Out of Place No.02: 'The Vagabond' by Colette

Out of Place is an irregular series about movement and place, and the novels that take us elsewhere, by regular contributor Anna Evans. 

‘Nothing keeps me here or elsewhere.’ Freedom and writing in Colette’s The Vagabond

It is true that departures sadden and exhilarate me, and whatever I pass through – new countries, skies pure or cloudy, seas under rain the colour of a grey pearl – something of myself catches on it and clings so passionately that I feel as though I were leaving behind me a thousand little phantoms in my image, rocked on the waves, cradled in the leaves, scattered among the clouds.

In the dressing room of the Empyrée-Clichy, a café-concert in Paris, Renée Néré is preparing for her act. She contemplates the mirror, from behind the mask of her stage make-up: ‘my painted mentor and I gravely take stock of each other like well-matched adversaries.’ It is a cold night, and the dressing rooms are unheated. She can feel the floor vibrate from the chorus and the dancers, listening to the creaking iron staircase and waiting to go on stage as the minutes crawl slowly by. This is ‘the dangerous, lucid hour,’ the time when thoughts and doubts creep in. A restless crowd has gathered in the dark and dusty, smoky auditorium. From the moment the first bars of music strike up, a mysterious discipline takes over and Renée has the sensation that all is well, that she no longer belongs to herself. On the stage she feels ‘protected from the whole world by a barrier of light.’ 

Published in 1910, La Vagabonde, which translates as ‘the wanderer’ was something of a turning point for Colette. This story of life in the music halls of Paris in the early twentieth century was drawn from her personal experience, travelling around France performing as a dancer and mime. As Renée reflects upon solitude and independence, the conflict between a sense of liberation and security, the book mirrors Colette’s own struggles to find artistic freedom. 

The encounter with the mirror image, a self-portrait in disguise, is something that recurs in Colette’s writing and suggests a way of framing her work. As she writes in her 1928 novel, Break of Day: ‘Are you imagining, as you read me, that I'm portraying myself? Have patience: this is merely my model.’

Written in a personal style, The Vagabond is a novel that breaks new ground suggesting that Colette was already beginning to explore the possibilities of a shifting style of writing, moving between fiction and memoir. In her work she mixes genres and different modes of writing in a way that feels distinctive and radical. Colette’s form of writing was based around her own life, but carefully crafted and shaped; constantly reinvented. From the start, we are in the company of a voice that feels fresh and immediate. The Vagabond is written in a first person, present tense that makes it feel ageless and undated. The tone is full of energy and sparkle. She is playful and inventive, witty and disparaging, yet also compassionate and sincere. 

Written in three parts, the novel mirrors aspects of Colette’s life and the events following the end of her first marriage to Willy. Married at the age of twenty, Colette’s life was transformed from the quiet solitude of her upbringing roaming the countryside, to a Parisian woman of society. Willy wrote popular novels, or more accurately employed a production line of young writers to produce the work which was unpublished under his own name. It was during these years that Colette began to write, later she would describe this as her ‘apprenticeship’, and became a ghost writer, publishing the Claudine series of novels under Willy’s name. The Claudine novels were incredibly successful, and the couple became well known within Parisian society. Not only did Willy keep the rights to the books, but he also sold them for an enormous sum of money in 1909. After their marriage and divorce, Colette began to publish under her own name.

Renée too is a writer whose books have had ‘an unexpected and extravagant success.’ The name Renée connotes rebirth, it means to come back to life or re-emerge, to be reborn. In the mirror she sees the image of ‘a woman of letters who has turned out badly’ in the eyes of the world. The book is about finding an identity in writing. As Renée tells us: ‘And that is where my story ends – or begins.’

The Vagabond describes these years of marriage as painful and humiliating - the discovery of her husband as serially unfaithful – and as a time of self-effacement: ‘I was made to understand so well that, without him, I didn’t exist.’ These past experiences haunt Renée when she meets a new admirer and begins to confront the central dilemma of the novel. Torn between finding love and companionship and letting go of her solitary life, and the sense of empowerment and self-sufficiency she has worked so hard to find: ‘On my good days I joyfully say over and over again to myself that I earn my living.’ 

