Christal Cooper
Marlon
L Fick’s The Nowhere Man
He's a real nowhere man
Sitting in his nowhere land
Making all his nowhere plans for nobody
Excerpt
from The
Nowhere Man
Written
by John Lennon
Performed
by The Beatles
The Nowhere Man follows the life and
travels of an American novelist, Bolivar Collins, from his youth to adulthood
through the later half of the 20th Century, a time of war and
political turmoil. Socially awkward and
introverted, Collins looks for answers in books of philosophy, trying to
understand the chaos around him and the chaos he feels. When he cannot find explanations for the
mysteries of human behavior, human sexuality, love, war, etc., he attempts to
apply philosophical explanations, which in turn results in black irony. Rapid changes in settings -= from the Untied
States, to France and Spain, then to Gabon, the Congo, and Zaire, then to Cuba,
Nicaragua, and Mexico – echo Collin’s own evolution, while eternal forces beyond
his control place him directly in the path of history: the man, who began as a bookish adolescent,
is compelled to participate in the Nicaraguan Civil War, presumably, as “a
spy.” Caught between allegiances – the
Untied States vs. his family, now Cuban – Collins becomes a fugitive, wanted by
the FBI and CIA.
This past fall of 2015 Jaded Ibis Productions published
Marlon L Fick’s novel The Nowhere Man.
Fick has written four other books: the short
story collection Histerias Minimas by Fuentes Mortera: Mexico City, 2000.
Poetry collection El nino de Safo by
Fuentes Mortera: Mexico City, 1999;
Selected Poems by Fuentes Mortera:
Mexico City, 2000
Poetry Collection The River Is Wide: Twenty Mexican
Poets, by Albuquerque: UNM Press, 2005
Fick, who was living part time in Kansas
City, Kansas, started the historical and philosophical novel The
Nowhere Man in 2005, after he was awarded the National Endowment of the
Arts for his poetry.
“I
finished the poetry project before the NEA money came, so I decided to try my
hand at the novel form.”
The
next five months he wrote with pen and notebook at his desk from 9 a.m. until
10 to 11 p.m. at night in the quietest of environments, where not even a mouse
is allowed to squeak, and only took breaks to drink coffee and nibble at
sandwiches his wife would place at his desk, sometimes not noticing the
sandwich until hours later.
“So,
with this book and with the other books too, I have generally lost a lot of
weight due to writing. I lose myself and forget to eat. I wrote approximately 700 pages in the first
five months. My wife was so frustrated that she went down to our house in
Mexico City to get away from my writing (for about three months). With first drafts, it’s a race with memory,
right? You have to remember what you wrote on page 15 when you’re writing page
150.”
The Nowhere Man’s main character Bolivar
Collins is on a journey to find answers to every aspect of his life: sexual, political, philosophical, and
spiritual. In the process, Collins,
similar to Sophia in Jostein Gaarder’s Sophia’s World, considers all forms
of philosophy and settles on Cuban politics, but still, in the end, finds that
his most faithful companion is the muse within him – the writer.
“The initial idea had
something to do with where the novel starts—during the end of the sexual
revolution, my own awkwardness at that time and my propensity to live in books
more than in the world. As Stevens said, “the problem with my life is that it
has been more about places than people.” The same is probably true for me.
However, I was aware,
even in the 70s, of horrible things going on in places like El Salvador. In later drafts, I began to use the places I
know firsthand as a template for settings.
Hence the Congo, Cuba, etc….”
Fick had a group of 12 readers read the
first draft: eleven readers loved the
manuscript, but one reader detested it. Unfortunately, Fick listened to the one
reader over the eleven readers, and left the novel untouched on his desk for
two years, which was enough time for the wounds from the harsh critic to heal
and he wrote more drafts.
After writing three drafts by 2009, he
met a Cuban writer who had an inside knowledge about Castro the man and about
Cuba’s role in Nicaragua.
“As a result of knowing
her (in Mexico City) I re-drafted the novel two more times and ran it by her to
check it. I wanted Castro to be utterly believable.”
