The Book of Departing, by Sanda Golopentia

The unthinkable pain of exile, the ripping away of all that is known and taking a leap off a precipice into the unknown...How Sanda Golopentia explains this with profound insight, depth and first-hand knowledge. It almost had me in tears, as I thought of all those I love and have loved who walked the path of such a departure.

Sanda Golopentia is a Romanian-American intellectual living in Providence, state of Rhode Island, married to Constantin Eretescu. She is a French professor at the prestigious Brown University and has a very prolific CV indeed. The Brown University site says the following: "Professor Golopentia's areas of specialization include 20th-century literature and culture, Francophone Studies (Belgium, Switzerland, Canada, U.S.), 17th-20th century theater, critical theory, semiotics, and philosophy of language. She is the author of, among others, Les Voies de la pragmatique (1988) and co-author (with M.Martinez Thomas) of Voir les didascalies (1994). Currently Prof.Golopentia is working on a book entitled Histoires de dires."

She worked in the old Securitate archives for four years on the 203 volumes which made up the dossier of a major trial in Roumania, that of Patrascanu, to whom her father (Anton Golopentia, sociologist) was a victim. 'The Last Book' is an inestimable document for the study of history and sociology - difficult to trace limits between the two - of communist Roumania of which she herself is a living illustration of the system. Within it, the 184 declarations during her father's imprisonment (January 1950 - May 1951) under torture, his mémoires and letters written in prison. It reproduces complete declarations or fragments of them from other detainees of the same Patrascanu trial written between 1945-1953 as well as the reports of the 'enquêteurs' at the moment of the reopening of the trial in 1967. Totalling 990 pages and published in Bucharest in 2001 under the name 'Ultima Carte', fifty years have passed since his death in prison. It is his name, as author, which appears on the cover. (see here for more information on Lucretiu Patrascanu and the trial: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucre%C5%A3iu_P%C4%83tr%C4%83%C5%9Fcanu )

The Book of Departing

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Sanda Golopentia is a professor in French studies. This piece was first published in Lupta, the Romanian-American newspaper based in Providence, and later in the book "Cartea Plecarii (The Book of Departing)," which is being translated into English.

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By Sanda Golopentia

There is a book that we can only write together and which, once brought to light, would give us strength. In my mind I call it "The Book of Departing." In it would be narrated, in many voices, by women and men, old, adult and young, artisans, workers, intellectuals or farmers (for, at least from previous migrant generations, at least some must exist among us as well), the moments and the thoughts before going away. The defeats, the revolt, the exasperation, the determination, avid curiosity, unforeseeable circumstances, hopes and plans that propelled us toward another continent, with other foods, different climates and another mindset. How was the day, the hour, how was the moment when the thought of leaving got complete and confronted us, brain scattering, blinding, fate-like. What was the street, the town or the city like - in Romania or elsewhere - where we found ourselves at the time? How long did we bear this new core, silently, among our fellows, among smells, voices in the dark, trees and lights that we had already begun to long for. How did we first voice this unnatural rejection and what was the response we got. How we then set out breaking, undoing, stopping, putting an end to things. How we cut short friendships, emptied houses, broke habits and abandoned the barely established rhythm of the days. How much we struggled, tired in new ways already, how much we were helped, opposed, how much understood and how much condemned. How many we made grieve, inspired, saddened, made happy and through what actions. What were our new doubts like. How did we get ready, steel ourselves and how did we imagine what was to come. What did we think we knew and what did we learn. Which were, once arrived in the U.S. or elsewhere, our first surprises. Our first successes. Our first wounds. With whom did we connect since then, for good or for bad. What does it mean to de-country oneself, what part of this experience can be put into words and transmitted to those who are emigrants like ourselves, to those who remained in Romania and try to understand, to those from the countries in which we now live like ghosts and to those who will follow us.

Some among us left especially in order to break away, distance, separate, thus choosing - after the agony of weighing them all - between alternatives that were equally bad. Active, sharp, decided in solitude, the departure belongs to them entirely, with its cruelty and vitality, its courage and despair. Others debated at length with those close to them: wives or husbands, children or parents, and lifelong friends. The departure occurred communally, energies got summed up and responsibilities shared, the devastating blade was not thrust up to the handle in their lives. Departing included some gentleness and warmth, a joke at times, the protection of someone dear, good complicity; a part of life, of its fond relations continued. For still others, the departure was fated - a husband, a child, a wife, a parent "remained abroad" and "claimed" them, "called" them, "bought" them. Their decision was of another nature, marking a solidarity with those now embarked on a one-way path, rather than a break with place or lifestyle. The question they had to answer was: Here without X or anywhere else, but with her, with him, with them? People or place? Dog or cat?

