Imaginary

Fictional Narratives

What he loved above all else in the maternal edifice, that which aroused his soul, and made it open its poor wings, which it kept so miserably folded in its cavern, that which sometimes rendered him even happy, was the bells. He loved them, fondled them, talked to them, understood them. From the chime in the spire, over the intersection of the aisles and nave, to the great bell of the front, he cherished a tenderness for them all. The central spire and the two towers were to him as three great cages, whose birds, reared by himself, sang for him alone. Yet it was these   very bells which had made him deaf; but mothers often love best that child which has caused them the most suffering. / It is true that their voice was the only one which he could still hear. On this score, the big bell was his beloved. It was she whom he preferred out of all that family of noisy girls which bustled above him, on festival days. This bell was named Marie. She was alone in the southern tower, with her sister Jacqueline, a bell of lesser size, shut up in a smaller cage beside hers. This Jacqueline was so called from the name of the wife of Jean Montagu, who had given it to the church, which had not prevented his going and figuring without his head at Montfaucon. In the second tower there were six other bells, and, finally, six smaller ones inhabited the belfry over the crossing, with the wooden bell, which rang only between after dinner on Good Friday and the morning of the day before Easter. So Quasimodo had fifteen bells in his seraglio; but big Marie was his favorite. [Victor Hugo, Notre-Dame de Paris, or, The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1831), Volume I, Book Fourth, Chapter III, “Immanis Pecoris Custos, Immanior Ipse”.]

Personal belonging and friendships:

• Erin Bow, Plain Kate (Arthur A Levine Books, 2010), about a young girl's search for acceptance and the perilous task of fitting into a difficult society.
• Nell Freudenberger, Lost and Wanted: A Novel (Knopf, 2019): “Freudenberger navigates complicated concepts from physics with admirable clarity, and those concepts — entanglement, uncertainty, gravitational waves — help us feel in new ways the ongoing influence of dormant friendships, the difficulties involved with believing in attachments that can’t be observed, the enduring pull of discarded hopes.”
• Isabel Allende, Long Petal of the Sea: A Novel (Ballantine Books, 2020): “. . .  there is the sense that every human life is an odyssey, and that how and where we connect creates the fabric of our existence: the source of our humanity. If what happens to us — the axis of our fate — is nearly always beyond our control, stubbornly unchangeable, we can still choose what we cleave to and fight for, refusing to be vanquished. This is true belonging, and how we build a world.”
• David Goodwillie, Kings County: A Novel (Avid Reader, 2020): “It’s not their originality or their coolness that makes them appealing — it’s something else, a willingness to go all-in that transcends where they live or how they dress.”
• Yoon Choi, Skinship: Stories (Knopf, 2021): “. . . in Korean culture, (skinship is) a portmanteau of the two English words “skin” and “friendship,” meaning nonsexual but affectionate physical contact between friends or loved ones . . .”
• Simone de Beauvoir, Inseparable: A Never-Before-Published Novel (1954): “. . . based on her friendship with Élisabeth Lacoin. There is an ethical, and even political, dimension to Beauvoir’s will to remember this friend, through whose mirror she sought to loosen the silken chains binding them both to outdated ideals of femininity.”
• Isaac Fellman, Dead Collections: A Novel (Penguin Books, 2022): “He’s a Transgender Archivist and a Vampire, and He’s in Love” – vampirism as a metaphor for being transgender.
• Carlene Bauer, Girls They Write Songs About: A Novel (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2022): “In This Novel of Female Friendship, Birds of a Feather Drift Apart”.
• Mark Haber, Saint Sebastian’s Abyss: A Novel (Coffee House Press, 2022): “The two men’s friendship, falling-out and sort-of reconciliation form what one might call the plot of this book. Schmidt is one of Haber’s keenest inventions — he’s so fanatical he makes the art historian seem mild and cuddly.”
• Paul Tremblay, The Pallbearers Club: A Novel (William Morrow, 2022): “Written as a memoir, the story is narrated by 17-year-old Art Barbara, a gangly high school student with severe scoliosis. Hoping to beef up his college applications, Art starts an after-school club, the Pallbearers Club, whose three members attend wakes and funerals. When a mysterious young woman named Mercy Brown joins the group, a life-altering friendship begins.”
• Claire Keegan, Foster: A Novella (Grove Press, 2022), “sends a poor child into a childless home in southeast Ireland.”

