Self-Portrait in Green

“…y el mundo es ancho y ajeno.”

“…and the world is immense and strange.”

— Ciro Alegría, 1941

A Self-Portrait emerges as a series of fragments.  

In Jean-Luc Godard’s Passion, El Greco’s Assumption of a Virgin emerges as a tableau vivant, a living picture. A camera circulates a mass of feathered wings. Each body stands in careful repose, trembling slightly. Feathers shuffle. Gabriel Fauré’s Requiem, a Catholic Mass for the dead, plays. Actors bear the weight of cloth in an emphatic hyperreality. Yet staging this living picture promises a return to a set of former conditions. To the precarity of depiction: a time when forms tremble, when oily pigment slips. To a moment of encounter, of beholding the image anew.  

Memory surfaces. I, age eleven, gaze upon the stretching bodies of El Greco’s paintings for the first time. I am bewildered. “He’s from an island called Crete,” my mom whispers. “Some people say he couldn’t see straight.”

I gaze upon them now: the brilliance of El Greco’s aqueous colors, his dazzling greens. I trace the rippling folds of iridescent garments, of pigment shuttling between fabric and skin.

While Faure’s Requiem accompanies Godard’s tableau, another “symphony” would accompany mine. This is Agustín Acosta’s “Sinfonía en Verde,” or a “Symphony in Green.” Long before forced exile, Acosta, former poet laureate of Cuba (and my great-uncle)—reflected on his pupil, like my own before the Vision, temporarily “flooded with green.” “My eye is filled,” he wrote, with the “green of the field.” 

The: 

Green of flower buds, 

sweet like children… and the strong 

thistle-green of plants wounded

by the bitter solitude of the road.

This “strong / thistle-green” is the “green of ocean and of hope.” It is the green of seas traversed. The blue-green of my oceans—Caribbean and Mediterranean—the green of my grandfathers’ eyes. I picture them, Suheil and Samuel, looking from their respective coasts of Matanzas, Cuba, and Acre, Palestine. 

I imagine the fragility of a green rippling before them. A green to which Samuel would submit his body, cocooned by boat. A green which Suheil would dive into as a boy, plummeting from the Crusader’s Wall, twelve footsteps from the Lighthouse, thirty-seven from the Mosque, forty-two from the Franciscan Church. (Did he count those steps to dive, once more, at night, before he fled forever?) Green stands in the middle of the color spectrum. Green is where you hope to reach another side. What you throw your body up against. What you sink your body into. Green is a field for poetry. 

Eight years ago, I discovered a set of photos of Suheil, age ten, posing as a model for the family’s photography studio in Acre and, later, Beirut. He occupies the hand-built sets of his imagination: Mediterranean and New England seascapes, Alpine villages, a vague American West. The photos capture an imagination sustained—and made, paradoxically, fertile—by displacement. Young Suheil would be responsible for the hand-coloring of the black-and-white film.

Barthes describes photography as producing an “illogical conjunction” between what is now and what once was. It is like Godard’s montage: a series of fragments set upon film. Suheil’s octagon serves such an illogic most beautifully. I picture my grandfather painting, hand assured. I suspect that the hand which paints the mountain—in yellow, red, blue, and that most intense of greens—retains the freedom to dream. 

And I, like my Uncle Agustín, long to capture this painted green which: 

…brings

to my heart and my memory

the ineffable memory,

 once in another’s eyes.