Ottilie Mulzet on how her adoptive heritage lead her to a life of and in translation.

Learning a language is a kind of practice, as anyone who’s ever learned one will tell you. It has its own drills, milestones, peaks, and valleys. Its own rituals, such as repeating phrases aloud three times so they will register in your ears, the choreography embedded into the interface of tongue and palate. The reverberations echo in your skull—even if forgotten five minutes later, a residue remains. One ploughs through printed dictionaries and delights in their idiosyncrasies, which are missing from the online versions. There are “found poems” in certain dictionary entries. There’s pleasure in the way the language lives on your tongue, in your throat, each language residing there differently.

As someone who, as an adoptee, had to perform identity, I am continually fascinated by the ways identity shifts within, and in between, languages.

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Growing up, I felt bereft of narrative. English was the language I spoke; Canada’s bilingual policy meant I had cursory French lessons in school, and I heard smatterings of Yiddish from older adoptive relatives (I always wanted to hear more). The notions of “motherland” and “mother tongue” are not anything I relate to. If anything, it was the English words I read that suckled me—but these words weren’t my mother. There were two mothers, one flesh-and-blood and present, the other absent, a vague image. One was Catholic, the other Jewish; one pregnant out of wedlock, the other married. The enforced secrecy of my birth mother’s identity enshrouded her in a taboo from which I recoiled, as from some amorphous void. That void had made me, but it could also swallow me up. I had been “rescued” from it, and what could be more ungrateful or unwise than to go rushing back to the disaster from which you’d just been rescued?

When adoptees choose to search, it is so that their shadowy parents might be granted real-life outlines. If this never happens, the parents remain amorphous, taking up undue space in one’s mind, eternal shape-shifters.

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“Don’t you think it’s funny how now the people making these ads get it?” I say to my best friend, my voice cradling the words “get it” with invisible quotation marks. We’re watching television, something we do together often now, grateful to be in each other’s bubble. “What?” she replies, looking up from her phone. “The models,” I say. “Oh, I know,” she says. We’ve been friends for twenty-eight years. She knows what I mean without my having to explain.

After yet another murder, one salve seemed to be representation. Between announcements of our crumbling democracy and more and more people dying, there were now ads with smiling Black faces. Black girls with crowns of 4c curls. Black women running businesses. Black men walking hand in hand down a suburban street with their Black and biracial daughters. It makes you wonder why Black people had to die in order to see ourselves reflected.

The Thanksgiving issue of The New Yorker features a little Black girl with a blue iris flower in her Afro holding an American flag with her sleeves rolled up. I’m caught off guard by the emotion it elicits. It makes me want to frame it. Keep it and one day show my daughter, if I have one. I stand in my mother’s house looking at the cover and wonder: Why does such a quotidian image make me want to cry? It isn’t just that it’s beautiful in the midst of the year’s chaos and pain. It’s because I can’t help wondering what it might have been like for me and my friend to grow up with images such as this one on a magazine like this one. Perhaps then I wouldn’t have been so caught off guard. The image could just have been beautiful, not uncommon.

Isn’t this what you wanted? That’s what I imagine the executives who made these decisions asking. Yes, but not at this price. I smile at the images, I’m glad for them, but they needn’t have come like this. They should have come before this. Without this. The taste in my mouth is bittersweet. I hate that guilt and corporate desire fuels change, rather than genuine understanding. Because if you understood, it wouldn’t have taken a murder of eight minutes and forty-six seconds to get us here. Read More

Photo: Mairead Small Staid

In the torpor of the past ten months, I’ve found myself missing most those things I rarely did before. I miss the grand galleries of art museums, though the nearest is more than an hour away and trips have always been sporadic. I daydream about travel, about the tenuous camaraderie of the airport screening line, the stratus-brushed horizon beyond the window, the world narrowed to a seat, a tray, a book, a bubble of time removed from the world and set ever so gently aside. What I miss, I think, is less action itself than the likelihood of action—or of accident. Even as the pandemic spans four seasons, some underlying transformation (or its potential) is absent; some kinetic possibility is missing in each changeless change. I miss, I want to say, the cusp of things, even as I know this to be a meager complaint amid the litany of real loss. That needling lack remains. And so, seeking some approximation of museum or airport, I’ve turned to the closest thing I have—my shelves—and there found a book on the work of the Italian artist Max Coppeta.

Piogge sintetiche is the book’s title, Synthetic Rain, and the unit of measure for the work within is the drop, caught upon vertical or horizontal planes. Coppeta’s synthetic rain is made of crystallized liquid, suspended on sheets of glass, paper, wood, methacrylate, or PVC. Rare is the solitary drop; they come in trios or quartets or scattered crowds. I would call them by the collective noun of patter, flung over a black or bronzed or transparent background or, in certain pieces, spread across a line of upright and parallel planes, one drop to each sheet, as if this rain did not fall but fly, its path tracked in glassine intervals like a sleek, modernist update on Muybridge’s birds. Read More