PRATIK SPRING 2021 ISSUE: HEBREW POET HEDVA HARECHAVI POEM, "And This The Rarity"

 

HEDVA HARECHAVI

And This The Rarity

 

And this the rarity   to listen to his breaths

And this the rarity   to place wreathes around his wishes

And this the rarity   and to explain to him love peace longings

And this the rarity   because this evening a choir of angels will sing in his home

And this the rarity   as though he is made of a different substance

And this the rarity   (hard for me to imagine)

And this the rarity   and to concede, to concede to him, to concede

And this the rarity   just to say his name out loud

And this the rarity   to give him a slip of paper and a pencil

And this the rarity   to unburden him of his worries

And this the rarity   to take his shoes off

And this the rarity   to hold his understanding hand

as his eyes close, his eyes

 

Afterwards this the rarity, that is my child, only my child,

then God

and His companions

 

Translated from the Hebrew by Vivian Eden

Recipient of the Prime Minister Prize for Poetry and  the Yehuda Amichai Prize, Hedva Harechavi  is an acclaimed Israeli Poetess and artist. She has lived most of her life in Jerusalem and has been translated into many languages including English, Arabic, Russian and German.

Vivian Eden was born in the United States and has taught English, theater, translation studies and poetry translation in academic and informal settings. Currently, she works from home in Jerusalem at Haaretz English Edition, a Tel Aviv-based Israeli newspaper co-published and distributed with The International New York Times.

PRATIK SPRING 2021 HIGHLIGHT : IRISH POET EMER DAVIS POEM, "The Voyage"

 

EMER DAVIS

The Voyage

 

a faded paper kite

trapped among the branches

its journey cut short

trembles in the warm air,

For days it lingers

camouflaged between the leaves,

unable to slip through,

I watch it from my window

sheltering from inclement times,

and drift slowly

towards the broken thread

wrapped around the trunk,

marking its age,

its tapered ribbons blowing lightly,

covered in dust,

I close my eyes and

see it soar above the terraces,

disappearing in the blue horizon,

and unwrap the threads holding me back.

 

Irish poet, Emer Davis, a civil servant, has been involved in various writers groups, including the Green Ink Irish Writers Group in London, Rooftop Rhythms in Abu Dhabi and the Drogheda Creative Writers Group in Ireland. She set up the Poetry in the Park initiative in her local town in Ireland and organized the Drogheda Poetry Trail during the 2018 Fleadh.  Her work with the Syrian migrants on Lesvos Island, Greece with the European Relocation Programme to support the resettlement of these migrants in the EU inspired her to write several poems about her experiences there which have been widely published. She also published a second collection of poems Chaat which explores her experiences and thoughts while living in India.

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PRATIK SPRING 2021 HIGHLIGHT: SVETLANA LAVOCHKINA reviews FIONA SAMPSON's new book, "Come Down"

Book Review

SVETLANA LAVOCHKINA

 

The flow of

a huge narrative river

 

I met Fiona Sampson through my collaboration in POEM, a literary journal focused on international poetry which she founded and edited. Right after, I became familiar with her multiple-layered oeuvre. Ever since, I’ve become an ardent admirer of Fiona Sampson’s work. I eagerly awaited her fresh book each year. In return, I’ve been duly thrilled by the intensity in her works repeatedly.

In this sense, Sampson’s most recent collection of poems, Come Down (2019) too came as a bliss to me. The poet here walks on a very thin line between tangibility of the real and the subliminal. The book possesses the impeccability of a violin virtuoso and compassion of a family doctor.

Home and displacement, sonority and muteness, pain and bliss – with a tender yet assertive hand, Sampson directs the reader into a restless infinity, freeing them from the post-industrial world of falsehood. She strips her artistic subjects down to the incorruptible essence that we deeply retain within our ancient core. Sampson’s poetry embraces the tradition of Thomas Hardy, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and, Emily Dickinson – all adroitly transformed into the material and spiritual framework of the 21st century.

In addition, I’ve never encountered another poet who has been able to reconcile the feral with the spiritual. Fiona Sampson’s verse is highly powered, and of all the elements, specifically by water – the flow of a huge narrative river, nearly free from interpunction (commas,  dashes, full stops etc.). The river is chilling to the freezing-point, as evident in the opening poem, eponymous to the book title (“through water cold enough/to drown you”), and at the same time, a tempestuous waterfall as I see it  in “Modern Prometheus”:

he wake                        alone in the lab

to night noises             breath roaring like a machine

and through all degrees of tepidity and warmth.

