André Aciman: "Nothing is stable, not nationality, not religion, not sometimes sexuality"

Writer André Aciman. Christopher Ferguson

In a scene from

(2017), by Luca Guadagnino, the mother of the main family reads to her children - who speak to each other in Italian and English - a story contained in a German translation

of Margarita's

Renaissance compendium

of Angouleme. This cosmopolitan and extremely cultured multilingualism is one of the ingredients that make the film an extravagant, almost utopian fable. And yet, in the recently translated

(Libros del Asteroide), André Aciman, the author of the novel on which Guadagnino's film is based, remembers a childhood exactly like this, of a boy who spoke in French with his parents, in Italian with his friends, in Ladino -Spanish Sephardic - with their grandmothers and in Arabic with domestic workers. A decadent world, that of Alexandria in the fifties and sixties where he spent his first years of life, and which he transferred to what was his first book.

Although

reach the Spanish-speaking public in 2021, its English edition has not stopped being reprinted since 1994. “When I started, my idea was to write about a very crazy family, but the truth is that my definition of family is already quite extravagant. "Aciman recalls by videoconference. “I don't think there are sane families, nor that there have been. Many families pretend to be normal, but they are not. Also, as I wrote I thought I could give an interesting insight into the childhood of a Jewish boy in Egypt, a country that was turning violently anti-Semitic on the streets, in homes and, of course, in classrooms. "

In

, the story of this family of Italian Jews who live in Alexandria and who are forced to leave Egypt in the sixties is told without political overtones but with a daily and traditional pulse. His characters are romantic, but real: two grandmothers whose grandson names, respectively, as "the saint" and "the princess", a fascist great-uncle who ends up working as a spy for the British during World War II, a grandfather who does not hide her double life or a hearing-impaired mother who employs her son, the book's narrator, as an interpreter.

When he published it, in the mid-nineties, Aciman was already living in New York, and his vision of the events did not appeal to all the protagonists alike. “My father, for example, told me that I had done the right thing, and that he was just as I had portrayed him. My mother didn't care and never read it. His sister, however, reproached me for writing that my mother was deaf, almost as if I was ashamed of it. Another relative did not like how he had portrayed his father, and said he was going to report me. I told him to please do it, because it would be a great publicity ”, Aciman recalls. “But in general no one protested too much. I also did not inhibit myself when writing. I counted the good and bad things as they had happened, without covering up anything or making my family seem more cordial or sophisticated than it was. I grew up in a very tough family,with many ambitions and many pretensions. Also with a certain snobbery, and snobbery is always comical. So I was as literal as I could. In the United States, many Middle Eastern family memoirs have been published in recent decades, and most of them are sugarcoated. Not mine. I wanted to portray my family as it was ”.

Aciman was educated in French but writes in English. It is one of the cultural clashes that can be sensed in a book in which the question of Jewish identity is a kind of low continuum: it takes time to explicitly emerge to the surface of the text, but it is essential to understand its context. “I was born in Alexandria, where there was no dominant culture. Everybody, in my day to day, spoke French. Arabic was the language of the street. My Italian friends spoke Italian, my grandparents and my father spoke Ladino, and all these languages ​​coexisted. That is why I do not know what my real language is. It was always floating. That's important to me, not being loyal to just one culture. I don't even have a real nationality. No religion. Half of my family is Catholic. Nothing is stable: neither nationality, nor religion,nor sometimes sexuality. Everything flows".

However, we ask you, today's world is not the same as 1994, when

saw the light for the first time. In today's climate, issues of identity, roots, nationality, and one's culture are viewed in a different light. A book like this, which reflects what many would consider a colonial society, raises challenges and sensitive points. "What I tried to do was show a world that belonged to the colonial era, but where non-colonists considered themselves as such," Aciman responds. “At that time Egypt was no longer a colony, but it was under Ottoman influence. The Ottomans considered themselves Europeans, and also the masters of the Middle East. They were very arrogant, and that's in the book, for example, in their way of treating their Arab servants. So I tried to reflect it. I adored the servants, not because I was a better person than the rest, but because I liked being in the kitchen,listening to them speak and say tacos. I was more comfortable in the kitchen than with the adults in my family. " The Egypt from which Aciman's family fled was that of Nasser, which from 1956 undertook a process of expulsion of the Jews and the confiscation of their properties, especially after the wars with Israel in the 1960s. In exile, the writer recounts that he returned to Egypt three decades ago and surprised a taxi driver with his command of Arabic. “He asked me why I spoke Arabic, and I told him that I was born there. And he asked me why I had left. I asked him if he was kidding me: his president had expelled me. I have not come back. I adore the people, the country, the food. It is a wonderful place but I don't feel so safe there that I will go back. They invite me a lot, but I always reject it ”.

Aciman responds to the interview from his New York office. Although

his coming out as a narrator, half the world knows him as the author of

(2007), a love story, initiation and coming out of the closet whose planetary fame shot up a decade later, with the film adaptation of Luca Guadagnino and the launch, catapulted to fame, of its protagonist, Timothée Chalamet. Aciman, he assures, takes great care of being "the author of

." “Away from Egypt has always worked well, but

it is something else.

Its audience is universal.

It is read by young, old, people of all countries.

And the film, which is also very good, changed everything and made it a best-seller ”.

The summer love story between Elio and Oliver is already a classic LGTBI on the part, curiously, of an author whose work is not part of activism: Aciman himself, heterosexual, father of a family with three children, escapes this model.

"It is complicated, but not as much as it seems," he replied when asked about this political dimension.

“You write a book and a lot of people like it.

It is a love story, yes, but it is also a gay story, and I do not want to omit this in any way.

it's a gay love story. For example, many people love the father's speech, and the funny thing is that my father could have delivered it perfectly. The novel has moved many LGTBI people who are older and have not been able to live freely. And it has also moved very young people, who hope to be able to live as LGTBI people. This is very important. After all, it is a book about freedom, and about how to live sincerely. In that sense, I gave Elio's character completely tolerant parents, and that's rare for a lot of people. The moment of coming out is very difficult, so difficult that some people never get to do it. But it is necessary. And the book has encouraged many people to come out with their family. In turn, these people have recommended the book to their parents,to show them that a gay love story is not that different from what they themselves have experienced as heterosexuals. That said, I did not write this book for a political purpose. I'm not interested in politics, and the only value I firmly believe in is tolerance. My coming out of the closet consisted of saying that I was Jewish ”.

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