From the sidewalk opposite I studied the ordinary rooms estranged by exposure - as we all would be if our interiors could be revealed. Onlookers gathered to watch the rituals of aftermath: trucks sirening up, the clatter of officialdom. Once, in Warsaw, I saw the facade of an abandoned prewar building fall, cleanly, like drapery slipping from a statue. Wonder that depended on nothing but my own willingness to find it. Trips to the post office and supermarket became exhilarating paying attention to the oddities and ironies of even my dullest routines reminded me that I lived, I perceived and I contained a startling range of feelings: humiliation, pain, self-hatred, yes, but also wonder.
I started a weather journal, hoping, I wrote, that it “might make me love the world more.” I remained a melancholic American struggling with Polish grammar, but attention did render the world entrancing.
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When I read the weather journals of Gerard Manley Hopkins, full of riverine descriptions of cloud architecture, I envied his ebullient noticing, his passionate benevolence toward everything he saw. “I live on Smutna Street,” I told someone, momentarily forgetting “Smolna” was my street’s actual name her laughter reminded me that smutna means “sad.” I was often sad during that first, dark autumn, dealing with a disintegrating marriage and the parched loneliness of the unlanguaged. With each failure of action or speech, I squelched around in touristic self-pity. Doing so required stripping myself of fluency and the cloak of native understanding. In 2016, I moved to Poland to study and write poetry on a Fulbright arts fellowship. Life, otherwise “automatized,” can pass as if we are unconscious - even as if we never lived at all. For Shklovsky, ostranenie occurs when a writer creates “a special way of experiencing an object, to make one not ‘recognize’ it but ‘see’ it.” The stakes are high.
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Artistic estrangement - originally ostranenie, a word coined by the Russian literary theorist Viktor Shklovsky - is sometimes translated as “defamiliarization.” A good writer, for example, makes unfamiliar what they depict - jealousy, or a tree, or a siren’s sound - to free it from clichés or preconceptions, forcing us to encounter it as if for the first time, though we have probably been jealous, seen a tree, heard a siren. Reflecting on this meeting, which happened only in retrospect, I can’t help thinking that the two meanings of “estrangement” converge. But I’d imagined estrangement as the man who stands arms-out to separate two fighters I never anticipated seeing my father as a stranger would. It’s been 12 years since I severed contact with my father, after a long history of his abuse. The clearer image was of a stranger in a doorway, half-turned away. With effort, I could find traces of the man my mind summons at the word “father.” The nose, yes, and the manner of walking. Afterward, my sister murmured, “You ignored Daddy perfectly.” In the clamor of hellos and farewells, I missed being introduced to the man - not much taller than me, gray-haired - I assumed was a family friend. When my sisters and I arrived, a few people were departing. Nearby family assembled into a small, masked audience. I drove down I-80 to Lorain, Ohio, where my grandparents settled in the 1950s, after emigrating from Puerto Rico, and raised 13 children, my father the eighth in line.
If I wanted to say goodbye, I was told, this would be my only chance. Have a similar background and goals as myself,” said Hernandez.In May of 2020, my 95-year-old grandmother came down with pneumonia. “I hope to become an internationally renowned researcher andĮducator who continues to work within the community and empower students who Hernandez has racked up many awards and honors throughout her career, with the Sisters with Superpowers award being the most recent. I developed amazing friendships I’ll never forget.” My cohort shared with me a very challenging and developmental part of my life. “We were very diverse and from many different places. “My favorite memories of my time were my interactions with other PhD students in my cohort,” said Hernandez. Hernandez also points to her fellow COPH students as big influences in helping her develop leadership skills in diverse environments, and to deal with the challenges that may come her way. Hernandez has been a crucial public health leader and educator in the Atlanta community since receiving her PhD from the COPH.
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