Harvard Book Store; WGBH Forum Network; Adam Schwartzman: Eddie Signwriter

Hi everyone. I'm Lou and on behalf of Harvard bookstore I'd like to welcome you to this evening's event with Adam Schwartzmann. He joins us tonight to discuss his newest book The sign maker. I want to take a moment to tell you all about some of coming events we have. Tomorrow night we have former presidential speechwriter Jeff Shesol sorry is this like doing a little bit with his book supreme power on April 15th we have the author of Life with Jaane Martel at the First Parish Church and also an evening of Rock Roll and books with author Steve Allman at the Brattle Theater on April 16th. You can find more information about these and other events on our calendars at the information desk. Events are also listed online at Harvard dot com but I recommend signing up for a weekly e-mail newsletter on our website for the most up to date book store news. After Mr. Schwartz wins talk we will have a Q&A session followed by a book signing at this table. You'll find copies of every sign maker at the registers up front and of course you have my personal thanks for buying your books from Harvard bookstore by attending talks like this one you are supporting an independent business as well as allowing us to host more great events for our community. Today I'm

pleased to welcome Adam Schwartzmann. He joins us tonight to speak on his novel at the signwriter. Travelling through Africa and France the young painter any sign writer escapes scandal and searches for a new beginning. Publisher's Weekly writes that Schwartzman debut novel bears testament to his background as a poet as lush description and bright playful prose chronicled the travails of every sign writer born in independent Ghana and raised by his father in Botswana. He grows up an introspective young man often perceived to be an outsider as he strives to redefine himself through his new life and a new love aspects of his past remain less than hidden. This wide ranging and gorgeously written novel has huge heart in Eddie's quest for identity is as sad as it is uplifting. Mr. SCHWARTZMAN attended Oxford University as hell positions in the South African national treasury. The World Bank and the International Finance Corporation. He is the author of three books of poetry the good life the dirty Life and Other Stories Mary Africa and books of stones as well as the anthology 10 South African poets. And now we please join

me in welcoming Adam Schwartzmann. Thank you very much and thank you very much for that warm welcome. It's really wonderful to be here in this beautiful town and in this gorgeous bookshop Wow especially the secondhand section downstairs. I was walking around Harvard Square for the reading and thinking and I think it all the more as I stand here with these books in my hand what a wonderful thing it is when people get together to tell stories and to listen to stories. It's quite magical in fact and also very very intimate. A good story is a pathway into a person's soul. And I would like to before I read from any signwriter read a poem from my last book of poems the book of stones which is an invocation to enter into that communion that I was just talking about. Think of it as the poem of a father to an unborn child welcoming into the world full of experiences and all the wonderful things that they can be in the world.

Or as one person to another welcoming or inviting them to leave the world of judger in boredom and enter into into the world of ideas and the communion of stories. The poem is called a. The birds are flying through a filling the empty houses. But only now come a it is full house only now coming the stars have dipped into the upturned jars and the coals blush and the fires sting like cats come away. It is one moment among other moments. It is something rather than nothing. So come climb into the sinews of a body and fold yourself between muscle and bone where your skin is a suit. But come a sense how glorious now are the fisherman seafarers and their long canoe barks vibrant as taxis and oceans getting over itself like sand and the glittery electric bodies of delicate women and their soft intelligent faces concealing biology.

How glorious is the winking of the snap eye cameras and the letter writers clicking like rain and the pointsman sleeves that are blazing with stars coming. As soon as you can before before the Cool Earth enters the soles of our feet before we melt through the ears of corn through the steel churn steaming in the dark air passing invisibly through trellises hanging with fruit like soft balloons being like the air being less than matter being like time and space. A medium a property of existence as nowhere as velocity or mass. Unreal even to ourselves. So come hey be a brilliant child racing towards a calamity. Be a whore to the right touch be reckless and breakable. Be open to defeat but come because this is something rather than nothing. This takes a moment then it goes. This is a conversation between intimates traveling. This takes an effort of the soul coming since the birds are flying through filling the empty houses. It is full

house only now. If I could say only two sentences about at the signwriter the first thing that I would say is that it's a book about the life of a young man who traveled from his home in Africa to Europe and the second thing I would say about any sign writer if I could only say to him perhaps more important than the first is that it's a book about freedom about how people lose their freedom and how people fight to get their freedom back. What I'll do first is I will read two sections that relate to the first of those sentences. I read from a section that in which we first meet the sign writer is in his incarnation as the sign writer. A young sign writer stands in the door of his shop surrounded by his paints and his boards looking out over the yard. It is 1996. He

