Two Jazz Standards made Klezmerical and Latinate

Cootes Paradise, a watershed

I made this video for the launch of Sweet Water: Poems for the Watersheds in Hamilton. My poems in the anthology explored the revitalization of Cootes Paradise. Because we'd subsequently learned that 24 billion gallons of sewage was accidently released into Cootes and that the city council knew about it and did nothing for many months—and kept it secret even from the Royal Botanical Gardens who oversee the marsh—John Terpstra invited me to write a new poem for the launch addressing that. So I made this video featuring a drone's eye view of Cootes Paradise and adjacent highway.

ReverBENT BANTER: a poetry & music performance

I made this recording of live performances/made performances for the International Institute of Critical Studies in Improvisation Improv festival coming up later this month. 

ReverBENT BANTER is a poetry and music performance reflecting on the idea of reverberation. Because this is a time of isolation perhaps we are especially sensitive to the communicative echo of relationship and communication. We shout or whisper or breathe into the world and hope for an answer, if only to hear our own voice, our own body. Most of the pieces in ReverBENT BANTER are improvisations using voice, computer (using vocal and typewriter samples) or the Armenian duduk and were creating using reverberation and delay. The processing and the visuals were also created through improvisation.

Four recent videos: Kaddish rabbit poetry book

The following four videos were all made using some implementation of the Max/MSP programming environment for both audio and video. For example, the audio for the Rabbit video was made through a routine that I wrote which modifies a MIDI recording of the original Bach by substitution or erasure of the original pitches and by mapping some of the pitches onto percussion sounds. The result was ported to Ableton Live where I further modified it (the intonation) and choice of timbres. The visuals were made by superimposing a found animation of a rabbit onto visuals generated in Max from the rhythms of the audio. You can see what a Max program looks like in the third video because I recorded the screen as it ran. 

 Kaddish (from a Portuguese cantor singing the Jewish prayer for the dead.)




 Rabbit (a transrabbitgrification of Bach'a Aria from the Goldberg Variations and the first Invention.)

 

 Poetry Makes Nothing Happen (after Auden)(for Carl Wilson) The screen is the Max/MSP running the program that generated the sound.

 

 The Book (for derek beaulieu_

Mind Blow Open by Algorithms: Some videos and music mades with Max/MSP

I recently took a class in composing with the Max/MSP programming environment. I studied this before—25 years ago, in fact—but remembered very little. So when the opportunity to take a class with Swiss composer and educator Tobias Reber came up, I happily signed up. I thought I'd share a few recordings that I made in the class.


The first few examples include videos that I made to the music. The last few are audio and I've included the Max patch that I adapted from one of Tobias's examples.

Here are the recordings based on the expanded version of the illustration that Tobias showed in class. I've linked to the patch also.

1. Max patch based on Tobias's probability lesson. Finite Probability Drive

2. Soundtrack for artist video. The piano part was generated using the probability patch -- with 5 different iterations of five different possible notes and five different combinations of those iterations. Golem

3. Solo piano piece using the same procedure as the above except with 7 and a different set of notes/probability. Probability of Overturning

4. "Gamelan" Synth sounds. The same as #1 (five iterations) but with different notes and different sounds, though with the same probability set.

Probability of Gamelan

MORE THAN A HAT TRICK: Reflections on Home

Home, according to Google in 2015

MORE THAN A HAT TRICK: Reflections on Home
written for The Six-Minute Memoir, June 2020

My family. Four generations. Four different continents. Why? Home is where you hang your hat and no one tries to kill you. Or your neighbours.

My maternal grandfather was called Percy Zelikow. Back in Lithuania, he was Pesach Zelikowitz. He was quite a character. My mother jokes that he was a self-made made who loved his creator.

He used to say that the town he came from was so small that if you began to say its name as you walked in, you'd have walked out before you'd finished. How small was it? Let me say it. Krekenova.  I think I got to the blacksmith shop by the second syllable. Krekenova. It was a shtetl in Lithuania, near the big city of Kaunas. In the late 1920s when my grandfather emigrated, the big city wasn’t that big. The mayor’s car had the number 1 as a license plate. There were only 9 other cars.

