The Partition of 1947 and Transgenerational Trauma

There are moments in life when everything seems to mysteriously point you in a specific direction and you start wondering if maybe some cosmic force is at work.

I have been listening (I should say entranced by) the podcast “Empire” hosted by Anita Anand and William Dalrymple. The first series was dedicated to the British Empire (they are now doing a second one about the Ottoman Empire), and the episode about the Partition of 1947, on top of being absolutely heartbreaking (Anita Anand mentioned William Dalrymple being a cry baby, but I could not keep my eyes dry either), touched upon the theme of grandchildren, the third generation, visiting the trauma experienced by their grandparents. They were explaining how the generation who lived through that horror never, ever spoke about it, whether they were Indian or Pakistani, or even British. This comes on the tail of my last post (here) about Angela Findlay’s book, “In My Grandfather’s Shadow,” where the grand-daughter of a high-ranking Wehrmacht officer dedicated decades of her life to trying to understand her ancestor and the times in which he lived.

The three people who participated in that episode of the podcast had family who were right there, in India, at the time of the Partition. Anita Anand’s family was originally from the part of Punjab that became Pakistan, and they fled their home and ended up in a refugee camp. Anita’s mother was only a baby. William Dalrymple’s father, very young at the time, was on the British side and would later on dodge questions about that time until his very last breath. This is a man whose renowned historian son lived in Delhi and dedicated his life to interviewing people and writing book after book about India, yet died without having uttered a single word about the events he had witnessed during the Partition and the bloodbath that followed. After his death, the family found photos of him sitting at a dinner table with all the men who played such a crucial part in these events: Lord Mountbatten, Sir Cyril Radcliffe, Nehru, Gandhi. He was right there, but could never speak about any of it, and it is now William Dalrymple’s own son, the grandson of that man, who’s become part of an initiative that not only works at collecting testimonies of displaced refugees of the 1947 Partition of India and Pakistan, but also gives them a chance to visit their childhood communities and villages using virtual reality (Project Dastaan) and recently wrote the book Five Partitions, the Making of Modern Asia. Last but not least, Kavita Puri wrote and produced an acclaimed three-part series, Partition Voices, on Radio 4 in the UK and she’s the author of Partition Voices, Untold British Stories, among other notable work. She explains at the beginning of the podcast how, at the occasion of the 70th anniversary of the Partition in 2016, she realized that her father who’d been there NEVER spoke about it, and it was the same for everyone from the South Asian community around her. The subject was “unmentionable.” Because the suffering was so horrific. But also because there is so much guilt and shame attached to it.

“You have to be asked,” says Anita Anand at some stage during the podcast. “And someone has to listen.” But someone’s grandmother, I forget which, also says:” Why do you want to talk about these disgusting things?” Clearly, it is a combination of things that make it possible, even conceivable, to open that box of sealed suffering: questions being asked, ears, and heart, and mind willing to listen, and sufficient time having passed, too.

But how important it is to finally give a voice to all that suffering.

“In My Grandfather’s Shadow: A story of war, trauma, and the legacy of silence,” by Angela Findlay

In my very first conscious memory linked to the Holocaust, I’m watching the black and white TV set in our Parisian apartment. That night, my father insisted that I watch a program called “Les Dossiers de l’écran,” as he sometimes did when he felt that the movie and following debate would have an educational value for me (and they usually did). Anyone who grew up in the seventies in France will know the weekly program I’m referring to and I bet they never forgot its hair-rising opening credits theme music.

I don’t remember the title of the movie they showed that night and I was physically unable to watch the debate afterward. I had taken refuge in the toilet. I was maybe 13 years old and probably a bit sheltered (certainly I did not have the maturity of today’s teenagers who seem much more savvy, aware, maybe even a little jaded at times). Some images in particular stuck in my mind forever: those of an excavator pushing emaciated dead bodies into a mass grave. It was, possibly, my first brush with the notion of absolute, senseless evil. After a while, wondering what had happened to me, my father knocked on the door of the toilet and found me shaking, obviously in shock. I’d had enough for one night and escaped to my bed. A few years later, I started reading about that period of History for my high school diploma, and my need to know more about this horrific period of our world history persists to this day.

I have often wondered why. Of course, I love History. But why that particular time and episode in the whole world History? Might there be something else?

Angela Findlay grew up in England, but she’s half-German and her maternal grand-father, Karl von Graffen, was a high-ranking and decorated officer of the Wehrmacht during the Second World War. She was born in the early sixties, like me, and most of her life could not shake an overwhelming sense of her own “badness.” In her book, she takes us on her decades-long journey, from food disorder, depression, and burn-out to her meticulous search for the answers that, in the end, liberate and allow her to heal. Was her mother’s father a Nazi? Was he an active and willing participant in one of the worst genocides of the twentieth century? And what impact does that legacy have on her own psyche, her very life? Is she somehow carrying the guilt of her ancestor?

I am fascinated by the notion of trauma being passed on from generation to generation (even though studies seem to imply that said trauma often jumps one generation, as the pain is too close for those who survived the trauma. As they burry it all under solid blocks of silence, the children coming right after, though they might sense the pain and secrecy, don’t get to hear about it and it is the following generation which begins to ask questions and look for answers). What in our psychological make-up is ours, and what is the unknown baggage left over by some ancestor(s)?