For Renée, the music hall provides a way of securing financial independence, a way for her to survive outside the constraints of marriage, which for Colette represents a form of entrapment for women: ‘He offers me marriage as if he were offering me a sunny enclosure, bounded by solid walls.’ The conflicting needs of independence, work, and love are themes of Colette’s writing, and Renée feels ‘an active passion, a real need to work, a mysterious and undefined need which I could satisfy equally well by dancing, writing, running, acting, or pulling a hand-cart.’ 

The Paris of The Vagabond is Montmartre and its surrounding areas. She writes about the street girls of the quarter: ‘slowly dying of misery and pride, beautiful in their stark poverty … they belong to a breed which never gives in, never admits to cold or hunger or love.’ With Colette as a guide, the Parisian dance halls and café-concerts come alive. The Empyrée-Clichy is a fictional theatre perhaps based on the Théâtre de la Gaîté-Rochechouart. She draws portraits of the music hall artistes. The star of the show is a singer from the streets, raw and untamed: ‘She sings like a sempstress or a street singer, and it never occurs to her that there is any other way of singing […] The public adores her just as she is.’

Behind the perception of the music hall as a place of dubious morality, Renée finds a comradeship among her fellow performers, while acknowledging the precarity of their lives: ‘my silent sympathy goes out to them without any preferences.’ They live an uncertain, wandering life, unrecognized, disparaged, little understood. In her eyes, there is a dignity to the insecurity, the sadness and pride of their lives away from the stage: ‘Who will condescend to wonder what you do […] when darkness has swallowed you up and you are hurrying, towards midnight, along the Boulevard Rochechouart, so thin you are almost transparent.’

Within this life, there is a truth about living. Renée has chosen a life of chance. She is aware that freedom comes also with loss: ‘I attract and keep the friendship of those melancholy, solitary persons who are pledged to loneliness or the wandering life, as I am.’ She tries not to look in the mirror too closely for there she sees the solitary life she has chosen and ‘the realisation that there is no one waiting for me on the road I follow, a road leading neither to glory nor riches nor love.’

On reading The Vagabond, I am struck by Colette’s great love of language and attentiveness in observing the world around her. She is a writer of the senses, concerned with feelings. Her writing is elegantly constructed, absorbing, written with exquisite timing and an extraordinary clarity of expression. The book describes the act of writing, ‘the patient struggling with a phrase until it becomes supple and finally settles down, curled up like a tamed animal, the motionless lying in wait for a word by which in the end one ensnares it.’ Colette’s descriptions are vivid, dreamily poetic, and intense. She writes in a way that seems to map feelings onto the world around her, blurring the boundaries between internal and external experience through memory and reflection.

Colette is a writer of place and landscape, and she has written often of her memories of the countryside where she grew up, Puisaye, an area of northern Burgundy. In The Vagabond, she talks about finding a refuge in the past through writing about memories and places: ‘Every time I touch the fringes of it, my own country casts a spell on me, filling me with sad, transitory rapture; but I would not dare to stop there. Perhaps it is only beautiful because I have lost it.’

Renée’s long self-examination and the central dilemma of the book concerns this sense of being torn between freedom and solitude: ‘I escape from myself, but I am not still free of you, I know it. A vagabond, and free, I shall sometimes long for the shade of your walls.’ These moments of reflection and melancholy contain a realisation that she holds the key to her own destiny, and that sometimes this means ‘the right to be sad’ and to exist in her interior mind, to become ‘neither darker nor lighter than the shadows.’ 

‘Call it obscurity, if you will: the obscurity of a room seen from without. I would rather call it dark, not obscure. Dark but made beautiful by an unwearying sadness: silvery and twilit like the white owl, the silky mouse, the wings of the clothes-moth.’

The Vagabond echoes its title in summoning a writing that is all about movement, and the conjuring power of words. Renée describes herself as an exile, a wanderer, a solitary. She feels a draw towards departures and a yearning for travel: ‘to move from one place to another, to forget who I am and the name of the town which sheltered me the day before, scarcely to think, to receive and retain no impressions but that of the beautiful landscape which unfolds and changes as the train runs past.’

Part three of the novel is the tour itself, written partly in letter form, full of glimpses, details, and images of the places they visit along the way. Colette writes beautifully about the passing landscape, the feel of travel, and of letting go, of seeing the changing scenery unfold. There is real life and feeling to this writing: ‘Half asleep, like the sea, and yielding to the swaying of the train, I thought I was skimming the waves, so close at hand, with a swallow’s cutting flight.’