is 20 years old. In the shack to his left the locksmith is grinding keys. His eyes are pinched as he works and there are fine specks of copper in the sweat of his face to his right. The shop of the stamp maker is empty. The shutters are tied back and pages flip over in an open receipt ledger. The prostitutes are still asleep in the wooden lean tos opposite their boots on top of their zinc roof. The washerwoman have left some time before and the passageway is wet with soap and water from the clothes they have pounded on the concrete from the street which is joined to the yard by an L shaped corridor. Come the sounds of the neighborhood in the paper market outside. Girls are selling Banku and rice from pots on their heads. The Barbers sit in the shade of the trees playing checkers as they wait for clients for the run. There is a school painted yellow and gray from which the children's distant voices

drift like birds. And next to that are the stalls of the Petrel bootleggers and the mechanical parts merchants. All the while the locksmith has not stopped working although he knows he is being observed. He let a few moments past then lift his eyes towards the young sign writer shared. He can see nothing in the darkness of the doorway though he can hear the signwriter in the creaking wood shifting on the balls of his feet. It's a fine afternoon to be doing God's work. The locksmith says aloud there is no response. It does not surprise him. They are all used to the sign writers ways the locksmiths grinding wheel begins to slow. He removes his key from the vise passes a steel brush over its new edge and holds it up to the light for inspection. Then he slips it into a small brown envelope which he carefully writes some words sits down and begins to hum. More than a minute has passed before the sign writer's voice comes from inside the shed.

A fine day it says. The locksmith raises his eyebrows. This is more than the sign writer has said to any of them for a while and he smiles. The sign writer is part of their small corner of the district. His neighbors rarely see him and speak with him even less what they know about him can be summed up in a short conversation the length of time he's been there. Around 18 months the trade name by which he goes painted about the lintel of his door in simple block letters signwriter that his business is brisk that he always pays his rent on time that he grew up outside the country. That is true he is not altogether fluent. But he lives with his uncle that he has no friends that some people say a young woman has been living with the two of them. Him and his uncle for at least a year. Although nobody can remember seeing her. Most of the time when the sign right is not painting he spends inside the shed with the door close and the windows hinged sometimes into the late evening. Well after the

prostitutes have woken up and gone off for the night's business and the stamp maker the locksmith and the washer woman have gone back to their homes so often he will come out for a few minutes just before closing time. He'll sit on the bench outside his shed and mix paints in a tin with a stick or write in one of his notebooks or sometimes simply sit there with no clear reason other than to say by his president presidents that he is the sign writer and this is his shed and to share with his neighbors in the way he is capable their company. It is a gesture they appreciate and because of it they have grown protective of his awkwardness. They speak kindly of him. They do him favors in his absence often taking messages from clients slipping small pieces of paper under his door to let him know who has come by. And so he is largely invisible in the life of the district. When he walks through the streets he does so unnoticed. He is not distinctive in his looks when he changes out of his painting clothes and moves about with his distracted shuffling stride.

He looks like any laborer tired after a day of lifting heavy things for a little money. His signs however are famous across the town. Sometimes his lettering is crisp and precise. Other times as loose and flowing as if twisting itself from the paint his figures expression the women are full and fleshy like ripe fruit in his painting he is playful. He hides jokes in the background or tell stories across multiple commissions with the same characters advertising hair braids here or telly centers there. And because he can paint excellent likenesses. His clients often find images of themselves or of local personages featured in there is in the in his science. Though he never signed his paintings everyone knows when a new one has been commissioned. His mural of the child under a sofa the man in the mirror a shop torn in two by his own reflection. The preacher woman welcoming people to the church robes flowing down her body rich and purple like the color of a ripe bruise her arms thrown back a great

generous smile as if all her teeth are for sale. Her eyes too joyful asterisks. A giant mattress for a betting shop. Floating out on the sea. Two figures sitting seated on a fully made bed. Their feet distorted in the still water each looking away. People will walk across the suburb to see such murals and signs. Children will stand on the pavements in groups old ladies will pause on their rounds and dogs will be beaten if they try to press against the walls where his latest work has gone up. So I'll take you a little bit forward now to part of Eddie's journey across Africa and part of the journey I will describe. And that is set out in these pages is the trip from Bamako in Mali to Dakar in Senegal. He gets to the station well before time. Already there is a crowd. He

