Against Summary
Photographs: Genta Nishku
I hate the tyranny of the summary.
I hate its grand, sweeping statements, the way they halt my imagination, force me to account for what I’ve written, allow me no respite, deny the possibility for bewilderment. A retelling of what was already said, the summary prefers not to hear the anecdotes, musings on process, the messiness of life translated on a page where coherence is only a secondary concern, because what the summary celebrates is structure and conciseness. If time and space could collapse entirely, the summary would rejoice: what difference could there really be between one decade and the other, between that year and the one that came before or right after?
The summary is sure of itself, and this sureness, this confidence, makes me uneasy. In the immediacy of close reading, the specificity of a turn of phrase, or the mysterious unfolding of a metaphor, I feel more at home. There, I can indulge my curiosity about even the smallest items of the sentence. No word or punctuation mark is insignificant, each contributing to the sometimes intangible, mysterious process of meaning-making. If the summary imposes conclusions, the close reading initiates a relationship of possibility, where little can ever be definitive. Escaping the summary’s grip would mean to choose observation over argument, arriving at conclusions through sustained—perhaps interminable—seeing and listening.
For the sake of the argument, for the sake of coherence of the summary, I had to let them go: the unruly victims of the previous regime’s repression, setting themselves on fire, in protest of the neglect and dispossession that they continued to experience, even twenty-years after Albania had transitioned from state socialism to democracy. I was writing a paper on Albania’s efforts to smooth over its recent history, package it into an easily digestible narrative for Western consumers by speaking of the past as purely bad and present as a beacon of capitalist promise. To illustrate the discrepancies I observed between the messaging of the Albanian government and its memory institutions, and their treatment of former political prisoners, I wanted to discuss a 2012 event when, fed up with the years-long delay in the compensation they were entitled to, having been forced into hard labor camp during the dictatorship, two men self-immolated. At the time, these acts were explained as the product of political influence, the men pawns in a game where they had little agency. Those debates did not interest me as much as the way this public display of anger and desperation disturbed the image of the good victim, whose suffering can be displayed only under preapproved conditions.
“Tragedy,” Dubravka Ugrešić once observed, “becomes tragedy only when it is transposed into the genre” (“Life as a Soap Opera,” Culture of Lies). As unruly victims, whose disfiguration was caused by their very own hands, these men did not act according to the conventions of tragedy, therefore escaping the borders of victimhood that the summary had long-ago drawn, and which precluded them from receiving the—often powerless and self-serving—pity of others. Yet the shape of my argument was not capacious enough to hold them, either, since the paper I was writing was intended for a conference and was, therefore, beholden to strict rules of summation: fifteen minutes, eight pages, and even better if less. So, I left them out, assisting their forgetting.
I encountered them frequently, however. On walks near my neighborhood in Tirana, I passed the plaque dedicated to this event, which claimed the lives of one of the men. Tucked into a nondescript corner, between old buildings and new construction, in an area that few pass and even fewer stop to read, the white stone plaque, affixed to a white wall is nearly invisible, its cursive writing making it more difficult to understand. “At this location, during the months of September and October 2012…” the sign begins, resorting to, what else, but the summary.
Everything is there: the persecution during communism, the hunger strike during capitalism, the incomprehensible self-immolation, the fatal outcome for one of the men. Despite its purported lofty goals of remembrance, the plaque signals that the last word had been spoken, and the conversation, over before it started, should now move on to something else.
On the way to Trg republike, the main square in Belgrade, someone asked if we could switch shoes. Because she would be in the very front of the group, holding one of the banners which would not cover her feet, she needed her shoes to fit the dress code of the protest, and so, somewhere between the street and the square, we exchanged her colorful sneakers for my black ones. In the square, we got to work, each taking up their tasks, a smooth, almost wordless undertaking. While a smaller group stepped forward with their individual banners, which together spelled out SREBRENICA, the rest of us stayed back, helping to hold up the long, black banner that grounded us in the day’s mission of remembering. Then, the time came to break the customary silence and read from the lists of victims. We read in unison, creating a chorus of names once borne by individuals who had also lived a life, and whose erstwhile existence, at least for a moment, became the only palpable thing in our throats.
