Norman Manea - The Fifth Impossibility - Essays on Exile and Language

The Nazi crimes were a precise execution of Nazi ideology, which openly professed hatred and murder. The Stalinist crimes, we are told today, were actually in contradiction to Marxist ideology, which claims humanistic values at its roots. (Marx: “Man is the most precious capital.”) If Salman Rushdie’s book has truly offended the sensitivities of the Muslim faithful, is it then necessary to burn the book and to kill the author? Is such a decision in accordance with the deep beliefs of the Islamic religion or is it, in fact, an aberration, a desecration of the Muslim faith? Is this the decision of a dictator who is courageously executing the inherent, irreducible tenets of his faith, or of a dictator who is criminally subverting his own ideology?

The answer to these questions shouldn’t be proposed, I think, by Christians, Jews, or atheists; they must come from Muslims themselves, from Egyptians, Pakistanis, Turks, Moroccans, Yemenites, Palestinians, Jordanians, Iraqis, Yugoslavian and Soviet Muslims. In answering, Islam will unveil itself to the world. That answer has become important not only for Muslims but for the sake of international peace.

In recent weeks, not a few people have found the strength and common sense to repeat, even for those who do not want to hear, that: a work of fiction is to be judged by its spiritual and literary values, no matter how irritating or enraging it may be, whereas a society — as well as a secular ideology or a religion — is to be judged by the manner in which it tolerates the challenge of a work of fiction.

In the silence that comes from the socialist East, I think I also discern this message.

Reading the García Márquez article, datelined “Havana,” in the New York Times a few days ago, I took away a more vivid image of the tragedy that has overtaken Elian Gonzalez than I had previously culled from the American papers. With the powerful storytelling talent that distinguishes all his work, Márquez conveys to the reader, in less than one of four newspaper columns, the biography of the troubled marriage of an amiable Cuban couple and of their amiable divorce, and also reveals in the deliberate misapplication of a single word in his final paragraph — the word “shipwreck”—his own distinctive ideological slant on the constitutional realities of American life.

In the article, we find out about Elizabeth Brotons, “an amiable and hard-working chief housekeeper at a hotel,” who fell in love at 14 with Juan Miguel Gonzalez, whom she married at 18, and from whom she separated finally on “the most amicable terms.” Everything, according to Márquez, seemed to have been as perfectly amiable in the aftermath of the couple’s divorce as it had been during their marriage — until, that is, the mother, without the father’s knowledge or permission, decided to take their son out of Cuba.

As Márquez writes, “An infallible formula for being well-received as an immigrant in the United States is to be shipwrecked in her territorial waters.” So Elian’s 28-year-old mother, who wishes to defect to America with her son, starts to prepare just such a shipwreck. And so here begins Elian’s tragedy — not on American soil but on the Cuban shore. Foolishly, Elian’s mother undertook the illegal voyage on an illegal boat — no other means of escape was available to her — in order to bid goodbye forever to amiable Cuba. She is helped by the leader of this risky adventure, her lover — according to Márquez, not at all amiable, but in fact a neighborhood “tough”—Lazaro Munero, who takes fourteen people in his improvised aluminum boat, including his younger brother, his aged father, a convalescing mother, as well as his partner’s entire family. The trip was plagued with mechanical mishaps from the start, and ended abruptly in “an inferno of panic” at sea, when the boat capsized after the failing motor was thrown overboard by the captain. Among those who drowned was Elian’s mother.

Had the adventure succeeded without incident, mother and son would, of course, have settled in Miami, and Elian would no longer have lived more or less between two divorced parents as he did in Cuba but would have remained solely in the mother’s household on American soil. For Elian and his mother, this would have constituted a solution to their Cuban problem — surely a drastic problem, in the mother’s estimation, if it required the drastic solution of this dangerous journey by sea. But instead, remarkably, Elian survived and was received in Miami by eager relatives, who had themselves found an American solution to their own Cuban problem some decades earlier.

From the start, American public opinion was heavily in favor of the boy being returned promptly to his father, who appeared to love him, who immediately claimed him, and who, without hesitation, asked for his return. After considering the family situation in Cuba, the American legal authorities swiftly decided in favor of Elian’s father’s claim and against the claim being made by Elian’s Cuban relatives in Florida. The Florida relatives, as was their right, then utilized whatever legitimate legal channels were available to challenge the judgment of the authorities and to seek to have that judgment overthrown. Their stubbornness was fortified both by their ferocious hatred of the Cuban communist system and by their exuberant exploitation of rights as free citizens in a free country. Despite their legal efforts, however, and despite the pressure from right-wing American politicians in Washington — and also despite the clichéridden, noisy demonstrations (complete with schoolchildren making canned speeches) against America staged by the Cuban government throughout Cuba — the American judicial system, coolly, commonsensically, in accordance with the law, without an explosion of vile propaganda or stupid political rhetoric, continued to confirm its initial decision to return the boy to Cuba. All of these details are missing from the painstakingly detailed account of Elian’s tragedy as narrated by García Márquez.

Márquez concludes his account by saying, “the real shipwreck of Elian did not take place on the high seas but when he set foot on American soil.” Is this really so? Is this a proper conclusion to draw from the story Márquez himself tells? Of course it isn’t. Didn’t the shipwreck — to accept Márquez’ metaphorical touch — begin on Cuban soil when his mother decided to leave her country and was without the legal means to do so? Didn’t the shipwreck begin when, in lieu of any other, she accepted the risks for herself and her child of this crazily hazardous solution? Didn’t the shipwreck begin in her persistence, in her desperation, in her determination to reach the other shore with her child for whatever reason, good or bad?

And isn’t this shipwreck part of a larger shipwreck, the shipwreck of communist Cuban society? Isn’t it because of the larger shipwreck — one known to the entire world — that the Cubans in Miami who are now so enraged wound up in Miami in the first place, and that the Cubans who continue to flee Cuba wind up coming to the United States to live? And in the fanatical zeal of Miami’s Cuban community to keep Elian in America, militant, misguided, narrow, propagandistic, and politically driven though that zeal may be, isn’t this community responding to the equally militant, misguided, narrow, propagandistic, and politically driven zeal that has, for decades now, marked the undemocratic, one-party, one-man, rule of the island across from Florida?

Whatever the ending may be of this sad and convoluted story “on American soil,” it will not be a “shipwreck” in any sense of that word. It will end on American soil as it began with Elian’s arrival on American soil: as a case for the courts. The conflict will be resolved through the orderly workings of the judicial system of a free country, which, as Márquez fails to note in his thorough documentation of the Gonzalez case, Cuba is not.