I was especially moved by “Mother as Eurydice”, which turns the famous myth to sparkle with multiple levels of implications, usually hidden.

In her title poem “Come Down,” Fiona Sampson follows in her immigrant ancestors’ footsteps. In a sentient way, she repeats their journey of loss, anchoring, arduous mastery of a new language.  Birth and bereavement recur along with an awed awakening, merging  into “Surfacing”, where the poet’s river flows into the ocean of world poetry:

At last you climb

out of the dream

as if from a dark valley

into light

letting all that was

uncertain come

clear on that high

pasture as each

preconception

melts in day-

light like shadows

do streaming

away under

the ragged thorns

 

was it this

woke you made you

clamber out

of yourself

 

little bare

creature         from your

sleeping self?

The highest praise for a poet is when the review won’t come out in prose. On reading Come Down, I sat down to write my own poem. The name beads, traditionally and indestructibly, join each other, in three-dimensional, intricate molecular ties. Sampson’s one hand comes out to touch John Davidson, Forugh Farrokhzad, Mary Shelley and John Keats, while the hand reaches out to the readers in an ecstatic, egalitarian invitation to co-create and commingle with a grander notion of the Muse.

A wound delivered by Manticore’s claw can fester,

unless promptly disinfected.

You think you have paper in your hands, but, before long,

you realize the pages are of salty water, your saline solution.

Not surprisingly –

remember that water sustains names writ in it.

The hardest the verse gets is dough: softly malleable,

no or almost no recipe.

Just “whip up with salty wind”.

Bake the puff pastry of your own

at 200 degrees Celcius of (re)cognition.

 

But if you look at the snakes of these lines –

verse like a piece of bunting

stitches the sail’s tarpaulin skirt innuminous folds.

Flashes of knowledge that is your own but can’t be,

having been pre-baked in her kiln.

 

Looked up Page 9, asking the Web about

“Lady of the Sea” and got exactly

the stone white bride of Copenhagen, that was easy;

 

more challenge with the black and blue Virgin –

the closest I could get was Guadalupe’s

Mary with folded hands but no palanquin.

I know though that we are not meant

to dig that literally, to the grit, to the antipodes.

Rather, in our own grey matter

to grow feelers on our fingertips.

 

Some of the riddles persist as sediment – tartar,

whether raw ground meat or plaque,

this is up to the chewer,

she might know the exact solution, or someone close to her pantry.

For us, might will reach an even harsher degree of uncertainty,

non-existent in English.

 

The stanzas are knapped into Prometheus’ lungs,

Mousterian Levallois technique,

with Mary’s vegetarian hand.

Sea spreads its water-legs in a shed. Come comb!

 

Eurydice can perform her leave from any longitude of kinship;

the tiny sprinkle of Old Man’s seed, a seizure catching you unawares,

a shockdrop of tabasco in the temperate tenderness of the soup –

 

– another drop – and the meal is inedible –

but she knows her measure, the drop will stay a shock –

homeopathic.

 

This is how a different smell, a different pool of tears,

pool of genes, forces you to bake your own impromptu puff pastry,

huffed and dishevelled.

 

This is why calm down. Come. Come down.

Merriam Webster gives seven meanings for the phrasal verb;

Longman also seven.

Cambridge Dictionary gives ten:

 

a help and a riddle at once, two sides of a coin,

to poetic immigrants and expats,

our ancestors and descendants.

 

 

Come Down: Poems

Fiona Sampson

Corsair , 2020, $ 15.60

Svetlana Lavochkina is a Ukrainian-born novelist, poet and translator, residing in Germany. Her work has been widely published in the US and Europe, appearing in AGNI, New Humanist, POEM, Witness, Straylight, Circumference, Superstition Review, Sixfold, Drunken Boat and elsewhere.  In 2013, her novella Dam Duchess was chosen as runner-up in the Paris Literary Prize. Her debut novel Zap was shortlisted for the Tibor & Jones Pageturner Prize 2015. Both novels were published by Whisk(e)y Tit, NYC, in 2017 and 2018.  Her translations of Ukrainian poetry were published in Words for War and The White Chalk of Days by Academic Studies, Boston and by the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute. She lives in Leipzig with her husband and two sons. She teaches English at a Waldorf school and is a literary columnist for LeipGlo, a Leipzig-based international English-language magazine.

