1 .
Cambodian refugees
"In the 1980s, in California, many women of Cambodian descent went to the doctor for the same condition: they couldn't see it. These women are war refugees. Many of them were raped, abused or otherwise brutally treated before fleeing their homes. They watched as their loved ones were killed in front of them. One woman said that some soldiers had taken her husband and three children, and she had never seen them again, and for four years she had washed her face with tears every day and cried blind. She didn't seem to be the only one crying blind. Others have symptoms of blurred or partial vision loss, where they see things in duplicates and have sore eyes.
150 people in total. After the examination, the doctor found that their eyes were normal. Further examinations revealed that their brains were also normal. If what these women say is true — and there are indeed some who are skeptical that these women may be pretending to be sick, wanting attention, or wanting to receive government benefits for people with disabilities — then the only explanation is that they are blinded by psychological reasons.
In other words, forced to experience so many horrific things, and unable to bear more, these women managed to extinguish the lamp in their hearts. ”
Sigrid Nunez
When Sigrid Nunez wrote the above passage, she would not have thought that in the fall of 2018, she won the National Book Award, the highest award in the American book industry, for her documentary-style novel, "My Friend Apollo", which had a documentary style and stabbed people with a knife and a tear point
She was 67 years old when she won the award. In the words of the characters in her novel, a woman only reaches a certain age, becomes inconspicuous, and then – the trouble is solved
Winner of the 2018 National Book Award
My Friend Apollo
By Sigrid Nunez
Translated by Yao Junwei
Shanghai Translation Publishing House
Published in October 2020
What is a woman's trouble? Sigrid Nunez repeatedly answered this question in My Friend Apollo:
"She can't walk the streets with the same emotions and the same manners as men. She would be watched, judged, and molested. She was taught to be vigilant at all times: Was this guy getting too close? Was the guy stalking her? So how can she relax and experience the joy of a real stroll? Well, shopping is good, even if it's a casual browse of the window. ”
"She would be asked for an interview by a male tutor who wrote poetry so he could decide whether to admit or not based on his looks. The teacher would quote the scriptures and tell her that the classroom was the most pornographic place in the world. Doesn't it say in The Master and the Disciple: 'Pornography, whether secret or public, fantasy or action, is intertwined with teaching.' This basic fact has been diluted by the focus on sexual harassment. ’”
She may not be 14 years old, she may not be in the United States, but she must be somewhere in the world, she is in a shack, a long line of men meandering outside the house, some of them looking up at the sky, some of them reading the newspaper, in short, that kind of boredom, it is likely that they are waiting for the bus, or waiting at the bus control office to get a license and a fine. But, they were waiting for the girl in the house to pick them up. This is a real news photo. ”
Even, when going out with Susan Sontag, because he stuffed a few more tampons into the handbag, Nunez attracted the confused eyes of a generation of knowledge idols: women can't do without the handbag is enough for Sontag to taunt, go out for a few hours, how can you use so many tampons?
.
2 .
In 1976, Nunez was 25 years old. Her father is of mixed Chinese and Panamanian descent, her mother is from Germany, a 1/4 Chinese blood, youthful and invincible face, and the blessing of a master of fine arts from Columbia University, when the young Nunez was recommended by a friend, as an assistant editor of the New York Review of Books, to go to Sontag who was recovering from cancer as an assistant, and this exotic mixed-race female Wenqing let Sontag mother and son fall.
She types back letters for Sontag while falling in love with her son, David Reeve. A few months later, she moved in with them. She and the idol's son almost reached the point of talking about marriage.
Susan Sontag and David Reeve mother and son
No one can imagine Susan Sontag as a mother-in-law, but this woman in a loose shirt and jeans and ho Chi Minh flip-flops on her feet is a natural mentor who sees the education of others, especially young people, as a moral obligation that makes her infinitely happy. Sontag is known for influencing those around him with his own cultural passion and intellectual passion. As a young woman who dreams of becoming a writer, Núñez has always regarded meeting Sontag and entering the private life of a generation of intellectuals as one of her luckies.
Although Núñez and Rif eventually failed to be together, she did not waste the years. If the intersection with Sontag in his early years is regarded as the first pot of gold in his career, Nunez turns it into a long-term investment.
In the decades since, she has focused on immigrant culture, cross-cultural exchange and conflict, writing novels related to them, and has a courageous and profound reflection on topics such as gender and racial discrimination, war trauma, and human trafficking. She returned to campus to teach creative writing classes at several universities.
It wasn't until more than a decade ago that Núñez received a manuscript of an essay called Mentors, Muses, and Demons, asking 30 writers to talk about the people who changed their lives. Nunez first thought of her undergraduate teacher, Elizabeth Hardwick, but the respected literary critic and novelist had been chosen by two. So she thought about the Sontag that she hadn't officially visited a teacher, but had changed her life to a greater extent than other mentors.
Susan Forever (2011), by Sigrid Nunez.
When an independent publishing company came to her, history was reopened, and she was able to rethink this extraordinary friendship that everyone would describe as a "sensitive topic." Sontag, an extraordinary legend known as an "idol", seven years after his death, had a unique and miniature biography, Susan Forever (2011), which became a sensation in the literary world.
"Don't be so conformist, who says we have to live like everyone else?" This is a sentence that Sontag once said to Nunez.
3 .
Sontag discusses photography, writes about diseases, and stirs up the thirst for knowledge in words; and Nunez seems to be more concerned about the "sixpence" on the ground - those oppressed and humiliated women, including but not limited to poor and backward areas, the cramped living space of urban women, and the spiritual depression that has nowhere to release, are all cruel existences that linger every day with their eyes closed, and the rapid development of the economy cannot reduce or even partially exacerbate these diseases.
