A writer's words separate and unite the living and those who left without a word.... The writer is heimatlos.... The writer looks for himself in the faces of others, while knowing that when his song touches the black kernel of ecstasy, the ultimate breath, it will close in on itself.... Every writer

Maria Mailat, Silences de Bourgogne

BORN IN ROMANIA, trained as an anthropologist in Romania and France, Maria Mailat lived until 1985 in Romania, where she was a celebrated interviewer, critic, poet, and novelist. In her monthly column in the review Vatra, she interviewed Romanian and Hungarian personalities in theater and the arts. A member of the postmodern Generation '80, she fought socialist realism. She published two books of poems and one volume of short stories, Free Entry, which sold fifteen thousand copies even though it was officially censored shortly after its release. In 1986 the Securitate, Romania's secret police, forced her to leave the country. She was seeking political asylum in France while her first novel was circulating in samizdat form in Romania, then translated and published in Sweden, Germany, and France, where Robert Laffont published it in 1988 as S'il est defendu de pleurer (You may not cry). Ten years and a doctorate in anthropology later, she wrote her second "first" novel in French, Salute perpetuite; (Holy perpetuity). Since then she has published nine volumes of prose and poetry. (1)

In La Cuisse de Kafka (Kafka's thigh), a thinly disguised autobiographical novel, Mailat acknowledges her literary heritage, it includes Eugene Ionesco, who urged her alter ego Mina Bailar to write "because she cannot do otherwise"; Franz Kafka, from whom she inherited "an inextinguishable debt drawn from the agonizing tongues that the terrible and desperate animal named kafka had amassed in my foxhole"; and Paul Celan, with whom she shares "an ashen identity and the foreign nature of her language." Mailat also acknowledges the influence of Romanian-born poet Benjamin Fondane, who died in Birkenau; avant-garde Romanian poet Urmuz, who committed suicide in 1923; and various world literatures. (2) She has no ties or affinities with Romanian literary currents. Her writing displays a visionary power that unveils the imaginary, reveals evil in man, and tells terrifying tales in light and humorous tones. These qualities have led French critic Armelle Godeluck to say that Mailat is to literature what Emir Kusturica is to cinema.

In the 1980s Mailat's work underwent two fundamental changes. First, she broke off with postmodernism because it blurred the boundary between reality and fiction. Like so many Romanian authors who saw their lives altered by war and totalitarianism, Mailat is deeply committed to witnessing, remembering, and using her writing to fight the fragmentary vision of history that Walter Benjamin says is the appanage of the poor and the oppressed. Born into a multicultural Jewish, Hungarian, and Romanian family, she experienced pogroms firsthand. She writes in part to tell the twice-buried history of Romania, first by the fascist regime of the 1930s and 1940s, then by communist totalitarianism, and to tell the story of her native Transylvania, land of legends and of the supernatural, and home to Romanians, Hungarians, Roma, and Jews: these are her matrices. Faithful to a family/community cursed by fate, she embodies the revolt of moral conscience against state reason. The other fundamental change in Mailat's oeuvre was the adoption of a new language for her written work. Although Hungarian and Romanian are her native tongues, French--taught to her by a French governess and her childhood language of survival--is now central to her writing, as it was for Eugene Ionesco, E. M. Cioran, and Mircea Eliade.

The experience of a deep Balkanic cultural anchor and an equally deep cultural displacement gives Mailat a unique perspective. Looking underneath the surface of Western culture, she debunks perceived differences between East and West. The same systemic absurdities and shortcomings dehumanize relationships, the same primal anxieties and impulses pierce through civilized veneers. Romanian or Parisian censorship--one is state-sponsored and the other a cultural-social institution. The French can be just as savage or cruel as the Romanians toward one another and their minorities, including immigrants and refugees, the only difference being a certain gallantry about it. Thus reflected in a mirror held by an "other" European, revealed to themselves in the ambiguities of their own culture, the French become "other." If Eastern characters do not fit in the Western world, Western characters do not fit in their own world either. They are displaced persons who create dysfunctional realities and belie Cartesian rationality. Mailat thus destroys cultural cocoons, awakening the French to the realities of their postcolonial culture. She affirms Mittel-europa, once "other," once culturally "colonized." She unveils archetypes and myths that lie dormant at the foundation of the new Europe. And she transcends the broken pieces of the twentieth century, preparing its cultural "leftovers" into a flavorful new dish. She describes this process as the work of an "ant" gathering materials to rebuild European culture. A post-postmodern Antigone, she seeks reconciliation by claiming the unity of Western civilization in a newfound awareness of its plural, transnational culture.

