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The Iowa Review ROBIN HEMLEY Ezequiel enters the restaurant just as I'm leaving, and we agree to see if there's anything going on in town tonight. Back at Kay's, I enlist Adam, the only other boarder at Kay's, in the hunt for Guy Fawkes. Adam is a medical student from London, on an internship here as part of his studies. Bedecked in lip and tongue piercings and something approaching a Mohawk, his father Indian, his mother Polish, he describes himself as a "royalist," and says that those who are not are a distinct minority. A proud Londoner, he even danced in the opening ceremony of the London Olympics. That evening after dark, Ezequiel, Adam, and I walk along the darkened streets of Stanley, looking for anything resembling a bonfire, but finally wind up in the Victory Bar, and in lieu of a celebration, we clink our pints of Longdon Pride, two of us as foreign as Guy (originally, Guido) Fawkes himself. "I don't feel at all foreign here," Adam tells us. "I just feel like it's somewhere I don't know." The Falkland Islands accent he finds unusual, difficult to pin down, but that's it. Perhaps a little like an Australian accent or New Zealand accent, or maybe just something from the West Country. On the way back to Kay's, Adam tells us what it's like to sit on Primrose Hill on Guy Fawkes Night and watch the fireworks all over London. And then he looks up at the sky and points out the Southern Cross. "Can you see it?" he asks. I try, but I'm not sure I can. I just see stars, more or less indistinguishable from one another. |
The Iowa Review Founded in 1970 and edited by faculty, students, and staff from the renowned writing and literature programs at the University of Iowa, The Iowa Review takes advantage of this rich environment for literary collaboration to create a worldwide conversation among those who read and write contemporary literature. ROBIN HEMLEY Robin Hemley is the author of eleven books of nonfiction and fiction and has received many awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, three Pushcart Prizes in fiction and nonfiction, and the Independent Press Book Award. He is currently Director of Writing at Yale-NUS College in Singapore and Distinguished Visiting Writer at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia. "They Have Forgotten Many Things" originally appeared in the Winter 2016/17 issue of The Iowa Review. This is excerpt 3 of 3. The full essay can be read at |
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