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PRATIK LA ISSUE HIGHLIGHT : American poet CAROL MUSKE-DUKE POEM, "Condolence Note: Los Angeles"

 

CAROL MUSKE-DUKE

Condolence Note: Los Angeles

     

Photo Credit:  Micah Baird for Women's Wear Daily

The sky is desert blue,

Like the pool. Secluded.

No swimmers here. No smog—

 

Unless you count this twisting

Brush fire in the hills. Two kids

Sit, head-to-head, poolside,

 

Rehearsing a condolence note.

Someone has died, “Not an intimate,

Perhaps a family friend,” prompts

 

The Manners Guide they consult.

You shouldn’t say God never makes

Mistakes, she quotes, snapping her

 

Bikini top. Right, he adds—You

Could just say, He’s better off—or

Heaven was always in his future.

 

There’s always a better way to say

We’re sorry that he’s dead—but

They’re back inside their music now,

 

Pages of politeness fallen between them.

O do not say that the Unsaid drifts over us

Like blown smoke: a single spark erupts

 

In wildfire! Cup your hands, blow out

This wish for insight. Say: Forgive me

For living when you are dead. Say pardon

 

My need to praise, without you, this bright

Morning sky. It belongs to no one—

But I offer it to you, heaven in your future—

 

Along with silent tunes from the playlist,

The end-time etiquette book dropped

From the hand of the young sleeper.

 

It’s all we have left to share. The book

Of paid respects, the morning’s hot-blue

iPod, sunlit words on a page, black border.

 

 

A widely published author,  Carol Muske-Dukes’ most recent (9th) poetry collection, Blue Rose, (Penguin) was a 2018 Pulitzer Prize finalist. She is Professor of English, USC, where she founded the CW/Lit PhD program. From 2008-2011, she served as Poet Laureate of California & has also been Poetry columnist for the LA Times. Awards include a Guggenheim, NEA, several Pushcarts, National Book award finalist & LATimes Book Prize Finalist. 

                                  

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PRATIK LA ISSUE SPECIAL : Former Los Angeles Poet Laureate LUIS J. RODRIGUEZ's POEM, "Love Poem to Los Angeles"

 

LUIS J. RODRIGUEZ

Love Poem to Los Angeles

(with a respectful nod to Jack Hirschman)

 

1.

 

To say I love Los Angeles is to say

I love its shadows and nightlights,

its meandering streets,

the stretch of sunset-colored beaches.

It’s to say I love the squawking wild parrots,

the palm trees that fail to topple in robust winds,

that within a half hour of L.A.’s center

you can cavort in snow, deserts, mountains, beaches.

 

This is a multi-layered city,

unceremoniously built on hills,

valleys, ravines.

Flying into Burbank airport in the day,

you observe gradations of trees and earth.

A “city” seems to be an afterthought,

skyscrapers popping up from the greenery,

guarded by the mighty San Gabriels.

           

2.

 

Layers of history reach deep,

run red, scarring the soul of the city,

a land where Chinese were lynched,

Mexican resistance fighters hounded,

workers and immigrants exploited,

Japanese removed to concentration camps,

blacks forced from farmlands in the South,

then segregated, diminished.

 

Here also are blessed native lands,

where first peoples like the Tataviam and Tongva

bonded with nature’s gifts;

people of peace, deep stature, loving hands.

Yet for all my love

I also abhor the “poison” time,

starting with Spanish settlers, the Missions,

where 80 percent of natives

who lived and worked in them died,

to the ruthless murder of Indians

during and after the Gold Rush,

the worst slaughter of tribes in the country.

 

From all manner of uprisings,

a city of acceptance began to emerge.

This is “riot city” after all—

more civil disturbances in Los Angeles

in the past hundred years

than any other city.

 

3.

 

To truly love L.A. you have to see it

with different eyes,

askew perhaps,

beyond the fantasy-induced Hollywood spectacles.

“El Lay” is also known

for the most violent street gangs,

the largest Skid Row,

the greatest number of poor.

            

Yet I loved L.A.

even during heroin-induced nods

or running down rain-soaked alleys or getting shot at.

Even when I slept in abandoned cars,

alongside the “concrete” river,

and during all-night movie showings

in downtown art deco theaters.