The decision to read victims’ names during this public commemoration of the twenty-third anniversary of the Srebrenica genocide had been made only after long, impassioned discussions at the office of the Belgrade-based Žene u crnom / Women in Black, the feminist anti-war activist group that formed at the start of the Yugoslav disintegration. In 2018, I was spending part of the summer in Belgrade. Each morning, I attended a language course in Bosnian/Croatian/Montenegrin/Serbian, making myself vulnerable to that part of the language-learning process where, as an adult, you must practice asking for a bus ticket or describing your likes and dislikes in more basic terms than usual. After class, I would spend the afternoon and evenings reading and writing for my doctoral candidacy exams that fall, but also meeting and talking with people, understanding the city through their eyes.
My meeting with Žene u crnom—whose tradition of silent protest had sparked my interest in studying the potential of a poetics of silence as a method of literary subversion—came in a somewhat roundabout way. Prior to arriving to Belgrade, I read a number of their publications: pamphlets, reports, academic studies, meeting minutes, correspondence and memoires, many of which were collected in the annual series Women for Peace or in special issues like the 2007 Women’s Side of War. It had been interesting to find an Albanian translation of Women’s Side of War, done by Naile Mala Imami, a professor of Albanian language and literature at the University of Belgrade. Writing to her on a whim, expecting no reply, landed me a meeting the very next day, long conversations about the Albanian Studies department at the University of Belgrade, warm invitations to gatherings at her home, and a contact that introduced me to Žene u crnom.
Thanks to this network of connections facilitated by translation, I was able to join the group at meetings and protests that summer, including the planning of the commemoration and protest for Srebrenica that July. Discussions about the event ran long as the group talked in detail about each aspect of the day: who would hold which banner, who would throw the flower petals on the ground, what color these petals ought to be, the length of our collective silence, and importantly, whether to read the names. There were concerns about the idea: what were the ethics of reading the names? How would the act honor the individuals represented? Who would be our audience? What would the reading accomplish? In the end, though the differing opinions on the matter could not be fully reconciled, the group decided to proceed with the reading of the names.
Remembering the protest now, I think of a graduate seminar where the professor loved to point at repetition in poems, comparing their literary uses with repetition’s functions in prayer. Did the poem reproduce or subvert the repetition’s supplication? In the square, reading the list of names top to bottom, again, and again, and again, until the predetermined amount of time had passed, felt like prayer only in the sense of pleading to no one and without any hope, because this repetition, responsible for the physical discomfort I felt as a tightness in my throat, was also an encounter with the mechanics of the summary: loss compounded by loss, the inevitable dissolving of each name into the cacophony.
One autumn, I spent a week reading my grandfather’s journals, spreading them out on the bed in my room overlooking the Lana, a small stream that cuts across Tirana, or bringing a journal along with me to the café tucked in an alleyway, only a block or two from where he had once lived. Written as records of his work, they did not provide as much insight into my grandfather’s inner world as I, having never met him, would have liked. As a child, my grandfather was a mysterious figure whose stern, black-and-white portrait hung on the wall or was displayed in a cabinet. The stories I heard of him then were limited to his bravery and hard work as a labor organizer, partisan, and later as a diplomat. I knew, for example, that my grandfather had been sent to prison after beating two fascist soldiers during the occupation of Albania, but I didn’t know simple things, like what he liked to eat or what nickname he might have given me. Even now, when I have learned more about him as an individual through my mother—that he loved byrek with pumpkin and played harmonica, for instance—finding his name, photograph, a speech he wrote or an interview he gave buried in a forgotten archive produces an uncanny feeling. How much of my grandfather is out there, I wonder?