fights his way along the platform and on to the train through the other passengers well-wishes through ambulating vendors beggars hustlers touts con artist pickpockets and into the seat of a third class carriage the appointed departure time approaches then passes. The crowd continues to mull about the carriages fill up. Baggage is stowed. People settle in for the journey. Then the sound of a whistle and the first jarring shunt on the old rusty line. The city begins unraveling around the train and soon the train is out of the country and the soft weaving light comes round and spurts the landscape away. Everything is still to come. Cutty case here about TS Dakar outside the window. There is only his own reflection and that of the light in the ceiling and the crowded party sharing meals talking settling down for sleep a single shifting surface of flesh. But for those who have arrived too late and are standing still and will for much of the next two

days. The train picks up speed its movement is endless. Its voice Constance sometimes a squeal sometimes a whistle as of escaping air and a lower briefer tick like a match catching and then its main voice a high pitched were like the sound of metal shearing through bone until the speed is so fast that it all mixes like water rushing past incredibly fast. A single even sound to which all movement is in a company are meant. All through this time his thoughts have been narrowing the world apart from movement apart from sound begins to recede. The world apart from what the eyes can see. He has a wall to lean against and a window scratched and scored by fingers luggage by washing rags wet with water full of dirt the night draws on. People talk less. The many are not asleep who are silent and he imagines that they like him are gathering strength because only a few hours have passed and still

two days lie ahead. And already the body aches with just comfort and the anticipation of endless discomfort. People curl around their backs to sleep. That is not it but it's not only theft that they fear but the closeness of strangers. The tangle of flesh that you see but don't feel as your own. The smell of food the inconsolable babies the short tempers the animal warmth that covers them over ready for those still the sun hasn't risen yet and fills the carriage and takes him to sleep then out again. Dawn has broken soft light lies over the still carriage the fresh smell of morning a light chilled on the skin. In his dream they were all stumbling from the carriages. I think I'd fall asleep for the whole length of the train. People were pouring the art of electric lights were full of insects darting dust rising from the ground where they walked. Families young men traders soldiers businessmen mothers with their babies bundled into

them. Children pulled along by the arm. The train was still warm with movement. The breathing breathing of the engine throbbed through the wheels. He cast a look back as he joined the stumbling crowd. The train's wheat lights glowed Ali and suddenly he was afraid to separate. Afraid of being left in the night except he realizes as he wakes that this was no dream that the border was crossed. His papers were stamped. He feels his back pocket there where he left them. His papers and he lets himself awake. The dark conch of a woman drifts in and out of focus. Small bubbles gather at the corner of her mouth. Multiply pulse in the air of her breath in the folds of her eye a crust of mucus the color of mother of pearl. The train is stopped on the tracks. It pursed like a fridge. It seems so innocent. You never know its strength. But then it jerks. I snap open inside the carriage. The Express expense of flesh shudders.

Somebody expose exclaims in indignation. Ah. The train is hardly moving but the purr deepens. A sound from the throat. Then the first tug of an even us catch and catches in the movement like stone against him. There is not just the sound but something stronger that registers in the body. A small jolt and then another and another in the wars against the seat in the glass in its frame in the light fittings in the roup roof. All these parts of the body capable of sound the wheels pick up a heavy double beat that data and somewhere in the train another set of answers more softly at a faster and faster as the whole train starts picking up the music the wheels the walls the windows the track and the horn praying a sound of warning but not only that of pure pleasure on through the day the first endless day too endless to resist as hard as he tries. But silence is patient is always waiting at the end of each sentence which falls into nothing. Though throughout the day people try to

talk to pass information to remain themselves to be people coming from somewhere or going somewhere to have stories someone has left a husband sumpitan is fleeing war someone doesn't know a soul in the place he's going. Someone wants to achieve something with his life who has never been beyond the compound of his parents. Someone recounts the beauty of his woman. Some who have traveled before have advice encouragement and in soft voices stories to tell of time in foreign countries time spent getting their time in jail in the no man's land between the borders penniless unable to go forward or back stories of track of traffickers and scam artists and the Brotherhood's that make life possible in the towns they hope to reach. Some have come to trade some to work. Some come to steal some just to see from all the capital cities all the large towns wherever people are hungry. Wherever the young are brave for some that car is the end of the journey for others. A stop to somewhere else by ship by land by air but always north.