He sent it out to Jaded Ibis Productions,
founded by publisher Debra Di Blasi. Di
Blasi got in touch with him in December of 2011 to accept The Nowhere Man.
And it
was Di Blasi’s idea to have two editions of The Nowhere Man – the
black and white edition that is not illustrated, and the color edition that is
illustrated by Cuban-American artist Christian Duran.
“Christian
and I have never met. We have talked on
the phone quite a bit. He asked a lot of questions, concrete kinds of
questions—like what specifically does the dog’s breed look like.”
The Nowhere Man is considered a fiction
novel but at least half of it is based on fact, and Fick and Bolivar Collins
share some of the same experiences.
“I think most novels are
concomitants of things that happen to us or to someone we know. They’re
reconfigurations. Castro and Ortega are
real people, of course. The political turmoil was real.
There are places where I
did weave myself into all that in a fictional way. Fact—About half the time I was making fun of
my younger self. I feel like I lost an entire decade (ie the 80s zoomed by)
when I had my nose in books by Kant and Hegel and Heidegger.”
Like Bolivar Collins, Fick was also a deep
thinker – and he started writing by the age of 6, which he attributes to the
books his mother and father would read to him as a child.
“Instead of regular kid
books, they’d read poems by Langston Hughes, Carl Sandburg, Robert Frost. I sensed the words were physical from the
beginning. It felt like a great dance going on in my head—hey, bop/ re-bop/
mop/ yeah!”
After he received his B.A. in Philosophy from Kansas University he entered the Peace Corps and taught in West Africa. He also received his MA in Poetics from New York University, and his Ph.D. in English from the University of Kansas.
In 1997, at the invitation of Octavio Paz, he
moved to Mexico City, Mexico where he maintains a home there today with his
wife the Spanish painter Paquita Esteve.
He also
lived in China, but presently lives in Arizona where he is the Associate
Professor of English at Navajo Technical University. https://www.facebook.com/NavajoTech/?pnref=lhc
He is presently writing the sequel to The
Nowhere Man, titled Rhapsody in a Circle.
“Marie Ella is based on an actual person I knew
in West Africa. The real Marie and I were never married; in fact, she was a
fellow teacher working at the same school. I found her mysterious though, and
the physical descriptions are much like the real Marie. She did not have any
ties to Mbutu in Zaire whatsoever.”
Marie Ella and I are spending the weekend at the
beach. It’s good to be out of the jungle
for a while. I am sitting on a fallen
okoume tree on a beach this afternoon reading Portnoy’s Conplaint under some palm trees that lean at sharp angles
west over the Atlantic Ocean. It’s an
overcast July day and Marie Ella has gone shopping in Old Akene. I get no more than a few pages and can’t
remember what I’ve just read. But I
remember remembering: tall,
undernourished Marie Ella turning, walking slowly, gracefully in that ancient
African way, slow and as graceful as a black, elegant wasp trailing its long
legs through the air, as if to say my
people have been here for thousands of years, what we have known we have known
for thousands of years, and this has taught us no to be in a hurry.
I thought about how beautiful she looked
sleeping. Her skin is so dark that she
disappears on a moonless summer night more quickly than my whiteness, but in
the tiny burst of a match to light the kerosene, her limbs shine like Japanese
lacquer. . . mon petit chou, porquoi tu
ne peux pas dormer, viens tu mes bras. . . the pink underside of her hands,
pink of her inner lips, such a whiteness in her teeth. She wore a small gold cross around her
neck. At night, she took off her large
man-framed, thick glasses and her eyes suddenly shrunk back to a normal
proportion.
The drums and ululations began around
dusk somewhere past the beaches reserved for the half-naked French women. When
Marie Ella returned from Old Akebe, she brought tortoise ova, built a fire
beside a beached okoume log, wrapped the ova in tinfoil, and buried them in the
coals to broil. As the fire licked its way further into the side of the tree,
we took off our clothes and went swimming. The water here is body temperature,
womb temperature, and we wrapped our legs and arms together like a couple of
male and female twins. I did not want to leave the water, ever. I remember
knowing the world has not heard from me for so long, the world has forgotten
me as if it had ever known me or ever would.