Like the rest of my family who escaped the Holocaust, my grandfather emigrated to South Africa. Why? It was a place Jews were allowed to go. I mean, other than Siberia, where the entire shtetl was sent during World War I. And then the shtetl was burned down.

Of course, their neighbours never really liked Jews. There were countless pogroms and persecutions. During the First World War, the Czar believed that the Jews were communicating with the Germans by hiding telephones in their beards. Really. Can you imagine getting telemarketing calls—to your beard?

So my parents were born in South Africa, and grew up during apartheid. That’s like saying, “they grew up when people didn’t believe in gravity.” Like everyone with darker skin, my father had to carry a pass to identify his race, though his card said, “white.” My parents couldn’t abide by this immoral regime and, in 1960, the Sharpeville Massacre marked the beginning of real civil unrest and violence. White police killed 69 unarmed black protesters. All too familiar. Of course, my parents were the privileged white, but this place that they loved was racist and was becoming too dangerous. So they got married, my father got himself accepted to medical school in Northern Ireland and they moved. And that’s how I was born in Ireland in 1964.

It was a remarkably beautiful, if parochial place. And then “The Troubles” began—the Civil War between the Republican Catholics and the Unionist Protestants. Political turmoil seems to follow my family like feathers follow a duck.

So. Hymie Goldberg is driving home when he’s stopped by a masked man with a gun. “Are you Catholic or Protestant?” the man demands “Ha! I’m Jewish,” Hymie replies. “Sure,” the man says, “but are you a Catholic Jew or a Protestant Jew?”

As a child I was insulated from the violence. Though once a British soldier at the end of our street,  let me hold his machine gun. We also used to play chicken with helicopters near an army base. Going close and then running like hell into the bushes. Sometimes neighbours had their businesses bombed. My parents decided to leave Ireland when there was a bomb scare at our school which already had barbed wire on the roof.

We moved to Canada. To Ottawa. I admit I did get worried when I went to university in Montreal and there was a real rise in separatist sentiment, but I knew that, finally, my family had found a safe place for us to live.

We moved to Hamilton about 30 years ago. My wife, a criminal lawyer, found her first job here. So yes, we moved to Hamilton for the crime. Our three children were born here.

Four generations. Four different continents. But I wonder where is home? Or to put it another way, where am I from?

There’s an old Yiddish saying, The tongue is not in exile.  It means that if you have to leave your home, even if you have to leave everything behind, even if you bring nothing but the clothes on your back, you always bring your language with you. Your words, your sayings, your stories, your jokes, your sounds, your culture and world view. Even the ways you move when you speak. When I think about Yiddish—so, nu, what do you want, it’s true—I move my shoulders in a certain way. The world has a certain texture, a certain philosophy, a certain physics, and it’s carried in the language. Yiddish is a library of our experiences and it has travelled with us through time and space.

But I don’t speak Yiddish. I don’t have those customs. They have faded like a tablecloth brought from the old country, washed a thousand thousand times until it disintegrates. I wonder: if there hadn’t been the Holocaust, would I speak Yiddish?

I know that many Jews solve the problem of home by imagining Israel as the place where they originate from and where they belong. Gey guzunterheyt. Go in good health. Whatever Israel is, it  doesn’t feel like home to me. When I think what my brain is like inside, perhaps you won’t be surprised to know that I think of fog. Fog rolling through the brooding, beautiful, narrative Mourne Mountains where we had a cottage when I was a child. Also, cows.

Where is my home?  In language, culture, family, our bodies. But what is my culture? If home is where you hang your hat, you also need to know what your hat is. Your hat, your culture, your sense of self. For me it is a stew—a tzimmes, a goulash, a jambalaya, a salmagundi—of my cultural triangulations. What I’ve learned, remembered, half remembered. What hasn’t been forgotten. What I claim or wish to claim. What my parents, grandparents, and my children long for. My inherited or future nostalgias. How I imagine my relation to the world. How I construct a place to be, like a tent with a thousand thousand guy wires holding it up. Home is where you choose to hang your hat and a hook appears.

