“I make a living out of the fact that truth is stranger than fiction…Yet I venture to say that I have been called a liar more often than anybody in the world. Ordinarily when one is called a liar- well, to say the least, one feels hurt. But it is different with me. I do not mind it a bit. When I am called a liar by a reader, I feel flattered! That short and ugly word is like music to my ears.”
-from the Preface to Believe it or Not! by Robert L. Ripley
Kublai Khan does not necessarily believe everything Marco Polo says when he describes the cities visited in his expeditions…
-Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino
I always liked telling tall tales in foreign languages, partly because, as a leg-pulling American in the pre-Bush, pre-Trump days, I felt I was at an advantage and my interlocutor at a disadvantage even though it was his language and not mine. Now, not so sure this is true.
In 1984 in Sudanese Nubia I was sitting by lamp light in a mud dwelling and talking to farmers about New York skyscrapers. I said something that I knew to be true but I presumed they would hear, at best, as a truth stranger than fiction and at worst as a lie. I told them we had two 100 story buildings there, and waited for them to express disbelief. Kazzaab, I expected them to think.
Later I saw the film 11’09”01 September 11, 11 short films made by international directors responding to 9/11 in 11 minute segments. The short by Samira Makhmalbaf was about a teacher telling her young children in an Afghan refugee school in Iran about what had happened. She told them that a tower had fallen and asked if they knew what a tower was, pointing out the window to the brick kiln chimney. She asked for a minute of silence but, looking up at the tower, they didn’t know how long a minute lasted.
In Nubia, one old man told me he had heard about those buildings. And then he asked me if it was also true that they each had a grocery store on the 50th floor. He asked that with a smile, which I could not read either way. I hadn’t heard about that I replied, and I still could not say if he asked in all seriousness. The others did not seem surprised, as if to them it made perfect sense- where else would you buy gargeer and mulukhiyah, they must have thought, but in your own neighborhood.
On the 4th of July, 1973 in Peru I was asked how I’d like to celebrate my independence day. I said, in the traditional way, by boiling hot dogs in beer, then cooling the beer and drinking it. This is what we all did, I said. Tomas said, OK, let’s do it, that sounds good, so I then had to come clean with him. Just joking. And he said, I knew all along that couldn’t be true, because boiled beer is spoiled beer, and Americans are too practical to waste anything.
