At the 2014 National Book Festival in Washington, D.C

The “foreign” author is sitting between two North American writers and poets busily talking on the stage

She is also being projected on a very big screen in the completely packed hall of the Convention Center

She talks about the fragility of reality for exiles and about the fact that she had left home at a very young

age to go and study abroad in the former Northern and Western “motherland”

Instead of looking at her up on the stage some fifteen to twenty feet away from where I am sitting, I find

myself increasingly starting to look at her up on the big screen hanging above our collective heads

She points out that both of the U.S. authors had dealt and they had struggled with the immense definitional

problem of reality for many authors, in both their poetic and nonfiction works

She says that books and poems contain the memories or aspects of the memories of her former life

Because when she had returned home on vacation after studying a few years abroad, she found out that her

South East Asian “home”, had in the meantime moved on without her, and she had been severely shocked

to discover that it had greatly changed since she had left at a very young age

One of the North American authors, who had lived abroad for some time, points out that not only is reality

fragile, but memories are also quite fragile themselves, as they become heightened, diminished, mixed up,

highly convoluted, and often ever more reinvented with the passage of time, space, and place

As I sat there listening, I had to wonder about we, as exiles, who come from those other places spread out

across the width and breath of this world, where there is no long written history of memories and of poems

about their past, or about the past lives of the people and where they had all accidently happen to come from?

I found myself continually looking at the various authors on the big screen instead of in real life, on the

stage right there in front of me, which often only focused on one at a time, and not on the group as such On the big screen, you could not only see the face of the “foreign” author, in much more depth and also

with much more precision than observing her, and the other authors, in real life at a slight remove from me

I had to wonder what all of this was saying of our collective lives together and about our interactions in a

in a longtime Film/TV, in an increasingly internet, and iPhone “selfie” dominated virtual present reality?

©Greg gilbert Gumbs