And so, let’s say, I’ve just come back from a long walk along the escarpment. I walk in the front door and take off my hat. Maybe it’s a stylish beret like my grandfather used to wear. I’m in the front hall and I go to hang up my beret. Look, there’s a hook. What hook? Here in this expanding universe, in this very moment and location in spacetime, in this single place of all the places, in this single moment of all the moments, a hook has appeared. It has appeared in the very place where I have chosen to hang my hat. And where is that? Turns out, it’s here.

The Marvellous Glitch: a performance

I did this reading tomorrow for POETIC LICENSE, a  festival organized by HYP

How? I will have recorded it the day before yesterday and it will be broadcast yesterday to the computer screens of the audience. The reading is text with music, animation, video, sound poetry, rambling. And here it is, in all its time travelling glory, available now for your screens. 42 minutes of wordly wordingness. (including work from my selected poems from
Wolsak and Wynn Publishers, edited by the great Alessandro Porco.

Leonard Cohen said there’s a crack in everything that’s how the light gets through. But here, everything itself is a joyful, painful, and surprising glitch. It doesn’t work how we expect it to and that’s where things get interesting and marvellous.

In memoriam, Isaak Grazutis.

My great-uncle Isaak died last night. I am honoured to have dedicated my forthcoming novel, centring around the Holocaust in Lithuania, to him. He was happy about that. A couple years ago, I interviewed him about his remarkable life.

In 1941 Lithuania, he literally walked away from the Nazis as an 11 year old. He and his aunt began walking out of Lithuania as the Nazis were arriving and the killing started. A truck full of Soviet soldiers told his aunt, "We only have room for one. Pass us the boy and we'll take him out of here." That was the last he saw of his family. (He did eventually connect with an aunt, years later, who had made it to Israel.)  My grandfather—his nephew—eventually found him in 1979 in Chicago where he was working as an illustrator/designer.

Here are three pictures. One (above) shows Isaak (on the left) this year, at 90 with his wife, Galina; my aunt, my mom and my father. Another is Isaak as a young man—he was a painter—painting a familiar face on the wall in a sports stadium. Art students were required to do this, as well as plough fields on Sundays. The last is a painting by Isaak of a street in Vilnius.

When I showed him my last novel, Yiddish for Pirates, he examined it very closely, thoughtfully, tenderly, intelligently noting and commenting on each design feature—from cover, colophon, chapter headings, fonts, and so on. He was, after all an artist and graphic designer all his life. This was his way of engaging with it, and with me, and his reading in English wasn't quite up to the novel.

Despite the hardships he endured, he was an exceedly warm, positive man alert to life's joys, humour, and beauty.

When I spoke to him, I asked him about returning home after escaping. He'd ended up in an orphanage in the Urals, then having caught a train from Vilnius to Moscow (climbing on the roof)  where he worked at a Yiddish language newspaper because of his facility with language. They noted his talent as an artist and he eventually started art school there. I wondered about the feeling of horror, of dread when he returned from the Urals, before he hopped the train. He said, he was young and with no family or expectations, the world was open to adventure and possibility. I found this hard to understand. This willingness to think of the future, to make the best of it. "Whatever it is, it is." In conversation, certainly he recalled his lost family with love, tenderness and affection. It wasn't for lack of that, I came to understand that it was something irrepressibly vital about him, something that held onto the roof of the train of life and let him make the best of things and be open to the possible.

And then there was that great story about when he worked as a graphic designer in a munitions factory where they manufactured guns and cars somewhere east of the Urals. He finagled a car out of the deal (they were exceedingly rare and expensive at the time in Soviet Russia.) And so, not knowing how to drive, he drove it the several thousand miles back to Vilnius, over frozen rivers and in deep cold. Also, without any windshield wiper fluid or heater, if I remember correctly, he used vodka.