There is a sense that this freedom is also about writing, and that the book mirrors Colette’s own path towards finding an identity through writing: ‘What are you giving me? Another myself? There is no other myself.’ For Colette, writing The Vagabond could be seen as a turning point, of belief in herself as a writer, and her quest to express what matters most to her in the world. Within the perfect moments of travel, and glimpses from the window of the changing landscape, comes a realisation: ‘as if the one dominating anxiety in my life were to seek for words […] In that same hour an insidious spirit whispered to me: And if indeed that were the only urgent thing? […] If everything, save that, were merely ashes?’

***

Anna Evans is a writer from Huddersfield who lives in Cambridge, with interests in place, memory, literature, migration, and travel. She enjoys writing about landscape – nature, cities, and all the places in-between. You can read more about Anna and her work on her website The Street Walks In. You can find more of Anna’s contributions to Elsewhere here.

Recovered Landscapes

By RÁ Costello:

It is a Tuesday in December. The rain drifting off the Irish Sea washes Dublin in a briny, opaque silence and as I cross Dawson Street, a cyclist plummets past me, like a gannet headed towards the Liffey. I am on my way back again, to the glass case where the Gleninsheen gorget sits, glowing in the dust-heavy air of the national museum. A broad, oxbow-shaped collar made of gold. Hammered into being during the Bronze age, I have been visiting it for as long as I can remember. In Irish, you would say that I am 'gafa leis.’ That something in its form has snagged on my mind. I could not tell you what in it catches me. Except that it was pulled from the rock of my home county. That it is a tangible piece of a landscape I struggle to name. 

Our family home sits on a lip of rock, one of a string of houses perched on the faces of a long line of small mountains which plunge in swollen ripples of limestone into the toss of the Atlantic. ‘Folt fionn na farraige’ the white-crested mane of the ocean.

Arthur Conan Doyle said that limestone landscapes are hollow places, secretive, and this is the kind of landscape where things that do not belong manage to endure. Along the edges of this coast, from Ballyvaughan down through Gleninagh and Murrough to Fanore and Craggagh, up the valleys into Fermoyle and Caher. The Irish language held on. A tongue to itself in an area you could walk across in a day. Enduring in the small community that lived in these pockets of watery rock, where glaciers have stripped the soil away and left the grey limestone ribs of the land exposed. 

As you leave the soft fields of Galway, the first hills of this karst landscape begin to rise suddenly, at Boston – a place whose name is, perhaps, the Anglicised sounding of the Irish Bos Toinne, ‘the palm of the wave’ – named for the scalped shoreline nearby which legend says was stripped clean by a great tsunami. These first hills mark the boundary of the Burren, their peaks picked out against the sky by the lattice of dry-stone walls that run across their peaks.

These stones and fields and crested hills had names once. Not the English names we use now. Names all of their own, with stories to explain them, stories built over centuries as each generation placed their layer on what had been laid down before. These are names hardly anyone knows now. Stories people do not even know they have forgotten. There were once Irish names for the gentians that flower in the warm shadow of a limestone pavement here. Not Irish versions of English names but Irish names which had never heard how English named their flower. And did not care. There was a name for the local practice of wintering cows on the mountain and summering them by the sea. A name for the lakes that bloom, like mercury rising from the low fields, in bad weather. These places had names that told you their history and their nature – cluain, inse, léana. The water meadows, the low-lying grassy places.

National surveys record widespread use of Irish here in the 1930s, yet, two generations later, as I was speaking my first words of Irish, the language had already faded from the landscape of my home. I can count my summers on the rocks of these mountains, but the distancing lens of translation means the knowledge wrapped in its Irish names, is now mostly lost to me. And yet I find I can’t give up on it.  I spend time trying to hunt down scraps of what time has worn off our maps. ‘Sa tóir ar’ I would say in Irish. ‘Sa tóir ar’ - to pursue. Derived of, or maybe simply adjacent to, the middle Irish ‘tóraidhe,’ - a bandit, the pursued. The root from which Tory island off Ireland’s far North-West coast gets its name – the famous home of outlaw pirates, pursued across the sea. The name given to the bands of guerrilla fighters who opposed Cromwell's armies during the seventeenth-century invasion of Ireland, and, by a process of crude association, the political label given to those sympathetic to the Catholic Duke of York at the end of Charles II's reign – The Tories. This is what I am pursuing, I think - these shapeshifting insights that come from the intimacy of knowing a language beyond its constituent parts. The magic of familiarity which can, by a process of consubstantiation, turn a word from a label for those outside the law to the name for those who sought to eradicate the language the outlaws spoke. 

