“In the air, that’s where my roots are”: An Interview with Alta Ifland

Alta Ifland was born and grew up in Communist Romania. She came as a political refugee to the US in 1991 and, after getting a PhD in French language and literature, she taught for a brief period in academia, then started to work as book reviewer, a writer and a literary translator from/into Romanian, French and English. She is the author of two collections of prose poems (Voix de glace/Voice of ice, bilingual, self-translated from French; and The Snail’s Song) and two books of short stories (Elegy for a Fabulous World and Death-in-a-Box). Ifland’s novel, The Wife Who Wasn’t (New Europe Books)—a satirical comedy about Moldovans versus Californians in a post-Communist world--and her translation (with Eireene Nealand) of Le Camion by Marguerite Duras (The Darkroom, Contra Mundum Press), were released in Spring 2021. At present, she is working on a novel inspired by the life of the first two of Romania’s queens, Marie and Elisabeta.

My first introduction to reading about life under communist rule in Romania was Herta Müller’s The Land of Green Plums, in which the author recounts the immense suffering of Romania’s German minority during that time. You were married to a political dissident and came to the United States as a political refugee in the early 90s - could you tell us more about the harsh realities of life in Ceaușescu’s Romania?

This is a very complex question to answer in a few sentences, but I will try: Romanian people lived for about two decades (the 70s and the 80s) under conditions that were similar to those of war. (In fact, we had a saying: “If we had a little more food and heat, we would live like in the war.”) The stores were always empty, and when there was food, there were huge lines and you could buy products only with coupons. Everything was state-owned, there was no private property whatsoever, aside from the house or apartment in which you lived. There was no freedom of speech, the power was off for most of the day, in winter people had to wear coats inside their homes to survive, and often we had no running water for weeks in our blocks of flats. I remember there was a period during my high school years when I was drunk for days because all I drank was wine--since there was nothing else to drink.

My (now former) husband was a dissident because he had signed a petition protesting Ceausescu’s plan to demolish all of Romania’s villages and to replace ancestral homes with blocks of flats in order to better control the population. My husband and I had 24-hour surveillance—there was always a car in front of our building, and when we left home, we were always followed. And, of course, we received letters threatening our lives. After the regime fell, we discovered that the Secret Police had installed a microphone behind our bed—yes! Apparently, the dictator’s wife got a kick from listening to the dissidents’ sex lives. I also discovered that my ID had a code encrypted in it that said “this person is dangerous for the security of the state.” I was in my early 20s. If the anti-Communist Revolution from 1989 hadn’t succeeded, we would have been murdered or, at the very least, imprisoned.

Since you mentioned Herta Müller’s The Land of Green Plums I should add, for those who haven’t read it, that this is a book that captures in an exceptional way the ethos of that world, and I highly recommend it.

Did your writing career begin during that time? It seems to me that most Westerners have trouble navigating the waves of cognitive dissonance when trying to understand the precarity of cultural production in communist countries: while the Soviets produced (in my humble opinion) the greatest film adaptation of Sherlock Holmes in existence, for example, they were also arresting and jailing dissidents for the possession of so-called “forbidden” literature well into the 1980s…

I began to “write” as a child because I was always a passionate reader, and I think my mother still has numerous notebooks with my “literary” output from that time. I was simply imitating what I was reading. The first novel I ever read was Mark Twain’s Adventures of Tom Sawyer (I read it for the first time when I was 9—in Romanian, of course), and so, this became a formative book for me. The second novel I remember was Jane Eyre. I read that between the ages of 9 and 10 because there was a film series on TV made after the book. This was the paradox of Romanian TV during communism: we lived in a very isolated country, we couldn’t travel anywhere, everything that was “news” on TV was lies, and the TV program kept getting shorter because of power outages (by the 80s the TV program was reduced to a total of 2 hours per day, which was entirely devoted to the cult of personality of the Dictator, who was being treated like a Deity in a country that was officially atheist—atheism, by the way, was enshrined in the Constitution!), yet during the 70s we could watch movies from all over the world (with subtitles--this is how many people learned foreign languages, especially English). It is true that most of these films were old because Romanian TV didn’t have money to buy new films, but in a way this was good because they bought many classics from the 50s and 60s. So, the paradox is that someone who grew up in this very isolated country had access to a cultural trove that most Americans never have access to because all they see on their TVs is (contemporary) American productions or, at most, British. Isolated as we were, we knew more about the world than some contemporary Americans because we were very aware of our isolation and kept trying to break free through the “lives of others,” ie, by watching foreign films and reading books by foreign authors. The concept of “literature in translation” did not even exist; we didn’t make the distinction. Literature was literature, and the more foreign it was, the more attractive. By contrast, Americans who grow up in freedom have little or no interest in other cultures.

This is a very big digression from your original question, so let me try to answer it: although I wrote fiction in Romanian as a child, I was never a writer in Romanian because I never wrote creatively in Romanian as an adult.

