By Benedicte Grima
When I walk into a house, the first thing my eyes tune into is the presence or absence of books. I am immediately unsettled by the invisible volumes, and the space seems stark, lifeless.
When I watch speakers on television talk from their homes and offices, I scour the bookshelves behind them, imagining that they specifically showcased certain titles to say something indirectly about themselves. My husband and I comment on what they read or have us believe they read.
I’ve always felt warmth and comfort in large libraries, alone yet surrounded. I spent a summer in the cavernous reading room of the Library of Congress, my first plunge into any and all material I could find on the Middle East. There I met a man who knew his way into the stacks and led me to the underground mazes of books, off limits to all but library officials. He lived there, I thought. The vastness of the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris dwarfs its readers, set up at large tables with lamps where I could remain for hours. At university I had my own carrel where I could keep my collection of necessary dictionaries and other books for my research, where I felt safe and undisturbed. And when my stepdaughter took me to a coffee shop in Brooklyn whose décor was large reading chairs cozily wedged in corners between filled bookcases, I immediately fell in love with the warmth it exuded.
I grew up in an old farmhouse with parents from old Europe who maintained a library filled with leather bound books, a fireplace, a record player and a collection of classical music on vinyl discs. Heavily influenced by German, Russian, French and American writers and intellectuals of the 19th and 20th centuries, I developed a sensual love of books. Their dusty smell, their variety of colors and cover materials, both insulated and decorated my space like textured wallpaper. Wherever I have resided, my library found a sacred niche, referred to as “library,” “office,” or “study” depending on its function and feel. At times, when the walls were taken up, I even stood bookcases back-to-back in the middle of the room, creating library-like stacks.
I took pleasure in removing specific forgotten volumes on occasion to locate a single line of poetry or a passage that had floated to my mind, just to brush it gently with my fingers and reread it, as if the touch could reignite the emotion it had first provoked in me. Nietzsche, Dostoyevsky, Basho and T.S. Elliott were probably my most frequent visitations. There were shelves holding certain literary works and children’s books for passing on to my children and grandchildren. I was certain they would need Hemmingway, Fitzgerald and Salinger, and anthologies of poetry.
My library defined me. It nourished me. Apart from literature and volumes of poetry and folktales, it housed a large section of ethnographies and anthropological studies on the Middle East, illustrated manuscripts in Farsi and Pashto, maps, and, of course, dictionaries and grammars. As I spent most of my life studying, reading, translating and teaching languages, these were shelved closest to my desk. At least forty massive dictionaries, in French, English, Pashto, Farsi, Urdu, and Arabic graced my collection, and I used them all.
Then there were the shelves of boxed files that contained hundreds of pages of transcribed material from field work, chapbooks in Pashto translated into English by hand. More boxes yet held cassette tapes, hours of recorded narratives told by people whose faces still filled my dreams and moments of recollection. File cabinets, meticulously organized, guarded class notes and teaching materials, handwritten on yellow pad sheets. The collected books and files were evidence of my work, my worthiness, my talent.
My library not only defined me; it was my sacred space. Once inside the comfort of its walls and smells, my kitchen, chores, children, worries – all the clutter of life – eased away to leave just me, alone in my best place. I could write, plunge into translating a text, or just revisit an old passage of delight.
At the time of my divorce, it was I who left our home to set up in a small house with my son. It was the time of my first library purge, like deleting dangling participles. My emotions dulled, I boxed over 2000 books and discarded them at various used bookstores and thrift stores. I kept my dictionaries and grammars, a very reduced collection of literature, and cases of field notes, teaching materials, and unpublished work. When I moved into a new and larger home with a new husband, I acquired a large collection of old leather-bound books in French and Latin, part of my grandmother’s library from France which I had meticulously documented in earlier years. I displayed these in our living room in a giant dark ebony bookcase with small sconce lights attached on either side. It had an old-world feel, enhanced by large masks made from pig parts that my husband had brought from Romania. They watched over the books, with their protruding red noses, daunting teeth emerging from behind full ruby lips, and long white hair under black skull caps decorated with coins. Had I thought of it, I should have used that setting as my background for any online presentations. Instead, when I did an interview for my book, I sat at my desk with insipid white blinds behind me.
When we moved again, this time to our final home, it was time for a second brutal library purge, this time a greater challenge. I contacted former colleagues and friends to come plow through the treasures and pick at their discretion: dictionaries and grammars, illustrated manuscripts, Middle East ethnographies and classical literary works. The leather bounds followed me in their ebony case for decorative purposes in our new living room, although I sold some valuable ones at auction. And I kept one case of popular paperbacks for the guestroom. As for the boxes of translations, transcriptions, recordings, unpublished papers and research, and teaching materials, I reasoned that if I hadn’t used them until now, chances were I would never do so. Oh, the agony of logic and efficiency!
Our trash and recycling removal took place on Tuesdays, with recycling first. The night before, I carefully placed six large cardboard boxes containing the last files, in front of the trash bins to make it convenient for the collectors. Tuesday morning brought on light rain. I watched from my office window, to see the trash truck unexpectedly arrive first. As they opened the boxes and saw they clearly contained paper, they flung these aside, frustrated that they were blocking access to the trash bins. They were, after all, on a schedule, and had no time to linger with the recyclers’ job. The boxes, now dampened from the rain, tore to release thousands of sheets in the driveway. I ran out like a madwoman, half crying, half laughing at the irony of the scene. All that I had for decades defined myself by, reduced now to wet white papers littering the black pavement. As if it hadn’t been enough to carefully, lovingly package it for the collectors, I scrambled after its loose sheets to restuff them into the wet flimsy boxes.
Today I live with a scant, purely functional library built into the wall beside my desk in a cold windowless basement. It contains merely what I use for work: a few dictionaries, maps and reference books. The shelves are more filled with family photos, mementos, and a bottle of Writers Tears Irish whiskey with two small glasses. The wall features photos of faces from fieldwork, my “friends” as my granddaughter calls them. Still, it is my home, my sacred space.
Anthropologist and writer Grima has published two academic books (The Performance of Emotion Among Paxtun Women, and Secrets From the Field) and two historical fiction novels (Talk Till The Minutes Run Out, and Heirlooms’ Tale. This piece is from her current memoir in progress, Photo Memories. Grima’s website: www.benedictegrima.com.
Academy of the Heart And Mind 