Language and landscape go together here. They hide each other. I find a field that has no English name. But it has an Irish one. Scribbled on the neat, lined pages of a child’s copybook in the national folklore collection is a list of places near the author’s home. Recorded in that golden window when Irish had not yet begun to fade off the landscape. The child’s name attaches her to a house where her family still live. I retrace the directions in her description.

It is late August. Marsh thistles worry my ankles as I cross the wall and into the long grass of a sloping field. Water seeps through my runners as a dun cow and her white calf watch me balefully. A month earlier and I would have been up to my waist in feileastram, the tall canary yellow Iris that grows in wet places around here. Talamh feagacha this kind of land – rushey. Wet footed, I crouch down – listening – because, in Irish, this field is called ‘Poll a’ ceoil.’ The hole of music. And as I squat there, in the silence between cars passing on the narrow road nearby -  I hear it. The rushing softness of water hurrying through some hidden path in a trickle of excited notes. Poll a’ ceoil.

Irish is not made for outsiders – the names it gives things are designed for those who are part of its landscape – internal references made of layers of locality that make them useless for a person who wants a precise co-ordinate, invaluable for those who seek a place. The language will exclude you if you let it but, in its strange acts of micro-identification it gives away the secrets of a landscape that run beneath the surface. Makes it difficult not to inhabit the place you describe.

The Irish poet Biddy Jenkinson refuses to translate her work into English, offering the refusal as a small and deliberate challenge to those who “think everything can be harvested without loss.” So much is lost in harvesting this place as a map of English names. And yet the landscape is sometimes difficult to listen to. There is so much I cannot recover. More silences in the landscape than I will ever fully fill. I look at these hills now and they confront me with a language and a landscape I am clinging on to but know I can never quite claw back. Waving goodbye to the cows, and the field, I clamber back over the stone wall to my bike. Back North-East is Gleninsheen. Ghleann insín, the valley of the small, grassy grazing places. They seem like such small victories, but in each name is a history, a landscape recovered.

***

Róisín Costello is a bilingual writer and academic who lives and works between Dublin and County Clare, Ireland. Róisín writes about the connections between language and landscape, and how to recover feminist understandings of place. Her writing is forthcoming in The Hopper and has been shortlisted for the Bodley Head/ Financial Times essay competition.

Podcast: Language Keepers

Marie’s Dictionary – Photo Emergence Magazine

By Sara Bellini

“I left my Indian language behind when my grandma died. So that was it. Since 1991 I’ve started remembering words: lake, ocean, sea... I wrote them down on pieces of paper [...] I would wake up [around] 1 o’clock and write down a word. I guess I dreamt about it or something, maybe my grandma was trying to tell me: remember, remember.” 

Marie Wilcox is 85 years old and she’s the last fluent speaker of Wukchumni, one of the Indigenous languages of North America. She gathered all the words she could remember and compiled the first and only Wukchumni dictionary, typing on a computer until late at night. Her daughter started helping her and picked up the language herself, taught it to her own daughter and grandson, and is now  teaching it to anyone interested in Indigenous cultures. The story of this family’s efforts to save their language from extinction, and that of three other Indigenous communities across California, is told in the mini-series Language Keepers.

In 2018/19 Emergence Magazine documented the process of revitalisation of the endangered Tolowa Dee-ni’, Karuk, Wukchumni, and Kawaiisu languages, which culminated in a multimedia story and film. This autumn they have released additional material in a six-episode podcast, to dig deeper into the reality of cultural extinction. Many languages solely exist in an oral tradition passed on from one generation to the next, which means that the only sources are the people who speak it, and in some cases, some notes written by foreign anthropologists. 

