Left Luggage

When you come to think of it, the world is full of boxes. Boxes that overlap, collide, fit into one another and contain yet more boxes inside. Boxes that release boxes. The image of the suitcase on the blog also brought thoughts of another suitcase to me. One that was less domestic or immediate, but important nonetheless, that I had read about in recent weeks. Capas lost suitcase [http://tinyurl.com/5tgu7b]. Filled with unseen images of the Spanish Civil War. Images that Capa himself believed to have been lost. A lost suitcase when found contains not possessions, but a cache. Findings. Treasure. The invaluable. And indeed, Capa’s images of the Spanish Civil War are rightly invaluable. Think of Capa fleeing war-torn Paris for the safety of America, abandoning the contents of his dark room yet another box. Think too of the rolls of film transported from Paris in flimsy cardboard cases boxes too to Marseille, and from there, in the unlikely hands of a Mexican general, to Mexico City and now, in a final journey, to New York, to that vast repository of images yes, another box that is the International Center of Photography.
Boxes shadow people. Even when put away, lost or left behind, they accompany them. Boxes remind us of our own mortality. Of journeys in life and death. In this case, though, the box has come back to life a reminder that a box, if closed, can always be reopened.
Why is this find of Capa’s images in a suitcase so meaningful? Not merely because they were Capa’s but also because, in the box-like frame of each unearthed image, lie buried memories of Republican Spain. And so it is that this suitcase here leads me to think of Capa’s suitcase and so marks a small gesture of unearthing, of emergence, of shedding light on what has lain invisible and silent for so long. I hear once again the voices of those I knew in Madrid back in the 1970s, when the dictatorship was on its last, shaky legs Paco, Toñín, Pepe Luis, Cristina, so many others. Who, in broken snippets, told me in whispers that they had been panaderos, albañiles, enfermeras, and then had found themselves becoming Republicans until the war ended. After that, they said, they had been nothing at all, people without memories, without a past. We were lucky to be alive. The neighbour next door would have told on us if he had found out. No me preguntes. Es mejor no recordar. Don’t ask so many questions. I prefer not to remember. It had been the only way to carry on and get by. I think of them whenever I look at capa’s images. These people I have known. They most probably are no longer alive. So if the finding of Capa’s images is singularly important for me, then it is because it honours them. No, it does not just honour them… it vindicates them. It vindicates who they once were. What they might have been and what they stood for. It validates a dream. When I think of Capa’s work, the image I find most striking is not that famous one of a falling soldier. It is one of a group of Republican women washing clothes in a thin stream of water. Engaged in the act of survival. Like these people I knew, old men in my barrio, who used to sit four hours on chairs out on the pavement in the evenings or who lived their weeks, yes, week after week, in the hope of winning the football pools. Old men in berets who had been gardeners, porters, doormen and messengers, old women who went shopping in the Mercado every morning to buy fresh fish and who walked around with curlers in their hair, these old men and women who had lived in silence and in forgetting for 36 long years. To think of Capa’s rescued images is to remember them.

[Text by Parvati Nair, © 2008]

At first, what rises up from this suitcase are memories… Memories that are my own, memories gleaned from others. Whoever said that everything we recall is based on our own lived experiences? Memories can be borrowed, stolen, acquired, gifted. Memories are even imagined. Turned into words. Stories we weave to cover the gaps of oblivion. Knitted stories. Crocheted stories. Darned stories. Memories stitched and held together by words … by images. Images and words.
When I first read Johns blog on Left Luggage and when I saw the photograph of a ship on high seas and of you, Dinu Li, in a train station with suitcase in hand, my mind leapt to a hidden memory, one that I had never really thought much about or ever consciously recalled. It was about two Revrobes, as they were called, or large suitcases, both in a leather somewhat more tanned than this ones, my fathers initials engraved in gold: VMMN. They have in fact been part of my life ever since I can remember. I seem to recall that I always knew the cases were special. My father put his belongings in them. The rest of us did not. Whenever we were about to leave a country, he would open them and begin to pack. With great care, I see him now, here in my minds eye, bending over and carefully laying his best suits in them. It was a sort of ritual. The Revrobes. They were his. They were special. In 1939, when as a boy of nineteen, he had gone from India to Britain to study, his parents had purchased these cases for him to take in them the things that he would need for his long stay abroad. Warm clothes, of a kind not needed at home, a formal suit, and books a copy of the Oxford English dictionary that he had won as a prize, his prayer books, his History textbooks, his beloved tennis whites. And so I remember my father, though I was not there to see him then, travelling with these two identical cases by train from Madras to Bombay, embarking on a ship that would take him to England, leaving India for the first time even as England entered the War. In a sense, though, going to England was also a sort of landing, for my father was born a British subject. This was the much-anticipated journey to the land of the ruler, who had long taught him and those of his generation to read Wordsworth and dream of England from the distant edges of the tropics. Indeed, such were the inner displacements not untypical of colonization that perhaps there was more that was familiar in England for my father in his own literary imagination than there was in his native India. Indeed, I know for sure that the squires of Oxford and the lights of Piccadilly were in my father’s store of remembered images before he ever saw them. For colonial incursions are all too often displayed most keenly in the mind.
When my father returned four years later, the cases came back with him. Shortly after he began a life of travel. The cases went with him everywhere. From Madras… In cabins and holds, in the boots of cars, on luggage racks in trains… To Oxford and then to Cambridge, to London, to Bihar, to Delhi, to Cairo, to Colombo, to Delhi, to Kuala Lumpur, to Singapore, to Phnom Penh, to Oslo, to Delhi, to Warsaw, to Rabat, to Tunis, to Madrid, to London, to Delhi again…
There are no photographs of my father taking the train from Madras to Bombay, or of his mother and sisters waving goodbye from the platform… None of him embarking on his own for England from the port of Bombay. None, that is, except the ones I carry in my head, imagined from the shards of knowledge that I have of his life before mine. I see him clearly though, aged nineteen, a boy rather than the man I know, excited and also fearful at the prospect of the unknown. I see him, leather cases in hand, on the threshold of his life. About to embark.

[Text by Parvati Nair, © 2008]

The blurred borderline between movement and identification.

`The border in this day and age is never unified, quantifiable or easily located.’

[From Parvati Nair's `Europe's "Last" Wall: Contiguity, Exchange, and Heterotopia in Ceuta, the Confluence of Spain and North Africa', in Border Interrogations: Questioning Spanish Frontiers, ed. by Benita Sampedro and Simon R. Doubleday (Berghan, 2008), pp. 15-41, p. 17]

The entire city has become a multiplying digital border as, with every footstep, our identity is continuously scrutinised, our trajectory mapped from above.