Until Findlay’s book, I had mostly considered the question from the POV of the victim. “In my Grandfather’s Shadow” takes us on a journey into not only the life and mind of the author, but also into the soul of post-war Germany, in other words, into the soul of the country responsible for that war.

While in high school, I visited my German penpal. She lived in Hamburg, but I was lucky to accompany her and her entire class on a trip to Berlin West AND East. This was several years before the fall of the Wall and I never forgot the underground train ride before and the passage through the border in East Berlin (which took forever and created a bit of anxiety and drama because my French ID was old and I had changed a bit since the photo had been taken). Nor did I forget the huge, empty avenues with the tall buildings where one could still see the impacts of bullet holes. Or the enormous, equally almost empty Alexanderplatz. But Findlay’s book reminded me of something else I had not thought about in years: the heated discussions between my 15-year-old penpal and her classmates that this visit had sparked — puzzling at the time for this French girl who still knew little about the Second World War and the genocide, and whose German, while not bad, wasn’t quite fluent. I remember that a few of the kids tried to find some excuses for what had happened (a form of denial, possibly fueled by their families) while the others, in much greater numbers, suffered from massive feelings of guilt, shame, and anger. Findlay, who chose to live in Germany for a while, details these complicated feelings with great finesse.

In the decades since that time, I have read countless books, seen countless movies on the subject of WWII. In France only, many films have been made about this period, especially about the Resistance — great numbers of men and women lost their lives fighting the Nazis. Some films have also treated the subject of men and women who collaborated with the occupier: the Germans stayed in France for most of the conflict and there’s still much to say and explore about the shady and even awful ways in which some French not only looked the other way, but willingly participated and helped the enemy. It is a dark page of our History.

The Hotel Meurice on the rue de Rivoli, in Paris, during the Occupation. http://www.occupation-de-paris.com/2012/04/der-kommandant-von-gross-paris.html?zx=cf96ce610de09beb

Recently, I had a conversation with my father in which, to my astonishment, he revealed that his father, who used to work as a bellman at the luxurious hotel Meurice where the Germans established their headquarters from the moment they set foot in France (they did have great taste), had actually managed to obtain the lease of an apartment in the building in which I grew up because it had been empty since the family occupying it had to flee Paris. It would seem that the wife left the capital before her husband, and my father doesn’t know if there were children. But he clearly recalls stories about that man escaping through the roof on the day of a round up, probably saving his life. My grandparents had been living in a small house in the suburbs of Paris and they wanted to move into the city. The man did come back after the war and returned to his apartment, thank goodness, while my grandparents and my father, who was 5 by then, moved into yet another one on the third floor – where I lived until I was eight. But my father is unable to tell me what happened to that man’s wife and children if there were any, only that he always lived alone afterwards. What stays with me is the fact that my grandfather used his close daily contacts with German officials to get the larger apartment of a man fleeing for his life. “This is the way things were, unfortunately,” my father concluded with a fatalistic shrug.

But is it? This is one of the questions that fuels Findlay’s decades-long search. Can anyone be absolutely certain that they would have chosen the right side? What is it that compelled some people to become Resistants, while others opted for the status quo (when they didn’t openly collaborate)? My grandparents were simple people. My grandmother stayed at home and my grandfather worked at the same hotel Meurice until he retired in 1966. He had fought in WWI, escaped a prisoner camp in Germany and walked all the way back to France, where he arrived on the very day of the Armistice in 1918. A young gymnast in his prime, he was hospitalized several weeks until he regained enough of the 22 kilos he had lost. Then, in September 1938, he was called again. And again in 1940. My father was conceived at the fort of Issy-les-Moulineaux during that last mobilization. When the Germans occupied France in a matter of days in June 1940, he returned to Paris, but could not go back to the hotel Meurice: the Germans didn’t trust new faces, or so was the reason they gave him at the time. He worked as a night-watch and accountant for a while, until he somehow managed to get his job back at the hotel Meurice. My grand-father died of a heart attack not long after his retirement in 1966, so I never really knew him. Did he feel any guilt at all for moving into the apartment of a family which had been forced to flee simply because they were Jewish? Did he ever wonder and worry about what had become of them during the war? Did he benefit from other advantages due to his proximity with the high ranking officers he must have served on a daily basis? A luxury hotel bellman is the person you go to when you need a taxi, or a reservation at a restaurant, or tickets to the theater or the opera, and the Germans must have used his services extensively. Did he ever think that he might have used his position and easy access to all these people in a different way? Did he maybe find them charming, educated and polite, as most of them certainly were? My father tells me that my grandfather knew when things turned around for the Nazis as he understood german and heard the conversations between the officers. Did he have any idea of what was going on, within and outside of our boarders?

Angela Findlay doesn’t shy away from this type of questions. Nor does she shy away from the pain, or the search, as difficult and uncomfortable as it may have been, especially for members of her family — including her mother. The youngest daughter of the man Angela Findlay is trying to understand, she always kept a portrait of her father in his Nazi uniform on her desk, yet didn’t hesitate to accompany her daughter as she retraced von Graffen’s steps in Russia where he’d in command for most of the war. These pages are riveting. As are the final pages in Italy, where the Generalleutnant finished the war and was held prisoner afterwards.

In the end, though, Findlay does find the closure she was looking for, not only for herself, but for her brother, and possibly the rest of her family.

