lodged amidst others later in the collection. In "For My Father," the speaker explains, "We cried with you: Mother, I, and a congregation of exiles, / Dreaming their own into the smoke of the censer" (46). His is a presence at one with the family rather than at the head of it. In "Leac Na Cumhaidg," which, in Irish lore, "is a stone that is said to cure homesickness," his absence marks the speaker's childhood memories:
The room returns to me the childhood years
The smell of baking pumpkins from grandfather's garden,
The microphones set in curtain rods,
Dad's postcards from prison: "I am fifty, make a cake for me."
The informal word "dad" appears in this poem, signaling closeness and endearment. The microphones in the curtain rods are echoed again in "The First Visit," one visit in August each year for the family to see "Daddy," as a young boy calls him. The children watch in court during "The Divorce," not a custody battle between parents but a forced divorce by the state, where the parents are legally separated. As Jacquelyn Pope notes, the understated, subtle, and intricate language of the poetry "balances the peculiarly invasive brand of oppression employed by Ceausecu, whose specialty was controlling the most intimate aspects of people's lives" (191).
The sentence that begins and ends the poem, "There is no cure for homesickness," frames this absence of a beloved father (33). The speaker returns to the house of her childhood, alone, without parents or siblings, to see for herself what it looks like after she has left. She is unable to really return home, since it is no longer home; she cannot simply miss life there, since it was filled with secrecy, harassment, and tension; she cannot even really call it "home," because, as she says, "[I]t is a return to something else" (33). This loss and absence, that echo in the descriptions of the home many years later and of the father in childhood, permeate the collection.
The poems' order, however, displaces this sense of loss. Though it lingers and largely shapes the collection, the poems themselves are framed by two that rethink generational identity through the women in the family. The first poem is dedicated to the speaker's grandmother, though it does not specify if it is her maternal or paternal grandmother, and the last is for her mother and sister. In a poem, dedicated to her grandmother, called "On the Side of Forgetting," the speaker reaches for her grandmother through her "new language," imagining her memory in English. It seems to be important that the past be reclaimed and reworked in a new language, so this tribute to Anghelina, the grandmother, in English is infused with imagery or rural customs, religious traditions, crafts, and nature imagery. It is one of the most lyrical poems in the collection. For instance, in the first section, first stanza, the image of the family home frames a multilayered picture of a departure: "We stood in the main doorway / According to the custom of important days / (Usually marked by the village priest / With holy water dripping from dry basil / But now recorded in the slow turn of hinges): / Come back, you said, I will, I said" (9). Sound, scent, tradition, and image create a gestault that brings together the sum of what the speaker is leaving, and the voice of the girl's promise to her grandmother, and the grandmother's desire to see her granddaughter once more set the tone for a loss that becomes palpable. Leaving her grandmother behind, in this wrenching parting, is softened by the end of the first section, as a symbol of the maternal guides her: "The moon whitened the crossing of dirt roads / Spread like open palms" (9). The grandmother passes in section three of the poem, and, again, there is irrecoverable loss but also a continuity, an ever-present, in nature that re-imagines the cyclical. Nothing is ever gone, and nothing is ever "to come," but everything "is" always present. The speaker says to her grandmother, "You whisper to me from hawthorns and hazels / The earth will remember you" (10). There is not an image of death and rebirth, winter to spring. Rather, the hawthorns and hazels are present where the speaker stands and where the grandmother is buried. The past and future fall away, leaving an ever-present. The speaker imagines performing a ritual that shows her awareness of her grandmother: "I want to walk around your grave / Three times, light incense and a candle / Inside the rusted bottomless bucket / Lodged in the earth next to your head" (10). Again, the speaker, the living, interacts with her grandmother in a moment that conflates the ends of the linear spectrum, the past and the future, turning the focus onto the present that encompasses both. While this poem introduces the collection with the speaker intermingled with the dead, the final poem locates her, her mother, and her sister in the present and with a sense of presence.
The speaker in the last poem, "For My Mother and Sister," tries to imagine her mother as a young girl, then brings the poem back into the present, ending the collection as it began, with a departure. The poem begins with a story that the mother tells about dressing corn cobs to make dolls, throwing them into the river, and "running with the other children / Chanting prayers for rain" (68). This search for origin is elusive, however, as the mother sings to the sisters the chant, which the speaker cannot remember, as "one never remembers / Things received abundantly" (68). The mother and sister are readying to leave, and she finds herself waving good-bye "blessed with their strength," because she "could finally say: 'Let health and fortune be / With you. I left you across the seas and you came to me / From the heart of love and gave generously" (68). Again, loss and absence mark this collection. Reunions are temporary, and taking leave is inevitable, making separation a constant state. To say, however, that the final wish is hopeful is not to diminish the state of loss. It is, however, a state that is equally matched by the way that this family is re-imagined without a homeland, which makes the moment of taking leave significant, and the present moment inescapable. While there is a wish for the future, there is no vision of it. The poem closes with the speaker watching, as "[t]hey walked along the current of the empty morning street / Carrying miracle with them" (68).
As geopolitical boundaries assume different meanings in exile, time, as well as space, changes. The two-line poem "In exile," which begins with ellipses gesturing back to the previous poems describing the family's leaving and traveling by train, time loses its individualistic trajectory of birth, life, and death. Time begins "in exile," as the speaker notes that she "has been searching for home ever since the train whistled in darkness" (24). Time is shaped by the experience of exile, which changes the originary point of the traditional Western narrative, and "home," which would mark the ending of a traditional story set in these terms, remains a "dream" in the next poem.
Bugan, Carmen. Crossing the Carpathians. Manchester, Great Britain: OxfordPoets-Carcanet, 2004.
Said, Edward. "Reflections on Exile." Reflections on Exile and Other Essays. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2000.
Watten, Barrett. "An Epic of Subjectivation: The Making of Americans." Modernism / Modernity. 5.2 (1998): 95-121.