The city beckoned as I tried to escape

the prison-like grip of its shallowness,

sun-soaked image, suburban quiet,

all disarming,

hiding the murderous heart

that can beat at its center.

           

L.A. is also lovers’ embraces,

the most magnificent lies,

the largest commercial ports,

graveyard shifts,

poetry readings,

murals,

lowriding culture,

skateboarding,

a sound that hybridized

black, Mexican, as well as Asian

and white migrant cultures.

 

You wouldn’t have musicians like

Ritchie Valens, The Doors, War,

Los Lobos, Charles Wright &

the Watts 103rd Street Rhythm Band,

Hiroshima, Motley Crue, NWA, or Quetzal

without Los Angeles.

 

Or John Fante, Chester Himes, Charles Bukowski,

Marisela Norte, and Wanda Coleman as its jester poets.

           

4.

 

I love L.A., I can’t forget its smells,

I love to make love in L.A.,

it’s a great city, a city without a handle,

the world’s most mixed metropolis,

of intolerance and divisions,

how I love it, how I hate it,

Zootsuit “riots,”

can’t stay away,

city of hungers, city of angers,

Ruben Salazar, Rodney King,

I’d like to kick its face in,

bone city, dried blood on walls,

wildfires, taunting dove wails,

car fumes and oil derricks,

water thievery,

with every industry possible

and still a “one-industry town,”

lined by those majestic palm trees

and like its people

with solid roots, supple trunks,

resilient.

 

Luis Rodriguez has published 16 books in poetry, fiction, non-fiction, and children’s literature. He’s best known for the 1993 memoir Always Running, La Vida Loca, Gang Days in L.A. The sequel, It Calls You Back: An Odyssey Through Love, Addiction, Revolutions & Healing, became a finalist for a 2012 National Book Critics Circle Book Award. He’s been a script consultant for three TV series, including Snowfall, from the late John Singleton. He’s also founding editor of Tia Chucha Press and co-founder of Tia Chucha’s Centro Cultural & Bookstore in the San Fernando Valley section of Los Angeles. From 2014 to 2016, Luis served as the official Poet Laureate of Los Angeles. His latest book is From Our Land to Our Land: Essays, Journeys & Imaginings from a Native Xicanx Writer

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PRATIK SPRING 2021 SPECIAL : Excerpt from AMERICAN POET RAVI SHANKAR'S UPCOMING MEMOIR, "Correctional"

 

BOOK EXCERPT

 

RAVI SHANKAR

Not a confessional.

A correctional

 

             

Sometimes as I go about my day, I will unexpectedly see the faces of the men I spent time with in jail. I will be ordering a chai latte at Starbucks, and for a moment I’m certain the barista is Junky John, the drug addict and kleptomaniac who taught me how to work the “hungry and homeless” hustle. Or I’ll be boarding a bus on Broadway and could swear on Amma’s mala that the driver is Chaos, the toothless convict who had spent as much time inside as out and was a master of facial contortions. Or I will stride up to a park bench to say hello to my old bunkmate Lenny, the badly inked Vietnam vet with a gut as large as his list of grievances. But my hand will freeze in midair because of course it’s not him.

I’ll never see those men again.

Those promises to keep in touch made in privation, those addresses of halfway houses scrawled out longhand in composition books, those damp and earnest handshakes made while sitting on a metal bench in a tan jumpsuit, waiting for a correctional officer to call your name and inmate number for court? They all melt away the moment you walk out the door.  Once you’re out, you’re out.

That is until you’re back in again.

Not me, though. Or at least that’s what I thought the first time I went to jail. That time I was innocent and indignant. Slurred a “sand nigger” by the NYPD, wrongfully detained on an erroneous warrant in a city I once considered home, I became another statistic of Mayor Giuliani’s infamous stop-and-frisk policing policy, later deemed unconstitutional by US District Court judge Shira A. Scheindlin. At the time, I was a tenured associate professor of English at a state university in Connecticut, a homeowner and married father of two daughters, so my immediate reaction was to get on a soapbox. I told my story on National Public Radio, wrote an op-ed for the Hartford Courant, and delivered a sermon on the topic of social justice at a Unitarian Universalist church in New Haven. I even sued the city for racial discrimination and police misconduct, winning a modest settlement from them—a drop in the bucket considering New York City had paid out well over a billion dollars to settle police misconduct and wrongful conviction cases just in the last decade alone.