In terms of language loss, California is one of the most endangered places in the world: 200 years ago over 90 languages and 300 dialects were spoken, and today only half of them remain. This is the result of centuries of colonisation, Christianisation, forced assimilation, relocation, rape, enslavement, repression and genocide. The collective intergenerational trauma and the linguistic imperialism that allows participation in the political, economical and cultural life of a country only through a dominant language, are key factors that lead to language extinction. Language connects us to our ancestors, our traditions and the place we live in. Language loss is not just an individual identity crisis, it’s the loss of a worldview and the loss of diversity for society at large.  

Indigenous Languages in California – Image Emergence Magazine

Loren Bommelyn is the last fluent speaker of Tolowa Dee-ni’ and contributed to finalising the alphabet in 1997. He explains that, in his native language, to express where you are from you say that “you are actually from that ground. [...] There’s a bond to that place, almost as if you were a sibling, so everything in that environment becomes intimate to you: the shape of the bark of a tree, the way a tree forks [...] We’re all interconnected, we’re all interrelated, it’s all interlaced into one gigantic entity. [...] This understanding of the universe and how we relate to our universe is bound within your language. If you don’t learn your language you miss out on that understanding of how the world fits together.”

Indigenous languages foster a connection with the environment by expressing and shaping a mindset where humans are not separate from nature. By passing on traditional ecological knowledge, Indigenous people have been able to maintain and value a sustainable relationship with their ecosystems - a relationship endangered everywhere by urbanisation, industrialisation and capitalism. In a time of climate emergency and a related pandemic, this resonates more than ever. 

Language Keepers takes us on a linguistic journey that explores the legacy of colonialism within Indigenous communities in North America, and the complex and transformative dynamic of language revitalisation. It is a reminder of the multiplicity of identities and lack of equality in our multi-ethnic societies and, most of all, an invitation to heal.

You can listen to the Language Keepers Podcast on the Emergence Magazine website, and find out more about Indigenous languages in California.

On visiting the Dylan Thomas Boathouse, Laugharne

By Anna Evans:

Approaching along the peninsula, the town seems to lie at the end of the road, like reaching a final destination. A castle stands guard over the quiet estuary, dramatic and imposing, its battlements slowly reclaimed by the landscape. It is a trip I embark on as much to look for traces of the past, a memory of a prior visit fifteen years ago. Arriving at the hour of dusk in early spring, the town quiet and deserted, the Boathouse already closed for the day. We walked along the street to the pub where Dylan and Caitlin Thomas used to drink together in the evenings. Then we continued our journey into Pembrokeshire, driven on by the time.

I am thinking of a photograph on a beach somewhere on that trip to Wales. Dark clouds and grey sea. There is synchronicity in the image; our faces are together, touching in the half light. When photographs were still like slips of chance on the paper. Thinking about being outside as night fell in the mountains, sharing a bottle of wine; jubilant in the almost total darkness, with no lights to guide us home.

Today I am on time to make the pilgrimage and see inside the house, but I had imagined my return differently, that I would have more time to look around and to absorb the atmosphere of the place. I am distracted, harassed; my mind caught in the argument we had this morning, still unresolved. Family life spinning around us, its currents of confusion. I am looking for clues of something. Thinking back to a simpler time and recalling pictures of my past self, shrouded in the rain-soaked hills and twilight of the Welsh skies. Dylan Thomas is important to me. His poetry resonated with me, the colour of language. He gave me a way to think about death and the passing of time, and about change.

Thomas lived in the town with his family, and for the last few years of his life acquired the Boathouse and the writing hut. It is a place in which he wrote some of his most important poems, and a place that witnessed arguments, the disintegration of his marriage, of his body. A life lived outside convention. The house is understated, leaving scope for imagining life here. I look around, my camera stuck on sepia mode, nostalgia in the recreated drawing room space. A notice explains that this is not the actual furniture, much of which Caitlin sold in response to the ever-advancing demands for money, the unpaid bills.

Family photos on the wall. Dylan and Caitlin in a rowing boat, his deep brown eyes stare into the camera. The exhibition tells me that Dylan would retreat to his writing shed, away from the noise of the children, from the travails of family life. The closed door. I look out from the window at the far-reaching view out into the bay, across the estuary, outwards to sea. Thinking about the precarious balance of art and life, between real life and life on the page, and about trying to carve out a space for one from the other. Thomas is seen in a pure sense as an artist, one who created his art and placed it above all things, the artist as genius, demon angel, doomed to destruction.