In your novel The Wife Who Wasn’t the Moldovan immigrants who knew of America only through the soap opera Santa Barbara were shocked to discover, in reality, how different the real Santa Barbara was. Let me ask you: is there anything that remains shocking, perhaps even disorienting for you, about American cultural life?

In order to answer this question, I would need to write a whole book. In fact, such a book is already in its first stages, but I don’t have time to work on it right now. I always wanted to write such a book—the provisional title is “American Insanity,” by the way—but I never attempted it until recently because I knew I could never publish it. I now decided that I would write it and maybe publish it in another country. Let me give you an example about American cultural life that I find extremely disorienting: “anti-racist sensitivity training.” The idea that in order to be an “anti-racist” one needs to attend a “sensitivity” session or read a book in 12 steps that tells you exactly how to be an anti-racist is something that could have been born only in the country that has invented the “self-help” industry, the same industry that always fixes you in a few steps, whether you want a firmer butt or  to change your life. Aside from this, who are the people conducting this training? Every single one of them is a representative of corporate America. Let’s spell things out: in the US, corporate America is hired by American schools and universities to lecture people on “social justice” and “anti-racism.” This is beyond Orwellian: that the very people who are the incarnation of capitalism have found a way to lecture us all on its evils. And to make a nice buck with it.

As for “anti-racism,” I watched a few videos with such training, and I couldn’t decide whether to laugh or cry. The latest one I watched featured a (white) woman who blabbered incoherently for about half an hour about how all whites are racist, which, she said, is OK—It’s OK, she said, because we all struggle with this; I have struggled all my life, she continued, with my feelings of superiority as a white person. If someone had told me that a white person could acknowledge her racism publicly with no shame whatsoever and that this person is also being paid to lead “anti-racist sensitivity trainings,” I wouldn’t have believed them. But I saw this with my own eyes: in this country racists are teaching us how to be anti-racists. Teachers are being humiliated and silenced by these bureaucrats who, clearly, are enjoying this game of power—how could they not enjoy it? After all, some of these academics are people with very impressive credentials. There is no greater “empowerment” for an ignorant, bigoted person than to humiliate someone who has the very thing they lack: knowledge. Do you think it’s by accident that these bureaucrats are equating “whiteness” (another very interesting, purely American concept, which, by the way, is untranslatable in most languages) with “logic,” “reason” and “the written word”? No, this is the revenge of ignorant, resentful America against cultured America. Add to this the fact that it is not only the administration that is inviting corporate America into schools, it’s often the students themselves. The same students, by the way, who never miss an opportunity to publicize their “anti-capitalism.” Imagine how privileged you must be to pay thousands of dollars to go to school, yet to despise your teachers so much that you, the student, feel entitled to tell them that you have nothing to learn from them, that you know better what and how they should teach, and that a corporate consultant is better positioned to enlighten you on the most problematic aspects of your society! In fact, these “anti-capitalist” students have completely absorbed the logic of capitalism and are themselves its perfect representatives insofar as it is as “(paying) customers” (which is how corporate America sees them) that they are making all these requests. A student can’t tell a teacher what to do, but a paying customer certainly can!

It seems to be the latest incarnation of American exceptionalism.

Ever inventive and flaunting an exceptionalism unequaled by any other nation,  21st century Americans have devised a never-before encountered form of political repression: self-repression. For the first time in the history of humanity, the citizens themselves are at the origin of their own repression. While the world is full of authoritarian rulers who, in one way or another, are attempting to curtail the citizens’ freedoms, in the United States it is the citizens themselves who have taken it upon themselves to voluntarily destroy all their cultural institutions and, ultimately, the very notion of “culture,” insofar as cultural exchange in itself is framed as a political transgression with the dubious label of “cultural appropriation”—never mind that anyone who has ever created anything in the realm of culture knows that all cultural artifacts, starting with the Bible and ending with the latest pop song, are a series of appropriations and recontextualizations.

This toxic mixture of religion and politics (or rather, secularized religion) has transformed contemporary Americans into the world’s most tribal and retrograde force. You may say, “Yes, but how about the Chinese or the Russian or Belarussian governments?” Well, exactly. In these cases, we are talking of an external repression, a repression of a force from the outside—the government; but in the case of the American people, the desire for repression comes from within the people themselves—it is a frightening type of tribalism, all the more so since it is framed under the noblest of sentiments.

Do you think this current state of American life, that is, the incessant debates over “political correctness” and “cancel culture” prohibits a lot of transgressive and visionary writing from being published?

There are many, many reasons why transgressive and visionary writing cannot be published in this country, and “cancel culture” is only the tip of the iceberg, or rather, the culmination of many decades of an anti-intellectual culture. “Cancel culture” would not have existed without social media, but “political correctness” was already here when I stepped foot for the first time on an American campus in 1993. I remember my puzzlement at the time at the idea that American academics not only were not bothered by this concept but that it was them who insisted on its implementation. How can you call yourself an intellectual and claim that you are teaching “critical thinking” when you embrace so uncritically a concept that tells you that there is a “correct” way of thinking? The truth is that there aren’t many intellectuals left in American universities. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but a lot of them call themselves now “activists,” which is the very opposite of an intellectual. An activist is someone who has all the answers, and no questions. There are two types of people who have all the answers and no questions: religious fanatics and activists. Actually, only one type—most forms of political activism are sublimated religion.