Some they know will be thrown from cargo boats to the ocean. Some will die of thirst in the desert. Some will suffocate in the back of vans or be beaten to death in the melt mountains of Algeria or die on their own or folks in desperation. Some will be stopped at the border at the passport desk at the ke side. Some will be caught in return and be caught then return as many times as it takes. Some will reach refugee camps prisons but many will make it through to the coast of Spain Italy France Britain through seaports and airports and on to cook fast food sell handbags sweep streets stack boxes pick fruit hawk watches hats perfumes and a thousand towns and cities. Wherever a living can be made wherever existence can be justified but only so much can be said before the journey takes them back again and he loses himself becomes part of the passage. His energy joys of being into it. The sun is everywhere. All that matters is the water he takes to survive. The heat is breaking him down. His

clothes are warm with him. Compass him sweat comes out of every part of him. His body is giving up its water giving him up and he can't stop it as the train carries on racing across the land. Now I'd like to tell you a little bit about the second of the sentences that I would limit myself to on any signwriter. The first part of the book starts with the death of a prominent woman on the bridge the name of the woman is not enough for you. And number four it is the aunt of the young girl with whom he cited sign writers had been having an affair and he has also had an ambiguous relationship with Nona for a while. And another person up on the ark with a rich location not far from Garner where where voice the signwriter done choirs he is in his early days spends his his last years of school and many people have have been drawn to it to the death of this woman as the kind of defining moment

of the first half of the book and in many ways it is but I think there's another moment in the book that in the beginning of the book which is equally important and this is the moment in which he loses his capacity to be free. And it tells of being sent to boarding school away from Gaborone Botswana where he's grown up and what that does to him. His parents sent him to a boarding school not from the not far from the village in which his father had been born. Accra was an hour away kneeboard town an hour more on his last night in Gaborone his father said to him. When you go home it will be for all of us. That is our place. They were sitting on the bed in the room he shared with his sister. Then his father left the room to let him finish his packing. He began to cry. Partly he cried out of sadness to be leaving the home and his father and sister

partly out of gratitude to his Father for giving him the thing his father wanted so much for himself but could not have to go home when his father could not. You will be so happy. His father said to him as they said good bye I will papa he replied. But he wasn't. His first few weeks in his mother's house before school began were an unexpected shock. He grew fat from the can catfish pond drop but most of his childhood friends had grown up and left that both houses on the football pitch. His grandfather was dead. The electricity never lasted for more than a few hours. He was bored. He missed his sister and father. He missed the life that had even up there in the desert where the emptiness never stops threatening and safety feels temporary. Even if you are with people. When they sent him to school the water made him sick for a week. He did not speak the language well he was used to his privacy. He was used to the quiet and the food feeling soon came over him of dissatisfaction and despair that softened his world and made the

world lose its shape. And as a consequence many things happened at that time that should not have happened. I would not have happened except for that this was the this was in the town of a cop a crumb on a quote from Rich in the mist and the thin crisp air and the weather that can hide behind mountains and appear from anywhere and is always unpredictable and forever changing. The missionaries chose Africa. When they came to Ghana because it was too cold for the mosquitoes that killed them down on the coast. And though there now go on the ridge Ridge is filled with churches and schools and the old buildings they left behind falling to ruin slowly. What happened to him there. Over the course of a few months started one evening as he sat with the 500 other students in the school hall where meals were taken. The rain was coming down as it had been on and off for a few days. It hammered on the tin roof so hard that night that to try and drowned out the sound of the talking and the shouting of the children got there so that soon people stopped trying to speak at all and they ate and

silent surrounded by the storm. While the smell of the wet ground began to rise up rich and choking. After the meal the rain still had not stopped. It was at least a five minute walk to the closest dormitory. And so the children all gathered outside under the eaves of the dining room pressed against the walls. As he stood there somebody dashed out. A girl running laughing at her daring he'd never talk to her before that he'd noticed her a few times. The first a few weeks before in one of the tele centers in town from which his mother had made him phone to let her know that he'd arrived safely. The girl had been with a friend with a friend. They'd seen him staring and laughed as he left. Now standing under the eaves he watched the girl running out into the storm. As the rain wrapped her up in her clothes something beautiful passing by he reflected then gone. The sky was a little short of night. There was checked and it still and you could make out the rise of the hill that separated the school from the town and the half presence of electric light

behind it. There was a breeze not cold but damp and he felt it in the sions through his shoes as if it were trying to flow into him. He stared for a stood for a few moments there and then there seemed no point in standing there any longer and he put his hands in his pockets pockets and stupas head into the evening and walked through the rain the distance back to his boarding house boarding house. By morning he had a fever. He spent the next four days in bed on the fourth first night he was given an extra blanket. Meals were brought down to him and taken away untouched. He lay in his bunk during the day while the other boys were in classes. He slept and when he was tired of sleeping stared at the ceiling of thought. He thought about many things he thought about what had happened. He thought about how his life was now and how it had been before and why his father had sent him back and why he felt so alone and how these things were connected. And then he was so tired tired he could no longer think. He could hardly go to the other side of the room to get water. Noise came in through the windows