I have always admired people who refuse the status quo, who put themselves through whatever it takes to gain the comprehension without which they can never be at peace. Angela Findlay is one of these people, and her book is a beautiful, raw, and important testimony to that kind of courage.

Let’s not build walls, let’s build bridges

I was going through my Twitter feed a couple of days ago, when this post jumped at me. My heart sank as I read it, again, and again. And then, I scrolled down, read the comments, and was further crushed by the reactions which felt so… unmeditated, powered more by the on-going atmosphere of a politically correct standpoint than by any reasoned thinking. So, here is the tweet: “me texting friends who don’t read about this phenomenon of white women authors marrying men of color, taking their last names, and writing from the POV of POC characters under a non-white name because their kids will be multiracial.”

Anyone who knows me a little knows that I check most of these boxes.

_ I am a white woman. Will it get to the point when I need to apologize for that? Why does the necessary, far too long in coming uplifting of a totally worthy cause have to mean the trampling and destruction of other people not belonging to that particular group? I loathe what was done (and continues to be done in too many places) to minorities throughout History. But how does accusing people like me of what is stated in that tweet help the cause of minorities? What does it achieve, except to perpetuate anger and resentment and, actually, become a form of reverse racism?

_ I’m an author (even though I became an author of fiction AFTER I married, and actually in parts THANKS to the encouragement and nudge of my Haitian and black husband who believed in me before I did – and these are the very words I used in my dedication to him in my first book).

_ I did add my husband’s name to my last name, actually mostly to please him, because I knew it meant a lot to him that I would carry his name, and also because I didn’t want to have a completely different name than our children.

_ Finally, I do write from the POVs of white AND POC characters, and yes, our children are multiracial.

Now, before I helplessly and irremediably paint myself into a corner (and in these days of fast and easy social media bashing, it doesn’t seem to take very much, which is why I usually stay carefully out of any types of debates online, but I can’t keep my mouth shut anymore), I would like to remind anyone who wanders on this blog that I believe in and wholeheartedly support the need for diversity, simply because books and culture should be representative of the world we live in, and the world we live in is composed of people of all types, backgrounds, and colors, and isn’t that glorious? I also recognize the reality of white privilege and the need to think deeply about it and to work consciously and constructively at fighting racism in all its manifestations. And no one is happier to see the many books coming out now with diverse characters. I only wish this had happened earlier, so I could have found more books portraying children like mine when they were at the age when I read for them. The theme that I have passionately lived my life by is one of building bridges to connect us all, with our common traits AND our differences and particularities. One only has to read my blogs (started in 2008) to have a confirmation of that. I believe racism and bigotry to be the natural children of fear and ignorance. (I won’t enter into the subject of financial interests at the heart of so many of our human history’s worst horrors and crimes. One recent book that touches upon this is the marvelous and indispensable novel of Rita Williams-Garcia, ‘A Sitting in St. James.”) I believe that if and when we know one another, when we know our common frailties and strengths, it is much harder to belittle, abuse or discriminate. Also, I may be naïve, but writing is such an arduous and intimate-pour-your-guts-out process that I find it difficult to believe that anyone would bring to their work the kind of calculated and perversely single-minded approach depicted in that tweet. No matter, let’s use it for the sake of argument and discussion.

If I understand it well, it basically accuses some white women of entering the state of marriage with the mid to long term view of using an exotic sounding name and the progeny born from that union for publication! Honestly! Is it not possible that an author fell in love, married, and was inspired, quite naturally, whether it was conscious or not, to feed her work with her life? Multiracial children? Yes, their experiences can differ from those of white children, especially in the US. I need to say that I do not feel at all that our daughters, of French, Haitian and Spanish heritage, biracial and born in the US but brought up in Nigeria, India, Bangladesh, Serbia and Madagascar, with most of their summers spent in France but also Haiti, approach or think of race in the same way as multiracial children born and bred in the US seem to (I happen to have very close friends with multiracial children who live in NYC).

My girls were lucky to attend international schools where welcoming new people from all over the world is the norm. During their first years, they lived in countries where their white mother was actually part of the minority. When we moved to Serbia, our first posting to a VERY white country, I did wonder briefly how it would go, but there were no issues other than our teenage girl being easily spotted if she happened to skip classes to go to McDonald. If you ask our daughters where they have their best memories, both will tell you Serbia.

So, why would anyone find it abnormal or even unconscionable, as the tweet and the comments it elicited seem to imply, that the mother of multiracial children, whether she’s white or not, would use her life experience in her books? I don’t get it. If her story is sincere, authentic, that any necessary research is done with care and thoroughness, that she is respectful and avoids the white savior trap, then, shouldn’t we focus on the literary qualities of the work, rather than the color of its author? In this day and age, it seems not. And what on earth is a “non-white name?”