I continue back along the path to the writing shed. It is beautifully restored and has inspired many aspiring artists, as the photographs and paintings of it attest. It is overlooking the water, the sweep of the bay and the harbour where boats lie, picturesque, as if cast adrift from the sea. A place to think about moorings and being unmoored.

I am always compelled by images of writing spaces and desks, by descriptions of how and when writing takes place. I think of my own chaotic balance of writing and life, the hasty tidying away of books and paper to make a space for living, my writing is always on the move, from one place to another. A dedicated writing space where things could remain untouched is every writer’s dream. Where, as Caitlin explains, from two until seven each day – often she would lock the door - Dylan would disappear, returning hours later with a perfectly crafted line or two of poetry. In his writing space, the many lists of words he compiled. The possibilities of language, and the meticulous hours spent in constructing a single sentence. Looking out to sea, a retreat away from the domestic confines of home, exposed to the waves and sealed off.

Leaving the writing shed, I begin to walk, thinking to head back into the town. There is a path leading to the churchyard where Thomas is buried, and a sign says that ‘the path to Dylan’s grave can be muddy.’ It occurs to me that I am the same age now, as Dylan when he died. I would like to keep following the path but I am uncertain where it goes and how long it will take. Instead I read your messages, you are wondering where I am, how long I am planning to be away.

Looking back as we drive onwards, the remains of the castle unexplored, the map open displaying the route along the coastline, the town falling away behind us.

Now I see that the road continues.

About the author:
Anna Evans is a writer and researcher from Huddersfield in the north of England, currently living in Cambridge. Her interests are in migration and literature, cities and movement, and she completed an MA in ‘Writing the Modern World’. She is currently working on a project on the places in Jean Rhys’s fiction and has recently launched a blog playing literary detective around Paris and London in seach or Jean Rhys and other wanderings, titled And The Street Walks In. 

Do writers need a nationality?

Photo: Chris Gilbert

By Vesna Main:

I am a Croatian writer. At least that’s what I was called in recent reviews of my debut collection of short stories. As a writer trying to find an audience, believe me, I am pleased that anyone would write about my work, but I baulked at this apparent identification of me, a writer, with a nation. Yes, I was born in Zagreb and lived there until my early twenties. Does that make me a Croatian writer?

I write in English. I write in English because that is the language I fell in love with when I first read Shakespeare. I write in English because that is the language I know better than any other. Does that make me an English writer?

I have lived in Europe and in Africa. Now, after almost four decades in Britain, I am fortunate to be able to divide my time between England and France. I feel comfortable in both countries because I appreciate their respective cultures, by which I mean their art and literature. But I do not belong to either.  In fact, I have never felt a sense of belonging to any country or nation. WG Sebald’s narrator in Vertigo speaks for me when he says that when it comes to nations, it is best to be associated with ‘none at all’. Similarly, Virginia Woolf writes that ‘as a woman I have no country. As a woman, I want no country. As a woman, my country is the whole world.’

I am proud to be a citizen of the world, one of those eternal wanderers, Ahasueruses of this world who, as our Prime Minister asserted, sending chills down our spines as her words echoed Nazis’ view of the Jews, are citizens of nowhere. In fact, I am puzzled by narratives of belonging. For me, the story of Odysseus is a happy one, but not because the hero returns home safely to Ithaka, rather because, as the Alexandrian Greek poet Cavafy teaches us, ‘Ithaka gave you the marvellous journey’. It is the journey and the wandering that matter, not the return home. After all, I don’t think of home as a place, or a geographical region. Therefore, it can be anywhere and nowhere.

When it comes to literature, the love of my life, I feel closest to contemporary European writing, particularly French and German and, if pushed, would admit to their influence on my work. In fact, it is this sense of not belonging to a nation or a country, this sense of strangeness, I would argue, that feeds my writing. My alienation brings about my voice, my perspective on what I write and my relationship with the language.

So, what is it, I wondered, that is supposed to make me a Croatian writer?  What is it that makes most people insist on a label of nationality? Is it simply a shorthand to enable communication? Or is it an expression of a belief that everyone ought to belong to a nation and that those who do not are somehow morally deficient and untrustworthy?