Community and national belonging:

• Ayad Akhtar,  Homeland Elegies: A Novel (Little, Brown & Co., 2020): “. . .  a very American novel. It’s a lover’s quarrel with this country, and at its best it has candor and seriousness to burn.” (‘about the dream of national belonging that has receded for Muslim Americans since 2001’)
• Sanjena Sathian, Gold Diggers: A Novel (Penguin Press, 2021): “This intimate glimpse of millennials who are second-generation Americans . . . shows how history repeats. It is a story of immigrants reaping their futures from property they have found, which is not theirs — or is it?”
• Andrew O’Hagan, Mayflies: A Novel (McClelland and Stewart, 2021): “. . . a bittersweet tale of friendship”.
• Paul Mendez, Rainbow Milk: A Novel (Doubleday, 2021): “Mendez balances the story atop the shifting tectonic plates of dislocation, and in the gaps Jesse discovers new friends and lovers who show him, through unexpected kindness, what it’s like to be seen.”
• Anthony Veasna So, Afterparties: Stories (Ecco, 2021): “The new generation isn’t sure where it fits in. Its members clown about being ‘off-brand Asians with dark skin.’ One young woman says, ‘Forty years ago our parents survived Pol Pot, and now, what the holy [expletive] are we even doing?’”

From the light and dark sides:

• Teddy Wayne, Apartment: A Novel (Bloomsbury, 2020): the postitive and negative sides of friendship, and relationships generally – the novel is “. . .  about a volatile friendship between two men enrolled in Columbia University’s M.F.A. program in creative writing in 1996.”
• Becky Albertalli, Kate in Waiting: A Novel (Balzer + Bray, 2021): “. . . on battling over a boy in the best way possible”.
• Saïd Sayrafiezadeh, American Estrangement: Stories (W.W. Norton & Company, 2021): “Stories That Render America Just Strange Enough to Recognize”.
• Asmah Zahanat Khan, Blackwater Falls: A Thriller (Minotaur Books, 2022): “. . . Denver police detective Inaya Rahman, a Muslim woman who struggles with being 'too brown for the badge, too blue for her coreligionists.'”
• Mohamed Mbougar Sarr, The Silence of the Choir: A Novel (Europa Editions, 2024): “The fate of people like these 72 men, who have left their homes, families, friends, cultures and languages, who have risked their lives to head to Europe, will be decided not by what they’ve endured, what they want or are willing to do, but by how they tell their stories and how ‘we’ — the resident public, the privileged reader — feel about them as a result.”

From the dark side:

Abdulrazak Gurnah of Tanzania won the 2021 Nobel Prize in Literature “for his uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents”. His novels include:

• Memory of Departure: A Novel (1987): “This haunting coming-of-age novel evokes in spare but vivid prose the exotic sights, sounds and landscapes of coastal East Africa and the spiritual rebirth of a sensitive 15-year-old.”
• Pilgrims Way: A Novel (1988): the protagonists “are people who are plainly marked by their skin color, foreign in the country they live in. And they will remain foreign, because this is the role that is assigned to them all over again every single day.”
• Dottie: A Novel (1990): “Dottie Badoura Fatma Balfour finds solace amidst the squalor of her childhood by spinning warm tales of affection about her beautiful names.”
• Paradise: A Novel (1994): set in colonial East Africa during World War I: “Gurnah's powerful, ironically titled story evokes the Edenic natural beauty of a continent on the verge of full-scale imperialist takeover by the European powers.”
• Admiring Silence: A Novel (1996): “This tightly focused story of an unnamed Zanzibarian expatriate who returns home after a 20-year exile in England poignantly evokes the cultural limbo of many emigres.”
• By the Sea: A Novel (2001), narrated by an elderly asylum-seeker living in an English seaside town: “Even when the winds of history push them toward other, less hospitable shores—England, or the old, Marxist East Germany—Gurnah's characters are still the embodiment of mythic Zanzibar.”
• Desertion: A Novel (2005): “An initially unidentified narrator reveals events following the 1899 appearance of orientalist Martin Pearce in an unnamed village on Africa’s east coast, in what was then the Uganda Protectorate.”
• The Last Gift: A Novel (2011) “explores immigrant experiences of identity, roots and family”.
• Gravel Heart: A Novel (Bloomsbury, 2017): “Gurnah hits upon an intriguing conflict: the post-colonial individual who becomes anglicised out of choice.”
• Afterlives: A Novel (2020): “This compelling novel focuses on those enduring German rule in East Africa at the beginning of the twentieth century”.