I recently had an exchange with a writer/author friend who had an expatriate life, like mine, and her agent had submitted her novel with a protagonist who arrives in Brazil as a foreigner and shares her first impressions about this new country. The publisher rejected it and sermoned the author because she “shouldn’t be writing from a place she’s not a native of.” What type of hogwash is this? First of all, that statement effectively forbids all migrants to write about anything but the country in which they were born. With this kind of mindset, we’d never have had authors like Pearl Buck, Paul Bowles, Louis Bromfield… these are the first names that pop into my mind, but of course, there’ll be many others. Madison Smartt Bell (a white American man) would not have written his magnificent trilogy about the Haitian Revolution for instance. What of Laurie Halse Anderson’s trilogy, “The Seeds of America” (“Chains” was a National Book Award finalist and received the 2009 Scott O’Dell award for historical fiction)? Or M.T Anderson’s two-volume-masterpiece “The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation” (winner of the National Book Award and Michael Printz Honor books)? Or is historical fiction exempt from these new rules? What about science-fiction writers? My mother is not a native of France where she migrated to flee the Franco regime when she was 25. So, could she not write about France, even though she’s lived there ever since? What happens to imagination? Creativity? Aren’t there as many stories as there are people on this earth? Any story that I write (again, with authenticity, respect and proper research when and wherever necessary) will be unique, the same way I am unique. Let the best story win, regardless of the color, genre, nationality, and age of its author.

Why not build bridges, to use this metaphor I love so much, rather than erect barriers and separations? What do these dictates achieve apart from stifling creativity (well, and let’s not forget allowing a person a brief moment of stardom on social media? That tweet was actually a screenshot from a tiktok video posted by a young woman. Do we realize, as a society, the perversity of the need to constantly create online content? But that’s another debate.) I can understand the need to vent frustration. The publishing process is currently so slow as to feel tortoiselike (for months and months and months, I’ve been waiting to hear back from editors and agents). It’s tough out there, I know. More than ever. But I don’t believe that disparaging authors, especially in such a sweeping generalist way, whatever their background may be, is the solution. Again, let the best stories win! Isn’t this, ultimately, the reason we write? Because we love and want to share good stories?

What happened, in a nutshell…

Three and half years since my last post. Days, weeks, and months during which blogging wasn’t something I found myself able to invest time in anymore. It had been slow for a while, but then, came 2015 – a difficult year for our family.

Parenting is an all-consuming undertaking – at times beautifully fulfilling, at others impossibly challenging. Nothing can ever prepare us for it. I know: not at all a groundbreaking statement, that. And then, the children grow and become teens! As I was the type of teenager who gave premature white hair to my parents, I suppose it’s only normal that I should have had to go through a testing time myself. Karma and all that… So there goes 2015, and the first half of 2016.

After our 15-year-old left Serbia for a boarding school in the UK, I was in a state best described as catatonic. For the first time in 15 years, my mind wasn’t juggling a millions thoughts and worries related to her schooling, her behavior, her homework, her activities. We have two daughters, but the youngest never required the same kind of high maintenance as her older sister. Did the little one instinctively adapt to the family situation, knowing there was only so much that her mother, with her limitations, could manage, or was she born naturally more independent and autonomous? We shall never know. But while the house suddenly became much quieter, the void left by our first daughter’s departure truly gutted me. I spent days sitting on the couch, watching series on the TV – something I had never done before – and my evenings going through the motions of life as best as I could. After several weeks of that, I managed to pick myself up and resume work, activities, etc, but that was all I had energy for. (I’m happy to report that the teen is now almost 21, and a gorgeous young lady with whom we have a lovely, trusting, fun relationship, something I remind myself of daily, as daughter number 2 now goes through her own, of course completely different, brand of teenage attitude).

2017 came and went. And then 2018 was the year of our moving to another country, with all the preparation, transition, and adaptation that go with it. We moved from our house to a small apartment so our shipment could leave earlier and possibly be in Madagascar once we arrived there, and I discovered the joys of living in the center of Belgrade. For a few months, I walked everywhere, and loved-loved-loved it. I saw so much more of the capital in that last stretch of our time in Serbia than I had in the previous 4 years…

In August 2018, we flew to Antananarivo, without our first-born child who’d turned 18 and moved to France. A most bizarre experience. The bubble that allowed me to regularly pick-up and relocate my life from one country to another for almost two decades, was now incomplete. I have never felt so far away from everything and everyone. Maybe it also has to do with Madagascar being an island. We are far, but no more than when we lived in India or Bangladesh. Actually, a single (10 h 30) flight will take us straight to Paris, something that never happened in the previous countries where we had to transit through Germany, Qatar, or Turkey. But there you go.

It’s been almost three years. We traveled the length and breadth of our gorgeous host country, as we always do, until the pandemic put a brutal halt to any wandering. I was very lucky to be able to fly back to France, in May of last year, and ended up spending 5 months there, unable to return to Madagascar before October.

And now, we’re empty nesters, as the young one decided she wanted to pursue her IDBP at a boarding school in the UK. She’s quite happy at her new school, they have excellent IB results, and the situation is getting better and better, over there, whereas winter is coming to the southern hemisphere and we’re going through a second wave of the blasted Covid19. Overall a good decision on her part. And in the fall, my husband will retire from UNICEF, after almost 30 years. A new chapter…

On the writing front, Benchmark Education published my Leveled reader titled Elliot’s Pen Pal, in 2018. A cute little book about two boys, one in New York City, the other in Haïti, who become friends through a pen pal project and their shared love of soccer. As always, a story with bridges being built. And I finished my YA novel set in India.

I’m now going through the looooong, arduous, frustrating querying/submission process. The novel had won a First Pages contest at a SCBWI Europolitan conference, which opened the door of a publisher in New York, and I sent it to her first. It’s been a year, and even though the manuscript was never rejected, I haven’t received any feedback or a reply yet. Patience is the name of the game, I know, even more so with the pandemic. So, I’ve been spending a LOT of time searching publishing houses that accept un-agented work, and I’m also trying to find an agent.

