No One Sleeps in the World

Like many Americans, I have spent the last five years preoccupied with borders. On the radio. In the news. Scrolling through my social media feed. Not so long ago, the then-ruling party promised it would “build the wall” at the border between Mexico and the United States; to this, the opposition laughed weakly, bewildered—could it be true? It didn’t happen, but borders still proliferated, some more metaphorical than others—the border between fiction and reality, say, or the border between truth and lies. The borders blurred. The border between languages, the border between bodies, the border between friends, between lovers. They merged or hardened. Every time we embraced in those years, we experienced a reunification.

This interest in borders carried over into my reading habits. Even when a country’s borders close because of a pandemic, we can still read, and when we can read, we can familiarize ourselves with the long and venerable tradition of the Old World peering at the New. Ever since the earliest days of the strange American experiment, outsiders have traversed the United States, that fever dream of a country, logging their observations for audiences back home, from Alexis de Tocqueville’s notes on Americans’ curiously malleable definition of equality in the 19th century onward. And vice versa—where would American literature be without forays into expatriatism? The experience of reading this particular genre as an American citizen is at once disorienting and thrilling. Like a funhouse mirror, the reflection is recognizable, even though it may be stretched and distorted, the features elongated into something grotesque.

America (Copper Canyon Press, 2021), the most recent collection by the Spanish poet Fernando Valverde, is a 21st-century iteration of this phenomenon. Emerging from the morass of the Trump years, America serves as a useful document of a particular time in a particular country, and the book weds that backdrop to the greater American mythos. A native of Granada, Valverde nevertheless has strong ties to his country’s own New World, as the poet Carolyn Forché notes in her introduction to the book, which she also translated; he travels among and is linked closely to the flourishing poetry scenes in Mexico, Colombia, Nicaragua, and elsewhere. Born in 1980, he has worked as a journalist for El País and is the author of several previous volumes of poetry. He currently teaches in the Spanish department at the University of Virginia.

The America he writes about—and I use America deliberately, rather than the United States, to better evoke the mythos Valverde taps into—is an America that exemplifies the contradictions baked into the country from the beginning. It is a nation that espouses freedom and democracy—all men are created equal—yet treats its most vulnerable citizens with contempt. Art and violence twine like hothouse flowers; as Valverde points out in the poem “Austin, Texas, 1966”—the first in a series focused on American mass shootings—the surname of one of the earliest American mass shooters was Whitman. And another, more famous Whitman makes an appearance in “The Wound before the Tomb of Walt Whitman,” in which Valverde writes, “Tell me if it is still / possible to announce triumphant justice / and deliver the lessons of the New World.”

But in 2021, what are these lessons? The inclusion of Walt Whitman suggests another Spanish poet’s famous invocation of him and his work, written in the early 1930s, another nadir of American political confusion and collapse. Federico García Lorca’s Poet in New York haunts this collection, an influence that Valverde himself makes explicit: “Lorca arrived in the year of the stock market crash and found what he believed to be the end of capitalism,” Valverde is quoted as saying in the book’s introduction. “Lorca wanted to write the drama of capitalism. I have preferred to talk about America, what it means today, the tension between the best and the worst.”

Like Lorca, Valverde is enthralled by the American landscape as he travels between North and South, cities and countryside, observing how these disparate places mix the natural with the mechanical in the furthest logical conclusion of industrialization. “[H]ell was a foundry / assembly lines,” goes a verse in “The Sons of the Emperor Celebrate Abundance at One with What No Longer Exists.” The poem continues:

greed does not understand the justification for a fatherland,
greed circulates freely,
it crosses walls, borders, currencies, calculations,
you have to remember that this land is not yours,
you have to remember it

“The terrible, cold, cruel part is Wall Street,” Lorca claimed in a 1932 lecture concerning his year in New York. “Rivers of gold flow there from all over the earth, and death comes with it.” Reading these lines in New York now, in my apartment a mere half-hour subway ride from Wall Street—the site of so many protests, transactions, and hopeful attempts at occupation—it is striking to think how little material change has occurred since Lorca first read those lines aloud. The rhythm of New York remains the rhythm of money changing hands, a tempo that reverberates through eras, decades, centuries. Ours is an age in which anyone can borrow anything on credit: interpersonal relationships, objects, time.