The next time I was arrested, I was not so lucky. Nor was I guiltless.

Once as a child in South India, I went to a Nādi astrologer in the dusty streets of Vadapalani, a neighborhood in Madras. The wizened old woman then told me that, due to my previous birth’s misdeeds and a rare planetary alignment when I was born, I would have equal parts fame and hardship in this life. When she held my palm to read the lines on it, she decreed that the gaps between my fingers meant that money would slip through them like water. I would earn much, but would never be able to hang on to it. My recklessness would cause a deep fissure somewhere along my days.

This is the true story of how in the middle of a seemingly successful life I suddenly ended up in jail. My own good self, as we say in India, turned so very, very bad. This is the story of how I became the first academic in American history to be promoted to full professor while incarcerated, a decision that inflamed the local media and caused a controversy among my peers and colleagues. This is me seen through six seasons, each one taking the form of a letter to a loved one, and this memoir is a trace of what the worst years of my life ended up teaching me about the American criminal justice system and mental illness at the beginning of the 21st century. This is how I learned to process generations worth of racism, shame, and redemption while at the same time coming to grips with the dark inner mechanisms of my own heart.

This is the song to set all that shit straight. Not a confessional. A correctional.

 

 

 

Ravi Shankar is a Pushcart Prize winning poet. He has published twelve books and chapbooks including The Golden Shovel Anthology: New Poems Honoring Gwendolyn Brooks (University of Arkansas Press). He founded Drunken Boat, has appeared on NPR, BBC, PBS, and in The New York Times and The Paris Review. Ravi has also won awards from Prairie Schooner, and from the Rhode Island State Council of the Arts, and he has taught and performed around the world., Correctional is due later this year from the University of Wisconsin Press.

From Correctional by Ravi Shankar

Reprinted by permission of  the University of Wisconsin Press.©2021

 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System. All rights reserved.

 

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PRATIK DOUBLE LA ISSUE SPECIAL : AMERICAN POET ELENA KARINA BYRNE''S POEM, "If This One Dies"

 

ELENA KARINA BYRNE

If This One Dies

                                    so will we…— Penny Dreadful

        It’s like painting the memory of you out

of the bushes, like awake-painting

       the bushes in the dark, letting

       it dry in my hair, like painting the bushes out

of the picture so you have somewhere

to stand.

 

Make no bones about it,—   I have no bones.

I sweep this floor, swim, sweet

the skin, the soft

       of you with my boneless tongue,

like taking a mouthful of fish to say I was out

for the horizon’s salt water, I was out

       for bees blurring their water-wings’ sunlight inside the ribs

of the body of my lover …

 

Know, it’s been some time since I’ve had love, it’s been an aftermath-time

       since carrying down our

       diving bell of final air, and so long

       since the harbored paint color, since the piano keys’ teeth

       were set into the body

so it has to sing.

 

Elena Karina Byrne’s fourth book is If This Makes You Nervous (Omnidawn, 2021). Former 12-year Regional Director of the Poetry Society of America, she is a freelance lecturer, editor, Poetry Consultant & Moderator for The Los Angeles Times Festival of Books and Literary Programs Director for the Ruskin Art Club. Her many publications include a forthcoming chapbook, NO, DON’T (What Books Press, 2020), Best American Poetry, the Pushcart Prize XXXIII, The Paris Review, The Kenyon Review, Poetry, Verse Daily, BOMB, Denver Quarterly, REEL VERSE: Poems About the Movies, Poetry International 25/26, The Academy of American Poets Poem-A-Day, New American Writing, and The Kyoto Journal. Author of five poetry collections and a collection of essays.

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PRATIK DOUBLE LA ISSUE SPECIAL : AMERICAN POET SUZANNE LUMMIS' POEM, "Bossing Los Angeles:

 

SUZANNE LUMMIS

Bossing Los Angeles

 

Don’t move east, Quake Queen—

           not even a couple feet. Don’t slide

 

open in daylight, in public places.  Strike

           a bargain with Earth—hey,

                    you know to close deals.      

 

L.A., comfort our stalled careers. Budge faster

our 6 p.m. autos stuck to the One-O-One.

 

On the Eastside keep secret your secret

          places and byways—staircase

                    of tiles and crushed shells,

Chicken Boy.

