Karen Bermann is the author and illustrator of the new family memoir The Art of Being a Stranger. She is professor emerita of architecture at Iowa State University, and she lives in Rome.
Q: What inspired you to create The Art of Being a Stranger?
A: Honestly, I didn’t plan on writing a book and I’m still surprised that it IS a book. I’ve always worked in fragments and through a process of iteration – repetition, alteration, demolition, reconstruction, and so on.
This came to me naturally but was also a path that appeared while I was studying, and later teaching, architecture – a pedagogy of embracing chance, digression, finding.
I’ve always been amazed when people put one word after the other and then one sentence after the other and so on, just like I’m amazed when someone puts one foot in front of the other to arrive directly at their destination.
In my first years in Rome, where I live now, I used to go out to mail a letter or get a coffee and it would be four hours before I got back, because there were too many interesting things to sniff around every corner.
Over time, of course, patterns emerge – in writing, in drawing, in design, in walking, and in thinking – and, hopefully, a methodology does too, and once I had accumulated a mass of material that required some kind of coherence, I arrived at a structure which permitted it all to hang together and that structure is called -- “a book”!
All the pages are the same size! All the pages are hinged to the binding in the same way, and you turn them in the same direction! Text on the left, drawing on the right, and a chronological order for the stories: these most obvious and conventional (and useful) tactics came to me late, and came like revelations.
Life, art, and walking to the post office would have been easier had I been less easily seduced by digression, but -- Oh well.
Also, the question could be: what inspired me to draw a book? The book is a visual as well as a textual narrative and I was working in both languages simultaneously.
Sometimes an image appeared first and carried the emotional impact or atmosphere of a story – or provided a slap, or a moment of silence -- before I knew what the text would be; sometimes it worked the other way around. The image does not illustrate the text any more than the text captions the images.
And in the end my chaotic process served the content of the book well, since my intention, or “inspiration,” to the extent that I can say there was one, was to tell not a single story about a family but to represent the complexity and contradiction of all the stories by simply laying them side by side.
There’s no single narrator – the book is a conversation. There is no clear narrative of victimhood and abuse, of trauma and “healing,” of the notion of “identity.”
We’ve been hearing that language a lot -- also resolution, redemption, transcendence, closure, and blah blah blah. They’re all just packaging, I think. I was inspired against those terms. I couldn’t recognize the rawness of my experience, our experience, in them.
My father was a victim of familial and historical violence, and while he railed against it, he also paid it forward. He was torn between what he believed was morally right and the brutal survival logic of “dog-or-eat-the-dog” and he lived according to these contradictory principles.
He resisted authoritarianism and patriarchy and was himself authoritarian and patriarchal. These things never folded together, but coexisted chaotically.
What inspired me, if that’s the word, was a need to hold contradiction: tenderness and violence, silence and speech, personal memory and historical rupture. The book doesn’t try to resolve these, but to give them space to coexist.
Q: How was the book’s title chosen, and what does it signify for you?
A: It wasn’t my original title, but I was told in no uncertain terms, early on, that my original title was too crazy – too long, too weird, too chatty, too obscure, too scary – and that, if I ever found a publisher, they’d kill it off, and this was true.
My original title, which I still love though now I also see its difficulty, was “Either I’ll Kill Myself or I’ll Eat the Cookies.” It’s a spoken line, and a recurring sentiment – not a metaphor! -- from the book.
The current title was negotiated with the book’s editor and I love its stillness, its sedateness, and its accurate description of the book’s central theme. It’s the opposite of the original title. So, I love them both for opposite reasons.
The word “stranger” connotes “foreigner” and “unknown person” and “alien,” with all the smokiness of menace and strangeness that those words carry. A stranger is not at home.
My father had no interest in revisiting Vienna, where he grew up, nor British Palestine, where he’d lived for 10 years during the war. He did not consider them, or anywhere, home. He always said, “In this chair [his ratty black Naugahyde lounger] I can sit forever. In this country I am comfortable in the knowledge that I am a stranger.”
In other words, at least it was clear to him that he didn’t belong, not in New York, not anywhere. So that was resolved. Better to know than to dream. Dreaming was dangerous. You could be caught unaware of the danger you were in, always.
He raised this way of being in the world to a fine art and he passed it down to me. My struggle with this inheritance, and what I made of it in my own life, my relationship to place and to diaspora, is key to my section of the book. So I’m happy with the title. The title nails it, in a dignified way.
Q: How would you describe the relationship between you and your father?
A: Volatile, ferocious, noisy, conflictual, comic, tender, loving but not forgiving on my part. These days our relationship is quite peaceful; for the first time, there’s actually quite a lot of open sky overhead, because he’s dead. Phew.
Q: The painter and author Miles Hyman described the book as “a meditation in ink and silence.” What do you think of that description?
A: Oh, it’s such a dignified (that word again!) comment! I utterly love it. The book can be quite noisy, of course, but I do know what he means.
My training is in architecture, and what he calls “silence” we’d call “space” or “void.” In drawing, or in graphic design, we’d call it “white space.” The pages are full of white space – around the drawings, or around the text, which on many pages is minimal.
And the stories are incomplete; what happens on one page breaks off, does not continue on the next page; people and events are obviously left out; and then there are things unsaid that, in their silence, have a presence, I hope.
No cookies, but crumbs which signify that there were once cookies. And rather than saying, “There were cookies, now there are no more cookies,” there’s a drawing, because the whitespace on the page is the absence of cookies, and the silence of the drawing is, too.
And the pictures provide, in the context of reading a book, a kind of silence. Text talks – we can hear it in our heads sometimes – but drawings, I think, do not.
So the time you take to look at a drawing before you turn the page is also silence. The page isn’t even making its little papery sound as it turns, the book sits in silence while you look.
Of course in any book that speaks about being a refugee, about the experience of diaspora and war, the family in a condition of loss, there is inevitably white space, voids, lacunae, people and things missing, and things that are not said. Maybe a silent drawing takes the place of speech. And silence holds the place of who and what is missing.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: Well, I’m working on a collection of text and drawing about … stones. I spent our intense Italian lockdown in a courtyard full of stones and I started looking at them closely and they became the focus of, and point of departure for, a long existential meditation, part drawing part writing, that continues to this day.
My father used to say that when he spoke English it-was-like-carefully-choosing-and-putting-one-stone-in-front-of-the-other, to make a complete correct sentence.
And it’s true that, in ways that are too digressive to tell here, and maybe I don’t understand yet, this stones project relates to language, to the fact that now I work hard, like my father did, to be creative and expressive in a language that is not my own. I’d say stay tuned, but really I’m the one who’s staying tuned here, watching this unfold.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: I’ll be touring around with the book and its drawings this fall, – Toronto (the publisher is University of Toronto Press) in late October, other dates to be determined.
karenbermann.com is my website – all updates can be found there!
Also, I’d love to hear from anybody who wants to talk to me. You can get in touch through bermannkaren@gmail.com, or my website, or any of the myriad ways available to get in touch these days.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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