Gcr-3-Spring 1994.Pdf

Global City Review Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde J SPRING 1994 ISSUE NUMBER THREE EDITOR SR EDITOR Linsey Abrams E. M.Broner MANAGING EDITORS Heather Rams dell and Burton Shulman ASSOCIATE EDITORS Gerry Albarelli, Paula Bernett, Edith Chevat, Karen de Balbian Vers ter, Elizabeth England, Carolyn Ferrell, Mann Gazzaniga, Marta Goldberg, Susan Lewis, Laurie Liss, Leslie Morgensteinf Andree Pages, Michael Steinberg, Anne Vaterlaus INTERNS Patrick Connolly, Erin Gray, and Luna St.Joer CONTRIBUTING EDITORS Susan Daitch, Michael Klein, Mary LaChapelle, Susan Thames, Eliot Weinberger GLOBAL CITY REVIEW Dr. Jekyll and Mr Hyde SPRING 1994 NUMBER THREE COPYRIGHT © 1994 GLOBAL CITY REVIEW ALL RIGHTS REVERT TO AUTHORS UPON PUBLICATION. Global City Review is published twice yearly. SUBSCRIPTION PRICE : $12 FOR I YEAR, $20 FOR TWO YEARS. international: $ 1 7 FOR I y ea r , $ 3 0 FOR two yea r s. INSTITUTIONS: $ 1 5 FOR I YEAR, $ 2 5 FOR TWO YEARS. available back issues: Sexual Politics, Spring 1 9 9 3 , and Paradise Lost, fall 1993, $6.00 plus $ 1 mailing ch arge. MAKE CHECKS PAYABLE TO: GLOBAL CITY REVIEW ALL CORRESPONDENCE SHOULD BE SENT TO: GLOBAL CITY REVIEW SIMON H. RIFK1ND CENTER FOR THE HUMANITIES THE CITY COLLEGE OF NEW YORK I38TH STREET AND CONVENT AVE. NEW YORK, NY I 003 I PLEASE INCLUDE SASE WITH ALL MANUSCRIPTS. GLOBAL CITY REVIEW IS DISTRIBUTED BY ARMADILLO, BOOK PEOPLE, BERNHARD DEBOER, INC., FINE PRINT DISTRIBUTORS, MARGINAL DISTRIBUTORS, PACK PLANT, SMALL PRESS DISTRIBUTION, AND UBIQUITY. ISSN:1068-0586 GLOBAL CITY PRESS WOULD LIKE TO ACKNOWLEDGE THE GENEROUS CONTRIBUTION OF THE ROY AND NIUTA TITUS FOUNDATION, AS WELL AS THAT OF MARY ELLEN DONOVAN AND MALCOLM NOLEN. WE ARE GRATEFUL FOR THE ONGOING FINANCIAL AND MORAL SUPPORT OF THE SIMON H. RIFKIND CENTER, AND WISH TO THANK ROBIN BECKER, AMY DANA, LOIS GALLAGHER AND HELENE PODZIBA FOR THEIR HELP ON THIS ISSUE. DESIGN: CHARLES NIX Contents HSSAYS Picturing the Underclass by John Hartigan Jr. 9 La Banlieue: Life on the Edge by Marguerite Feitlowitz 117 MEMOIR In the Land of the Absolute by Eva Kollisch 49 From Village to Global Village by Marina Budhos 106 POEMS Being Southern by Jane Cooper 1 Crepe de Chine by Mark Doty 3° Neither of Us by Martha Rhodes 68 The Dead by Debra Weinstein 86 The Bends and The Woman in the Magic Show 104 by Victoria Hallerman STORIES Knife and Fork by Anne Vaterlaus 3 Superman's Diary by B. Brandon Barker 34 Mother's Day by Karen de Balbian Verster 7° Trees by Mary LaChapelle 88 Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde EXPLORES SELF AND OTHER IN SUCH areas as immigration, race, gender, and the underclass, as well as psychological and historical identities. The issue includes two literary/sociological essays— one on American cities, myths, crime, and representation (in literature and current media) of the monstrous other, by John Hartigan Jr., and one a reprint from our last issue, by Marguerite Feitlowitz, concerning the apocalyptic life in the out skirts of Paris {la banlieue) and its recent reframing of French iden tity and literature. The Editors wish to apologize for not delineat ing properly the separate author interview at the end of Feitlowitz’s essay, and intend that this issue will clarify that distinction. With poems by Jane Cooper, Mark Doty, Debra Weinstein, Victoria Hallerman, and Martha Rhodes.. .on the imagined self, the historicaUelf, the lover as other, drag and more. Plus a novel excerpt from Whiting Award winner Mary LaChapelle in which a young girl at a diner meets a man who says one thing and means another, and a gloriously surreal tale by Anne Vaterlaus. Also B. Brandon Barkers first published story, “Superman’s Diary”, including both the superhero’s and Clark Kent’s entries, and a funny, touching story by Karen de Balbian Verster, on entering the life of in-laws where a couple teaches a newly widowed mother to drive. We continue Global City’s exploration of both globalism and nationalism, and how they shape identity and history, with a memoir by Marina Budhos, whose father’s Caribbean-Indian roots inter twined with her American coming-of-age to make complicated but enriching demands on her adult literary subject matter. And another memoir, by Eva Kollisch, of a Jewish girlhood in Austria during the Nazi rise to power. LINSEY ABRAMS, EDITOR Being Southern by Jane Cooper i It’s like being German. Either you remember that yours was the defeated country (The South breeds the finest soldiers, my uncle said, himself a general in one of his incarnations) or you acknowledge the guilt, not even your own guilt but Can any white person write this, whose ancestors once owned slaves? 