Her Poetic Origins

Everyone lived by thinking about flight.
         —Herta Müller

In Milan a man imagines the devil. It is 1452, perhaps earlier. The Americas are only a merchant’s dream. The man holds a brush and a palette of egg yolk and dried red pigment. The duke is paying him to paint the Devil and the Tower and also the cups and the coins. The parchment has already been sliced to the width of the man’s hand.

Perhaps the man refuses wine and paints all night. The symbols rush at him. Or they arrive slowly. The vellum waits. The man too. In the corner, a young assistant crushes gold into thin sheets.

The man does not know that his paintings will become the tarot. That the little painting of the Devil will get lost, and so will the Tower, though scholars now speculate: Perhaps the man never painted the Devil. In those years it was rare to have representations of evil.

Herta Müller won the 2009 Nobel Prize in Literature. That is the first thing I say about her to my Latina writer friends, my feminist friends, even my university colleagues—because it surprises them. How could they have missed the news?

Despite being a writer, until Müller I had never been obsessed with another writer. This fixation, which arrived in my late thirties, confused me. It also got out of control. I mentioned Müller’s novels at every job interview to teach nonfiction. I spent one afternoon taking dozens of screenshots of her 2012 speech at New York University. All of Müller’s words, translated from German to English, were projected onto a display behind her so that she looked like a woman with a bob of black hair carrying a white box on top of her head. I clicked for hours, terrified to miss a verb or a comma, until I had close to a hundred im- ages—and this was not even the famed lecture about handkerchiefs that Müller gave when accepting the Nobel Prize. These were not even the sentences of hers that had initially grabbed me by the wrist.

To this day, I can’t really picture a grave. Only a belt, a window, a nut, and a rope. I repeated this line from the first page of Müller’s novel, The Land of Green Plums, for days. The days became weeks. The words turned into song: A nut and a rope. Her novel, so image rich, became a tarot for me, and I spent hours reading the same passages, peering at nouns as though they had been painted onto the page.

The novel follows a group of college friends who defy the dictatorship in Romania. A belt, a window, a nut, and a rope. It is Müller’s story too. She grew up in Romania and wrote against the police state, or despite it. The not-secret police interrogated her for hours. She lost her job at a factory where she translated German manufacturing manuals into Ro- manian. She had loved her work, the hours spent digging into multiple dictionaries, finding the lyric in descriptions of hydraulic machine parts. At dusk, I walked around the park near my apartment in South Florida, past tall palm trees and a gazebo and empty benches, while sounds from Müller’s novel followed me like the echo of a song.

At my Roman Catholic elementary school, someone has locked the windows. It is the early eighties, the first years of the Reagan administration. The afternoon sun hangs in the sky: a yellow disc, a target of some kind. My feet dangle from a chair at the long table because the earth has vanished and taken my mother for the next several hours. Blue socks hug the back of my calves. I am five or six, my hair clamped into crooked pigtails.

My father is from Cuba and my mother from Colombia. I speak Spanish and a few words of English, mostly the numbers. One, two, three, four. The world ends at five. I stare at the locked window. The sun comes closer. The window swallows the sun, holds it in its throat like a live chicken.

The teacher who marched me into this room lifts a single card. Someone has painted a brown dog on the card. The dog pants. The woman says, Repeat after me: Dog.

I smell the treachery. The window still holds the sun in its throat. The sound sneaks into the cavern of my mouth, crawls past my teeth. Dog, I say.

The teacher raises another card. The artist has painted a child like me, except with pigtails the color of sunflowers. Every strand could be its own word: girasol, abeja, maize, limón, amarillo. The child’s hair is an opera. The teacher says, Girl. Repeat after me. Girl.

We continue. Girl. Cat. House. The entire world a memorized song.

At dusk, I walked around the park in South Florida with only lines from Herta Müller’s novel for company. Whenever someone dies he leaves behind a sack of words.