 

Don’t let the Westsiders know. 

 

Water

             your stub-toed river a bit,

Hard-to-Drown-In-River.

 

Write your own poem, Big Girl,

without using the word

dreams.

See?  Impossible, even for me.

 

Do that thing you do

          at night—let your erased past

ghost dance down your strip 

 

of boulevard, Sunset, stretch

          of street that began beyond your city

limits, anyone’s

 

limits, given to vice and mobster

          crime. Now? Argon, Helium, Xenon.

                    Neon.                                               

 

If blood could shine, if light

could bleed, it would be Neon,

 

          or it would be L.A.

 

Suzanne Lummis was a 2018/19 COLA (City of Los Angeles) fellow, an endowment from the Cultural Affairs Department to distinguished mid-career artists or poets to create a new body of work. She has poems forthcoming in Luvina (U. of Guadalajara), and Saw Palm, a special issue on Florida Noir. Poetry.la produces her web series on film noir and poets influenced by that style and sensibility, They Write by Night.  

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PRATIK LA POETRY SPECIAL : AMERICAN POET FRANK X. GASPAR POEM -- "Black Notebook #9—Los Angeles In Bed with an Old Book of Chinese Poetry"

 

FRANK X. GASPAR

Black Notebook #9—Los Angeles

In Bed with an Old Book of Chinese Poetry

 

photo credit: Alexis Rhone Fancher

Of course I’m sad.  It’s night again, but all day long people have been

churning at their books, stuck in the same old tired dialectics and

categories.  Their fraudulent poems come from fraudulent thinking.

They are a danger in the world.  They make you bleed and toss on

your own sheets.  Sometimes you feel so broken that you start to

believe that you cannot break any further, and then someone comes

and asks you for clarification, or another says, I’m confused—you seem

contradictory.  I confess that I have always been a frayed glove filled

with shattered glass trying to pass myself off as a hand, and then I

smile in a certain way, and then they smile in certain way.  It’s un-

bearable. You always feel that something terrible is going to happen.

You feel that nothing is true.  Let’s stop all this.  Let’s go down to that

river where the fisherman’s wife says she’s looking for a good dream. 

She says they’re hard to find.  Then she weeps while the rain falls and

drips all night from the eaves.  You don’t find god there.  You don’t find

the self and its deadly sins.  It’s all about how you’d really be if you

turned off the lights and turned down the noise and stopped all that

goddamned smiling.  The emperor gives a silk glove full of pearls to a

lovely woman.  She is married.  She gives two of them back with a letter.

These two are my tears, she says.  How did she grieve so perfectly?

That’s what we want to know.  Nothing else matters.  By that river:

There’s a shack there.  The wood is old and bleached.  The water

swirls by it.  Sometimes the wind blows the reeds in tiny circles.

 

Author of five poetry collections and three novels, Frank X. Gaspar’s work has appeared widely in magazines and literary journals, including The New Yorker, The Nation, The Harvard Review, The American Poetry Review, and others. He has held the Helio and Amelia Pedrosa/Luso-American Foundation Endowed Chair in Portuguese Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth, and more recently was named the 2016 Ferrol A. Sams Distinguished Chair, Writer in Residence at Mercer University. He currently teaches in the Graduate Writing Program at Pacific University, Oregon.  

 

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PRATIK LA ISSUE SPECIAL : AMERICAN NOVELIST AND EDITOR TOM LUTZ on Coming to LA: Images of the Migrant City

 

TOM LUTZ

Coming to LA:

Images of the Migrant City

with an assist by  

Juan Felipe Herrera

 

We see the myth long before the reality, and even when we are looking right at the dingy street, we think: Sunset Boulevard. The old-school iconography—palm trees, the Hollywood sign, swimming pools, Rodeo Drive, beautiful children, the Santa Monica Pier—these effigies engulf our perception. As if sprung from our unconscious, images from the other media wash, too—of gangbangers, Charlie Manson, police brutality, the Bling Ring, homeless misery, smog, fiery uprisings, oceans of traffic—bubble up without surcease. When we arrive, those of us from elsewhere, which is most of us, we move through the city with our Gestalt switch twitching: face, vase, face, vase, paradise, hellscape. Mike Davis described this doubleness, in City of Quartz, as “sunshine and noir.”It makes the city, for those of us who alight from afar, both easy and hard to read—not illegible, exactly, but hieroglyphic, a series of signs that we recognize as a language of place, but which we cannot quite, at first, translate. Or like a poem we cannot quite understand—we get the images, we hear them, we see them, we even see what they mean. We just can’t quite put them together.

