Migratory Birds

March 29, 2021
Essayist Oliver debuts with a thoughtful, roving meditation on migration, language, and home. In intimate pieces studded with references to history and literature, Oliver ponders such topics as the tug of home and the consequences of dislocation. In the title essay, she imagines the interior life of Bill Lishman, a Canadian naturalist and inventor who studied avian migration patterns. While trying to save birds in danger of extinction, Lishman discovered that chicks born in captivity could be helped to migrate and return from whence they came, leading Oliver to conclude that “home is also a recording from childhood, an implanted memory.” “The Other Lost Boys and Girls” sees Oliver blending reportage with evocative prose from a trip to Old Havana, where a U.S.-funded scare campaign in the 1960s said that the state would take children from their parents, which resulted in over 14,000 children being sent to Florida, the devastating consequences of which reverberated for decades. In “Ozdamar’s Tongue,” she ruminates on the writer Emine Sevgi Ozdamar, who moves from Turkey to Germany and finds refuge in the “indeterminate foreignness” of a new language. Oliver’s dreamlike, intelligent musings don’t always cohere with the narrative’s broader theme of migration, but few will begrudge following this exciting writer as she experiments and explores. Fans of lyrical essays will enjoy this literary global odyssey.

April 15, 2021
Essays haunted by echoes and shadows. In the third entry of the publisher's Undelivered Lectures series (following books by Mary Cappello and Namwali Serpell), Mexican-born essayist Oliver debuts with a collection of 10 graceful pieces that include meditations on place, language, exile, and memory. Whooping cranes, the subject of the title essay, follow "a route anchored in memory" in their annual migration. Not all migrations, though, end in home: In the early 1960s, thousands of children were sent from Cuba to Florida by parents who feared that they would be wrenched from their families to serve Castro. Too many to house in camps, the children were relegated to orphanages or temporary homes; many never saw their parents again. Other migrations are willful tests of one's identity: Writer and performer Emine �zdamar left her native Turkey for Germany, where she chose to write in German. "Authors who write in languages that are not their own are frequently interrogated about their motivations, as though words were also private property," Oliver observes. The author, who won a scholarship to study in Erfurt, Germany, when she was 22, considers the complexities of inhabiting language, place, and time. In Berlin, Oliver discovered that the violence of the past "is a dense fog that refuses to lift. The city stands out because it trades in reversal: the echo is sharper than the sound, memory is stronger than the present, and in public you are only allowed to conjugate in the past tense." At least 3,000 unexploded bombs lie beneath Berlin; the city of Koblenz has been evacuated four times so that bombs could be defused. Oliver also found secrets beneath the surface in Cappadocia, where she visited cities of ancient caves carved out of Anatolia's volcanic earth; 37 cities have been found so far, connected by high-ceilinged tunnels. Early Christians sought refuge in the caves, which now have become a tourist destination. Thoughtful, sensitively observed essays.

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