NORMAN MANEA
An
Interview
Dialogue Across the Ocean
MP:
Norman, you have lived through our common experience of total–
itarianism. Have you recovered from it by leaving for the "brave new
world" across the ocean?
NM: I
left Romania in 1986 at the age of fifty. Right up
to
the time I
left, I tried to protect myself as best I could from the lingering poison
which that coarse, hypocritical society injected daily into all its citizens.
There were people around me who believed that I had succeeded, that I
was a "liberal Englishman," as one friend liked to call me. I was surprised
that even a well-known American man of letters, upon reading the
manuscript of my recently published volume of essays,
On Clowns,
commented that it showed I was "a free man in an unfree time."
The truth is that the wounds, and the deep , twisted perversion
which marked our lives cannot be easily healed. We were lucky enough
to survive, however, and as someone recelty said, the survivor takes on an
extra risk. The risk of our life "afterwards" contains a continuous process
of confrontation, reeducation, and perhaps , we hope, regeneration. As
much as is possible, as much as time still allows .. . .
A time of painful remembrances, of often bitter reevaluations, but
also of accepting one's life history - which, in the end, did also mean
protecting the humanity within and around us. A vague yet persistent
belief, containing hope and denial, naivete and isolation and ambiguity
and playfulness and denial again - simply to preserve the human being in
the progressive dehumanization which threatened us all. The "brave new
world," from which we have a lot to learn, has a lot to learn itself, I
think, from the fractured and still-active life history of our struggle.
MP:
Your experience must have been much more terrible than mine, for
Editor's Note:
Dialoglle Across the Oceall,
an interview with Norman Manea by
Romanian poet Marta Petrell, was first published in
Romania Literara ,
nr.
31/1992.