*

Last Tuesday, my Lyft driver was from Beirut. He had lived a number of places, including Germany, Miami, New York. He lived near the airport, in an apartment that he split with his business partner, and which was also their office and warehouse. They had a fashion company. He liked Los Angeles—it was his favorite city so far, except for Beirut.

‘I can’t believe you have been to Jordan, but not Lebanon,’ he said. ‘Jordan has nothing! Amman, Aqaba—these are boring cities!’

‘It has Petra,’ I said, the ancient red city carved from the living rock.

‘Yes, but this is one day. Beirut—ah, you can’t believe what a great city Beirut is. Like LA, on the sea….’

‘Do you want to go back?’

‘Some day,’ he said. ‘But to do business there, good business—it is who you know. The wealthy people have all the power. I can never do this in Beirut, be myself. Here, it is true, we are free. I can do my business. It is for me, you know?’

‘It is up to you.’

‘Yes, it is up to me. I can have power.’

*

My first day in Los Angeles, everywhere I went, people were watching TV. I went to a used furniture store, Wente Brothers on Western, and in the back, four people stood watching a small TV on the manager’s desk: a 40ish black man and his mother, the Israeli manager, and a scrawny white guy of about 50, who maybe worked there. I’d seen people watching TVs through storefront windows all day, peering into the hair salons and other businesses as I walked by, and I wondered, briefly, if this was part of LA culture, that people watched TV in random informal groups as they shopped.

I joined the foursome at the manager’s desk and saw a helicopter image of a white Bronco driving up what the announcer said was the 405. I was beguiled by the way people used definite articles to refer to roads—we never said “take the 80” in Iowa, it was always just “take 80 west”; we never said “go up the 91 past Hartford” it was always “take Interstate 91 into Vermont.” I was searching for a theory to explain it. I never did come up with one.

I had heard about the murders, of course, but there hadn’t yet been an arrest, and pre-Twitter, pre-smartphone, we weren’t all, yet, plugged into a constant media stream, so seeing the Bronco on the screen was the first I knew of the chase, the first I heard that OJ was supposed to turn himself in but instead went on the lam and was being driven by his friend in his white Bronco. All long the 405 people were lined up—they had pulled over to watch, had come to the highway to see him be driven by. We watched them as they watched OJ on his lonely ride.

The mother was originally from Arkansas, the manager from Yerevan, the scrawny guy from Petaluma. We all disagreed about whether OJ was innocent or guilty. We all had opinions. The son said that killing Nicole Brown and Ron Goldman with knives like that was the key piece of evidence.

‘That was no brother,’ he said. ‘Brothers don’t do like that. He’d a just shot her. That’s some Columbian shit.’

His mother looked unhappy about the word.

‘Columbian?’ I asked.

‘Yeah, Columbians like the knives. They like to make a point like that.’ The three other men nodded a little sideways, as if to say, okay, worth considering. His mother nodded straight up and down.

Through those first weeks in the city, it was all people talked about. I rarely met a white person who had any doubt that OJ was the murderer. I never met a black person who thought he was. Most of the immigrants I talked to—from Guatemala, from Cameroon, from Cambodia—weren’t ready to say.

*

Guillermo goes by G, a nod to the slightly tricky—for Anglos—pronunciation of his name. I have heard him called Guell-erel-mo, as if one unnecessary ‘l’ sound deserved another. His mother lives in Guadalajara again, after raising him and his siblings here in LA and then in Victorville. He talks about life as a non-immigrant immigrant, about Driving While Brown, about the various slights and insults that arrive regularly, come rain or sleet or hail. Most of the time he lives well and feels it is indeed the best revenge, but sometimes it fucking infuriates him, a white-hot flame in his chest...

For Full Story Read Summer/Fall 2021 Issue of Pratik (Links below)

 (Mel Melcon / Los Angeles Times)

Tom Lutz is the author of Born Slippy: A Novel, And the Monkey Learned Nothing: Dispatches from a Life of Travel, and many other books, articles, screenplays, and other work. He is Distinguished Professor at UC Riverside and the founding editor of Los Angeles Review of Books. 

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