None of this is overly interesting, I know. But a catch-up blog seemed a good idea, so there it is.

I have more time to write, now that I don’t have children in the house. Most importantly, my mind seems to have gone back to that place where it thinks of little else. The new upcoming transition could prove interesting. We will move to France, at least until we decide if it feels right (my husband is not originally from France, after all, and there is the little matter of our Third Culture Kids having to decide where they will be, now and in the foreseeable future, something that might influence our whereabouts). It’s hard to imagine staying put anywhere, forever and ever. And yet, a part of me IS truly looking forward to it.

Tango and life, third week

Today was our sixth lesson and the last of the year as we’re traveling to Haiti for Christmas.

It was amazing.

Since the beginning, our main instructor has been keen on demonstrating how the right approach to dancing the Tango can be transferred to pretty much anything else in life. Darko is not interested in teaching us the mechanics of Tango as much as teaching us how to “live” the dance. He talks about posture, connexion and centeredness, breathing, being in the moment and meditation as much, if not more, as he talks about the actual steps.

Today’s class was mostly focused on creating the connexion between both partners so that the man (although the notion of a leader and a follower is inaccurate, in Tango) can communicate the direction he will go, the step he will take before it actually happens, and the woman can sense this and respond accordingly. There was a lot of standing in front of each other, moving from one foot to the other, slowly, to feel the ground, eyes closed.

Listening to him was like listening to a guru share some life wisdom. At some stage, he came to us, and what he said brought such a wave of emotions for me, I had tears in my eyes. “You are both really good dancers,” he said. “All the instructors agree about that. But you are struggling because you (my husband) are trying too hard to control the dance and your partner, and you (me) are afraid to not do well even as you try to correct him. It’s not bad. You are a very good match. My partner and I have the same dynamic and we learned so much from each other and allowed the other to progress so much. But for that, both of you need to let go. You (my husband) need to trust her more, and you (me) need to trust yourself more.”

Ha!

Yesterday (we have two 1 and half hour tango lessons during the weekends), they had changed the time of the class but a glitch in communications meant that we did not receive the SMS with that information and arrived on time – 30 minutes late. This was very unsettling as we basically crashed into the middle of the class and catching up felt hard. We were disoriented, and it made my husband uncomfortable and annoyed. I worried that he was going to quit right there and then.

These Tango lessons are mainly my idea, my initiative. He loves dancing, and we had tried one lesson 20 years ago when we lived in New York City, but he’s a Salsa person – something he learned practically from the moment he could walk. These Tango lessons are taking him (us) out of our comfort zone. But today, he was completely there, and I felt that we shared something in a way that had not happened in a while.

The Tango Lesson by Sally Potter

As I watched our instructors during our last tango class, a memory of a couple dancing in a black and white film flashed in my mind. It was vague but thanks to the Internet, I was able to trace it in no time: The Tango Lesson, by Sally Potter. I watched it again, yesterday.

Revisiting movies or books years after first discovering and enjoying them is a humbling, sightly bittersweet experience. I always miss so much the first time around. Each new reading brings up a set of “oooh” moments – which makes some sort of cosmic sense, I suppose. Like a nod to moments and experiences passed allowing me to feel I’m making laborious progress at this elusive thing called life – not so easy to detect in the flow of a day-to-day routine. Besides, don’t we approach a story through the restricting prism of whatever is going on for us at that particular moment in time?

I first watched The Tango Lesson when it came out, in 1997. I remember loving the music, the dancing, the camera work and the relationship between Sally and Pablo, even if I missed a lot of its complexity. Twenty years later, which happens to be precisely the amount of time that I have been in a relationship with my husband, I truly enjoyed the way both protagonists dance with, but also around each other. Their relationship is very cerebral – he always wanted to be in a movie and she’s a movie director; she always wanted to be a dancer and he is a professional tango dancer and teacher – yet intensely physical – they spend so much time dancing in each other’s arms, and not just any dance: Tango.

In Argentinian Tango, the ’embrace’ is of utmost importance. The bodies’ posture. Erect, the head in direct alignment with the neck and torso, said torso pushed forward, one arm wound around the neck (for the woman) or the back (for the man) of the partner. Faces are very close to each other (once you reach a certain level, that is. As a beginner, I first need to get the posture right). Without this connexion between the two chests (which must be face to face practically at all times), there is no Tango. We spent quite a bit of time, during our first lessons, closing our eyes, and working on creating that invisible connexion. It sounds easier than it is.

Sally Potter structures her film like a novel, with a chapter per lesson. And she takes us inside her creative process. I noticed details that I don’t remember finding significant, the first time: Sally fussily scrubbing her white table before she sits down to write, or the way she sharpens her pen and organizes her pile of blank pages. Her own little ritual. The movie is in black and white, except for the very colorful dreamlike scenes of the movie she imagines, as she writes the script – before life takes her in another direction – something she allows to happen with deliberate acceptance. I loved that, as I loved how she is strong, very strong, yet vulnerable.

I read a critique by Robert Ebert and apparently, she was roasted for giving herself the role of Sally in the movie; it was deemed self-aggrandizing. Also, a middle-aged woman falling for a man who appears to be younger, really? It’s interesting to read this critique, twenty years later, and in the current global turmoil around women’s rights.