I wrote more about him here 

My great-uncle Isaak died last night. I am honoured to have dedicated my forthcoming novel, centring around the Holocaust in Lithuania, to him. He was happy about that. A couple years ago, I interviewed him about his remarkable life.

In 1941 Lithuania, he literally walked away from the Nazis as an 11 year old. He and his aunt began walking out of Lithuania as the Nazis were arriving and the killing started. A truck full of Soviet soldiers told his aunt, "We only have room for one. Pass us the boy and we'll take him out of here." That was the last he saw of his family. (He did eventually connect with an aunt, years later, who had made it to Israel.)  My grandfather—his nephew—eventually found him in 1979 in Chicago where he was working as an illustrator/designer.

Here are three pictures. One (above) shows Isaak (on the left) this year, at 90 with his wife, Galina; my aunt, my mom and my father. Another is Isaak as a young man—he was a painter—painting a familiar face on the wall in a sports stadium. Art students were required to do this, as well as plough fields on Sundays. The last is a painting by Isaak of a street in Vilnius.

When I showed him my last novel, Yiddish for Pirates, he examined it very closely, thoughtfully, tenderly, intelligently noting and commenting on each design feature—from cover, colophon, chapter headings, fonts, and so on. He was, after all an artist and graphic designer all his life. This was his way of engaging with it, and with me, and his reading in English wasn't quite up to the novel.

Despite the hardships he endured, he was an exceedly warm, positive man alert to life's joys, humour, and beauty.

When I spoke to him, I asked him about returning home after escaping. He'd ended up in an orphanage in the Urals, then having caught a train from Vilnius to Moscow (climbing on the roof)  where he worked at a Yiddish language newspaper because of his facility with language. They noted his talent as an artist and he eventually started art school there. I wondered about the feeling of horror, of dread when he returned from the Urals, before he hopped the train. He said, he was young and with no family or expectations, the world was open to adventure and possibility. I found this hard to understand. This willingness to think of the future, to make the best of it. "Whatever it is, it is." In conversation, certainly he recalled his lost family with love, tenderness and affection. It wasn't for lack of that, I came to understand that it was something irrepressibly vital about him, something that held onto the roof of the train of life and let him make the best of things and be open to the possible.

And then there was that great story about when he worked as a graphic designer in a munitions factory where they manufactured guns and cars somewhere east of the Urals. He finagled a car out of the deal (they were exceedingly rare and expensive at the time in Soviet Russia.) And so, not knowing how to drive, he drove it the several thousand miles back to Vilnius, over frozen rivers and in deep cold. Also, without any windshield wiper fluid or heater, if I remember correctly, he used vodka.

I wrote more about him here 

An actual rejection letter and a poem...

I received this remarkable rejection letter and posted it on Facebook, as one does. Then Lillian Necakov suggested that I made it into a poem, though it really is a perfect thing in itself. I had recently read this article in the Globe by Marsha Lederman and was inspired by what Marsha was writing about, including what Michael Christie had written above his desk.  Here's the rejection letter and subsequent poem.



Thank you for submitting five poems to __________.

We are unable to accept your work for publication this time around. The Poetry Editorial Board responded quite variably and strongly to these poems, admiring their craft and wit and tonal range, but disagreeing no less variably on which they preferred and why. The poems struck a bit like bowling balls, knocking different readers down in each case. Other readers elsewhere may well respond differently, too, and most of the poems will likely find good homes, so you should certainly keep them in circulation.

A Transcreation of Der Lindenbaum (Schubert/Muller)

Paul Evitts over on Facebook asked if I would do a free translation of Müller's "Der Lindenbaum" (a poem used in Schubert's Winterreise (listen to this beautiful recording of it by Jonas Kaufman, here ) since I have been doing versions of others of the poems. My procedure is to run the text through a series of Google Translate operations (and sometimes a N+7 procedure) and then edit. I did this with this poem -- Zulu, Basque, Samoan, Macedonian. When I edit, I look to what I see in the changed text--and of course, what I see reflects how I'm feeling and what in going on in the world. Thus this poem suffused with grief and violence. 