Other dark-side novels and stories:

• Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, At the End of the Century: The Stories of Ruth Prawer Jhabvala (Counterpoint, 2018): “The stories — all of them elegantly plotted and unsentimental, with an addictive, told-over-tea quality — are largely character studies of people isolated, often tragically, by custom or self-delusion.”
• Laila Lalami, The Other Americans: A Novel (Pantheon, 2019): “ . . . all of the novel’s speakers — regardless of race, class, gender, political affiliation, legal status or place of birth — see themselves as outsiders to mainstream American identity. This is a powerful setup, raising the question of whether anyone feels that today’s America is one to which he or she belongs.”
• Kazuo Ishigugo, Klara and the Sun: A Novel (Knopf, 2021): “What is it like to inhabit a world whose mores and ideas have passed you by? What happens to the people who must be cast aside in order for others to move forward?”
• Kyle Lukoff, Too Bright to See (Dial Books, 2021): “A young person, over one key summer, finds themself, embraces that self and moves on into the future stronger, more certain. Who could possibly object? Well, the young person in question is transgender, and the world into which this book is published is an increasingly unfriendly one for these children.”
• Samanta Schweblin, Seven Empty Houses: Stories (2015): “The stories . . . tear down the delicate scaffolding of home.”
• Dionne Irving, The Islands: Stories (Catapult, 2022), “investigates the alienations that come with displacement, tracing the movements of Jamaican immigrants and their descendants across the United States, Panama and Europe. What does it mean to be a part of the Black diaspora — born of a shared history of colonialism, racism and slavery — while also feeling dislocated from the Jamaican culture you still carry with you?”
• Dolki Min, Walking Practice: A Novel (HarperVia, 2023): “an extraterrestrial who crash-lands on Earth shows what it means to feel out of place in one’s body and its surroundings.”

Yoko Tawada’s “trilogy of friendship amid climate change dystopia”:

• Three Streets: Stories (2015): “. . . women, men, and human-adjacent beings land in slow-simmering metaphysical adventures. Her characters face predicaments and puzzles that present the reader with interesting new ways to think about language, inspiration, history, and chance.”;
• Scattered All Over the Earth (New Directions, 2022): “When Nations Disappear, What Happens to Nationalities?”;
• Suggested in the Stars: A Novel (2020): “. . . a group of friends continue their search for someone with whom Hiruko, the novel’s ethereal center, can speak her native language. Hiruko comes from ‘the land of sushi,’ which may or may not have disappeared owing to rising sea levels, and now lives in Denmark teaching Panska, a ‘Pan-Scandinavian’ language she has invented. Her friends, scattered across Europe in the first book, have located a man named Susanoo, who appears to be Japanese but is suffering from aphasia, and the new novel brings him to a hospital in Copenhagen to recover his mother tongue.”

Poetry

Poems:

• Henry David Thoreau, “Friendship”
• Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Love’s Philosophy”
• Robert Frost, “Iris By Night” (analysis)

Books of poetry:

• Baba Badji, Ghost Letters (Parlor Press, 2021): “Baba Badji uses English, French, Arabic, and Wolof to find belonging and move through the trauma of being an outsider”.
• Thera Almontaser, The Wild Fox of Yemen: Poems (Graywolf Press, 2021) is “. . . a dazzling exploration of a life caught between different cultures”.
• Julia Cimafiejeva, Motherfield: Poems and Protest Diary (Phoneme Media, 2022): “grapples with questions of language, nationalism and oppression”.

Music: Composers, artists, and major works

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s mature sonatas for violin and fortepiano express the virtue of friendship with Mozart's unique sunny and playful exuberance. His entire sonatas have been recorded notably by Andrew Smith & Joshua Pierce, and his mature sonatas by Renaud Capucon & Kit Armstrong in 2023.