MAILAT'S WORK reflects the major post-1945 intellectual trends--modern, postmodern, and post-postmodern. Her sweeping look from past to present highlights the twentieth century's brokenness. (3) Modernism is rooted in the dualist dialectics that birthed the "modern" world with revolutions, two world wars, and totalitarianism. Ushered in by violence, postmodernism displaced the Western monopoly over literary and historical discourse, ended colonialism, and gave equal voice to a wide array of individual and collective voices. What comes after postmodernism is still unclear for many, although one could argue that it is the new Europe. The myth of Orpheus, according to Mailat, provides a crucial explanation of this process. (4) In stage one, the birth and education of Orpheus are marked by a hope for a better (modern, realist) world. In postmodern, fragmented stage two, Orpheus's descent into hell is symbolized by his inability to look behind him. In post-postmodern stage three, we see "the head of Orpheus bobbing in the slatch, his song / Still beckoning from his still-bloody lips, bright as a bee's heart." (5) Out of anger, doubt, alarm, and insomnia, Orpheus searches for the sacred, the incommunicable. Having lost his station in life, forever exiled, he speaks from a new where-topos that is place-less, eternal, and universal.

Mailat's narratives use all three registers of modernist dualism, postmodemist multicultural diversity, and post-postmodernist syncretism. Her denunciation of appearances provides her with some of her most powerful dualist narratives. In La Grace de l'ennemi (The enemy's grace), her primal, sensual collages of colors, smells, sounds, and touches conjure vivid images, caught in either/or terms: love/death, destruction/rebirth, frozen/fragile, asphyxiating/vulnerable, gentleness/violence, innocence/perversity, German SS/Romanian Jew, hope/despair. Her postmodern narratives include shades and hues, multilayered poetic metaphors and multiple perspectives. This is very visible in the ministories of Silences de Bourgogne (Burgundy's silences), which are nestled against a web of silence. As a post-postmodern builder, Mailat is a writer-healer who gives the multiple stories cohesion and a raison d'etre. Leftover scraps of reality are fit together, mended not by some arbitrary construction but guided by a primal need to establish the commonality of the human experience, to exorcize fear, and to taste freedom, rebirth, and empowerment. This new literary form uses ancient archetypes and myths and clothes them in new cultural forms.

The journey from modernism to post-postmodernism is also reflected in Mailat's characters. Thrown out of balance, they live on the edge of insanity, rebellion, and rejection, experiencing multiple exiles, living off precarious and shady deals, in a semilegitimate world. Normalcy is dysfunctional, and the outrageous appears natural, normal. In this sated, anaesthetized, indifferent, inverted world, the rules of decency disappear. The complex personae of Avant de mourir ell paix (Before dying in peace) succumb to mutual Kafkaesque entrapment, fall into their own web, and perish. The taxidermist, who performs his supreme work of art on humans whom he gallantly stalks and kills, is innocently perverse; so is Chantal, a woman who roasts her lover's pet dog for a gourmet betrothal feast.

Unable to resist others, characters oscillate between strength and weakness and trade emotional power. The characters of La Grace de l'ennemi illustrate this point particularly well. Two rival heavyweight champions, the "good" Vladilen and the "evil" Zolotarov, celebrate a "last supper" complete with mafiosi warlords and prostitutes, in a Transylvanian castle, before a decisive boxing match. Having asked Vladilen's friend Malvina to dance, Zolotarov suddenly recognizes in her the victim of a carnage he committed against Malvina's village, during which he raped her and forced her to watch her young daughter being raped and killed. Malvina's dance of remembrance reveals her power/ weakness. It is also the climax of a life broken into senseless, directionless fragments.

Destitution is the ultimate phase of brokenness. Beyond having nothing, beyond bureaucratic pettiness and cultural paucity, beyond imposed and inherited poverty, destitution is an indispensable rite of passage. It is an unlearning process that makes space for freedom. Food is in Mailat's works and life a powerful metaphor. In La Cuisse de Kafka, it is a metaphor for destitution. Food--either too much or too little of it--is the dehumanization that robs our world of measure, empties its meanings, and spirits away its sense of community, and yet it is the epiphany that follows destitution. Symbol of existential unease, it is also miracle, joy, creation of a new culture. Mina, now living in France, is repeatedly asked at dinner parties what Romania's culinary specialty is. This throws her back to her hungry past in an eerie evocation.