HOW VISUAL POETRY WILL CHANGE YOUR LIFE AND MAKE YOU A SNAPPY DRESSER: A WORKSHOP

A WORKSHOP/TALK WITH:

Gary Barwin
Dani Spinosa
Michael Sikkema

Kate Siklosi: She Bites (Two Visual poems)

For poetry makes nothing happen
it survives,
A way of happening, a mouth

      —Auden:  In Memory of WB Yeats

from OO: Typewriter Poems by Dani Spinosa

from OO: Typewriter Poems by Dani Spinosa

OUTLINE:

What is visual poetry?

What do you like about it, what interests you about it?

What does visual poetry do that more normatively textual poetry does or doesn’t do?

Do you think it is especially good in these times, or for the net?

What are some examples that excite or engage you (you could include a piece of your own.)

Something about your process or techniques.

An activity or prompt for viewers for making their own visual poetry.

All other business.

Visual poem by Michael Sikkema

LIST OF RESOURCES

Electronic Literature CollectIon
https://collection.eliterature.org/

Train Poetry Journal
http://trainpoetryjournal.blogspot.com/

Languageye: Series on Visual Poetry by Gary Barwin
https://jacket2.org/commentary/its-poetry-it-aint

OO: Typewriter Poems by Dani Spinosa (Invisible Publishing, 2020)

Luke Bradford: Four Paths (poems as labyrinths)
https://timglasetcom.files.wordpress.com/2018/0
7/Four-Paths-Free.pdf

Phases of the Moon

Blur, after lines by Joe Fiorito & Andrea Bennett

After HOW NOT TO READ CELAN by Andrés Ajens (trans. by Erín Moure)

After "How Not. to Read Celan" by Andrés Ajens (trans. by Erín Moure) published in Dispatches from the Poetry Wars and dedicated to @ErinMoure who has been a constant poetry inspiration#translation #duduk http://DispatchesPoetry.com

Typewriter Music for Dani Spinosa

I made this piece of typewriter funk in celebration of Dani Spinosa's new book of typewriter poems, OO

And here's the eye "catching" video:

WORSHIPFUL COMPANY, a story for a time of Covid-19

UNION OF HOUSEBREAKERS OUT OF WORK DURING COVID 19 BECAUSE EVERYONE IS STAYING HOME. ASKS FOR HELP FROM GOVERNMENT!

Julie Tepperman, through Convergence Theatre, created this amazing thing: she organized people to commission artwork from artists, including writers, who lost have lost work due to Covid-19 cancellations. The artists would create work based on prompts that these patrons provided. It's a fantastic initiative. You can read about it here.  I was delighted to be commissioned to write a story.  The prompt that I received from someone called Peter was basically something like the headline above (he recorded it.) It was a hilarious bit of satire. Below is the story that I created from the prompt. Thanks very much to Julie, and of course, to Peter for commission the story. 

WORSHIPFUL COMPANY

Gary Barwin

Jimmy, my neighbour, duckwalks down the front steps with a big flatscreen, puts it on the curb and goes back in. He emerges with a laptop and places it beside the TV, then leaves and returns with a couple of his fancy watches and puts them down, too.

            “Morning, Jimmy,” I call across the street.

            “Morning.” I get the paper and go back inside.

We’re safe inside a house. It’s where we have our corn flakes, our sandwiches and our yelling matches. Where we dance in the kitchen or smooch on the stairs. Where homework gets done, or scrapbooking. Where we fall asleep on the couch or watch another episode of Star Trek.

It’s where the whole family drama occurs.

But sometimes we go out. To restaurants. To visit our nans, our dads, our children. Sometimes to go on holiday. To the pub. To work.

That’s why we signed the agreement with the Worshipful Company of Home Burglars. We go out, they get to work. They burgle our things. It’s like a tithe. They don’t steal everything, just the appropriate amount.

We return and some of our things are gone. Like my wife.

They have their work, we have ours. Together we keep the economy going.