These two far-flung years in America—1930 and 2020—fold in on each other when reading these books side by side, collapsing 90 years into one convincing portrait of a nation growing ever more self-conscious and beginning to fray at the edges. Time never dies these days, not on the internet and not in literature, and both Valverde and Lorca take special notice of the ways in which poverty and racism remain inescapable facts for so many in the United States. In “Guinea Slaves Arrive at the Plantation of Buenaventura (Bonaventure Cemetery, Savannah),” Valverde is quick to emphasize the relationship between the accumulation of wealth and the unpaid labor of the enslaved, who constructed many of this country’s monuments and its self-identity. In “Race,” he declares that “America is watered with the blood of civilizations”; later, he uses a sentence from Louisiana’s segregation laws, c. 1960, as an epigraph to “The Blindness,” a work critical of certain metaphors of blindness, color, and race. “The Board of Trustees,” the epigraph reads, “shall … maintain a separate building … on separate ground for the admission, care, and instruction, and support of all blind persons of the colored or black race.” Lorca, in his travels, was similarly disturbed by the segregation he witnessed. “Oh, Harlem! Harlem!” Lorca laments in “The King of Harlem,” translated by Pablo Medina and Mark Statman:

There is no anguish compared to your oppressed reds,
to your blood shaken inside the dark eclipse,
to your garnet violence, death and mute in the shadows,
to your great prisoner king in his janitor’s uniform.

The legacy of the slave trade is one of America and Europe’s irrevocable, unavoidable bonds, as other writers have pointed out: implicit on one continent and explicit on the other. The British journalist Gary Younge once observed in the New York Review of Books that “the most pertinent difference between Europe and the U.S. on this regard is simply that Europe practiced its most egregious forms of anti-black racism—slavery, colonialism, segregation—outside its borders. America internalized those things.”

It is one of the many instances in which the New World and the Old—particularly Europe—appear as though they were photo negatives of each other. Diasporas are characterized by a sense of longing, a simultaneous extreme identification with and excruciatingly self-conscious rejection of the home country. A similar uneasy longing permeates Europeans’ accounts of America, particularly those following the period of intense and rapid immigration from Europe to the United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It is as though the countries and continents were unwitting doppelgängers of one another, cousins with the same faces but incomprehensible diversions in dress, style, manner, and speech. When you encounter your doppelgänger, the real one—whichever that might be—is supposed to die. How strange it is to see your face, your mother’s face, your father’s face superimposed on the faces of people purported to be your family! The narrator of W.G. Sebald’s novel The Emigrants (1992) stares at photos of relatives who immigrated to America, these ghostly strangers who, nevertheless, share his blood. “I imagined, as I grew up, that I too would one day go to live in America. … The longer I studied the photographs, the more urgently I sensed a growing need to learn more about the lives of the people in them.”

To leave one’s home, to learn a new language, to break with the past is very emotional. But American cousins too have photographs to stare at; American cousins too will wonder what might have happened if they or some unfamiliar ancestor had never left the old country. After Lorca (1957), by the American poet Jack Spicer, is like a letter from an American cousin, folded neatly and sent from across the ocean. Writing in San Francisco in the 1950s, Spicer quite literally translates some of Lorca’s most famous poems of America. His rendition of “Ode to Walt Whitman” is perhaps my favorite; the line toward the end, “America drowns itself with machines and weeping,” lacks the stiffness of other English translations that have attempted to incorporate clunky sounding words such as lament. Spicer also includes selections of his own poems, which read like translations of work sent directly from the countries of loneliness, of queerness, the countries of poetry without regret. The introduction, cleverly, takes the form of a letter “written” by Lorca, who by that time had been dead for more than 20 years, constrained by another border: that between the living and the dead.

“Tradition,” Spicer muses in one of his own letters to Lorca, “means generations of different poets in different countries patiently telling the same story, writing the same poem, gaining and losing something with each transformation—but, of course, never really losing anything.” Borders, after all, can be circumnavigated. Boundaries can always be dissolved. “They have decided to abandon the land,” begins Valverde’s “Ellis Island,” his own retelling of this familiar story, “and the country / where memories rot.” It doesn’t matter if a European or an American tells this tale, crossing the borders of Old World into New, even just in writing, because what matters is the fantasy. America is a place but so too it is a concept. In his brief work Ellis Island, first published in 1980 and reissued earlier this year, Georges Perec writes, “Essentially, Ellis Island was a sort of factory for manufacturing Americans, a factory for transforming emigrants into immigrants. … You put an Irishman, a Ukrainian Jew, or an Italian from Apulia into one end of the production line and at the other end … an American emerged.”