Through her 7th novel, My Friend Apollo, she conceived of a special creative writing agency, or "writing therapy workshop," to heal wounds that could not be spoken, spoken of, and healed in time: the wounds of war, the wounds of trafficking, the wounds of sexual abuse, the wounds of domestic violence, or the ubiquity of daily life, all kinds of tangible and invisible violence
But some argue that the writers who run this creative writing agency are trying to squeeze inspiration from these wounded souls — to cure anxiety, why not try coloring games? Instead of letting them write about themselves, they should be fictionalized.
Lilia Forever: We only have vodka and suffering
Ignorant people feel that these girls and women can be shaped into vivid and interesting characters, and their pain can also be made into bizarre urban legends. But in reality, art is not necessarily more shocking than life. In "My Friend Apollo," Moldovan sex workers watch a Swedish film about the doom of a Soviet girl, and the plot can almost be described as tragic, Lilia Forever, and calmly say: The truth is far more cruel than this
Isaac Dinexon believes that any grief can be tolerated as long as it is written into the story. Perhaps, "Out of Africa" is her own writing self-help.
Isaac Dinerson and she couldn't get out of Africa
In creative writing agencies, the women write similar nouns: knives, belts, ropes, bottles, fists, scars, bruises, and blood. Others are similar verbs: forced, beaten, whipped, burned, suffocated, starved, screamed...
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However, in "My Friend Apollo", even the heroine and writing therapist herself, as an urban intellectual woman, is also a person who needs to be saved.
After her mentor committed suicide, she left behind a harlequin, the Great Dane, the Apollo. Reluctantly, she adopted the "gentle giant." In it, she was surprised to find that this giant dog, known as the "Apollo of Dogs", was the best mourner, and it could smell all her visible wounds and invisible fears.
No one has explained to it what "death" is, and no one has told it that its owner will never come back. It doesn't cry or commit suicide, but it can really collapse. When the 7-foot-tall behemoth tried its best to curl up and make itself smaller and more trembling, no one would suspect that the righteous dog Bobbi and the loyal dog Hachiko were fictional myths.
This Big Dane called "Apollo" does not drown, does not "demolish", is worried about taking the elevator to shock the neighbors, it even gracefully follows the heroine down from the sixth floor; even if the small dog teases it, it also perfectly interprets the teaching of "sending the other half of the face up"; it even has no privacy, and tolerates passers-by to watch and guess at its stool and urine.
The Great Dane, the Apollo of the dogs, was known for its nobility and gentleness
The heroine is reminded of the Novel "My Puppy Tulip" by the British writer Actley. If a person's most important relationship is with a dog, what could be more sad than that? But Akley fully experienced the "unconditional love of each other" that everyone craves but that most people can't. He believes in emotionally blending with people and trying to please them forever, leaving the dogs in a constant state of anxiety and tension. Dogs and other animals have a higher tolerance for pain than humans.
After the adoption of Apollo, the encounters of these non-verbal friends of humanity continued to come from memory to the heroine:
In some Asian countries, Tibetan mastiffs are overbred because of human greed, sent to slaughterhouses because of their frenzied past, excessive food consumption, and even tortured to death in crowded trucks because they can't wait for their destination. This ferocious lion and known for its loyalty to its lord may be thinking on the way to the slaughterhouse: Who will protect its master now?
The English writer Graves, who had fought in World War I, described the Battle of the Somme as follows: the number of dead horses and mules was staggering; the corpses of men were counted, and it seemed unjust to drag animals into such a war.
Zamperini, a legendary American pilot who moved from the Berlin Olympics to the Pacific Theater, recalls the Japanese prisoner-of-war camp in World War II, and the most indelible memory is that of a guard torturing a duck.
Indestructible World War II veteran Zamberini: Forgive cruelty, but not let go of a tortured duck
Why does anyone think that animals must suffer more than humans? Nunez writes in the novel that she believes:
"The degree of compassion you have for an animal has to do with the degree to which the animal causes you to have compassion for yourself."
"Man, throughout his life, remembers the early years, when we were half animals and generally human, helpless, vulnerable, and wordless fear, full of longing for protection. If only we could shout it out loud. ”
"Innocent time is something we humans have experienced but can't go back to, but animals are in this state for the rest of their lives. Some will call this sentimentality cynicism and cynicism, but when the day comes when we are no longer capable of feeling it, it will be a terrible day for everyone alive, and we will slide faster into violence and barbarism. ”
At this point, Nunez completed an interaction between the oppression, humiliation, rescue and healing of man and his friend, the animal.
Thus -
"What stopped me from becoming a complete world-weary person was seeing the love of dogs for humans."
And even --
"Is it better to have a dog instead of a husband than a husband like a dog?"
But, prefer -
"I don't want it to be my bodyguard, to be a gun, I want to make it calm and calm, to be my 'Mr. Happy Dog.'"
Nobel laureate in literature Alexievich said she would leave her pen and ink to the victims of the world, those who experienced horror but were never listened to and eventually forgotten.
Núñez's "My Friend Apollo" uses humble stories to play the strongest tone.
In November 2018, when Nunez received her certificate from the National Book Award, she was included in the history of modern and contemporary American literature along with a long list of shining names such as Saul Bellow, Faulkner, updike, and so on; 18 years after her mentor Sontag (the novel "In America") won the award, Sontag also happened to be 67 years old.
Write to oppressed women – write about encounters, stop violence
Written to the world's love pet - born as a dog, love is stronger than stone
Humble stories, playing the strongest voice, the model of human and animal stories
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