And then the Plague. I was planning on taking my boys to Nova Scotia this summer, but then everything changed. We’re not allowed to travel. We’re not even allowed to leave our homes. So, there goes that plan.

I’ve been satisfied with the burglars. They’re clean and always leave things as they found them, except of course, for what they’ve removed. They’re efficient. They jimmy the door or cut the screen in the upstairs window neatly, don’t cause unnecessary damage, are in and out in no time. And they don’t do anything strange—like dancing around in my wife’s underwear. When her underwear could be found in my dresser. I’d know if they did. It’s a feeling. Only once did they finish the orange juice, but the guy left a note. It had been unseasonably hot and he’d been working all day. He promised it wouldn’t happen again. It hasn’t.

They could filch the dark, or hope, take a bit from the boys’ future dreams, but they don’t. They leave my musicality and my wit. It’s only the simple things: laptops, jewelry, TVs. Fair enough. People got to eat. And they’re fully insured. They leave what’s essentially us. You can always replace the things. They’re only things.

Time was, you might surprise a burglar going downstairs at night for a glass of milk. Or rather, they’d surprise you. Things didn’t always end well. A knife attack. A bullet hole though your favourite pajamas. Someone cleaved in two by a regimental sword.

But since the agreements, all that’s past. They only work when we’re out. They watch the front door and the back. They check the garage.

It’s win-win. They have daytime shifts. And there are less deaths. Not once have either of my boys woke to a burglar in their bedroom snagging their PlayStation or the collectable coins Grandad gave them.

I’ve considered joining. It’s an honest day’s work. It keeps you active. You can work with friends. And there’s room to advance your skills, even move into management. Jimmy was a member of the Worshipful Company for a while, but that was before he met Carol.

The Plague. It’s been rough. I’ve been lucky and my ma and da are ok, though they’re in isolation out in the country. My ex’s new husband was taken to hospital and had to be put on a machine. They say he’ll live. I’d say good riddance but he’s a good man and treats the boys well.

I keep a list of the things I’ve lost. My wife. My brother to cancer. A whole series of dogs, jobs, friends, months, girlfriends. My buddy Nick in a car accident. Jamie to a gun. And, of course, TVs, silverware, computers, cameras, VCRS, golf clubs. I wonder where they are. The people. But also, the things. Some guy like me out there on the links, a real duffer, using my 5-iron and ending up in a sand trap, maybe Facetiming his boss from a holiday in Cuba with his new girlfriend. That list. It’s my life. What I had. What I lost. Reading it, you could imagine what I still have. What’s still possible for me. At least, I hope so.

Since the Plague, everyone is stuck inside, and the burglars are out of work. They tried to get compensation from the government but they’re proud of their trade. So they struck a deal. Each day a homeowner or resident is to carry a selection of their things to the curb. A team of licensed burglars arrives in an unmarked van and ransacks it. No one gets hurt.

Last week, I left a few old iPhones, a CD player and a computer monitor on the sidewalk. I slipped in a bit of sorrow and some kind of unsettled feeling that I couldn’t identify. I thought it was a good time to get rid of them. I know I shouldn’t have. I got a call. I had to take them back.

Or else.

My boys are coming to visit me this weekend. It’s the only place they’re allowed to go and when they get here, we can’t go anywhere. I’m thinking that we’ll haul the old filing cabinet out back and take turns smashing it with a tire iron. Then maybe we could watch a movie that we’d all like, maybe Star Wars or else Lord of the Rings.

In memoriam Nelson Ball.

In memory of Nelson Ball (1942-2019) who died yesterday. Beautiful man and poet.


Here is Stuart Ross's announcement:

With profound sorrow, I share with you the news that Nelson Ball has died this afternoon in Brantford, Ontario. Quietly, peacefully, smiling, close friends by his side. A brilliant poet, a kind, generous, and beautiful person. 1942 - 2019

Redaction Ellipses

Redaction, for Martón Koppány (written while listening to this podcast interview of Martón with Geof Huth where they talk about his work and visual poetry.)

