dead men on holiday

On reading Go, Went, Gone by Jenny Erpenpeck.

Refugees cross borders looking for safety in countries that don't want them. It's a critical issue on a global scale right now.  That's why Jenny Erpenbeck's Go, Went, Gone is such an important book.  It's a novel about refugees who have made their way from war torn countries on the African continent to Italy and then to Berlin,  where in the story, a German retiree named Richard finds himself caught up in their lives.  

When the Berlin Wall came down it was a miracle in the lives of all East Germans, including Richard himself, and it led to unexpected prosperity. And so, Richard reasons, "if this prosperity couldn't be attributed to their own personal merit then by the same token the refugees weren't to blame for their reduced circumstances." 

Later in the novel Richard wonders, "have people forgotten in Berlin of all places that a border isn't just measured by an opponent's stature but in fact creates him?"

The Africans who Richard finds himself involved with are, in the words of Eugen Levin-  like "dead men on holiday."  Yes they've made it from Africa into Europe without being killed in civil war or drowning on the way to Europe, but in a sense, it's just a matter of happenstance because "everyone of the African refugees here...is simultaneously alive and dead."

Having found their way to Germany, they find they can't work or even (ultimately) remain in Germany since according to the rules they can only claim political asylum in the country where they first set foot.  Which is Italy.

 But because they can't find work in Italy, they come to Germany - and now they are shuttled from one refugee center to another, unable to work, unable to make headway, unable to connect to the society, but instead desperately mired in an endless convoluted bureaucracy.  "The more highly developed a society is," Erpenbeck observes, "the more its written laws come to replace common sense." 

Thus these men, who do have skills and education, but whose homes and lives have been destroyed, are stripped of their personhood.  They're reduced to nothing. At the outset of his involvement with these men, Richard prepares questions he'd like to ask them. He manages to talk with them (mostly in Italian).  But all the questions he wants to ask are actually beside the point, since the men are stuck in the terrible moments when their boat capsized and their children were drowned before their eyes. They exist in a holding pattern, traumatized by memories of murdered loved ones in their homelands, as well as others lost in their escape.

Some of them wish to cut away their memories.  But "a life in which an empty present is occupied by a memory that one cannot endure, in which the future refuses to show itself must be extremely taxing, Richard thinks, since this is a life without a shoreline, as it were."

While I was reading, I recalled the many African refugees of Rome, where I lived for four years.  You'd see them lining the bridges over the Tiber, spreading blankets which displayed knock off designer handbags for sale.  I remembered one conversation I had with an African trinket seller on the docks in Naples, when I was taking a ferry to Ischia.

He told me he had sometimes worked as a fisherman, but there was no work for him now.  He had no visa or papers and so he sold wooden key chains, beaded purses and beaded bracelets for a living. "But there are many rip off artists here," he told me in Italian. "Not a good place.  Keep your bag inside your coat," he advised me. "People will rob you all over."

I asked how much he made each day? "Some days ten," he said. "Other days twenty or five.  This is not easy." 

There was also a Rwandan refugee I befriended when we lived in Brussels for four years. He came door to door, selling a magazine about African wildlife.   We had many conversations on numerous occasions. He spoke French.  I learned all about his wife and family and how they  had escaped the genocide. He had seen it all.  But all I could do was chat on the doorstep now and again, and give him bags of clothing. 

I remembered too other refugees who have crossed my all too privileged path-  students I taught at NOVA. One came from Sierra Leone. I learned he had walked a thousand miles across the desert during the civil war and somehow made it to political asylum in the United States where he was studying,  in the hopes of becoming a nurse. He hoped to get his daughter out of Sierra Leone, because this was during the Ebola outbreak, but he didn't know how he was going to achieve this.

His name was Moses and he came to class early every day and sat in the front row.  His work was always meticulous and thoughtful.  Then one day he asked me to explain how he could attach a document to an email.  I learned he had only known how to use a computer for two years.   

But he made it through somehow.  He got his nursing credential.  But not without tremendous struggle.  At one stage in the middle of his studies he had tuberculosis of the spine which could have paralyzed him had it not been discovered and treated.  I visited him in hospital. Things looked pretty dire but somehow I managed to contact some of his family members in Florida and help arrange for him to get transferred out of Northern Virginia.  We may try to help people - but somehow the help we offer is never quite enough.

One of the things illuminated in Jenny Erpenpeck's novel is the impossibility of true communication. 

 "To understand what a person means or says," she writes, "it's basically necessary to already know what that person means or is saying.  So is every successful dialogue just an act of recognition? And is understanding not a path, but a condition?"

Later she writes, "In just the same way as the listener always understands more than just words, the act of listening always contains the questions: what should you understand ? What do you want to understand? What will you never understand but want to have confirmed?" 

It's impossibly difficult  for the men in Go, Went, Gone to learn the German language, because they don't know what's going to happen to them next or what it is ultimately for. There are too many ghosts in the room -  there are ghosts all around.  As for our protagonist Richard there are the ghosts of the Holocaust.  And he wonders what questions would lead him to the land of beautiful answers.

Maybe such a land does not exist.  In the end, this novel raises more question than it answers.  Nevertheless, the questions are important to consider.  What is to become of these people? What can be done for the traumatized and lost, those who have lost everything, including their sense of being human.

The meals Richard used to have by himself were comprised of two slices of bread - one topped with cheese, the other with ham.  In the end of the novel, he gives up his knife and fork and private dish and stands at the kitchen counter and scoops up the food together, from the communal pot of African stew and couscous, with all the other Africans in his household.  The richness of this life, and the way in the end these men have opened him up to his own memories, personal failings and heartaches demonstrates the value of embracing a wider community.  But even such  beautiful connections as these are stopgaps on an impossible journey. 

And yet the alternative to reaching across borders and making individual connections is too dreadful to contemplate.  One of the refugees, Osarobo. who Richard tries to help, ultimately rejects his kindness.  Although this is not spelled out, it looks as if he is complicit in a robbery of Richard's home.  Richard tries to contact him afterwards but Osarobo avoids him and disappears from his life. Perhaps Osarobo is too traumatized to be helped.  Even as Richard continues to reach out "he feels that the Osarobo he knows is now flying out into the universe, flying somewhere where there are no longer any rules, where you don't have to take anyone else into consideration but in return you are left forever, completely and irrevocably alone."