As serendipity would have it, while in my teens, struggling with The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, I came across a phrase by Ignatius Sancho, an eighteenth-century freed slave, born to a captured West African woman on the notorious middle passage, and later a resident of Westminster. Writing a letter to the author of the novel, his friend Laurence Sterne, Sancho remarked that he didn’t wish to express an opinion on a particular political issue since he was ‘only a lodger…and hardly that.’ The words accurately described my own feelings about the place where I was born and where I grew up. Despite my comfortable middle-class existence and a loving family, my home felt temporary, a place that I knew I was bound to leave. But Sancho’s words made me understand I didn’t have to belong; it was fine to be a lodger, free of national allegiance, free to choose a culture, a country, a language and, by implication, an identity. Katja Petrowskaya, whose first language is Russian, writes in Maybe Esther, a wonderful text written in German, that we should not be ‘defined by our living and dead relatives and where they resided, but by means of our language’.  And in Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as A Young Man, Stephen Dedalus claims that ‘nationality, language, religion’ are constraints. He vows to ‘fly by those nets’. I vowed the same. While nationality was not an issue for me – my passport was only an aid to help with international bureaucracy – I flew ‘by the net’ in choosing to write in English, a language I was not born into. This choice, deliberate and voluntary, resulted from my determination not to be trapped or pigeonholed in a particular historical and cultural context. I wished to construct my chosen identity by rejecting those I had been saddled with. As Thomas Bernhard writes, ’we can leave our place of birth if it threatens to suffocate us’.

My alienation from what was reckoned to be my native country, and from my fellow nationals, extended to everywhere and everyone. I have never been anything but a lodger in all the places I have ever lived. There were only occasional moments, fleeting, like a dream, existing more in time than in space, when I glimpsed the possibility of home or the recognition of something familiar, such as where I found myself face to face with another human being who shared my passion for a painting or a text. I felt at home when in Zagreb a sculptor friend, Ivan Lesiak, took me to see Andrei Rublev, soon after my seventeenth birthday, or when another friend, years later in London, introduced me to the work of Chris Marker and we watched La Jetée. I was in ‘my own country’ at those moments with the people who shared my interests. And here I am reminded of the words of the poet Ezra Pound, who was displaced in more than the usual sense, and who writes of being ‘homesick after my own kind’, or feeling ‘wistful for my kin of the spirit’. Similarly, Robert Walser writes that ‘one belongs in the place one longs for.’

At university, in Zagreb, in love with Shakespeare, I had a brief fantasy that his country was my imaginary home. That notion was soon dispelled when as a postgraduate in England, I felt lonely and lost outside my privileged enclave of Elizabethan studies. However, far from my displacement bothering me, I remembered the words of Sancho and I accepted my alienation as part of who I am. But I also learned not to disagree with the old ladies on city buses who started a conversation and said that I must be homesick. In their eyes, only a monster wouldn’t miss their country. There would have been no point in my telling them I aspired to Roderigo’s apparently derogatory description of Othello as ‘an extravagant and wheeling stranger of here and everywhere’.

If you still feel I should belong somewhere, I have good news: as I have been suggesting, I have at last found a country, an elusive, attractive place which obsesses me, which fills my days with meaning, which I love and where, for the first time, I feel ‘at home’. I write. Writing is my country. It took me a while to find an entry point. I feared becoming lost, if not expelled in shame, labelled a failure. Worst of all, I didn’t have a language in which to write since I had stopped reading in Croatian, my first language, many years ago. At the same time, I didn’t dare write in English. Eventually, twenty years ago, I threw caution to the wind (I could always fail better, as I learned from another displaced writer) and embarked on a life-long journey. Like every journey, it has its challenges, its wrong turnings, pleasures and frustrations, and it often brutally exposes my shortcomings. But I carry on.

My fellow nationals are other writers, some published, some toiling in patient obscurity. I have chosen to belong with them. And if you ask me whether I miss this country of writers on the days when life intervenes, yes, absolutely, I do. I am ‘normal’, after all.

My favourite writers of the twentieth century – who include Franz Kafka, James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, Thomas Bernhard, WG Sebald and Gabriel Josipovici – are lodgers too, displaced in one direction or another. Not belonging exclusively to the literary tradition of their birth countries, whether or not resident there, they operate in the space created by the difference between the native and the foreign, between the established, the dominant, and the predictable on the one hand, and the alternative, the marginal, the unforeseen on the other.