Interview with Peter Carey: A Long Way from Home

A while back I had the great privilege of interviewing Peter Carey at the Toronto Public Library about his amazing recent novel, A Long Way from Home. Really fascinating to hear about how he approached addressing the history of Aboriginal people in Australia.

 

The Tongue is not in Exile: The Polyglot Polyphony of Heritage Languages used in my novel, Yiddish for Pirates and other English Language Fiction.

Selfie in the Gents at the National Library of Ireland

The Tongue is not in Exile: The Polyglot Polyphony of Heritage Languages used in my novel, Yiddish for Pirates and other English Language Fiction.

Talk for AWPI (Associated Writing Programmes Ireland)

Friday, April 26, 2019. University College Dublin. 

A few years ago, I began writing a novel called Yiddish for Pirates.  So nu, you have a better idea? Most nights, I’d walk my dog and think about what the book would be about. My regular route took me past the Shalom Village retirement home, lit-up, large and ship-like against the dark. To me, each window seemed like a porthole into a life and it made me think about how each of us is a book, an encyclopedia, an entire library of memories, emotions, and stories. Sometimes we can’t put it all into words. Sometimes the words begin to disappear, become vague, or are difficult to retrieve. Sometimes, the words the best container or conveyance.

I know this will surprise you, but Yiddish for Pirates turned about to be about…Yiddish-speaking pirates. It’s also true that at a signing, a reader came up to me, quite irate, upset that the book wasn’t an instruction manual for pirates to teach them how to speak Yiddish. 

My Jewish pirates live around the time of Columbus and my protagonist is a Bar Mitzvah boy from Eastern Europe who becomes a pirate after being expelled from Spain at the time of the Inquisition.

When I began writing the the book, I thought about who might be a good narrator, who might be there to observe all that piratey stuff. Then I realized. Of course, a parrot would be the perfect narrator. It sits on a pirate’s shoulder and observes everything, like a Go Pro camera. And like a Greek chorus of one, it can comment on the action and make sarcastic asides. As I like to say, there’s a wisecrack in everything. That’s how the light gets in. 

And parrots learn the language of whoever they are with, so this Polly was a polyglot. But, parrots (at least the ones that speak human language) have to use the limited language they know, the limited language they have received—the words, tropes and stories—to express their reality. To mediate between themselves, their thoughts and the world. And to question whether this language is expressing their reality or is constructing it.  This is just like human beings. Or writers. 

And then I read about the explorer Humboldt who at the end of the 18th century came across an indigenous village that had been entirely destroyed by war. There was no trace of its people or its language left—it wasn’t a written language. Except, there was one parrot that had flown away from the village and knew about 30 words of their language. The language survived because the parrot was a kind of a dictionary, a book. So Humboldt wrote these words down, and was able to figure out the meaning of many of the words since the parrot used them in context. And then I read about a contemporary artist who had taught modern parrots to speak this language. From parrot to parrot, this language, this way of seeing the world, this world view, was passed down. Like with books. 

I  also read about domestic parrots in Australia that escaped into the rain forest and taught the wild parrots how to swear like suburban Australians, but maybe that’s another thing.

Maybe my narrator is the original parrot who sailed with my pirate and Columbus, or maybe that parrot passed his story down to another parrot who passed it down to another one and so on. The parrot is like a book. A dictionary. A language.


Memory is an important concept for Jews, but it’s also a feeling. We feel deeply that we should “never forget” and we do our best to pass on our stories and culture, from great tragedies to kugel recipes to jokes and family stories. But we also pass on that “sense” of Jewishness. 

I wanted my book to be filled with Yiddish because it carries the culture, the humour, the memory of Ashkenazi Jews, Jews from Eastern Europe where my family is from. And so my parrot spoke Yiddish.

There’s an old Yiddish saying that I quote in the novel, The tongue is not in exile. It means that even if you have to leave everything behind, even if you are expelled, like the Jews of  Spain in the Inquisition, even if you bring nothing but the clothes on your back, you always bring your language with you. Your words, your sayings, your stories, your jokes, your sounds, your culture and world view. Even the ways you move when you speak. When I think about Yiddish, I move my shoulders in a certain way. The world has a certain texture, a certain philosophy, a certain physics, and it’s carried in the language. And like many Jews, though my knowledge is limited, I have a great love of Yiddish—it’s in my bones.

