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

Today I'm pleased to welcome Adam Schwarzman. He joins us tonight to speak on his novel. Eddie signwriter traveling through Africa and France the young painter Eddie signwriter escape scandal and searches for a new beginning. Publisher's Weekly writes that Schwarzman debut novel bears testament to his background as a poet as lush description and bright playful prose chronicle the travails of Eddie signwriter born in independent Guyana 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 and Eddie's quest for identity is as sad as it is uplifting. Mr. Schwarzman attended Oxford University and has held positions in the South African national treasury the World Bank and the International Finance Corporation. He's 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 please join me in welcoming Adam Schwarzman.

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 Mary 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. Well coming into the world full of experiences and all the wonderful things that there can be in the world or as one person to another welcome or inviting them to leave the world of drudgery and 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 come a. The stars have dipped into the upturned jars and the coals blush and the fire sting like cuts. Come a 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 while the fishermen see fairies and their long canoe barks vibrant as taxis and the ocean skidding 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 cameras and the letter writers clicking like rain

and the pointsman sleeves that are blazing with stars. Come a 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 churned 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 horse 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 come a Since the birds are flying through. Filling the empty houses come a. It is full house only now.

If I could say only two sentences about Eddie 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 the signwriter if I could only say to him perhaps more important than the first is that it's a book about freedom but 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 Mr. Eddie signwriter is in his incarnation as the signwriter a young signwriter 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 that 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 washerwomen have left some time before and the passage ways 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 or come the sounds of the neighborhood. In the paper market outside girls are selling Banku and rice from pots on their heads. The Barbus sit in the shade of the trees playing checkers as they wait for clients for the run. There is a school painted yellow and grey 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 lets a few moments past then lift his eyes towards the young signwriter shed. 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. A locksmith says aloud there is no response. It does not surprise him. They are all used to the sign right his way is the locksmith's 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 on which he carefully write 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 signwriter has said to any of them for a while and he smiles though the signwriter is part of this 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 around 18 months. The tradename by which he goes painted above the lentil of his door in simple black letters. Eddie signwriter that his business is brisk that he always pays his rent on time that he grew up outside the country. That is true it is not altogether fluent that 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 the year although nobody can remember seeing her most of the time when the signwriter is not painting he spends inside the shed with the door closed and the windows hinged sometimes into the late evening. Well after the prostitutes have woken up and gone off for the night business and the stamp

maker the locksmith and the washerwoman 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 presence that he is the sign writer and this is his shed and to share with his neighbors in the way he is capable of 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 whose 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 little money.

His signs however are famous across the town. Sometimes his lettering is crisp and precise. Other times loose and flowing as if twisting itself from the paint his fingers especially the women are full and fleshy like ripe fruit in his painting. He is playful. He hides drugs in the background or tell stories across multiple commissions with the same characters advertising hair braids here or tele centres there and because he can paint excellent likenesses his clients often find images of themselves or of local personages featured in their eyes. In his science though we 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 shop told him to 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 to joyful asterisks. A giant mattress for a betting shop floating out on the sea to figure seating 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 piss 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 Senegal. He gets to the station well before time. Already there is a crowd. He

fights his way along the platform and onto the train through the other passengers well-wishers 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 flap baggage is stowed. People settle in for the journey. Then the sound of a whistle and the first jarring chant on the old rusty line the city begins unravelling 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. Katie Jambu case Khedira tambour Kunda dear about TS Dakar. Outside the window there is only his own reflection and that of the lights 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 Constans sometimes a squeal sometimes a whistle as of escaping air and ALOA a brief 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 an accompaniment. 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 top 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 discomfort and the anticipation of endless discomfort. People curl around their backs to sleep. That is not good but it's not only theft that they fear but the closeness of strangers the tangle of flesh the arm that you see but don't feel is your own. The smell of food the inconsolable babies the short tempers the animal warmth that covers them over. Ready. Although still the sun hasn't risen yet and feels the carriage and takes him to sleep. Then out again dawn has broken soft light lies over the little carriage. The fresh smell of morning light chill on the skin in his dream they were all stumbling from the carriages. The guide full of sleep from the whole length of the train. People were pouring the arcs of electric lights were full of insects darting dust rising from the ground where they were 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 to breathe. Breathing of the engine throb through the wheels he cast a look back as he joined the stumbling crowd. The train's weak lights glowed dully 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 wake the dark of a woman's drift in and out of focus. Small bubbles gather at the corner of her mouth. Multiply pulse and the air of her breath in the fold of her eye a crust of mucus the color of mother of pearl. The train is stopped on the tracks. It purrs like a fridge. It seems so innocent you'd never know its strength but then it jerks. I snap open inside the carriage big splash expanse of flesh. Shudders. Somebody exclaims in indignation Ah. The train is hardly moving