His journals, spanning over a decade, offered me little indication of how he felt and what he thought outside of work. Except for a few notes about falling ill or taking the children on a picnic, they mostly contained notes on meetings with government officials from around the world; travel and itineraries to Sofia, Bucharest, Moscow, Warsaw; more mundane who-met-whom-where; budget planning; movies watched (the planning for a screening of the The Great Warrior Skanderbeg, a Soviet-Albanian production released in 1953, took up several pages of a notebook); political and cultural topics discussed; and the ever-present wishes for the success of the international proletariat. This wasn’t surprising—his position required careful note-taking—but after the nth report about what they discussed at this or that consulate, and what they ate or drank afterward, I was getting tired. Determined to finish reading the journals, I kept going, and after the initial disappointment, I began to realize that if the journals could not provide me a window into my grandfather’s inner world, what they could give me was an insight into his style, one that I could not have gained in any other way. But first, I had to become attuned to his impossibly small cursive handwriting. His writing, already difficult to read, would gain a significant slant when, I imagine, he was rushed or had a lot to cover. The pages full of this small, slanted writing were intimidating: where, in the disappearing negative space was there room for a reader, especially one who arrived sixty years too late?
Among the documents and papers my grandfather has left behind, there are many different copies of his autobiographical summaries. Every new job, every promotion, every work performance review, required the self-summary. Sometimes as short as a paragraph, other times a few pages long, these autobiographies attested to the correct political leanings of the individual. In my hands, the yellowed papers seek to tell some sort of story; they try to break the mold of bureaucracy. Born at the beginning of the 20th century, orphaned early, working class, meager savings, already working as a teenager, a union organizer, adequately committed to the revolution, and so on, the autobiographies continue, echoing one another. How disappointing the self-summary is to read and, I imagine, to write because of everything it excludes.
During the week in which I delved into my grandfather’s journals, I approached his sentences and began to learn their rhythm. What had seemed impossible to understand started to take on a more concrete shape, even as the lacunae lingered. I thought, at the time, I should take notes, for a future in which I made a second, more methodical, attempt to read the journals and make a record of my impressions. These days, when I am trying to become more trusting of memory, or rather, let’s admit it, more comfortable with forgetting, I am not as worried about not having followed through with that idea. After all, I know where the journals are located, in which corner of which old, wooden wardrobe in Tirana, a city now preoccupied more with progress than the detail of the past, and, more importantly, I know that they can’t give me what I want. Not because they reflect the minutiae of his job rather than something more intimate, but because no amount of records could provide me with a complete understanding of my grandfather.
And yet, without these journals, left to the mercy of the autobiographical summary, I would never have known his annoyance at tardiness, or his bad habit of—like me—working with little breaks, or the abbreviations he liked to use, the idiosyncrasies of his writing, the orthographic rules he liked to ignore, like his penchant for abbreviating the days of the week and spelling words with a double l, reflecting the dialect of his hometown, Korça. Who he was will continue to remain elusive, but these details help to form a modest map, orienting me toward the connections that, in a different world, the two of us could have made.
I have been wondering if there’s an excess of history. Everywhere I turn, there’s the past. At the Chelsea flea market, on 25th street in Manhattan, there are boxes filled with tattered envelopes containing old letters and postcards, one-sided correspondence you can purchase for a few dollars. Often, these photographs of anynomyous people and forgotten events spill out of the boxes and onto the vendors’ tables, where they scatter, forming mounds of pastness. As if hoping to be saved from the abyss, their eyes peer into our present, beckoning for a moment of recognition. People at the beach, people at birthdays, people at dinner, people at work, sewing, cooking, posing, dancing, sunbathing, showing off, smiling or laughing, upset or angry, etc., etc., etc.. The summary doesn’t know how to act—the photographs are so distinctive!
I can never resist. I take them with me, the young friends swimming; the old women posing with a blooming moonflower cactus, a celebration, a once-a-year occasion; anyone fashionable, or joyful, in any era; even the bygone dogs and cats. But then, I tuck the photos in a book and lose track of them, promptly, as soon as I arrive home.
“Where do you think this guy is now?” someone asks, grabbing a formal portrait of an old man smiling, wearing glasses and a shirt likely from the ‘70s. “I don’t know,” I reply, “long dead, I guess.” He shakes his head, says, “How could they do this? No family member wanted the picture?” and leaves, dropping the man into the endless pile.
