I step into your shoes and become a part of you

18 januari 2006 The distance between first and third person fluctuates and sometimes nearly disappears. Poets and other writers, children and politicians, wise people and complete fools may speak about ‘he’ or ‘she’ when they are actually talking about themselves, and vice versa. It may happen that this patently obvious trick erases the distance between ‘I’ and the third person, and manages to successfully arrive at the ‘you’. At other times, the mix of personal pronouns stems from the multiple identities shared by each and every one of us, ever increasing in a world whose borders are more and more blurred. In the global village, preserving one’s distinct identity – national, religious, gender, sexual, political, and social – is not only proof of one’s loyalty to oneself, but, paradoxically, is the result of external circumstances, of great pressure that only a strong spine, and firm values, can withstand.

In ‘A Glass of Beer’, Amir Or abandons the poet’s ‘I’, the ‘I’ of his self – Hebrew, Israeli, the child of Jewish parents – in order to get under the skin of a completely other self, one defined by the words ‘enemy’ and ‘Satan’, or by adjectives such as ‘abominable’ and ‘corrupt’. Or does not express presuppositions, prejudices or value judgments when he gives permission to speak to a person who might have been his murderer, had the two met in another time and place – in Europe during the second world war.

Through his artist’s work tools – language, sensitivity, and a wise, sharp glance – Or is able to enter the Other’s shoes and to become – even if only for a short while – a part of him. He succeeds in becoming part of a thinking, feeling person whose ideas, thoughts and will, and, most important, his actions, may seem to most of Or’s readers – most of whom, after all, read him in Hebrew – to be unbearable, offensive to good taste and disrespectful of the Other: in a word, inhuman. Yet being ‘inhuman’ doesn’t really remove this Other from humankind. After all, all people – beautiful or ugly, loved or despised – belong to the human race. Life grows from scars, as the Finnish poet Sirkka Turkka says; it is impossible to heal a sore by rubbing it against another sore. In order to heal the soul, one must touch it – to leave aside the ‘I’ and move toward ‘you’, toward ‘he’ and ‘she’: to listen to oneself, but also to the Other. “The perfect murder is love”, the speaker in the poem says, shocking the reader. Only wide-open eyes and attentive ears permit a brave, direct and honest contact with pain – a mature, intelligent gaze at the complexity of the reality of our current lives and of our past.