New York missive no 17 - Dead orchids

Last year George Packer wrote a long article for the New Yorker (which New Yorker articles aren't long?) about the experiences of Iraqis who worked as translators for the Americans after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. How their hopes for realising the lives they had long dreamed of were quickly shattered as the country descended into a new chaos and they became fearful for their lives, targeted as traitors by fellow Iraqis and refused US visas despite the fact the US government had been so dependent on them and paid them for their services. A few have been given EU passports and found refuge, of sorts, in Sweden. Packer said that after the article was published the translators’ voices stayed in his mind. Their story needed more telling. So he turned it into a play, “Betrayed”, that’s brought those voices to more audiences in a different, somehow more immediate, way. R and I saw it last week. It must have been a difficult process for Packer to distill months’ worth of interviews and reporting into a 2.5 hour play revolving round the lives of just a few characters. Yet in that way he conveys so much of the insanity of the occupation and the situation that’s emerged from it. Free from statistics, soundbites or an attempt to grasp the full picture, the intense experiences of individual human beings can say so much more about what that situation means, and its meaninglessness.

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A quietish weekend, in which one day was Spring-like and the other wintery. I interspersed work with a Writers’ Studio evening of readings by Edward Hirsch (poems that touch nerves by avoiding analogies and cutting straight to the reality of things), Junot Diaz and Cynthia Weiner – in which a common thread, as in much writing, seemed to be illness and death approached with humour and shock – a party at A and St’s at their apartment in Inwood, and a Sunday excursion with M to the New York Botanical Garden in the Bronx to see the Orchid Show. Where the death theme was carried through: it was the last day of the show and many of the orchids were shriveled, except the ones from Singapore.