"Who was I when I wasn�t looking"
| Friday February 7, 2014 13:29
Harvard Square: A Novel, is narrated by an Egyptian Jew from Alexandria. He is 26, already a looser and a failed graduate student. He has a second chance at passing his comprehensives and pursuing his doctorate at Harvard University. It is 1977 and the narrator, never named, tells his tale of loneliness and failure, from the position of an observer, who has distanced himself from others and receded into a cynicism to allow for justifications of his demise if he fails his exams again in January 1978.
'All I had been doing these past four years was hide from the merciless world outside the academy, burying myself in books all the while resenting the very walls that sheltered me and made it possible for me to read more books. I hated almost every member of my department, from the chairman down to the secretary, including my fellow graduate students, hated their mannered parties, their monastic devotion to their budding profession, their smarmy, patrician airs dressed down to look a touch grungy'.
From the shelter of his fourth floor walk up in Apartment 43 on Concord Avenue, where the door was never locked, he would view his world with disparagement. Here he was, after an education in Egypt and a love of France, at Harvard University, at the apex of aspirations for further study across Africa, especially his Maghreb-for students from Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia and Egypt, and he was losing it.
Then he discovered a little basement dive just off Harvard Square, the Café Algiers where he could sit all day and read and observe other customers. This became his home away from home. There he met Kalaj, a Tunisian driver of a rare Checker yellow cab who would sit and fulminate against the world, against white America, 'les amerloques', women who were jumbo-ersatz, all in fluent Maghrebi-accented French and poor English. Kalaj, a proud Berber, took a table in the centre of the café and shot off his mouth like a Kalashnikov machine gun.
Kalaj, who had a sensitivity for those around him and what they were like, achieved by one darting look, and then in a loud diatribe, would hone in on their assumed biases and prejudices, just to tease, irritate and fluster them. Kalaj was like a volcano, and particularly enjoyed ranting against American women. He was particularly observant of the women who entered the Café Algiers and their potential for being his partner for the night. He was a master womanizer, a dragueur, who had the knack of letting woman feel they were taking the first step, selecting to be with him. Invariably they were in Freudian analysis.
Café Algiers, open from early morning to late at night, had a faithful North African clientele, plus employees who spoke Arabic, like Zeinab, who was also Tunisian. Kalaj enjoyed riling them with statements like, 'As Arabs, we were infinitely better off as colonies”. No one was spared his caustic words, as he enjoyed embarrassing people. To our narrator, Kalaj commented in his first exchange, “Just like a Jew: always answers with a question'.
Though they were opposites, the narrator and Kalaj quickly became fast friends. 'He was proud to know me, while outside of our tiny café society, I never wanted to be seen with him. He was a cabdriver, I was Ivy League. He was an Arab. I was a Jew'. Yet, 'I envied him. I wanted to learn from him. He was a man”. He was a master fornicator. He was 'the product of a frightened child in harsh French, colonial schools where they taught you self-hatred for being who you were (if you were half French), for not being French (if you were an Arab), and for wishing to be French (if you were never going to be)”. They each shared a “desperate inability to lead ordinary lives'.
Kalaj had left Tunisia 17 years before and was now in his mid thirties. He told people that he was from “a tiny town in Tunisia, Sidi Bou Said, adding, the most beautiful whitewashed town on the Mediterranean, south of Pantelleria”. He had only been in the States a short time, and was already in trouble with immigration.
Aciman captures succinctly the essence of ambivalence that possesses students at Harvard (I should know, I had a decade there). The keen pleasure they take in being submerged in a place of excellence and being able to rise to challenges and contribute to that image while at the same time they know that they each have a use by date; that for the majority at Harvard it is ‘Up and Out’. Students’ acute awareness of this dichotomy-the best of the best and not good enough at the same time-creates an ambivalence that each person handles differently. When on a high they are dancing on top of the world; when on a low Harvard was irrelevant, self-satisfied, ongoing, corrupt, totally bogus, hypocritical and fraudulent, a place to flee from.
For our narrator in his doldrums it was a shift to the sleazy side of Harvard Square, an involvement in non-student undercurrents, and an escape into their totally different preoccupations and fantasies. For Kalaj it was the proverbial wine, woman and song. His penetration into Kalaj’s realm provides an escape from his academic commitments, a release from his loneliness, and a more masculine (male supremacist) approach to women. From being alone, he finds he is now able to open up to and become friends with women: Linda, then Niloufar, Allison and Ekaterina. Through Linda he discovers the roof terrace on their building; from Niloufar Ansari, an older Iranian woman and Francophile, new pleasures; with Ekaterina a Romanian au pair, youthful enthusiasm and from Allison, a WASP, the laidback self-possession and confidence of those already pre-endowed. From all of them he may learn to conqueror his fear of freedom, his fear of commitment, and his inability to sustain a relationship. They will be supplemented by a commitment to Harvard-at least until it is his turn to go up and out. For Kalaj, the working-class taxi driver, without a green card, it is definitely out. Our fair narrator has become a Harvard square; while Kalaj will be deported.
The narrator still wonders about his identity. “Who was I? How many masks could I be wearing at the same time? Who was I when I wasn't looking?” Allison wanted to know what was wrong. “How could I begin to tell her when I didn’t know myself? What truth could I speak when I didn't even know the truth?”
When he was 15 in the 1960s André Aciman's Jewish family was expelled from Egypt. His third novel is a winner. He is great at capturing people and the way they talk. There are some wonderfully imaginative scenes, especially when Kalaj and the narrator go to Walden Pond for a picnic in the Checker cab with their current girlfriends. Don’t miss it.
E-mail: sheridangriswold@yahoo.com