Yiddish in its vitality and its humour, has an ability to sum up the richness of experience and Jewish being-in-the-world. Wherever Jews went, with or without possessions, they also brought their language. And for me, Yiddish expresses a quintessentially Jewish irony and a fatalistic yet celebratory humour. They tried to kill us but instead we lived and celebrate with good food and family. Life is hard but still, we’re around and can tell jokes about it. We’re often a pessimistically optimistic people. Is the glass half full or half empty? Full-shmull. As long as we have a glass.
Yiddish is a library of our experiences and it has travelled with us through time and space. Somehow, even if you don’t know much Yiddish, you can still get a sense of its way of engaging with the world. In my novel, I engineered a way to have my main characters speak Yiddish even though much of the story takes place in Inquisition Spain where the Jews spoke Ladino, a Hebrew-Spanish hybrid.
By the way, did you know that Columbus brought a translator who spoke Aramaic and Hebrew with him, in case they ran into one of the lost tribes of Israel? 

“So, how have you been, this last 2000 years?” 

“And what did you have for breakfast? Was it eggs?”

There is a particular music when words from another language are included in a text. It has a je ne sais quoi about it. A pinch of spice which colours the whole thing. There is a particular energy between the words of the main language of the text and the words from the other language. An electric charge of sound, colour, sense and history leaps back and forth between them.

A few years ago, I read Junot Diaz’s The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. It contains a lot of Spanish from the Dominican Republic and its America diaspora.  The Spanish adds a distinct new characteristic to the English. Like adding a clarinet to a string quartet. Or bagpipes. It’s apparent how rich and vital the language is, from the sound alone. I don’t know what any of it meant, but it makes it clear to me that I’m listening to people speaking from a culture that I am outside of. It isn’t meant for me, but at the same time, it allows me to listen in a bit. I also know that Dominican Americans would understand everything. Diaz is making a deliberate delineation between being inside and being outside the culture. It’s both an aesthetic and a political choice.

I’d add that the notion of using a non-English or a heritage language can be extended to dialects or regional variations.  I say all of this aware that I’m here speaking in Ireland and that many authors have integrated Irish and Anglo-Irish dialects into their writing. In Canada, this technique is increasingly used by Indigenous authors. And it is occuring for the same reason. A remembering, an articulation against erasure, of being spoken for, a reclaiming of culture, land, place, sense of being in the world, of concepts indivisibly connected to language and tradition. After all, the Canadian government banned these languages, explicitly trying to extinguish them and their speakers. This is sadly a familiar story and one that I’m sure you recognize.

I also think of Holocaust survivor Paul Celan and his awareness that he was writing poetry in German, the language of the regime of the oppressor. 

As writers, as storytellers, as people who live in language, it is our job to claim the language for our own, to interogate its assumptions. To speak the language and not have the language speak us.  Language gives us access to the collective memory, the grammatical and semantic technology embedded in its structures. Language gives us access to a word horde, a grammatical repository, a choreography of meaning. But we need it to be a trampoline and not a trapdoor. We need to be able to have ownership of this inheritance, to forge it into the tool that we need to shape and express our world. Perhaps this means expanding it, reforming it. Perhaps this means we need to communicate using other languages with which we have a different relationship, a language which relates differently to the world, the dominant power structures, the prevailing traditions, cultures or economic or social structures.

Which reminds me. There was this sailor, Yankeleh. He leaves a pair of pants to be repaired baym shnayder—at the tailor. After seven years, now covered in scars and tattoos, he returns to pick up his pants. They weren’t ready. 

“Gevalt!” Yankeleh exclaims. “It only took Adonai himself six days to make the world. You’ve had six years!” 

“What is there to say, now that the world is done?” the tailor replies. “So, nu, your pants are a tragedy . . . but at least we can talk about them.”