Every immigrant family, it seems, has someone who does not belong in the new country they have come to. It feels like permanent exile to that one brother or wife who cannot stand a silent fate in Boston or London or Melbourne. I’ve met many who remain haunted by the persistent ghost of an earlier place.
Michael OndaatjeTags: immigrant-experience
We keep wanting to save those who are forlorn in this world. It’s a male habit.
Michael OndaatjeTags: chivalry saving-others
Don`t talk to me about Matisse
the European style of 1900, the tradition of the studio
where the nude style woman reclines forever
on a sheet of blood.
Talk to me instead about the culture generally
how the murderers were sustained
by the beauty robbed of savages: to our remote
villages the painters came, and our white-washed
mud-huts were splattered with gunfire.
Tags: art colonialism
But when we are searching for an example of what we no longer have, we see it everywhere.
Michael OndaatjeAmerican movies, English books - remember how they all end?" Gamini asked that night. "The American or the Englishman gets on a plane and leaves. That's it. The camera leaves with him. He looks out of the window at Mombasa or Vietnam or Jakarta, someplace now he can look at through the clouds. The tired hero. A couple of words to the girl beside him. He's going home. So the war, to all purposes, is over. That's enough reality for the West. It's probably the history of the last two hundred years of Western political writing. Go home. Write a book. Hit the circuit.
Michael OndaatjeAround three a.m. he feels a presence in the room. He sees, for the pulse of a moment, a figure at the foot of his bed, against the wall or painted onto it perhaps, not quite discernible in the darkness of foliage beyond the candlelight. He mutters something, something he had wanted to say, but there is silence and the slight brown figure, which could be just a night shadow, does not move. A poplar. A man with plumes. A swimming figure. And he would not be so lucky, he thinks, to speak to the young sapper again.
He stays awake in any case this night, to see if the figure moves towards him. Ignoring the tablet that brings painlessness, he will remain awake till the light dies out and the smell of candle smoke drifts into his room and into the girl's room farther down the hall. If the figure turns around there will be paint on his back, where he slammed in grief against the mural of trees. When the candle dies out he will be able to see this.
His hand reaches out slowly and touches his book and returns to his dark chest. Nothing else moves in the room. [298]
Tags: imagination books death
The right ending is an open door you can't see too far out of. It can mean exactly the opposite of what you are thinking.
Michael OndaatjeMoriamo.
Moriamo ricchi di amanti e di tribù, di gusti che abbiamo inghiottito, di corpi che abbiamo penetrato risalendoli come fiumi, di paure in cui ci siamo nascosti come in questa caverna stregata senza memoria.
Voglio che tutto ciò resti inciso sul mio corpo. Siamo noi i veri paesi,
non le frontiere tracciate sulle mappe con i nomi di uomini potenti.
Lo so che tornerai e mi porterai fuori di qui, nel palazzo dei venti.
Non ho mai voluto altro che camminare in un luogo simile con te. Una terra senza mappe.
La lampada si è spenta, e sto scrivendo nell'oscurità.
The rain comes through their thin cotton clothes against their muscles. Alice sweeps back her wet hair. A sudden flinging of sheet lighting and Clara sees Alice subliminal in movement almost rising up into the air, shirt removed, so her body can meet the rain, the rest of her ascent lost to darkness till the next brief flutter of light when they hold a birch tree in their clasped hands, lean back and swing within the rain.
They crawl delirious together in the blackness. There is no moon. There is the moon flower in its small power of accuracy, like a compass, pointing to where the moon is, so they can bay towards its absence.
He had begun to fear her presence during the afternoon dismantling. He had to remove it, or she would be with him every time he approached a fuze. He would be pregnant with her.
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