None of the characters I create in my novels or short stories is me, but I share with them their sense of alienation, the feeling of being citizens of everywhere and nowhere. What guides the lives of the protagonists of my short stories, what makes them ‘belong’, is a passion. An ex-prostitute dedicates herself to helping young women escape her former trade; her work is driven by a deferred maternal instinct, a wish to protect the daughter she lost to adoption from the fate of her own youth. An elderly man pursues his obsession for collecting books until they literally squeeze him out of existence. A woman bakes all day, hoping that somebody will turn up to share her cakes and pastries, but ends up carrying them to the park for the ducks. A concert-goer recognises the face of a man sitting next to her as a face from her memory and cannot bear the thought that she will never see him again.

It seems appropriate that The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, the text that exiles the reader to a position of permanent uncertainty, led me to Sancho who, in turn, made me recognise my status as a lodger. More than a hundred years after Sterne’s death, Nietzsche still considered him ‘the most liberated spirit of our time’. I wonder what the novelist would have made of our Prime Minister’s strictures about citizenship.  

This from a Croatian writer.       

About the author:

Vesna Main was born in Zagreb, Croatia, where she studied comparative literature before obtaining a doctorate from the Shakespeare Institute in Birmingham, England.  She was a lecturer at universities in Nigeria and the UK and has worked at the BBC She has written articles, reviews and short stories for daily newspapers and literary journals.

She has had two novels published. A collection of short stories, Temptation: A User’s Guide, was brought out by Salt in 2018 and you find out more and order direct from the publisher here.

She lives in London and writes in English, her second language.

Looking For The Southern Cross

IMAGE: Yessica Klein

By Yessica Klein:

crickets / across the ocean / loud songs of summer in the tropics / chords of trembling leaves / frogs // sleep with the windows open to the drizzle / warm breeze / moonlight / cicadas // a red double decker / visit Brazil / I’ve betrayed my mother tongue for foreign sounds instead // silence gone / fights / sirens / headlights dancing on my ceiling / adapt to the most unusual situations / look for the Southern Cross / Alpha Crucis / Beta / Gamma / Delta / Epsilon / to Camberwell or Brixton // no / the North Star kingdom / don’t know where that constellation is // lucky enough getting a glimpse of the moon / full in Virgo / purification, astrologers say // saw Venus once / only at sunset or dawn // a glimpse of my skin / ash / craving the sun as the days get darker / 730 days abstinence / beating for sunshine / tropical heart / solar soul // an English word for that restlessness in the stomach / craving for the unknown / emotional anchor up / sail to new shores / don’t predict what’s coming / pack the bags / black hole of the future // the crickets I miss the most / through perfectly still silence / another red double decker / visit Morocco / maps / phone / music / the noise inside my head / Starbucks every other corner / chains make believe the world is tiny / yeah / I’m aware of the distance / miles and kilometres / the physicality of space / learned concept / the furthest place we know is our grandmother’s house / 45min up the mountain on a dirt road / once across the Atlantic / take the train and Paris / Le Starbucks // cultural predators learn others’ ways to lose their own / adapting / freckles after the sunburn in Málaga / knuckles rough after frost bites in Berlin / skills at Maths from calculating currencies / scars / sweet trophies of endurance / visible or not / where is home if we’ve left it already / where to go next if we can always go back // can’t trace those accents home anymore / where are you from / a country defines an identity / thought you were French / a red double decker / visit Brazil / last time I spoke Portuguese I was told I had an English accent / oh dear / my native speech cadence drowns in Earl Grey / time to go / not back but forward // warm breeze tangles my hair / leaves / frogs ribbiting // muscles stretching / too long a hibernation // hope is a feeling not a place / can’t pin it down anywhere // crickets / cicadas / the air vibrates / the sky lights up / Alpha Crucis / Beta / Gamma / Delta // Venus the love planet / full moon in Libra / my star sign // reunion, astrologers say // finally going home

Yessica Klein is a writer and artist currently based in Liverpool (UK). Her first collection of poems is coming out in Brazil in 2017 and her artwork is represented by Carolina Badas Gallery (London). @yessicaklein or www.yessica-klein.com.