Pages
81-82
“The CIA did contact me, however, and they did
in fact ask me to “listen” for them. I told them to go to hell. All this was just prior to the civil war in Zaire—at
a cost of 2 million lives. It is also
true that I was very ill and had to be medevac’d out of the jungle.”
Eventually I got out of the water. As usual my footprints disappeared behind me
in the waves. I was taken, seized from
Africa by invisible claws and quickly condemned to spending much of my life
longing to return. After several months
of dysentery and malaria, a pontoon plane landed on the Ogoue, down river from
my village where the river was wide enough for the landing. The elder and his oldest son paddled me down
to the plane. In my delirium, sweat,
bloody shorts, I mediated a heated argument between a group of rabbits and
porcupines. The rabbits argued that they
were more delicious in peanut sauce and red pepper than the porcupines, and the
porcupines were about to throw their quills when I assured them both: they were both equally delicious, and arguing
that it was precisely because our lives are so short that they should stop to
consider how best to lead these lives, as all of us would soon be simmering in
a cooking pot, like me. I’m simmering in a cooking pot and brokering a peace
between animals and still I don’t know its malaria and bloody dysentery. The next solid thing I knew, from the shared
world of common reference, was of being in a hospital in Paris.
Pages
82-82
The most compelling excerpt to write was when
the main character Bolivar Collins is wounded during the attack on
Corinto.
“When I wrote this, I
had not personally experienced war, so I did quite a bit of research, talking
to vets, talking to active soldiers, Nicaraguan refugees…”
I leaned Zapata’s gun against the
stone. Exhausted, I took off my boots
and my socks. In one of my socks I
dropped in three bullets for good luck, one for the Father, the Son, and the
Holy Ghost. Amen. I tied the sock, tied the boots together, and
rested my head on the boots. I don’t
know how long I was asleep. Gunfire and
bright flashes from flares awakened me.
I slid my ammunition sock into my left pocket and slipped on my
boots. Then I peered out at the city
around me.
A third of the houses and buildings were
demolished by bombs. I could also see
American made tanks perched on the hills on three corners surrounding the
town. There was a sudden scream of air,
a sound I remembered from Africa, fighter jets swooping down to strafe the
city. They were F16s and they left vapor
trails as they shot back out of their dives and tilted east into the sun,
toward their aircraft carrier somewhere in the Gulf of Mexico. I thought about food and wanted to sleep and
maybe I prayed. If I did, the prayer was
interrupted.
The helicopter hovered so close that I
could see the pilot. He looked more like
a fly than a man. With bulbous black
sunglasses, I took him for a fly. I
didn’t think. I just aimed and
fired. Through my sites I saw his head
fling backward and now the co-pilot fumbling for control. The Apache spun around the way maple leaf
wings twirl and fall. It crashed into
the gazebo, exploding and sending large pieces of metal and mushrooms of fire
into the Tule trees in the town’s square.
Then over the hills that surround Zelaya,
I counted three more helicopters on the horizon. They drew my attention away from the tank on
the northeast corner of the plaza and the Contras taking up positions along the
pillars of the tower’s center and arcade.
More helicopters – Apaches. You
think of the strangest things. I
accidentally stirred up a family of red hornets in a sand box on the family
farm. I was about Sophia’s age . . . I
was dragging a toy tractor and plough through the sand, getting the sand, the
earth, ready for the winter freeze.
After several direct hits, my grandmother brought out a gallon of red
diesel to douse the sand box. Then she
drove me to the hospital.
In a few seconds that seemed like forever
in a memory, another one hovered. It
only occurred to me later that the fly was a man, the fly and his crew were men
. . . maybe from Kansas or Missouri. In
my dreams I jumped out of the tower before the tank shell or whatever it was
blew the town apart, and I landed hard against the flagstone tile roof between
the weeds that were growing there and rolled head over feet off the cathedral
until the bones in my body crashed some fifty feet below.