I don’t know if Colin is still alive. He may be. He was married to my Colombian auntie for a number of years, and they shared a one- bedroom apartment in West New York. For Thanksgiving, Colin cooked arroz con pollo. Tía Rosa made her famous buñuelos and her younger sister joked that the fried cheese balls were so deformed that they had sprouted tetas. I drank Coca-Cola from a plastic cup.

Afterward Colin picked up a deck of playing cards decorated with staffs, swords, coins, and cups, and he shu±ed the cards. He had fat fingers and black-rimmed eyeglasses, and he knew how to make the cards do tricks. He turned the cards into a staircase between his hands. He marched up the stairs and read the future in the cards: a job coming, a jealous neighbor, a doctor needed.

A card with seven coins means a dark girl. Four is suspense, delay, opposition.

In Müller’s novel, the four college students break the law by reading books written in German that have been smuggled into Romania. They keep the contraband in a sack hanging inside a well in a summer house. They take turns with the key. We sniffed at the pages and caught ourselves sni∞ng our own hands out of habit. We were surprised our hands didn’t blacken as we read, the way they did from the ink in the newspapers and books printed in our country.

At dusk in South Florida, college students ambled past me in the park on their way home from the supermarket. They carried white plastic bags heavy with gallons of milk, bags of raw shrimp, boxes of cereal. I walked alone near the empty gazebo, tethered only to Müller’s words: We sniffed at the pages.

Before I knew that Müller grew up speaking a German dialect with her mother, that in Romania she was part of a language minority, I could smell it. Gloria Anzaldúa describes a similar phenomenon in her classic feminist text Borderlands/La Frontera: I walk into a house and I know whether it is empty or occupied . . . I can tell how others feel by the way they smell, where others are by the air pressure on my skin. She ascribes this instinct, la facultad, as she calls it, to people who live between cultures, between languages, races, and genders.

Somehow I could smell the poetry in Müller’s novel. The Nobel Prize committee members chose her work, in part, for its concentration of poetry, for how the precision of her language depicts the landscape of the dispossessed. I used to be someone who didn’t like poetry—before I read Herta Müller’s novels.

Six cups means love and also widowhood. Three cups: dancing. Five cups: loss, but something remains.

Once in South Florida, away from the park and its palm trees, in an o∞ce with fluorescent lighting, the poet John Murillo drew the music of English words for me on a blank sheet of paper. His hand moved quickly across the white page, the ink churning out a series of symbols, some straight, others curved. He thought of these marks—the meter made manifest—as musical notes.

I stared at his notebook and saw only dashes stabbing the short words on the page between us, a song I had never learned. I knew memorization, not music. I flew into the Tower, and John, the poet, turned into the Magician.

He recited the words, stretching his voice as if he might emphasize how the symbols indicated where the letters hid the song.

You hear it? he asked.

I smiled weakly. No.

Growing up in a police state, speaking two languages plus a dialect, Müller knows intimately that words create reality. That is their power and their shortcoming. In our village dialect we say the wind geht or “goes.” In High German, which was spoken at school, they said the wind weht or “blows.” But for me as a seven-year-old, that sounded like the wind had weh, which meant it was hurting. Meanwhile, in Romanian they say vintul bate—“the wind is beating.” . . . [I]t was hurting others.

Five bastos is troubled times. Disputes, litigation, and trickery. In English, we would say five clubs or staffs, but those don’t sound nearly as awful as bastos.

The bastos crowd the television cameras, the cell phones, the hand- helds. In Tulsa, Oklahoma, a black man in a crisp white shirt holds both hands up the way his father taught him: the lifelines on his palms facing the police uniform.

In her novel about coming of age in a police state, Herta Müller’s characters use punctuation marks to warn each other if they are being followed, if they have been interrogated, if they will turn up as corpses and be blamed for their own deaths. Their rule about the letters they write to each other: After the greeting always an exclamation point, but a comma if your life is in danger.

