I, WABENZI

I, WABENZI
Rafi Zabor

To quote the Sandokai, a Zen liturgical chant; Ordinary life fits the absolute/as a box and its lid./The absolute works together/ with the relative like two arrows/meeting in mid-air. The poet Paul Eluard put it slightly differently: There is another world, but it is in this one. We all instinctively recognize that this is true, but so what? How is it possible to live fully into this knowledge?
Most of us don’t have the slightest idea how to collapse the distance between our ordinary lives and the absolute. We wait for an occasional glimpse of clarity or a moment of grace, while constructing comfortable lives for ourselves in the interim.
However, a few people go for broke, try to pierce what they suspect is the veil of illusion that passes for reality, maybe because the bourgeois life style doesn’t quite do it for them and/or they are driven by private demons. In Zabor’s case, his girlfriend’s late term abortion was a pivotal event, but his motives are more complex than this.
It also helps to be young and foolish, because older people understand that the religious quest often ends badly, the seeker feeling ripped off and bitter, or worse. The great gift of psychoanalysis is to remind us that we have a nearly infinite capacity for self deception, and Zabor is not unaware of the allure of the exotic and our predisposition to project our own fantasies on to the Other.
Rafi Zabor, a PEN/Faulkner award winning novelist and practicing jazz musician, has written a wonderful memoir in the tradition of Augustine’s Confessions. Like Augustine, Zabor takes religious experience seriously. There are problems with this subject matter both because of the highly subjective nature of religious experience and the difficulty of establishing the authority or believability of the narrator. He solves these issues by his narrative strategy.
The book is divided into three sections. The first chronicles the decline and death of Zabor’s immigrant parents. It is poignant, funny and moving. We meet his extended family, eastern European jews living in Brooklyn, and he describes nursing his parents through their final illnesses. He emerges from this experience shaken and depressed. In the second section he travels to England to visit friends who were members of Reshad Field’s Sufi religious community, which Zabor belonged to in his youth. The third section is an extended flashback to the time years earlier when Zabor arrived in rural England to join the group.
This structure is essential to the book’s success because it establishes Zabor’s credibility. He is someone not unlike the rest of us. He speaks from the perspective of middle age, and with rueful bemusement describes his younger self, lurching from one epiphany to the next.
A compelling narrative is essential for a book’s success, but narrative skill--the quality of the writing--is ultimately what makes it work, and Zabor writes beautifully. To write clearly and vividly about the ineffable is impossible, but he gets very close.
I, Wabenzi is nearly 500 pages long and is the first book in a projected four volume autobiography. I can’t wait for the next installment.