There are many books that have left a permanent mark on me, but I want to write about two of them specifically: both have lasting power and I have been struggling with the thematic lines of their intersection. That struggle has resulted in a short story that I am tentatively calling, "The Stone Fields" or alternately, "The Lumen."Can one borrow a title? I am not sure, and I have asked everyone I know, my father, my mother, my friends, co-workers, writing partner, critique group members, writing teacher; the answer seems to be yes. But still I have lingering doubt.
The Stone Fields is actually a published book, a non-fiction work, by Courtney Angela Brkic, a first generation Croatian American like me. There the similarity ends: she went—at the tender of age of 23—to Bosnia in 1996 to work as a forensic archeologist for the United Nations International War Crimes Tribunal at The Hague and Physicians for Human Rights. She dug in dirt, arranged personal effect for photographing from the graves of people massacred during the war. The most telling thing for me in her book was the realization of fear. She felt threatened because she was a Croat, and at one point she wondered if the workers who were helping the team were the same men who may have assisted in the massacre in the first place.
If you would like a summary of the war and The Stone Fields read the 2004 Washington Post article by Jonathan Yardley at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A44089-2004Aug5.html.
Another resource is an interview with Ms. Brkic found at http://www.identitytheory.com/interviews/birnbaum159.php, a regularly published online literary magazine. (Main page is at http://www.identitytheory.com/ )
I love my Croatian heritage, but I hate it too. I have not made peace with my piece-meal language skills. I lived there, in Split, a big city along the Adriatic Coast, before the war. That is now at least twenty five years ago. Some of my earlier memories from when I was six and thirteen are golden: they have that quality of a fable. The time that my cousin threw our metal silverware and dishes into the sea to wash them, we went snorkeling to retrieve things for our next meal; the dust of the late afternoon and the sound of pigeons; the pale pink of dawn….
Now, when I speak Hrvatski, I sound like some deluded six-year old who has never really learned any sense of grammar. My father winces while I talk, so I don’t speak to him, except in English. And yet…I struggle with my history daily, the fact that I was born here, in America. I long to understand, to know…. but I suspect that I don’t want to know, not really. What. Happened. There. I am not as brave as Ms. Brkic.
Her book, a lyrical and harsh account of the reality of family history and genocide, gave me the idea of an apocalyptic graveyard, the stone fields that represent mass death, where a young girl, only thirteen years old goes to hunt souls, in the far and distance future.
This leads me to the second book, Beyond the Sky and the Earth, by Jamie Zeppa. This is a book that is on my “bible shelf,” a must read at least once every year. It is about coming to understand Bhutan, a small Buddhist country, where Ms. Zeppa went in 1988 to teach English. It is a story of her clash and acceptance of the culture, and all the empty space between; finally it is a story of two people, Jamie and Tshewang, who manage to bridge that gap—for a time at least.
One line, a simple sentence, still echoes in my brain, “He listens and then from inside his gho, he pulls out small presents: a feather, a picture of white Tara, a mango, definitions copied neatly onto pieces of paper: aleatory—depending on random choice, a lumen is a unit of flux of light; infrangible—unbreakable.” (Page 255)
Many people keep a list of words to learn a language. But I love this particular list. And the definition of a lumen, a flux of light, is what rivets me. A soul, I think, the answer to death, the thing that lives on; no matter the horror, or trauma or massacre.
Can one excavate souls, I wonder?
In the summer of 2008, after reading both The Stone Fields for the first time and re-reading Beyond the Sky and the Earth, I write a short story to find out.
And then the re-writing begins. It’s been almost a year now, and I'm told by friends near and dear, critique group members, or even fellow classmates, that I have "started a novel."
This distresses me; I don’t want another novel. I have five of them on my shelf already, waiting patiently for me at nine p.m. every night, and most nights I ignore them.
But now after a critique group meeting today, I realize what I have started cannot be undone. I must continue my work on the “short story” (regardless of its title). I need to know its end.
One line, a simple sentence, still echoes in my brain, “He listens and then from inside his gho, he pulls out small presents: a feather, a picture of white Tara, a mango, definitions copied neatly onto pieces of paper: aleatory—depending on random choice, a lumen is a unit of flux of light; infrangible—unbreakable.” (Page 255)
Many people keep a list of words to learn a language. But I love this particular list. And the definition of a lumen, a flux of light, is what rivets me. A soul, I think, the answer to death, the thing that lives on; no matter the horror, or trauma or massacre.
Can one excavate souls, I wonder?
In the summer of 2008, after reading both The Stone Fields for the first time and re-reading Beyond the Sky and the Earth, I write a short story to find out.
And then the re-writing begins. It’s been almost a year now, and I'm told by friends near and dear, critique group members, or even fellow classmates, that I have "started a novel."
This distresses me; I don’t want another novel. I have five of them on my shelf already, waiting patiently for me at nine p.m. every night, and most nights I ignore them.
But now after a critique group meeting today, I realize what I have started cannot be undone. I must continue my work on the “short story” (regardless of its title). I need to know its end.
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