Every departure had its wealth of happenings, its cocoon of hesitation and aspiration, its share of analysis and inner death, of assessment and rationalization. We still bear their unabsorbed weight, although we forget with each day that passes details which, if reminisced, could illuminate perplexities giving us, perhaps, a longed-for continuity and harmony. When we come to evoke this threshold we keep silently ill-at-ease or utter platitudes. When asked "Why did you leave?," "How did you leave?," "How did it happen?" we answer confusedly, almost identically whatever the question and often stridently, stunned by all that does not go into words at once or through the effort of one's mind only.

Departures are, however, the experience that unites us unfailingly, our truly common dowry. We all went through them one way or another. Each of them demands to be known and retained in its abstract scenario, in the strain of its secret subtle calculation. Mircea Eliade often spoke of the superlative existential moments that define a culture, a human community. He was referring to moments of religious experience. For us - and by "us" I mean at least three generations of Romanian emigrants - such a defining existential climax is represented by what we used to call while still in Romania the "definitive departure." The definitive departure as an interruption of identity, relinquishing people, language, your name uttered as it truly sounded, some time long ago, in a childhood of the soul. As a separation from friendly tastes and noises, an amputation of part of your life, sometimes unexpectedly and fleetingly evoked, by one more inadvertent word, vague pain, unintentional gesture. ...

We are not the only ones to have known the phenomenon of mass departure. Germans, Poles, Hungarians, Russians and Czechs likewise have left. Jews, Armenians, Gypsies are peoples that lived aspirated in the whirlpool of departures - strengthened, transfigured or decimated by them. French Canadians, formerly chased out of Acadia, continue to be traumatized by what they still call "le grand dérangement (the "great disturbance")." Once, long ago, whole villages of Scotts left - with tailor and baker, with priest and midwife - for more auspicious horizons. ...

It is not enough to say that people do not leave because of a good life or that definitive departures do not occur from the West toward the communist countries in Europe and Asia. Beyond the general political aspect of this modern phenomenon of mass migration, the different communities of displaced people, refugees or emigrants occupy with respect to the country they left specific positions that have to be defined and understood in their uniqueness.

We lost, when leaving, the quality of native experts. We no longer speak our language unfailingly and inventively. We no longer practice our professions (when it so happens that we have here the same profession we had at home) without a feeling of estrangement. We do not talk lightheartedly with our new friends. The Romanian parents of American (or so acculturated) children cannot be, for them, an oasis of trustworthy and infallible certainty. We eat with wonder, listen slightly aloof, step on invisible stilts. We have an accent in all we do. But with respect to departing, if we want so, if we do not hide, if we do not try to forget it at any cost, we are unbeatable. This we know and know well. We should write it, clarify it to ourselves while doing so and start to understand it. We should write it together because, as with any social phenomenon, departing is only visible through corroborations, additions and subtractions, reductions to a characteristic average solidly obtained.

A game to be played while on vacation this coming summer: Write one page, or two or three on how one departs from home, with or without the perspective of arriving in one specific place, with or without articulate arguments, with or without hopes. Write as it happened. Write attentively, orderly and, most important, exactly, so that something of what we know may remain and bear fruit and so that in Romanian life there may come to be one less blank spot. Write with the feeling of the old archivists who dipped their pen in ink and drew a line when one more truth had been engraved in lasting calligraphy in the registers of eternity. Write not in order to assess, for this will be done later, not in order to interpret, for this still concerns us too closely, but in order to enter into possession. Into possession of what? Into possession of the negative wealth of departing, from which it remains to be weighed what good may come."

Comments

[Dan Ghelase]

Am asistat la o prelegere a Sandei Golopentia la MTR, privind amplele cercetari etno-sociologice facute de tatal ei Anton G in stepele ucrainiene si rusesti in timpul WW II in teritoriile din spatele frontului.
Au fost descoperiri fabuloase, dar multe documente au fost pierdute, privind asezari cu urme romanesti - ale oierilor mocani care au ajuns din vechime cu oile si au colonizat pana pe Nipru si Volga...
Sunt realitati expuse si in Enciclopedia Romana de Diaconovich, de la Sibiu, din 1904