Pages
165 and 166
Photograph
Description and Copyright Information
Photo1
Marlon
Fick
Copyright
granted by Marlon Fick
Photo
2
The
Nowhere Man
– illustrated edition with Christian Duran
The
Nowhere Man
– black white edition
Photo
3
John
Lennon’s handwriting of The Nowhere Man
Public
Domain
Photo
4
Illustration
from Page 16 of The Nowhere Man
Attributed
to Christian Duran
Copyright
granted by Christian Duran and Marlon Fick
Photo
5
Jaded
Ibis Productions web logo
Fair
Use Under the United States Copyright Law
Photo
6
Jacket
cover of Histerias Minimas
Photo
7
Jacket
cover of El nino de Safo
Photo
8
Jacket
cover of Selected Poems
Photo
9
Jacket
cover of The River Is Wide: Twenty Mexican Poets
Photo
10
Marlon
L Fick trout fishing in Tetons Wyoming.
2010.
Copyright
granted by Marlon L Fick
Photo
11
Laura
Chavez Fick, Pythia, and Marlon
Copyright
granted by Marlon L Fick
Photo
12
Laura
Chavez Fick and Marlon loading the camper
Copyright
granted by Marlon L Fick
Photo
13.
Jostein
Gaardner
12-29-2009
Attributed
to GAD
GNU
Free Documentation License Version 1.2
Photo
14
Jacket
cover of Sophie’s World
Photo
15
Wallace
Stevens
Fair
Use Under the United States Copyright Law
Photo
16
A
billboard serving as a reminder of one of many massacres that occurred during
the Civil War in El Salvador. The
Castilian inscription to the left reads, “They tore out the flower, but the
roots are returning among us.”
Attributed
to Dave Watson
Public
Domain
Photo
17
Marlon
L Fick in March 2008.
Copyright granted by Marlon L Fick.
Copyright granted by Marlon L Fick.
Photo
18
Marlon
L Fick, in Cuba, standing next to a boat by his own name in 2001.
Copyright granted by Marlon L Fick.
Copyright granted by Marlon L Fick.
Photo
19
Fidel
Castro speaking in Havana in 1978.
CCBY
CA 2.0
Photo
20
Jaded
Ibis Productions logo
Fair
Use Under the United States Copyright Law
Photo
21
Web
photo of Debra Di Blasi
Fair
Use Under the United States Copyright Law
Photo
22.
The
black and white edition of The Nowhere Man
Photo
23
The
Illustrated edition of The Nowhere Man
Photo
25
Illustration
from page 68 of The Nowhere Man illustrated edition
Attributed
to Christian Duran
Copyright
granted by Christian Duran and Marlon L Fick
Photo
26
Marlon
L Fick diving in Cuba, 2001
Copyright
granted by Marlon L Fick
Photo
27
Castro
and Ortego
Photo
30
Immanuel
Kant
18th
Century Painting
Public
Domain
Photo
31
George
Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel in 1831
Painting
attributed to Jakob Schlesinger
Public
Domain
Photo
32.
Martin
Heidegger
May
10, 1960
Attributed
to Willy Pragher
CCBYSA
3.0
Photo
33.
Marlon
L. Fick, age 4
Copyright
granted by Marlon L Fick.
Photo
34.
Langston
Hughes
1968
Attributed
to Carl Van Vechter
Public
Domain
Photo
35
Carl
Sandburg
1955
Attributed
to Al Ravenna
Public
Domain
Photo
36
Robert
Frost
1941
Attributed
to Fred Palumbo
Public
Domain
Photo
37
Marlon
L Fick in 1985 as a New York University Graduate student
Copyright
granted by Marlon L Fick.
Photo
38.
Octavia
Paz in 1988.
Attributed
to John Leffmann
CCBY
3.0
Photo
39
Marlon
and Paquita Esteve
Copyright
granted by Marlon L Fick
Photo
40
Navajo
Technical University web logo
Fair
Use Under the United States Copyright Law
Photo
41
Marlon
L Fick trout fishing in Tetons, Wyoming in 2010.
Copyright
granted by Marlon L Fick.
Photo
42
Web
logo for the illustrated edition of The Nowhere Man
Photo
43
Jacket
cover of the illustrated edition of The Nowhere Man
Photo
44
Jacket
cover of the black and white edition of The Nowhere Man