But this begs the question: who is the American? In non-natives’ writings about the country, a picture quickly emerges. “One doesn’t gloss over things in America,” a character in Kafka’s unfinished novel Amerika—written, infamously, without the author’s ever having stepped foot inside the country—declares, implying some kind of national attention to detail. John Banville, writing in the Irish Times, once observed that, save for a few “not very convincing exceptions, Modernism left American writers untouched,” so preoccupied were they with “chronicling the continuing process of nation building their country is undergoing” rather than “to have time for Modernist interiority.” In the 1920 short story “A Man and a Maid,” by Hermann Ungar, a contemporary of Kafka, the narrator immigrates to America as a teenager and unscrupulously earns a fortune; “The next evening,” he writes, “I visited the New World—that was the name of the house where I had taken Stasinka,” a maid he sells into prostitution. It turns out, in a stroke of dark humor, that the New World is quite literally a brothel. “When I engage an American in conversation,” writes the Japanese novelist Minae Mizumura in her 2008 study of the global rise of English, The Fall of Language in the Age of English (a surprise bestseller in Japan), “typically the exchange follows a pattern: I try to come up with a question, and the almost always talkative American responds with a lengthy answer.” One night, a Chinese writer participating in the same international writers’ program as Mizumura slips an unpublished short story underneath her hotel door; a satire of both Western capitalism and Chinese communism, it ends with a young man moving to New York and undergoing a transfusion of Coca-Cola to replace his blood.

These are easy stereotypes, familiar in their simplicity, yet they are also funny, redolent of the same stereotypes that Americans invoke in their national anthem, their political speeches, all that propaganda about the “shining city on a hill.” The American is open, expansive, addicted in equal measure to Manifest Destiny and the ease and comfort of modernity. Americans love nothing more than to construct a national mythos; “American myths,” Simone de Beauvoir writes in America, Day by Day (1950), her extraordinary account of her travels in the States, “rest not on lies but rather on skillfully exploited truths. It is certainly true that Europe needs America. … The arrogance of Americans is not the will to power; it’s the will to impose Good.”

For Valverde, too, the idea of “America” is complicated, its stereotypes a creative jumping off-point. It is “the promised land,” a phrase he invokes frequently. The second section of the book is titled “The Promised Land”; a later poem is titled “The Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. Sees the Promised Land”; and “a god watches in the heights / or in the depths / the last miracle on the way to the promised land” are the last few lines of “Jeff Buckley Goes into the Waters of the Mississippi River,” a poem about the drowning of the singer-songwriter Jeff Buckley in 1997. But it is also the land of the “lone wolf,” of rugged individualism, of mass shootings perpetrated by solitary actors. The final poem in the book, “The Country of Lone Wolves,” is particularly bleak. Opening with an epigraph from Rudyard Kipling—“For the strength of the Pack is the Wolf, and the strength of the Wolf is the Pack”—immediately puts readers in the territory of empire. “The law / is a wolf,” Valverde writes, going on to portray Lee Harvey Oswald and his “Italian-made rifle,” James Earl Ray and his “Remington rifle,” Sirhan Bishara Sirhan and his “.22-caliber revolver,” Mark David Chapman and his “.38 Special revolver.” Valverde writes, “[T]here will always be a lone wolf willing to do the country / a favor,” a sentiment that seems to be the defining attitude of the Trump era, in which self-proclaimed “alphas,” their language borrowed from wolves, think they can take matters into their own hands. The violence of the poem is the reality of America. The stereotype was true.

If America has an enduring fault that underlies most of the country’s other abuses, it is that Protestant propensity toward black and white, bad and good. Immigration, part of the essential fabric of the country, has been demonized anew in recent years, split into the “bad”—the illegal, the recent, the non-European—and the “good”—all those grayscale photos of Ellis Island arrivals. However, much in the same way that the Old World needs the New, if only against which to contrast itself, so too does America rely on its internal dichotomies. “Individuals are as different and as separate in the New World as in the Old World,” Beauvoir observes, “but Americans more readily find ways of fleeing their singularity.”

“No one sleeps in the sky. No one,” begins Lorca’s “City Without Sleep (Brooklyn Bridge Nocturne).” “No one sleeps.” It is strange to think of a poet as famous as he walking across the same wooden slatted bridge that I have also walked across what feels like a hundred thousand times. Strange—yet this is also what history does—it tells a story, renders the strange into the familiar. And history in the United States, a place often derided in the popular imagination for lacking precisely that, is now beginning to accumulate; history is piling up and changing Americans’ perceptions of themselves and of their country. What is that old joke? Europeans think 100 miles is a long distance. Americans think 100 years is a long time. Only a few hundred years have passed in America; the country is still so young. Is the experiment a failure? The past few years have reminded some Americans that history happens for them too.

Eventually history will erode the New World. The soil will fall into the sea. The wooden slats of the Brooklyn Bridge will not last forever. But America as we know it will exist—I am sure of it—for a while yet. In the meantime, remembering the essentially arbitrary nature of borders and the fictions they embody is useful. The way they fuse people, almost imperceptibly, with their countries forces them to become unwitting diplomats—a fiction from which, if they are determined, people can work to break free. “No one sleeps in the world,” writes Lorca. No one. Not even the Americans.