I was standing on the platform at the Brighton Beach station, still obsessed with the idea of the house of memory, when I saw a slender young woman with a large piece of luggage. The luggage almost matched her in size, yet the woman didn’t seem dressed for travel. I thought to myself, “Perhaps she’s gathered all of her possessions in search of a new home.” As I got on the train, I thought of a piece of luggage, a suitcase layered with the three forms of memory, a kind of existential baggage to be carried at all times. Hence, the title Cargó was born.
As if packed and stored within a piece of luggage, these images, or fragments of living, represent layers of memory – the memorial, the immemorial, and the everyday. This cargo, seemingly disordered and lacking consistent narrative, is nothing more than a repository of an intimate, yet collective existence.
After all these years, I am not sure if I know what this is fully about. Or perhaps I do, and then I understand it even less, as nothing would be more disappointing than a clear, definitive “reading” of the work. If I were forced to answer, I’d say “It’s an exploration of the psyche of migration.” At least this statement is true to the book’s original intent, as it is to my immigrant experience.
Migration is a leap into the void. It is an experience that isn’t particularly misunderstood, but rather unrecognized, like languages we’ve vaguely heard at some point in our lives, but to which we aren’t able to attach a body. Or temperatures and distances that, measured in unaccustomed units, can be assimilated, yet only half-rhymed. It is an experience hidden in the invisible weight of opposites – the collision of the old and the new world, the social and the personal, empathy and intellection, the immemorial and factual remembrance of things.
