Homesick by Jennifer Croft
Review by Laetitia Erskine
Jennifer Croft’s Homesick is both a memoir and a novel, a translation and not a translation. Charco Press, its Edinburgh-based publisher and specialist in Latin American translations, describe it simply as a ‘story’: ‘The coming-of-age story of an award-winning translator.’ This feels a truthful way to describe a work that is both richly enigmatic and as direct as a photographic lens. Croft, who is perhaps best known for her translation from Polish of Olga Tokarzcuk’s Man Booker International Prize-winning work Flights, originally wrote Homesick in Spanish. The English-language version – which she does not see as a translation – does not contain the photographs and illustrations said to be integral to other editions, but I did not miss these images, because Croft’s writing makes eloquent what it omits.
From a young age, growing up in Oklahoma, sisters Amy and Zoe must take refuge from tornadoes, so intense that ‘Even in the day, the sky gets black and the streets get empty.’ Amy and Zoe – sisters named at opposing ends of the alphabet – hide together in the hall closet, play games, tell stories by torchlight, and work on secret languages. When the scare is over, ‘their mother will reach down and grab Zoe, and then she’ll carry her away.’
Through careful sequencing of detail, the deep bond between them is established in the same breath as Amy’s profound, premonitory fear of disaster, of rupture and loss. At summer camp, one of the counsellors had a spider bite that must be cut out to leave a hole where the wound had been. Their mother embroidered or softened the story, perhaps knowing the idea’s appeal to her daughters, saying that she ‘kept secrets things inside it, like messages’. Later, Amy makes a realisation about the power to send and receive secret messages: ‘you don’t have to be poisoned or have any particular place. What you need is a secret system, a network of secret shapes.’ It is an observation that will grow on the reader, eventually to map a rigorous intellectual discipline allowing the writer, translator, and/or Amy, to travel both with and away from her original emotional compulsions. When Zoe is struck by a mysterious illness that gives her violent seizures and then a brain tumour, Amy’s suffering is flavoured with survivor guilt coupled with a dread sense of culpability over others’ misfortune, irrational but which seems nonetheless borne out in tragic turns of event. In her growing ability to foster these secret networks of shapes however, glimmers the seed of her resilience, too.
An often searingly accessible account of a childhood scarred by illness in the family, Homesick is also a discussion of photography, and an exploration of language-learning from the babble of infancy to sophisticated excursions into foreign worlds. No one in the family owns a passport nor has considered learning another language, despite their father being a geographer, making the arc of Croft’s achievements – which appear authentically mirrored in Homesick in quasi-fictionalised ways – all the more remarkable. But there is no self-congratulation in this; the book is concerned with the inner drive of this arc, and with emotional stepping stones in all their idiosyncrasy. Its epigraph is from Diane Arbus: ‘A picture is a secret about a secret. The more it tells the less you know.’ Written in third person present tense, from a child’s or bird’s eye perspective, Croft’s style freezes life events in such a way that emotional nuance leaks from their contours. Dancing between indirection and the head-on, the narrative is structured by short chapters with powerful super-informative subheadings, creating what feels a unique and living form to convey the intense sibling bond at the heart of Croft’s story and the way trauma shapes her world.
It is love that first leads Amy into languages. Due to Zoe’s illness, the girls are home-schooled and their Russian tutor, a young student of their father’s, opens up a world of poetry and stimulation particularly magnetic for Amy. These ingredients already offer the whisper of a tragic love story, but what happens is no less shocking, unpredictable, and profoundly formative for Amy. That she is a well person in a sick world forces her knowledge and thirst for new worlds into ‘her secret future; her secret grief’. Croft invites the reader to make their own interpolations about this and Amy’s subsequent years of travel and immersion in other languages. Yet with quiet rigour and great artfulness, Homesick exudes a sense that the keen blade of trauma and loss is always – madly, desperately, if often silently between the lines – in pursuit of the intangible, and surviving that journey is a matter of constant translation.