In The Last Tango, both Sally and Pablo use their art and passion for dance to try and keep pain at a safe distance – and fail. He wants to lead, the way he’s used to as a tango dancer. But Sally is a movie director – used to running things according to her artistic vision. The first time they perform together on stage, she searches his eyes at the end, obviously happy, but he’s furious. Back in the dressing room, he accuses her of not allowing him to lead her, thus killing his artistic freedom.

This “who leads whom” question is fascinating. Isn’t marriage, life as a couple, a perpetual dance? Some couples are good at sharing the leading role. At our first milonga  (as spectators, only) a couple of weeks ago, a couple of dancers gave a performance, and sometime during the dance, the woman became the leader. It was obvious and elicited huge cheers from the crowd. It also looked very difficult. It’s hard to change roles. The other day, during our class, there were not enough men, and a lady was faster to grab my husband as a partner, and I had to dance with another lady. Which was fine, except that I found it very hard to take on the other’s role. Which is beautifully contradictory, because I only have a few tango lessons under my belt, but already, I ‘ve been told by our instructors and by my husband that I need to let him lead me. It’s all very confusing.

I also found an interview on YouTube in which Sally Potter talks about directing this movie. “This film is not cool,” she says. “I wanted to make an “uncool” film that wasn’t detached, wasn’t ironic, that was raw. It’s “I love this”. I love this dance. I love this man. I love this tango. I love this music. And love, of course, brings also pain and suffering and humiliation and disappointment and regret and that’s what being human consists of.”

If you like good cinema, beautiful dancing scenes shot by someone who really knows about dance, great music (most of the soundtrack is by Astor Piazzolla), and interesting couples’ dynamics between two strong characters, I recommend The Tango Lesson.

Three years, and now, Tango.

I have agonized for months about blogging again. What could I say to break this 3-year gap? Could I just jump in? It is my space, after all. Must I explain the silence? What to say? Somehow, life got complicated and as a true introvert, I folded upon myself.

I never lost the habit of writing blogs (or emails, or letters) in my mind – when driving, walking, or tossing and turning in my bed at night. Most of that mind-writing remained in my head instead of traveling to my fingertips and onto the screen.

But I’d like to give it a try again.  And recently, my husband and I signed up for tango lessons. Provided I need a reason, sharing bits and pieces on the process of learning to Tango seems as good an excuse as any to revive my blog.

I love the art of dance. I love watching dancers, and I love dancing myself. Salsa, Flamenco, Senegalese Sabar and everything in between, including Scottish dance. All this time, I watched Tango from a distance, with a mixture of curiosity, longing, and hesitation. Diffidence, also. Tango seemed a different challenge – something serious I would get into once I grew up!

So, first impressions? Tango is as hard as I expected it to be, and some more. It’s the technique, of course, but not only. There’s the posture. There’s having to think about the million ways you’re supposed to hold your body while listening to the music while remembering the steps. The back hurts from thinking constantly about keeping the chest forward, the shoulders down, the elbows in, the shoulder blades flat…

The way the upper body works independently from the lower body reminds me of Flamenco. The trick of imagining a string coming out of my head and pulling my whole torso and back upward is one I discovered with the Alexander technique as I tried to apply it to the piano. Finally, these two salsa dancers must remember to keep their hips still – no swaying sideways in Tango.

I was amazed to discover a whole world of Tango aficionados, here in Belgrade. Men and women, young and old, meet for Milongas in the afternoons, in the evenings, through nights and marathon weekends, and they dance, dance, dance.  Not a bad way to spend one’s time, I say.

A Serbian touch of humour

On Saturday evening, we attended a friend’s birthday party at a small local restaurant. The Kafana Katun has a distinct Serbian flavor : wooden rustic furniture, red and white checkered tablecloths and curtains, an old wood burning stove, large carriage wheels, and an odd assortment of items scattered here and there : blueberry combs, guitars, and the type of coal irons still very much in use in India, but here, displayed for decoration. The music was local, and so were the food and the drinks. And then, there was this funny piece of humor art. For those who like their I’s dotted, and their T’s properly crossed, “Ulje na platnu” means oil on canvas, in Serbian.

Technology and young people

Another rant, this time about technology and what it does to our young people. Which is ironic, as I’m an avid, and grateful user of technology.

As a young journalist, in France, I worked in the newspaper which first introduced computers in its editorial office and trained writers to use them. That was in the early eighties, and the computers were ugly, bulky machines with black screens and green letters. Later, when I became a translator, I also worked for the first publishing house to use computers in France. Instead of printing out two copies of my manuscript, the way my other publishers requested me to do it, I would simply bring the large, black square floppy disk containing my finished assignment to the editor.  The computers were still enormous, the screen was still black, and the letters bright orange. And in the late nineties, when I lived in New York City, that same publisher was among the first to allow translators to email the completed manuscript as an attachment instead of mailing hard disks which were by then much smaller. The Internet also allowed me to forget about carting my hefty bilingual dictionary around. Research became so much easier. And then, in Nigeria, I discovered online writing communities; In India, online writing courses and blogging, and Facebook. It is hard to imagine life without all these medias, today.