2 O f course there were “good” Germans. My father was still under 30, a passionate Wilsonian, when he was named a delegate to the 19 16 Democratic Conven tion. By the end of the first evening he had discovered that eleven of the other Florida delegates were members of the Klan, he couldn’t answer for the twelfth, he was number 13. Later he argued for, and won, token black representation on the Jacksonville school board. And my aunt as a girl went into the sweatshops to interview Cuban cigar workers, all women. She founded the first Girl Scout troop in the South for, as she put it, colored children. True, it was segregated. But it was the first. COOPER BEING SOUTHERN Take your guilt to school. Read your guilt in your diplomas or the lines of the marriage ceremony. Face your guilt head- on in the eyes of lover, neighbor, child. Ask to be buried in your guilt. O f course they were paternalistic. I honor their accomplish ments. What more have I ever done? When is memory transforming? when, a form of real estate? 3 Transplanted “north” in 1934 I never questioned a town that received its distinguished refugees with a mix of pride and condescension: the specialist in Christian iconography in her man-tailored suits, Einstein like a disembodied spirit pacing our leafy sidewalks. Only because my best friend lived next door would I glimpse him, sometimes at twilight, tuning his violin as his backyard filled up with tents But why can’t I remember the actual men and women who slept in those tents, among patches of ragged tigerlilies? the children with skinny arms, who would soon be passed along...? All he could vouch for. Not famous. A few saved out of six million. Knife and Fork by Anne Vaterlaus FROM THE FRONT OF MY LOFT, I HAD A CLEAR VIEW view of the plain, grey facade of a housing project, pierced with hundreds of flush windows exactly the width of two children’s heads. This had not been mentioned in the real es tate listing in which the loft had been described as one with a cathedral ceiling. I supposed this was the small, poorly caulked skylight at the top of a narrow flight of stairs over my sleeping loft. From the mattress I could see my painting studio, a dining room table, and part of a small kitchen. I could not see a room at the back of the loft, also featuring a narrow flight of stairs and sleeping loft, minus the skylight. I placed an ad in a small paper for a roommate. Nobody responded to the ad for three weeks, and just as the rent I didn’t have came due, Paula called. She moved in during a heat wave. Since we had no air conditioner, we left windows open, letting in waves of hot air, soot, and noise. Grime coated the floors and walls. Summer closed around us thick as flesh. Paula’s large body curved like a modern, French bronze sculpture. With an ice cream box in one hand and a plastic spoon in the other, wearing only underpants and a bra, my new roommate shuffled from room to room eating, leaving empty food cartons wherever she finished. “I can’t take the heat,” she said every night after her din- VATERLAUS KNIFE AND FORK ner, pulling a few tight clothes over the underthings. “I’m going out for a walk.” I leaned out the front window and watched her saunter, trailing a line of smoke from a mentho lated cigarette, until she rounded the corner onto a broad avenue. Then she wandered, she told me, up and down, win dowshopping and chatting, while I had an hour to myself in my studio. I liked to paint at night. As the heat wave closed more tightly upon us, Paula began to drag a small mattress from her room into my studio, which faced the street. She claimed the need for better ventilation. Every night I heard the tell-tale shuffle as she pulled it across the floor, and if I looked down, I could see her naked body glistening in the soft light of a street lamp. “We have an admirer,” she said one morning, referring to a man in the housing project across the street, who, I could see, had glued himself to the window with a pair of binoculars. My heart jumped. What if he smashed through my sky light? What if he scaled the wall from the street, broke the window, and came into the studio? “Paula,” I said, “don’t you think you should, I mean, wouldn’t it be better if you covered yourself, just a little, I mean.” She gave me a flat look. “Some people spend their whole lives worrying,” she said. She dragged herself into the kitchen and swung open the refrigerator.

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