“The bullet holes are still all over the walls,” someone tells me, after a two-day trip to Sarajevo. Nothing else to note. The summary works like this, too, dictating what we see and how we see it. For any city to become synonymous with war, the summary must become commonplace, which is achieved through the unquestioned regurgitation of iterations of the summaries one has heard. The impression conveyed to me, thus, would have already been determined before the visit to the city. After all, travel as an industry is wholly reliant on the summary. And while in Tirana, I see tourists flock to bunkers as summaries of communism that are bizarre enough to make for a great Instagram post, in Sarajevo I watched guides lead groups though walking tours of the war and the siege, the demand for which, I presume, comes from the visitors’ drive to summarize and the moral satisfaction of having done it so well.
Andreas Ban, the protagonist of Daša Drndić’s Belladonna and E.E.G., also loves flea markets. Over the course of two novels, he digs through history obsessively, remains unsatisfied until he has looked at the decay so thoroughly that he, too, erodes, his body failing him in multiple, devastating ways. But he can’t keep away, because no matter how many times he tries to relinquish his obsession with the past, traces of fascism emerge—at lofty literary meetings, academic events, prestigious writers’ retreats—and when that happens, he can’t look away, he must research. As a method of resisting the proclamation that Europe has now “dealt” with its past sufficiently, Andreas Ban’s obsessive descent into history and his all-consuming research uncovers every detail it can, until the opposite starts to come into sharper relief. An infinite progression of stories of violence, ones which did not fit the summary’s mold, take over, initiating us, as readers, into a world of implication that would be impossible to ignore.
A recent project researching Michigan’s maritime travel and labor history has led me down a similar path. Spending late nights searching 19th -century periodicals, I come across so many people whose names, very likely, have not been uttered in decades. Their lives come as just a flash, but they still distract me from my tasks. I collect what I can find, share them with friends, and think how improbable it is to meet someone like this, more than a hundred years later.
“A stowaway’s sad fate,” reads one headline in the Detroit Free Press from May 14th, 1879, detailing a group of longshoremen’s discovery of a dead body as they unloaded cargo from a vessel. Letters in his possession gave this anonymous body a name, and with the name, came a story. John Battersby, of No. 9 Dorset street, in London, had been an out-of-work mechanic who, according to the newspaper, decided to emigrate to the United States to find a job. Having no money for a ticket, he managed to hide in the hold of the SS Canada, bound for New York, a tin of sardines in his pocket. The few documents he carried with him, a temperance pledge, a library card, a post office order for $1 meant for an office in Boston, give us a glimpse into the life of John Battersby, his interests and beliefs, his ambition for the future. The news report does not linger on these details, however, choosing instead to imagine, at length, the mental and physical anguish this man experienced when, during an inspection of the lower decks, the captain gave orders to nail down the hatch to the hold where John Battersby was hiding. The author of the report waits until the final sentence to mention the letter of recommendation that he had with him. This letter, that confirms he was a “good, sober and industrious mechanic,” is transformed into a redemptive ending for the readers of the paper. It is not difficult to find images of this steamship, sailing forward though the billowing waves of the Atlantic, or read about its numerous voyages and the first-class passengers it transported. John Battersby, however, is made known to us not because of the privileges that wealth bestows on someone or because of a magnitude of success that is easily understood by the public. We learn about him because of his death and because the tragic circumstances of which could be turned into an entertaining news story to be read and discarded into that same endless pile as the photographs in the flea market.
The news stories I read are not always so sorrowful, of course. Like now, there is plenty of humor, adventure and successful struggle recorded—like the young girl who petitioned a judge for emancipation from her abusive mother and won, or the long-time organizer of the Longshoremen union retiring early to live on a farm. It is hard to ignore the great number of reports that resemble John Battersby’s story, but shorter in length and lacking in detail, often not even a name given for the bodies found in the rivers, or the people lost at sea. I start to gain another understanding of the meaning of our collective reading of the names in the square that July: such a close, embodied meeting with another, even if brief and incomplete, poses a challenge to the summary’s totalizing power. It shows history how somewhere, at some other time, by chance or on purpose, someone will find even us.
When the day takes on the shape of grief, its intensity forces me to face the moment I’m inhabiting. Then, like clockwork, the request arrives: a few weeks left to submit a self-evaluation, an application, a cover letter.
The summary, once again.
This time, I won’t answer.