Facebook allows me to keep in contact with people who live hundreds and thousands of miles away. It also keeps me informed. This is how I read most of my news. And even as I recognize the increasing Orwellian quality of our world , I can’t, nor do I wish to renounce the many advantages of being connected. But I’m an adult. A flawed adult, but an adult nevertheless. I have had time to develop a reasonably discerning, critical mind which allows me to recognize the dangers of technology. Also, as a dinosaur born half a century ago, my mind was shaped at a time when we actually read books from beginning till end, when we still knew how to sit and listen to entire pieces of music, to watch entire movies or TV shows. The world was not fragmented in bite size, pre-digested segments, movies could be slow, even contemplative. We could sit in a car, watch the world go by, and not whine about being bored only a few minutes into a journey. And if we did, no one gave us a DVD player, or a DS, or an i-Pad to keep us occupied. I remember trips from Paris to Malaga, in the south of Spain: 1800 Kms in a car, with usually one overnight stop in the middle, and what did we do? We sang songs in canon, told jokes, argued, or slept.

What about our young people today? Teenagers, and even pre-teens? What about these kids who seem to have mobile phones surgically attached to their hands, some of them not even 10 years old ? These kids who are requested to use computers for Homework, and work on their Maths, Sciences or English projects,  (or should I say try to) even as they have half a dozen or more applications running: Google chat, Skype, emails, Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, and all the other social networks, new ones, older ones that I discover every day (the last one, Ask.fm, allows you to ask other users questions, with the option of remaining anonymous, and it has been linked with cyber bullying  and several teenagers suicides in recent past.)

As a teen, when I was not in class, or doing homework, I could usually be found reading, playing my piano, day-dreaming or singing in my room. My family wasn’t into sports, which is not necessarily a good thing, but other kids my age might have been practicing a sport, or another instrument. When I was bored with Homework, I’d open the drawer under my desk, lay a novel there and read, quickly pushing the drawer close when I heard my parents coming down the corridor. After I turned 16, I was allowed to go to the movies with my friends.  I still remember  how Saturday Night Fever and Grease shook my world. I got the Grease record for my birthday, and listened to it over, and over, and over again. Oh, and we had one telephone with a rotary dial (a what?) and the curly cord plugged into a wall socket. All my parents had to worry about was my running huge phone bills when my best friend moved from Paris to a city north of the capital, and it only happened once. Mostly, we wrote each other 18-page letters. By hand. Of course, while working on this lengthy correspondence, I was not solving Maths problems, translating Latin texts, or memorizing German vocabulary lists. But at least, I was practicing a skill. What skill do kids practice, nowadays, when they exchange messages with truncated, acronymed groups of words? Certainly not spelling or syntax. Of course, I often use these abbreviated forms myself, nowadays, when texting. But I learned to spell words properly, first. Of course, with spell checkers, who needs to know how to spell, nowadays? And that makes me so sad.

How can parents possibly keep up with all the gadgets and Cyber distractions available? I almost feel as if I must do the rounds, each evening, to make sure that my teenager doesn’t stay on a smart phone, or an i-Pod, or an i-Pad, or her computer until 2 in the morning, texting with her friends or watching You Tube videos under the covers of her bed.

And let’s talk about You Tube. I love it. You Tube is fun. It’s great. It serves me the whole world onto a rectangular screen, from recipes, to dance steps, to TED talks, to TV shows I cannot watch where I live (Jon Stewart’s Daily Show, Bill Maher, yes, I love knowing I can find them any time I need a recreation). But our children, what does it give them? Most importantly, what does it do their brains, to constantly watch this barrage of over sexed music videos showing women in various states of undress contorting themselves on sandy beaches, the back seats of stretch Limos, or hanging from lianas in the jungles? And what about shows like the X Factor, that seem to promise the world to everyone, and make it look as if it’s easy, as if all you have to do is show up and sing and everyone goes berserk and claps and cries and screams adoringly! Or the way some singers are hailed as great singers, when in my opinion all they do is shout (anyone else out there wonders what the big deal is about Adèle?) Last year, our teen said she wanted to play the guitar. We bought her a guitar, we paid for guitar lessons (on top of the piano lessons, that was the condition), and after six months, she decided she no longer needed lessons, and would continue on her own. Of course, the guitar now sits on its stand, gathering dust. If you ask my daughter about the piano, which she also gave up a few months ago (we were in the middle of a move, and I didn’t have the energy to continue fighting that battle), she’ll tell you that she knows how to play and doesn’t need to take any more lessons. What can I do, when I hear that, but roll my eyes, bite my tongue, and chant internal mantras about adolescence being a normal, necessary phase in life, knowing I’m only good at the first one, and terrible at the other twos?

But I digress. Or do I?

One of my friends likes to claim that her children (slightly younger than mine, I’m waiting to see if she can keep it up) are not allowed any computer time, or barely. I respect that, and yet, find it an impractical solution. I don’t even think I could implement it in our house. Not with an IB school system that relies so heavily on technology, using the irrefutable argument that our children need to be able to function in tomorrow’s world – a world that no longer uses rotary-dial telephones or typewriters. Clearly, the way we educate our children today is, for the most part, on the verge of total obsolescence. I recognize that. I understand the value of introducing them to new languages like Internet coding. But how do we avoid the pitfalls as we negotiate the transition into this new era?