Out of destitution comes renewal, Antigone's paradoxical freedom. Mailat's freedom is historical--freedom from the SS, the Securitate, pogroms, and self-infatuation. It is also a rebellion against collective amnesia and a victory over the emotional emptiness that accompanies the act of freeing oneself. Finally, freedom is a way out of (dualistic) relationships into (multicultural) human solidarity. Passage through destitution is indispensable. It brings out the pure and the primal, which Mailat names after James Joyce's and astrophysicists' term: quark, as in "basic particle, light, charming, strange, truth, beauty." (6)

MAILAT'S FEMALE CHARACTERS are modern versions of Antigone cast at different stages of her journey. They embrace multiculturalism, guard memory and tradition, guide and mentor others. They wrestle openly with the dilemma of either forget and fit in or remember and be ostracized. The older characters are too broken to reach freedom. Among them are Esther in Sainte Perpetuite (Saint Perpetuity), Reine Hirsch in Quitte-moi (Leave me), Rosa Rosen in La Cuisse de Kafka, Malvina in La Grace de l'ennemi. Survivors of the Romanian Shoah and of ethnic violence, amputated and mutilated in their flesh and soul, they can only transmit the courage to go on. They act as facilitators, encouraging younger women to embark on the dangerous and lonely road of self-discovery and identity construction. This road takes younger women into a new language that allows them to overcome the good/evil dichotomy, to "raise" their voices, and to accept collateral sacrifices that their actions entail.

Three younger women succeed in their Antigonian quest. In Sainte Perpetuite, Lea flees Transylvania, vowing to keep alive the memory of her grandfather, a Shoah survivor. In a variation of the fashionably Parisian menage a trois of Quitte-moi, Romanian-born Vera, the wife of a Frenchman, is trapped in a marriage that requires her to forget and fit in. Ailing from a blood disorder that symbolizes her dilemma, Vera can only heal if she accepts her father's gift of memory. Her father, too, a survivor of the Shoah and Ceau escu's jails, is now lost in exile and elderliness. For her, freedom means recapturing her roots through fusion with her father (memory) and solidarity through fusion with others (eternity). Fusion, however, retains the memory of fragmentation:

   I shall leave the space of our couple and swim against the
   current, deep in the fog of my own blood. I shall be healed
   by questions.... I shall disperse my questions, my laughter.
   I shall look at myself in the mirror, knowing that it sees and
   reflects but a part of me. No one sees everything. (7)

Mina Bailar, the central character of La Cuisse de Kafka, also attempts to make sense of the wreckage of days. She encourages solidarity among the teens in the Parisian youth shelter where she is employed, and she seeks out her writing voice. She uses the many "tongues" given to her by "the animal kafka" that refer to multiple cultural registers. By inventorying her foxhole, she not only recenters herself but creates a new universe. Her progress reflects Mailat's own personal journey, from the emigre's fresh look at her new environment toward the integration of her past and present life. Thus, Mina too could have said with Mailat that writing is her redemption, her "high wire act over the abyss. My wire was made of words folded like origami and hooked to the French language." (8)

MAILAT'S LATEST LITERARY ENDEAVORS stress the role of the writer as community-builder. In the world in which she grew up in, culture was transmitted by communities and families. This may well be one reason why her work fits so well in the new transnational Europe. Realizing the perils of today's world, Mailat affirms the writer's role as essential to fight conspicuous consumption and intellectual poverty. Her new humanism purports to "build bridges and dams between languages, erect paper refuges at the heart of the inevitable cataclysm." The writer, says Mailat, is humankind's archaeologist, the writer only testifies and should remain anonymous. (9)

Two honors recently bestowed upon her highlight her place amid a growing European public. In the summer of 2003 she was the recipient of a coveted writer-in-residence stipend funded by the late Jules Roy. She spent the summer at his house near the sacred basilica of Vezelay, discovering the rich culture of this province, which was settled early on by Balts and East Central Europeans. This setting provided the inspiration for Silences de Bourgogne. While there, she also created a new culture, sharing her native culinary and cultural flavors with the local population; in her words, she "seasoned words, smells, and tastes." Using her female writer's voice, she cultivated a new role for literature as "a way of life proper to stimulate knowing and sharing: to know oneself and to gain savoir-vivre go hand in hand with the pleasure of reading." (10) Mailat's life is inseparable from her work. Both are deeply political in their advocacy of liberation and cultural intercrossing.

