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Comma Press - Alexei Sayle

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79 pages

English

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The six European port cities known as the Cities on the Edge Liverpool, Bremen, Gdansk, Istanbul, Marseilles and Naples - share a history of dissent, diversity and economic reinvention. Once gateways to the world, bringing wealth and innovation to their respective nations, they've long been maligned and misunderstood by their compatriots, preferring instead to look outwards, towards the sea - to the possibilities of change, of travel and of rebirth. Featuring short stories by twelve acclaimed writers from the Cities on the Edge, ReBerth explores these landscapes of change - the social tensions, the scars of war and economic decline, the attempts at regeneration, and the startling and sometimes unsavoury secrets of how these cities inhabitants thrive and survive.

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Short story

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Publié par	Comma Press
Date de parution	28 décembre 2008
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781910974865
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0250€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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First published in Great Britain in 2008 by Comma Press
www.commapress.co.uk
Copyright © for all stories remains with the authors
Copyright © for all translations remains with the translators
Copyright © for this selection belongs to Comma Press
All rights reserved.
The right of the authors and translators to be identified as such has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright Designs and Patent Act 1988
The moral right of the authors and translators has been asserted.
This collection is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities, is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not always share the opinions of the authors.
Supported by The Liverpool Capital of Culture as part of theCities on the Edge and Liverpool 2008 European Capital of Culture programmes

Project part-funded by the European Union

The publishers also gratefully acknowledge assistance from the Arts Council England North West.
CONTENTS

Foreword
Franco Bianchini & Jude Bloomfield

Introduction
Jim Hinks

Scent
Dinesh Allirajah

Midday Mania
Claudia Parman
Translated from the German by Rebecca Braun

Everyone Has a Skeleton in the Cupboard
Artur Becker
Translated from the German by Rebecca Braun

Silver Rain
Pawel Huelle
Translated from the Polish by Antonia Lloyd-Jones

Witominska Street
Adam Kaminski
Translated from the Polish by Antonia Lloyd-Jones

The End of the Quays
Jean-Claude Izzo
Translated from the French by Helen Constantine

The Cave and the Footbridge

Christian Garçin
Translated from the French by Helen Constantine

Right in the Eyes
Valeria Parrella
Translated from the Italian by C. D. Rose

Beneath the Torregaveta Sun
Peppe Lanzetta
Translated from the Italian by Helen Robertshaw

The Terminal
Murathan Mungan
Translated from the Turkish by Aron Aji

Aborted City
Hatice Meryem
Translated from the Turkish by Idil Aydogan and Amy Spangler