The school does try to educate them: they have talks and assemblies on Digital Citizenship. Facebook, and now Ask.fm, are banned from the school computers, on campus – but of course, most kids have their smart phones or tablets and access these networks via Wifi. And what about the time they don’t spend on campus?

At my request, my daughter now leaves the school laptop at school before she comes home at the end of the day.  If she or her sister need the computer to work on a school project, they save it to Drive, and use one of our home computers. I purchased two applications to help me control the time spent on the computer. If they need to do research, I run the Anti-Social application that automatically blocks Facebook, Twitter, and any other social network  of my choice, for the amount of time that I choose. If there is no research involved, I run Freedom, which blocks access to the Internet, again for a time chosen by the user. It helps. A little. So long as I’m there to launch the application. And too bad if it makes me feel like a police constable.

Have I turned into one of these conservative grumpy old farts who cannot tolerate the way the world changes before their eyes? Do I need to relax and trust that all will be well in the end? A friend of mine, who refuses to use Facebook, also says that she doesn’t want to know what her son (a few years older than my daughters) is up to, and if she used it, would not even consider being his friend on Facebook. What you don’t know cannot hurt you. Is this the way to go about it? Look the other way?

It’s like a massive tide, over powering, unavoidable. We can try our best to keep our children occupied in as sane a manner as possible (sports, music, travels), and continue to be self-appointed home police constables. Mostly, we can take a deep breath, ride that wave, and hope that our children will make it to the other side, safe and sound. With the understanding that while they ride that technological tsunami, they must also learn the skills to strive, and possibly succeed in this ever-more competitive world.

Pondering the virtues of chaos over the illusion of order

The reaction of many of our friends and relatives, usually those who have never lived outside their home country (and this is in no way meant as a negative judgment, simply an observation) when we told them that we were moving to Belgrade, was: “Oh, wonderful, Belgrade is Europe. This is going to change your life.”

It certainly has, in more ways than one. And as I’m still in the first transitional year, I have decided to refrain from trying to decide whether this is indeed a wonderful thing. But something happened, a couple of days ago, that had me reflect and come to this conclusion: if I must choose between one disorganized way or another, I’d rather go with the kind found in places like India or Bangladesh.

Of course, the following rant is colored by my current mood, a sort of confused and forgetful nostalgia where the many difficult moments spent in my last host country tend to blur and smudge even as the good times come into bright focus, effectively distorting my memory. No matter, a little rant from time to time keeps this brain’s cells working. So, here comes:

Before I even landed in Beograd, I somehow heard about the Serbian way of driving : fast, reckless, macho (although I’d like to add a twist to that one, because I have found women behind the wheel to often be as aggressive as men, here). I just laughed, responding that after driving in India 4 and half years, not much could phase me. I was also told that even though Serbia is requesting entry into the European Union, it retains enough quirks and idiosyncrasies to keep things interesting – a comment I found enormously reassuring.

So, I was quite surprised when I found out about the parking system in place. Cities are divided into zones, according to the number of hours we’re allowed to leave our car in the same area (one, two, or three hours). The parking spots have their colored markings, and signs planted at street corners indicate the zone and give a phone number. You SMS your plate number, and that’s it. Of course, I had not been told that you need to send an SMS for each hour that you’re allowed to park in a 2 or 3 hours zone, and I collected a ticket on my very first day. Neither had I been told that when you’ve collected a ticket, you are entitled to remain in that parking zone for 24 hours, and if you are to return to the same area before the 24 hours have expired, well, you may send as many SMSs as you want, they will not be validated. BUT, the second the 24 hours deadline expires, here you have an agent leaving a nice blue rectangular ticket on your windshield. You do receive an SMS warning you that your time is up, but as it is in Serbian, well, I couldn’t figure out what they were saying. So again, I learned the hard way. Five months later, and apart from one time when I totally forgot to send the SMS (I was late for a Flamenco class), and received another ticket (these parking attendants walk their assigned area with utmost zeal, I can vouch for that), I’d say I have pretty much mastered the parking system in Belgrade.

Then, the other evening, I was driving along the street, trying to park. Two empty cars sat on the side of the roadway, each in front of an empty parking spot, effectively blocking it and disturbing the traffic along that 3-lane avenue. I slowed down, and pressed the horn, thinking they might come out of a shop, but nope, no such luck. I grumbled, drove around the block, twice, and eventually found a spot in a nearby street. I was still grumbling as I took pictures of both cars, thinking: “honestly, who would do that? Block a parking spot, not even bothering to enter said spot, and leaving the car on the road instead.” Then, I noticed two parking attendants. “Ha! they’re gonna get it,” I thought gleefully. Yeah, I can be vindictive, that way. Imagine my astonishment when both parking attendants walked past the cars, not even looking at them. If my Serbian were better, I might have run to them and started gesticulating, asking them why I get a parking ticket if I’m two minutes late sending my SMS, but they don’t give a ticket to these two people, even though they are so blatantly breaking the mighty laws of rational parking? Maybe it’s a good thing I still don’t speak Serbian.

In India or in Bangladesh, there are basically no road rules. Or rather, the mightiest road rules of all is: the biggest car gets priority. As for parking, anything – and everything – goes. It is absolute chaos, everyone knows that, and I, for one, find some semblance of order in that notion. What I find hard to deal with are places where some things obey a number of rigidly enforced rules and regulations, except for the times when they don’t, but when does the exception apply, well, that’s anybody’s guess.