When I first experienced the magic of writing I was reading a novel by Jules Verne. The heroes had just dropped their balloon in the desert. The heat was continuous. Their food had finished several days ago and in the morning even the last drops of water had been swallowed. My mouth was dry. Suddenly, through the warm, shimmering air, I heard my grandmother’s voice calling me for dinner.
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dinner? Do we have food? is there water?
Gradually it became clear that my late grandfather’s bookshelves contained portals. Some of them led to places that were forbidden, almost aggressively cryptic, while others were easy enough to read but the eight-year-old girl had the feeling that there was some funny business going on behind her back. Verne had balloon and submarine expeditions. It was hit and miss, but overall they were just like the bookshelf world, stretchy enough to accommodate both a middle-aged lawyer and his elementary school-aged granddaughter for decades.
I was about to find out that the magic didn’t end there. Irving Stone’s Michelangelo novel, pain and ecstasyIntroduced me to the idea of the artist, to the miracle of a person bringing something completely new and amazing into the world. To a child it seemed like a miracle. It distorted the way we define people, the way we talk about them: No, we are not our job, we are not our property. We are definitely not our school grad. We are this other magical thing, this creative ability. From coal to diamonds, that’s how I understood it. I remember walking around in a daze after finishing the novel, and feeling angry at my grandmother for wasting her infinite capacity for cooking and laundry.
No, we are not our job, we are not our property. We are definitely not our school grad. We are this other magical thing, this creative ability.
My family eventually moved to Sweden, and literary success followed. I was eleven years old and was bullied at school because I had curly hair. The initial solution of wearing a headband to flatten frizzy hair did nothing to reduce the bullying and earned me the nickname “Björn Borg”. But one Friday afternoon, during our weekly fun class, the teacher asked me to read the first chapter of a “novel” I was writing. Suddenly, the same kids who were teasing me were begging for the next chapter. For several months, the kids in my class preferred to spend Friday afternoons listening to stories rather than playing games or watching movies. This didn’t help my already inflated view of the business of writing. I felt that I had done magic, I had tamed the wild animals. Writing was now clearly magic. Of course, I owe this success to my old love Jules, and I mean this in the copyright sense: ‘my’ novel featured a trip to a volcano, and an interesting main character, whose passport no one had bothered to check, called Captain Nemo.
This was the time when I was so fed up of switching languages from one book to another that I decided to read only in English. The idea was that wherever we went in the world, there would always be English books. My problem was that until now everything was in different languages: I was born in Transylvania, a region with a significant Saxon minority, and I was sent to German-language kindergarten and primary school. Textbooks were in German, classmates spoke Saxon dialect, while my grandfather’s novels were in Romanian. My father was Yemeni (we spent most of a year in Sana’a) and he tried unsuccessfully to teach me Arabic. Eventually, we moved abroad so I could be bullied in Sweden for my weird hair. This idea stuck in my mind: one language is good, many languages are bad. I will learn another one, to keep my reading safe from any future migrations.
The decision to study only English would have been futile in most other places – we couldn’t afford to straighten our hair, let alone buy foreign language books. But the public library system in Sweden is excellent, and even in our small town there were yards of shelf space for English literature. It was also possible to request books from other public libraries. So, throughout my teenage years, I read books in my adopted language, and it was natural that at some point during my last year of high-school, I sat my mother and grandmother on the couch and announced that I would study literature. I had no idea what I was doing. Through tears, my mother cried, saying that she had left two countries and a disappointed husband so that her children would not die of hunger, and now I had perversely decided to do the same. Grandmother would talk, irrelevantly but convincingly, about wars, blizzards, and trekking barefoot to school. They both wondered how they could fail so miserably. I went into that room an aspiring writer and left it some kind of accountant.
I didn’t enjoy economics. In fact, I thought so little of the profession that for years I imagined it was possible to walk like a duck and quack like a duck, but still somehow remain a writer. I thought that if I kept reading and writing in my spare time it would be enough, that I would not need like-minded people around me. Even the childhood decision to abandon other languages and adopt English meant that not only was I now in the wrong profession, but also in the wrong language. The turning point came when I made a sad comment to a friend, something along the lines of, “In another life I would have been a writer,” and I received a blunt reply, “Everyone is what they are and nothing else.” It shocked me because it was true: There was nothing standing between me and being a writer except my choices. it Was It’s silly to say I could, would, etc., because clearly I could and couldn’t. A duck is a duck.
London, again. This is where I will find my people. It was such an obvious answer that I boarded the plane without a job, a place to live, or any contacts except a nice woman I’d met on a train a few years earlier. I had enough savings to stay in a cheap hotel for a month. But it worked: My new friend found me an apartment that rented for almost nominal amount, and that economics degree landed me a freelance job that paid modest bills and left plenty of time for writing. For many years I was incredibly fortunate to live poor in a big city but not actually live in poverty. The local library had free creative writing classes, and eventually I could afford City Lit courses, where I met friends from my writing group and finally felt at home among peers. I wrote frantically and badly and never had any sign of getting anywhere. Somehow, it turned out to be the perfect recipe for happiness.
What I would say to a child with their nose in books is that the creative impulse is not just an activity. If she persists, writing will no longer be something she does occasionally, but will become the driver and background for everything else.
If aspiring writers are always a little ridiculous, immigrant aspiring writers are full-on comedic actors. One of the side effects of learning a language from books is that your pronunciation becomes imaginary. Spoken English is not kind: “tomb” is not pronounced like “bomb”. My English cultural literacy isn’t like a curriculum, or even growing up in an educated home, is much more scattered, and people are as surprised by what I’ve read as what I haven’t read. Astronaut!Which I began writing at that time, is set in an iron-curtain world that today feels isolated even at the level of daily human interactions. Fortunately, London was full of people who did not think that any of these people could be unfit to be a writer in English.
After seven London years I became so convinced that my authorship was set in stone that I moved country again, this time to a Greek island. In a moment of cognitive impairment, my sister and I decided to buy an old house with money we didn’t have and turn it into a business we knew nothing about. The plan was to have more time to write, but in early 2020 I found myself nearing the end of a nerve-wracking situation, a Herculean recovery, grandchildren in debt, and a tiny hotel on an island no one had heard of. My sister kept asking, “Was this a good idea? Did we make a terrible mistake?” And I kept responding: “We just need to get over it. Barring some global disaster, we’ll be fine.” As you know, a catastrophic event occurred and we surprisingly were not okay. For this, too, I blame my grandfather’s books and my childhood insight into human beings as essentially bundles of creative potential. It had turned me into a kind of Wile E. Coyote, secure in the technicolor belief that no rock, let alone bankruptcy rock, could ever hurt my inner Michelangelo.
In the event, we only survived because an international newspaper published an article about our Greek island adventure, and the comedy of our colossal failures under the Aegean sun somehow struck a chord with people. Thanks to words on paper – to a story – we will live to face the next boulder. So, what I would say to a child with their nose in books is that the creative impulse is not just an activity. If she persists, writing will no longer be something she does occasionally, but will become the driver and backdrop for everything else – migration, jobs, friendships. His mother and grandmother are half-right: writing will both ruin and save him, and not necessarily in that order. I would caution him that a writer runs the risk of believing the world to be the subject of his imagination, and some of us are prone to enjoy this illusion greatly. Let me explain in more adult terms what any eight-year-old already suspects: writing really is magic.
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Astronaut! By Oona Aristide Available from WW Norton & Company.