• Violin Sonata No. 17 in C Major, K. 296 (1778) (approx. 15-20’)
• Violin Sonata No. 18 in G Major, K. 301 (1778) (approx. 12-15’)
• Violin Sonata No. 19 in E-flat Major, K. 302 (1778) (approx. 13-15’)
• Violin Sonata No. 20 in C Major, K. 303 (1778) (approx. 10-11’)
• Violin Sonata No. 21 in E minor, K. 304 (1778) (approx. 13-16’)
• Violin Sonata No. 22 in A Major, K. 305 (1778) (approx. 15-18’)
• Violin Sonata No. 23 in D Major, K. 306 (1778) (approx. 22-26’)
• Violin Sonata No. 24 in F Major, K. 376 (1781) (approx. 15-21’)
• Violin Sonata No. 25 in F Major, K. 377 (1781) (approx. 18-21’)
• Violin Sonata No. 26 in B-flat Major, K. 378 (1779) (approx. 17-23)
• Violin Sonata No. 27 in G Major, K. 379 (1781) (approx. 16-21’)
• Violin Sonata No. 28 in E-flat Major, K. 380 (1781) (approx. 16-21’)
• Violin Sonata No 29 in A Major, K 402 (1782) (approx. 9-12’)
• Violin Sonata No. 30 in C Major, K 403 (1784?) (approx. 12-18’)
• Violin Sonata No. 31 in C Major, K 404 (1786?) (unfinished) (approx. 4’)
• Violin Sonata No. 32 in B-flat Major, K. 454 (1784) (approx. 23-27’)
• Violin Sonata No. 33 in E-flat Major, K. 481 (1785) (approx. 19-23’)
• Violin Sonata No. 34 in A Major, K. 526 (1787) (approx. 17-27’)
• Violin Sonata No. 36 in F Major, K 547 (1788) (approx. 17’) 

Works by Charles Koechlin:

• Clarinet Sonata No. 1, Op. 85 (1923) (approx. 10’)
• Clarinet Sonata No. 2, Op. 86 (1923) (approx. 9’)
• Sonatine Modale for flute & clarinet, Op. 155a (1936) (approx. 7’)
• 14 Pièces for clarinet & piano, Op. 178 (1942) (approx. 12-14’)
• Various works for clarinet, flute and piano; flute and piano ; clarinet and piano

Other works:

• Robert Baksa, Sonata da Camera (1994) (approx. 14’)
• Ralph Vaughan Williams, Household Music: Three Preludes on Welsh Hymn Tunes (1941) (approx. 17-21’)

Albums:

• The Reunion Project, “Varanda” (2017) (67’): “If ever there was a gathering that's true to name and a misnomer, this is it. The Reunion Project isn't a glimpse at a band reformation or a grand comeback statement, but rather an expression of shared experiences, influences, and actions. It's both a look back to earlier times and the dawn of a new adventure.”
• Oregon, “Friends” (1976) (41’); “Treffpunkt Jazz, Ludwigsburg 1990” (1990) (135’)
• The Raritan Players, “In the Salon of Madame Brillon: Music and Friendship in Benjamin Franklin’s Paris” (2021) (76’)
• Danilo Brito & João Ruiz, “Esquina de São Paulo” (2021) (42’): this guitarist and mandolist had been friends for twenty years when they recorded this album, united in their passion for choro, a form of popular music from their native Brazil.
• Clark Terry & Max Roach, “Friendship” (2001) (46’)
• Joseph Decosimo, “the aluminum wonder” (2021) (36’) is an album of simple country tunes on a solo banjo, evokes a sense of belonging in a place. “Rooted in the the banjo and fiddle traditions of Tennessee’s Cumberland Plateau . . . Joseph has researched and written extensively about the music and the people who make it.”
• Eddie Gripper, “Home” (2023) (42’): “The album is dedicated to the memory of Gripper's late grandparents, and this is fundamental to the direction of the music.”
• Conspirare, “House of Belonging” (2023) (79’) (booklet): “The album’s texts convey and explore themes about spirituality, philosophy, the natural world and the human need for deep connection with others.”

