2 Artists Follow Muses to Success in Argentina
When the singer and songwriter Kevin Johansen moved back here in 2000 after living for a decade in New York, all his Argentine friends were aghast. 'Why are you here?' he recalls them asking incredulously. 'Are you crazy?'
True, it would be another year before the economy here would collapse and five presidents would hold office during two weeks of political chaos. But the warning signs were already discernible, and Argentines were leaving the country in search of opportunities abroad, not returning to settle down.
'Talk about timing,' Mr. Johansen, 39, says now. 'But I needed a breather from New York, I am married to an Argentine and I realized that I can write songs anywhere, so I thought, 'Let's try it and see what happens.' '
Three years later Mr. Johansen, an American, has a hit CD in Argentina called 'Sur o No Sur.' He is being singled out by critics here for his inventive lyrics, and he has just finished a successful national tour that culminated in a sold-out show at a theater on what he calls 'the Broadway of Buenos Aires.' On Thursday he is scheduled to perform a solo set at CB's 313 Gallery, at 313 Bowery, at Bleecker Street, next to CBGB in the East Village, and then he is to join his band, the Nada, later this month to tour in Spain.
To his utter surprise that CD's most popular track is a quirky pop ballad in English, 'Down With My Baby,' which he describes as 'Barry White and Leonard Cohen meet Nirvana.' Chosen as the love theme for 'Resistiré,' or 'I Will Resist,' a popular prime-time soap opera here, his song is played constantly on the radio and in nightclubs, and when he played it at his recent Buenos Aires show, audience members sang along.
Mr. Johansen is not the only American enjoying artistic success here after having cast his lot with this country in crisis. A highly praised novel published in Argentina recently is 'Flores de un Solo Día,' or 'Flowers of a Single Day,' by Anna Kazumi Stahl, a Louisiana native, also 39, who first arrived here 15 years ago not speaking a word of Spanish, and now, like Mr. Johansen, writes in that language.
Even more curious is that though Mr. Johansen and Ms. Stahl do not know each other, their work addresses many of the same issues. Both, as might be expected of émigrés working in a country and a language not initially their own, are fascinated by what Ms. Stahl describes as 'the experience and sensation of national identity and belonging.'
'Flores de un Solo Día' is the story of Aimée Levrier, who owns a flower shop here, and her mother, a Japanese-born ikebana artist who is mute. Their orderly, settled life is thrown into confusion when Aimée is notified of an inheritance, which forces her to go to New Orleans to confront the carefully hidden secrets of her family's dark, tangled past.
Writing in La Razón, a national newspaper, the critic Luis de la Peña said that Ms. Stahl 'shows herself to be an extraordinary narrator in Spanish.' The novelist and critic Ricardo Piglia compared her to Vladimir Nabokov, commending her for having achieved 'the feat of being transparent and mysterious' and showing a 'mastery of the poetics of estrangement.'
Ms. Stahl teaches American and world literature for a joint program with Lincoln University College and Gen. San Martín National University here and has worked as a translator. 'I guess that what I'm trying to talk about more than anything else is the question of the components of identity and how we end up putting them together,' she said. 'I'm interested in the stories of people who choose to leave and install themselves somewhere else -- how you do that, why you do it and whether you can do it.'
Mr. Johansen, born in Alaska to an American father and an Argentine mother, addresses those same issues directly in the title track of 'Sur o no Sur,' a pun derived from Hamlet's soliloquy that Mr. Johansen translates as 'To South or not to South.' As a violin plays mournfully in the background, he sings of displacement and longing:
I leave because I can't make it here
I come back because there is no hope
I leave because here they take advantage of me
I come back because there they throw me out
I'd like to stay here at home
But I no longer know what that is.
Mr. Johansen's parents divorced before he was in grade school, and he lived with his mother, a literature teacher, in San Francisco in the early 1970's. But he spent his teenage years here with his mother during the brutal military dictatorship, and after high school he played in a series of rock 'n' roll bands before leaving for the United States 'to reconnect with my North American roots.'
During the decade he spent in New York, Mr. Johansen worked as a movie video salesman, a bartender and waiter, a bilingual tour guide at the United Nations and as a doorman at a Manhattan tango club. Like many musicians before him, he also found a home at CBGB.
Ms. Stahl's background is equally complicated, though without family ties to Argentina. Born in Shreveport, La., she grew up in New Orleans, where she spoke Japanese at home with her mother, an immigrant from Japan, and English with her father, an architect of German descent, while always 'feeling slightly outside the loop' as she and her brothers shuttled from Roman Catholic school to ikebana classes to the high school track team.
'I never felt like the United States was 100 percent my home,' she said.
She came here in 1988 to research a graduate school thesis about writers in exile. Urged by a Spanish-language instructor to write short stories in that language, she ended up winning second place in a student competition here and was spotted by a publishing house literary evaluator. That led to 'Catástrofes Naturales,' her collection of short stories published in 1997.
Critics have traditionally argued that Spanish, more so than English, lends itself to a florid vocabulary and to ornate sentences. But Ms. Stahl said she finds it to be exactly the opposite: 'Perhaps because I am a Southern writer' in English, she said, she is more direct and disciplined and less flamboyant, 'cautious, with short sentences,' when she switches to Spanish.
'Like any good Southerner, I get attached to the words and all the resonances and so everything gets a little bit embroidered,' she said.
Writing in Spanish, on the other hand, 'took everything away from me except primary colors,' she explained, adding, 'It's not that I was necessarily working on a smaller canvas than in English, but I was working with fewer elements, and therefore every stroke had to be a stroke that counted.'
'Flowers of a Single Day,' her first novel, was nominated for the Rómulo Gallegos Prize, one the most prestigious for Spanish-language literature, and is to be published in Ms. Stahl's English translation by Harcourt next year.
Mr. Johansen, in contrast, considers himself truly bilingual and writes lyrics in English and Spanish, sometimes bouncing from one language to the other in the same song and tossing off puns as if they were party favors. But he finds it difficult to explain how he decides to pair a song with a language.
'Usually a melody or a line of a lyric will come,' he said, 'but beyond that I really don't know how it happens. I always say that some day I'd like to learn a foreign language, like French or Portuguese, because the two languages, English and Spanish, are really just one for me.'
Musically, Mr. Johansen also likes to mix genres, describing himself with tongue in cheek as a musical 'degenreate.' He has released two albums since returning here, and both are world music, with individual songs that mix Spanish flamenco with Colombian cumbia or Dominican bachata with Argentine milonga, but which also contain traces of tango, American folk music and even reggae.
Despite the severity of Argentina's national crisis, Mr. Johansen and Ms. Stahl say they intend to stay on. Mr. Johansen says he has enough songs written to make another record, and Ms. Stahl has begun a second novel, also set here, with a character who is a translator working with Japanese material.
'I didn't come down for material or economic reasons, so my project is more alive than it was before,' she said. 'My experience of this place is that there is always flux, and as a writer that is inspiring and energizing.'