Socialist Realism
(Tirana, 2019)
In a courtyard behind the museum
stood two derelict statues of Stalin—
each twice as tall as a man,
patinated green, the bases
still slick with last night’s rain.
The space was empty except
for two kids rasping up and down
the concrete on skateboards,
then landing with that
familiar, wooden clatter.
One statue’s arm had been torn off,
so I could see into the hollow
I imagined was still filled
with the air of the twentieth century.
Inside the museum, the exhibit
was on socialist realism,
because thirty years had passed
and those paintings were now
powerless artifacts—it was
time to consider them
through the abstracting lenses
of period and style. Back home
across the ocean my children
were sleeping, their sound machines
projecting up into their rooms
like statueless plinths. In Candide,
the deposed kings will dine forever
in Venice, while all the buoyant,
resolute people in those paintings
are building a future.
They’re mortaring walls
and climbing telephone poles,
they’re working the fields
in flowery dresses, melting down
metal for I-beams and monuments.
The future is right there—
a transit station waiting for them
to lock into it. I can’t help
but exude my country’s aging
narratives of triumph. Art
is not just agreement
or disagreement, you said,
it shapes the moment into form.
In the cab to the airport,
as we slid beneath a dappled
canopy of beeches, the driver
blessed me three times simply
for being an American
who could say in his language
that his country is beautiful.
(published in The End of Childhood)