From the dark side, generally:

• Susan Botti, The Journey Without Her (2010) (approx. 14-15’): “Aeneas embarks on two perilous sea journeys – first in fleeing Troy, and second in departing Carthage. ‘She’ is city, country, home, a loved one. A momentum of escape – a whirlwind – a broken compass – calm within the storm gives clarity of purpose, strength, and direction – a new momentum towards someplace, someone.”
• Sebastian Fagerlund, Cello Concerto, “Nomade” (2018) (approx. 38’) “is an abstract account of journeying which places the soloist as a ‘cellist-wanderer’ passing through different ‘landscapes, moods and events as depicted by the orchestra’ in the work’s six vibrant movements.”
• Australian Art Orchestra, “Sometimes Home Can Grow Stranger Than Space” album (2020) (58’): the suite of three works is an elegy to World War I victims.
• Stratis Minakakis, “Crossings Cycle” (2017) (approx. 21’) is “a visceral musical response to the experience of observing Syrian refugees on the Isle of Lesbos.”
• Carl Czerny,  Romantic Fantasy No. 3 on Sir Walter Scott's "Ivanhoe", Op. 242 (approx. 22’): a main theme is “dispossession, or the depriving of home, possession, or security, on several levels: national, individual, and cultural”. Here is a link to Walter Scott’s novel, Ivanhoe (1819).
• Anthony Branker & Imagine, “What Place Can Be for Us?” (2023) (62’) “After witnessing the forced mass migration of Syrian civilians during their bloody civil war, Branker committed to composing 'What Place Can Be For Us?' as a suite of ten movements to unpack the 'overarching issues of inclusion and belonging,' while speaking to the 'circumstances of exploitation and zones of refuge experienced by people of color and other global citizens.'”
• Max Richter, Exiles (2021) (approx. 33’): “Profoundly moved by the tragedy of the migrant crisis, Richter chose to channel his compassion into a piece for Nederlands Dans Theater. His ballet score Exiles grew from a conversation with the Dutch company’s resident choreographers Sol León and Paul Lightfoot.”

From the dark side: diaspora

• Gregory W. Brown, “un/bodying/s” (2017) (approx. 32’) “explores the history of the displaced populations of Quabbin, the Swift River Valley in Western Massachusetts, including the Native Americans moved by incoming Europeans, and then those Europeans relocated by the State when creating the massive reservoir that supplies Boston with water.”
• Dylan Findley, The Story of Our Journey (2020) (approx. 51’) is a work that “gives voice to refugees worldwide through their personal experiences of several individuals interviewed by the refugee advocacy organization Their Story is Our Story (TSOS). This multimedia composition recounts their escape from their homelands to foreign lands.”
• Dina e Mel, “Bërbili” (Nightingale) album (2020) (37’): “forgotten songs of the Arbanasi people who migrated from the Skadar Lake to the Zadar area in the early 18th century”.
• Branko Mataja was a Nazi concentration camp survivor and a displaced person after the war. Perhaps those experiences informed his haunting electric guitar style, as on the album “Over Fields and Mountains” (2022) (40’).

Music: songs and other short pieces

• “Beautiful River” (We Shall Gather Together) (lyrics)
• “We’re All in This Together”, from “High School Musical” (lyrics)
• Elton John, “Friends” (lyrics)
• Demi Lovato, “Gift of a Friend” (lyrics)

Visual Arts

• Paul Klee, Siblings (1930)
• Pablo Picasso, The Happy Family (1917)

Film and Stage

• Taxi Driver, about a Viet Nam war veteran with violent inclinations, which turn toward the salvation of a teenage prostitute: the “steam billowing up around the manhole cover in the street is a dead giveaway” that “Manhattan is a thin cement lid over the entrance to hell, and the lid is full of cracks”; the man is a loner but not by choice, failing in every attempt at human relationships
• Moonrise Kingdom: two emotionally troubled pre-teens, a boy and a girl, find belonging with each other, and the instruments in the orchestral numbers, especially in the sequence as the credits run, serve as a metaphor for the theme of belonging.
• Up, in which an elderly widower takes on a new family
• Farewell, My Concubine, a story about two men, beginning with their boyhood as castaways to the Peking Opera School with “nowhere else to turn”
• Mosquita y Mari, a film about two adolescent girls whose “friendship is genuine refuge”
• The Kid With a Bike: abandoned by his father, an eleven-year-old boy skirts disaster
• My Life As a Zucchini (Ma Vie de Courgette): orphaned children make their own family