I stare at this sentence for hours, a tarot card snuck into a novel A comma if your life is in danger.

A card with two swords means sanctuary. Or a temporary amnesty.

Five swords is defeat, funerals, and perhaps great danger from liars.

In the days after the 2016 presidential election, my mother lamented, Let the man take office. Let’s see what happens. But she said it in Spanish: Deja que se siente, which literally means, Let the man take his seat, and which made it sound to me like Donald Trump was tired and only asking to rest, and there I was, with other women and men, getting in his way with our handmade signs that read This Pussy Grabs Back and Make America Brown Again.

I had been reading Müller’s novels and the news. I did not need a tarot-card reading. Neither did anyone else.

When I clicked on the link that should have taken me to the Spanish version of the White House’s home page, I knew to expect the scrape of absence. Still, it startled: the image of a podium with two microphones, the presidential seal, the American flag blurred in the background, the single line of English-only words: Thank you for your interest in this subject.

I paused at the last word.

subject: noun:

one that is placed under authority

substratum; especially material or essential substance a department of knowledge

I knew better than to search for other parts of myself, but I did.

Sorry, no results found for ‘lgbt.’ Try entering fewer or broader query terms.

The card with the Tower represents a sudden change, the shattering of illusions.

That day in South Florida when I took almost a hundred screenshots of Herta Müller’s speech, it was a year after George Zimmerman had shot Trayvon Martin four hours north, in Sanford. It was the same year that Black Lives Matter began as a shared hashtag among three women friends. It was the year that the phrase “police state” began to take shape in my mind, to inhabit sound in a new way. I was looking for a way forward. Many of us were.

In her speech, Müller describes how the police state requires time. The first repressions I saw were of strangers; then some of my friends were summoned.

Every deck of cards can be read as a picture of the state. The swords and coins are nobles and merchants. The cups represent clergy, and the bastos, or staffs, peasants.

The symbols changed when the decks reached England and France. The swords became spades, and the coins diamonds. The cups—the priests, the nuns, the monks—are hearts now. The sta≠s or bastos stayed clubs, because poverty is the same no matter what language you speak or what border you cross.

For a few months, the novelist Carolina De Robertis tutored me in Spanish. While I spoke to my parents and aunties in my mother tongue, I had only ever taken a few classes in grammar, syntax, vocabulary. The accent marks terrified me, appearing like swords a letter lifts on the page to declare war on me, a reminder that I was deaf to the lyric.

After a few lessons I said, I can’t hear the stress in the words.

Carolina grinned. Yes, you can.

I pitied her. I knew an earnest teacher when I saw one. No, I can’t hear the stress.

Yes, you can. Look at your body.

I ventured onto a Spanish noun, a verb, a bridge of a sentence, this time watching my elbows and wrists and fingers, all of which slowly woke up, shifted, even rose when I reached the stress in a word. I stood there on the bridge, a puente of my mother’s words, the music in my forearms, my knees, even my toes.

Ten hearts is a mother, a housewife, an artist.

Müller’s New York University speech was titled “School of Silence: Herta Müller on Her Poetic Origins.” She spoke of her political exile, of how, though she had never written in Romanian, that language had become a part of her world view, a silent collaborator on all her nov- els. She spoke of her dead father and the interrogations. She spoke of dahlias and how sometimes she had to be silent about the specifics of state terrorism lest people think her insane and dismiss her. All dictator- ships misuse language, whether on the Right or the Left, atheist or religious. They blindfold the words and attempt to blot out the language’s very reason.

The screenshots of her speech sit on my computer now, a digital tarot about the artist and the police state.

note: Interpretations of the tarot cards come from several texts, including Bill Butler’s Dictionary of the Tarot; Robert Places’s excellent book The Tarot: History, Symbolism and Divination; and Serena’s Guide to Divination, an online guide to the Spanish tarot.

Read more from Issue 15.1.