Bread, Circuses and Replica Shirts
Alexei Sayle

Authors

Special Thanks
Foreword
CITIES ON THE Edge was conceived as an international collaboration between six port cities – Bremen, Gdansk, Istanbul, Liverpool, Marseilles and Naples – and their cultural organisations. It sought to build on common characteristics and problems that port cities face such as the contraction of port activities, gentrification, displacement and dislocation of the working class population and global migration no longer contained or protected within the ‘space of mixing’ of the immediate port area. Rather than treating these as intractable problems, the project aimed to capitalise on them as strengths – traditions of dissidence, irony, and tension towards national political, economic and cultural establishments – and mobilise their imaginative and intellectual resources.
The Cities on the Edge project – initiated as part of the European dimension of Liverpool Capital of Culture 2008 – puts the artists and intellectuals (including the writers in this collection) in the lead, encouraging them to explore the multiple meanings of ‘edge’ in the six cities, not only signifying geographical or political marginality but a border and point of exchange between different worlds: for example, Islam-Christianity and Asia-Europe for Istanbul, Europe and North Africa for Marseilles, and Germanic and Slavic cultures in the case of Gdansk (the latter being one of the themes in Pawel Huelle’s story in this collection). Other meanings of ‘edge’ in the six cities are found in the presence of deep-seated poverty, lives that are lived on the social margin, forced to the edge of existence, or lived in the hollows and on the periphery of the urban fabric – as well as ‘edginess’ in artistic production and cultural life.
The premise of Cities on the Edge is that port cities live on the edge of their nations, in tension with their capitals, drawn outward by the pull of sea, the transitory movement and settlement of migrants on their shores, the need for solidarity and resilience to counter the vicissitudes of employment, weather, and time. The people of these cities are also, historically, driven inward by the solitariness of the sea and the anarchic individualism of seamen’s and dockers’ lives, a rebellious spirit, quick wit and ironic humour, and fierce local loyalty expressed through allegiance to the city’s football teams.
If these were the conscious aspects of the six cities’ mindscapes, the stories in this anthology chip away at some of their more romantic and optimistic political connotations. In this collection, we find distinctive voices worn away by the incessant tides of change, defeat, and marginalisation, rather than rebellion or resistance. Where the voices are hopeful, they are steeped in fantasy like the two friends, in Bremen in Artur Becker’s story, videoing their own lives and going on dope trips to Amsterdam, or, also in Bremen, the married woman, in Claudia Parman’s story, escaping to the Weser waterfront to recall her lost lover during her lunch breaks.
The title of this collection, ReBerth, implies a rebirth of port cities, and yet these short stories pose a question mark over such a renewal. Rather, they suggest that if these cities are to live again, they will not do so primarily as ports. In all six cities, former docks have been or are being transformed into marinas, expensive flats, up-market shops, hotels, bars and public spaces which look the same the world over. Gérard, the central character in Jean-Claude Izzo’s story, expresses his fear that Marseilles will lose its distinctiveness and become a playground for the rich, when he says ‘One day you’ll wake up and find it’s not your place any more. It’ll be like Nice, only bigger, and even more stupid!’
These cities have lost substantial parts of their port functions, which had spawned distinctive literary and cinematic representations, and it is more difficult than in the past to identify a Gestalt, a metaphor of the city as a whole. Yet these stories convey a very distinctive sense of place. They are studded with motifs that embody some aspect of local society – deindustrialisation, social isolation and exclusion, the negative sides of modernity – such as the rubbish in Istanbul and Naples in ‘Aborted City’ and ‘Beneath the Torregaveta Sun’ respectively. In the Torregaveta story, the ‘seaside Bronx’ of Naples is black with sewage and tar, and the beach encrusted with detritus. The place is literally the opposite of ‘sanitised’ upmarket resorts like the Seychelles, the Maldives or nearby Capri. And yet Torregaveta has a plebeian vitality and humanity, made of ‘music cassettes… onion frittatas, egg frittatas, aubergines, cockles… stories of love and squalor.’
Extreme social polarisation appears in several stories, including ‘Aborted City’ by Hatice Meryem, in which the well-heeled residents of Istanbul live in ‘gated communities’ overlooking the alleys and doorways inhabited by street children, and Alexei Sayle’s ‘Bread, Circuses and Replica Shirts’, where a young Spanish Liverpool FC footballer is shocked and intrigued by the boarded up houses and other signs of urban dereliction surrounding Anfield Stadium, the home of one of the world’s most iconic and financially mighty football brands. Indeed in all six cities economic inequality is visible, in the contrast between regenerated parts of city centres (offering a myriad of opportunities for tourists and well-off residents) and inner city or peripheral areas suffering from multiple deprivation.
Because of their histories as ports, all six cities have important traditions of multi-ethnicity and cosmopolitanism, which have continued in recent years, with the concentration of legal and undocumented immigrants in neighbourhoods like Belsunce in Marseilles, Ferrovia in Naples and Osterholz-Tenever in Bremen. In the case of Istanbul, the eponymous reflectedterminal of Murathan Mungan’s story acts as a metaphor for the Turkish megalopolis in its chaotic modernisation - a container of people of all backgrounds, ages and nationalities passing through from town to countryside, province to metropolis, known to unknown.
Other images in these stories offer a perspective on the city from the viewpoint of immigrants and outsiders, who often live in the more deprived and marginal areas, such as the hermit in the no man’s land near the old port in Marseilles in Christian Garçin’s geography. These are places of anonymity and chance, decay and arbitrariness of fate. Only Polish migrant Tadek Brozio and his German friend Koko, in Becker’s ‘Everyone has a Skeleton in the Cupboard’, who do not feel rooted in Bremen, choose where they want to live - in a tower block which takes them imaginatively beyond the confines of the city, giving a wider view of the world. In the Liverpudlian tale ‘Scent’, by Dinesh Allirajah, even though the river Mersey ‘washes the whole city’, the endless repetition of the tide acts as a counterpoint to the arbitrariness of events in the rest of the story. In this story, the tide no longer regulates fate: the power of the sea is subjugated.
The imaginary urban landscape of these port cities has become more fragmented, and this is reflected in the rich social characterisation of these stories, which offer a diverse range of perspectives. Valeria Parrella’s ‘Right in the Eyes’, a sustained first person monologue of the Naples’ female sub-proletariat gets inside the head of the Guapetella who trades on her beauty, plotting her social advance through strategic economic moves while remaining entirely dependent – both sexually and economically - on the local mafia (the camorra) and combining generosity and cruelty, typical of her circumscribed choices. In a context of deindustrialisation and declining employment opportunities (in Naples as well as in many other port cities