The second honor bestowed upon her is the 2005 Marguerite Yourcenar Fellowship, which was awarded for the totality of her work. Residing in the late writer's home near Lille in northern France, she will continue building new literary communities, something she likes to do by organizing literary soirees that gather writers from all ages, nationalities, and walks of life, who are linked by a desire to reach truth in language and in literature. Thus she builds "a genealogy of sorts," speaking from and to "the 'New Europe,' a cultural and geopolitical formation that is in the process of radical identity reconstruction ... discovering itself a far more complex and diverse space than previously thought, a concert of intermingling voices and traditions in intriguing combinations." (11)

University of Tennessee at Martin

(1) The books include three novels, La Grace de l'ennemi (1999; The enemy's grace); Quitte-moi (200l; Leave me); and La Cuisse de Kafka (2003; Kafka's thigh). Avant de mourir en paix (2001; Before dying in peace) is a collection of short stories. There are four poetry volumes, Cailles en sarcophage (1997; Quails in a coffin), Transylvanie (1998; Transylvania), Klotho (1999; Klotho), and Graine d'Antigone (2000; Antigone's Seed). Her latest, Silences de Bourgogne (L'Armancon, 2004; Burgundy's silences), is a mixture of journal, fantastic tales, and literary chronicle.

(2) Maria Mailat, e-mail to Alice-Catherine Carls, April 30, 2004.

(3) Brokenness, one might argue, is the hallmark of the twentieth century. I modeled the term after the psychoanalytical terms oneness and separatedness. Brokenness is the state of a person being psychically broken by force, circumstance, illness, exile, or some other form of violence. It implies grieving and despair but also the search for healing and the longing for renewal and wholeness.

(4) Maria Mailat, e-mail to Alice-Catherine Carls, May 4, 2004.

(5) Charles Wright, "Returned to the Yaak Cabin, I Overhear an Old Greek Song," in Appalachia (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1998), 15.

(6) Mailat, Quitte-moi, 207.

(7) Mailat, Quitte-moi, 218.

(8) Mailat, Silences de Bourgogne, 3.

(9) Mailat, Silences de Bourgogne, 7; Mailat, e-mail to Carls, May 4, 2004.

(10) Maria Mailat, "Ecrire en Bourgogne: Une maniere d'y vivre," in Les Amis de Vezelay, September 2003, xvi. Mailat defines herself as a journalier des roots (a linguistic sharecropper), wanting words to serve as support for conviviality.

(11) Christian Moraru, e-mail to Daniel Simon, April 18, 2004.

ALICE-CATHERINE CARLS, professor of history at the University of Tennessee at Martin, earned her Ph.D. from the University of Paris IV-Sorbonne. A scholar and translator (from Polish and English to French and from Polish and French to English), she is a regular contributor to several literary journals in the United States and Europe, and her publications include eight books (one monograph, seven translations), more than fifty articles, and several dozen historical and literary book reviews. Among the authors she has translated into French are Carl J. Buchanan, Stuart Dybek, Anna Frajlich, Wyslawa Szymborska, Zofia Romanowicz, Charles Wright, Marilou Awiakta, Jozef M. Rostocki, Jozef Wittlin, and Aleksander Wat.

Mina's Hunger

Hunger's bony fingers pulled single gastronomic image from the past. My Transylvanian kitchen, filled with piles of cut-off chicken claws and decapitated heads jelled in frozen sawdust and excrements.... With a hunting knife, I am carving frozen slices and laughing. My neighbors are crowding the door. Each one takes a slice and thanks me. I take a swig of vodka and continue to carve the loot my cousin brought back from the slaughterhouse. Meat does not fall in the gutter. Just the claws and heads.... I clean the crests, scrape the brains, pry excrement loose from the claws and sing a song for the soup-to-be.

I am half asleep in a chair, glancing at the pot now and then. I am dreaming. My poems die on sticky floor tiles, in pools of reddish water. An invisible rooster perched atop a cloud crows three times, betraying my female body. I am a thief's cousin. If caught, the slaughterhouse worker might face the firing squad.

While peeling carrots, I cut my thumb. My blood drips on the salted brains waiting to be fried. Such happiness, this stolen, soiled, washed, secretly shared food! To cook is crime, incest, ode to joy. Each supper could be the last one before death's anonymous, sentence-less, requiem-less hallway.

I remembered the smell of warm broth, after the distribution of the frozen piles. It was my most beautiful culinary memory. The clear, saffron-yellow liquid tasted best in the world, unique since there was nothing else to eat. My culinary specialty was meatless chicken aspic. Just a carrot slice atop the plain jelly. This aspic earned me a place of honor in the human night, amid jagged chicken carcasses. Try as I may, I could not pry this culinary image out of its glass casket.

My French hosts adorned each dish with a million anecdotes, at each dinner, with plenty of wine. Eventually I learned to share their pleasure. I watched the living eat and drink. The dead moved their lips in the scintillating candlelight.--from La Cuisse de Kafka

AUTHOR Maria Mailat (b. 1953) COUNTRY Romania/France PRINCIPAL GENRES Fiction, Verse