You have cited Paul Celan as one of your literary influences, which of course piqued my interest, as I am writing to you from his native Czernowitz. Could you expand on the ways in which he influences your work?

I began to read Celan while studying philosophy in France in the mid-90s, because my mentor, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe—who was one of the greatest French philosophers of the 20th century—had written a book on him, Poetry as Experience. I immediately felt a strong affinity with Celan because of our multilingualism, and because, like me, he felt torn between his Eastern and Western selves. He spoke perfect Yiddish, German, Romanian, Russian and French, and although he had no Russian blood, he often stated, after he had settled in France, that he was “Russian.” I am convinced that this was his way of asserting his difference from the French (of all his identities, the Russian one is the most “Eastern”). In fact, I would say that “our” part of the world (Celan’s, mine, and yours now) is a synthesis of the Eastern and Western worlds. Romania in particular is a synthesis both linguistically and culturally: the language is Latin (Western) with many Slavic elements, but the religion is Christian Orthodox (Eastern). I do have a book in which Celan’s influence is present: The Snail’s Song (prose poems). I even have a poem in which I quote Celan, but without naming him: “Water: what a word.” But the line that I feel closest to is “In the air, that’s where my roots are, there, in the air.”

I feel compelled to point out the fact that this Romanian-Jewish-born poet was made accessible to me by a French philosopher, because in the Romania that I grew up in, no one cared about Celan. This situation in which a writer of a certain origin is revealed to us through another culture is, in fact, not that exceptional: this is what literature is, a state of constant fluidity in which the spirit of a great writer is transmitted to writers from other cultures through a process of constant rereading and reappropriation, a process guided by “elective affinities.” Only narrow, uncultivated minds imagine that cultural artifacts are some kind of personal, segregated assets that need to be guarded against intrusion from the outside. This tribal vision of “culture” is the direct result of a society in which identities have been commodified. In such a society, culture is downgraded to a constant fight for a privileged, symbolic status.

Celan famously said a writer can only authentically express themselves in their native language, which for him, a German-speaking Jew who had survived the Holocaust, was a source of great anguish. But he spoke many languages: he translated from Russian and even wrote some poems in Romanian. You speak Romanian, French, and English and work in all three languages - is there a language in which you feel the most at ease as an author? As a translator?

Indeed, he has seven (if I remember correctly) very beautiful prose poems in Romanian, which have been translated into English by Julian Semilian, and which I translated into French many years ago—but I can no longer find my translations. Yes, I speak and write in English and French, but, ironically, I don’t write in Romanian, although Romanian may still be the language I know best. The truth is I no longer have a native language because I left Romania 30 years ago; at the same time, both my French and my English are imperfect because I learned the first in school and the second as an adult. So, I am trilingual, but all the languages I know are mastered imperfectly. They are the languages of someone whose roots are in the air. (I also speak Italian, but I don’t write it.)

You have written both short stories and novels. So tell me: is the short story a “stepping stone”, for lack of a better word, to the novel?

I think it is, though probably not for all writers. It was for me because I started as a short story writer, and then, I decided to write a novel to see if I can do it. I like to challenge myself.

Did I hear correctly that you are working on a novel about the Romanian royal family? What do you think about the enduring nostalgia of so many people for the time when monarchies dominated the European continent?

People always desire what they no longer have. Personally, I never had nostalgia for the monarchy (at least, not before I began to work on this novel). I am, indeed, working on a novel about the Romanian Royal Family, but that is not out of nostalgia, but because of a set of very special circumstances. I began to do research on the Romanian Royal Family in 2017 when I was in my third year of near-total isolation from the world. I had fallen chronically ill in 2015 with a mysterious illness that almost killed me and forced me to live isolated (until the pandemic, actually, when my health started to improve) in very difficult circumstances—for two years I couldn’t even swallow. I was living in my home, alone—my family couldn’t afford to come see me from Romania, and the first time a member of my family was able to visit me was 29 years after my arrival in the States—and so I was extremely depressed. So, when I accidentally discovered on Youtube that the Romanian Royal Family had returned from exile, I started to obsessively watch videos about it, at first, out of curiosity or to kill the time—also because I was in constant pain and was incapable of doing anything else—, and so, little by little, I began to use these videos as self-medication. I was watching videos about all European royal families in which one could see these creatures adorned with jewelry and tiaras worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, creatures that a hundred years ago were considered quasi-divine, and so, in order to survive a condition that had transformed me into something barely human, I began to “self-medicate” by identifying with these royals. I was the lowest of the lowest, away from all humanity, hidden in my home, while these royals were one step removed from the Divine. I became Queen Marie.

Interviewed by Kate Tsurkan