but the purr deepens the sound from the throat then the first tug of and even this catch and catches in the movement like stone against turn though is not just a sound but something stronger that registers in the body a small jolt and then another and another in the walls against the seat in the glass in its frame in the light fittings in the Roop roof. All these parts of the body capable of sound the wheels pick up a heavy double beat. Da da da da. And somewhere in the train another set answers more softly a faster and faster as the whole train starts picking up the music the wheels the walls the windows the track and the horn breaking sound of warning. But not only that of pure pleasure on through the day the first endless day to endless to resist as hard as he tries but silence his patient is always waiting at the end of each sentence which falls into nothing. So throughout the day people try to talk to pass information to remain themselves to be people coming from somewhere

going somewhere to have stories someone has left a husband someone 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 recalls the beauty of his women some who have traveled before have advice encouragement and in softer voices stories to tell of time in foreign countries. Time spent getting their time in jail in the no man's land between borders penniless unable to go forward or back stories of track of traffickers and scam artists and the Brotherhoods 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 or 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 Kaga 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 mouth. Mountains of Algeria or die on their own are filth and desperation. Some will be stopped at the border at the passport desk at the quay side. Some will be caught then 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 sea ports and airports and on to cook fast food cell hand-bags sweeps streets stack boxes pick fruit Hauk watches hats perfumes in 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 resolving 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. Dirt covers 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 from which the name of the woman is now not far away and not far away is the aunt of a young girl with whom it excited signwriter has been having an affair and he has also had an ambiguous relationship with Nana 41 and another person from the aquarium rich location not far from Ghana. Where where. Voice Eddie signwriter or quasi Danquah as he is in his early days spends his his last years of school and many people have have been drawn 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 Eddie 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. Nearby town an hour more on his last night in gulper own. 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 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 goodbye 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 kinkier fish pond drop but most of his childhood friends had grown up and left their both houses on the football pitch his grandfather was dead. The electricity never lost it for more than a few hours. He was bored. He missed his sister and father. He missed the life that had even out there in the desert where the emptiness never stops threatening and safety feels temporary. Even if you are with people when they sent 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 will 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 this was in the town of a copper

from an aquifer I'm 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 Aqua Aqua palm. When they came to Ghana because it was too cold for the mosquitoes that killed them down on the coast. And though they're now gone the Rindge Ridge is filled with churches and schools and the old buildings they left behind. Falling to ruins slowly. What happened to them there. Over the course of a few months I 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 she tried to drown out the sound of the talking and the shouting of the children got there so that soon people stop trying to speak at all and they ate in 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 talked to her before that he'd noticed her a few times. The first few weeks before in one of the tele centres in town from which his mother had made him phone to let her know that he had 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. They was checked in it still and he could make out the rise of the hill that separates 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 attention's 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 stooped his head into the evening and walked through the rain the distance back to his boarding home boarding house. By morning he had a fever. He spent the next four days in bed on the 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 above him was catching crinkled 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 had lost was coming and felt like sleep so that he gave into it and when he woke he now no longer felt agitated at all but rather disconnected from himself as it as if he had 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 it father seeks to regain his freedom through the myth or 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 in other way another character tries to regain their freedom by truly entering into the experience of his existence in the world.

I'm not going to tell you how he seeks to get back his freedom. I'll have to read the book for that. But I will read to you one section that describes a painting on a wall that might give you one hint. One afternoon he climbs up on a wall to paint and open primes section but the letter is on balance and begins to slide. And though he steadies himself the brush slip says he does leaving a mess shaped Panic's crawl across the wall to where he got his balance back. He climbs down and inspects the damage. Scribble a miss that he can fix it simply. He begins to work around the area filling in space adapting the shapes he's left and as he does the attempted recovery begins to take on form the possibility of a figure appears an arm a head turned

sideways and he suddenly has a feeling as he balances on a chair on the tin roof where the scaffolding won't reach of being accompanied that in all this madness the swirl 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 or may lead to freedom and one of them doesn't. If I were to read don't read anything from those sections I would read the rule 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. 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 was not really in love with me. This poem was set work for all the students 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 old hated me. I think this poem was chosen because it's not only a love poem but also a very political poem. 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 I will give you a clue into one of the ways you might read Eddie signwriter. The poem is called Rivonia road to without words. Crouching on the roof of your neighbor's garage garage that slopes over the garden and your mother's rosary. We watch a school drop and clobber them book foothills

from far away in the suburbs though it is a dumb show. We count the long seconds between flash and wollop and try to remember the formula to link sight and sound by distance. What we see is the storm small and entire in the wide sky and 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 brimmed and level. Thank you very much. I would say your lost 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 better narrative but prose has had some that has something of novels allow you to do something else which is to play with with narrative with stories and stories all 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 and learning to wield it or learn it from others how they ever feel that it wielded it is a fascinating and very difficult task one that came a lot more 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 turned up in Ghana. Now 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 the images chose me rather than me choosing the images. 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 novel the signwriter 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. Thank you very much.