all the time. He was defenseless against that. The fan about him was catching creaking like plastic throbbing in the ceiling. But he needed the breeze to keep his temperature down. And as he lay in bed sweating and distracted and wishing for things to be different he suddenly felt a likeness which at last was calming and felt like sleep so that he gave in to it and when he woke he no longer felt agitated at all but rather disconnected from himself as if as if he'd become an observer a mere witness removed from the events that were happening in his own life. There are many visions in the book of how people regain their freedom. One character in the book his father seeks to regain his freedom through the mere thought of the great story of Africa's liberation from Europe. Another seeks to regain his freedom by hiding those things that he believes are his own from those who are powerful. Another way another character tries to regain their freedom by

truly entering into the experience of of his existence in the world. I'm not going to tell you how as he seeks to get back his freedom you have to read the book for that. But I will read to you one section that describes the painting on a wall that might give you one hint. One afternoon he climbs up on a wall to paint an open prime section but the ladder is on balance and begins to slide. And though he steadied himself the brush slips as he does leaving a mist shaped Panix crawl across the wall to where he got his balance back. He climbs down and inspects the damage a scribal a mess that he can fix it simply. He begins to work around the area filling in space adapting the shapes he has left and as he does the attempted recovery begins to take on form the possibility of a figure appears and a head turned

sideways and he suddenly has a feeling as he balances on a chair on the tin roof with a scaffolding won't reach of being accompanied that in all this madness this world of survival. He is not alone that maybe the world is still with him. The world talking back at him through his own shabby gift. And of course the other way in which people often try to find freedom is through love. And there are two love stories in this book. One of them does lead to freedom and may lead to freedom and one of them doesn't. And if I were to read anything from those sections I would read the ruin the book for you. So what I'm going to do is I'm just going to read a love poem that I wrote many years ago in my first book of poetry. The good life the dirty Life and Other Stories. And I wrote this poem when I was 19 years old and it's about a girl I was in love with when I was 16 who is not really in love with me. This poem was set work for all the students are finishing high

school in South Africa it was set as the exam piece last year which is a particularly terrifying thought for me. It means that for an hour sometime in December 2009 hundreds of thousands of South African 18 year olds hated me. I think this poem was chosen because it's not only a love poem but also a very political poem the same time it's at once it's about about this girl and the same time it's about the changes that were taking place in South Africa. Love and love and politics have always been very closely linked in all of my writing. And I hope in reading this how give us a clue into one of the ways you might read at the sign writer. The poem is called Rivonia wrote without words crouching on the roof of your neighbor's garrote garage that slopes over the garden and your mother's rosary. We watch a school drop and clobber them foothills

from far away in the suburbs though it is a dumb show. We count the long seconds between flash and wallop and try to remember the formular chilling sight and sound by distance. What we see is the storm small and entire in the wide sky a neatly defined between two tilted parallels as they open up nearer. We will smell them cleanly. We will see through rain shade. Things will be darker not dimmer when it comes to us. We will be inside safely until afterwards we clear the garden table and find the wine glasses brimmed and level. Thank you very much. I'm very happy to answer any questions if anybody has any and I'm equally happy to sign copies of the book. If not I will.

That's an excellent question. I would say your last everything is difficult in different ways. As a poet I think you train yourself to focus on the smallest unit of meaning which is ultimately the word. And I've tried to retain that in writing prose but the narrative process has something has something else. Novels allow you to do something else which is to play with the story with narrative with stories and stories of this magical thing that that we are instinctively drawn to. And that's that's a very very powerful tool if you can if you can wield it. And that and learning to wield it or learning from others through how they have yielded to wield it it is fascinating and very difficult task

one that came a lot more or didn't come as easily as the poetry I have to say. Not actually in South Africa but very much in West East and Central Africa. And it was very exciting actually when I I turned up in Ghana the first time I actually visited West Africa to be confronted with these amazing images. And people often ask me why did I why did I use these images. And in many ways I kind of feel that images chose me rather than me choosing the images I did. I literally turned up in Accra Ghana looking for a story to write. And I let one thing lead to another I saw these magnificent images the magnificent images lead me to a sign writer

who became a central person in the character in the novel the sign writer led me to an immigrant who then became another character. And I randomness and chance is a very big part of writing for me. And so I guess it's random that I was drawn to those images but I'm very glad that I was right. Thank you very much.