Harley loco
Author : Rayya Elias
Publisher : Bloomsbury, Rs399
Covering issues from xenophobia to homosexuality, this memoir of Rayya Elias is disturbing, provoking and sobering all together, and is definitely worth reading, says ANUBHAV PRADHAN
There are few people whose life’s story hits you in the gut, takes you on a high and leaves you with a sombre thoughtfulness. Rayya Elias’s Harley loco is one of them. It’s a disturbing, provoking, sobering tale of not just, as Elias puts it on her website, the best of the worst but also the worst of the best of our times.
As the subtitle — A Memoir of Hard living, Hair, and Post-Punk from the Middle-East to the lower East Side — suggests, Harley loco narrates a multifaceted, cosmopolitan kind of deviance. As a six-year-old migrant to the USA from an affluent Christian Syrian background, Elias experienced the ill-effects of sudden economic impoverishment and of a near-pervasive socio-cultural alienation from her parents and family. It also traces the contexts of her adopted homeland throughout her childhood and adolescence.
The first few chapters are devoted to the relation of these details and events: what her family’s roots are, what her childhood in Aleppo was like, why her parents were forced to leave their home for ‘a better life’, and what childhood and early teenage in the States entailed for her. Particularly striking is the frank and unhesitant manner in which she lays down all the important landmarks and formative occurrences and influences on and of her life: from the death of her paternal grandmother Te RsTe: “she looked like she was posing for death”, to her family’s first experience of xenophobia on their first Halloween soon after the migration to the States, to her first sexual explorations with her cousin, “we never kissed, but were grinding on each other”, Elias narration is direct and honest to a fault.
Indeed, for this honesty about herself is what is most remarkable in Elias’s narrative. Also, while an autobiography does necessitate a performative laying bare of the self, Elias writes without seeming to perform at all. This is apparent throughout the text; as her life story progresses from adolescence to youth, her concerns change from fitting in as part of her peer group to pushing herself beyond the limits of familial and social biases and starting her own band. Substance abuse — which she was exposed to early in her adolescence — and sexual un-inhibition remain an integral and growing part of her life’s multi-chromatic experiences. In fact, they follow her as guiding frameworks from Detroit to New York.
In New York, as a professional hairdresser and an upcoming performance artist, Elias gains fame and success, but continues to continually suffer at the emotional plane. Further, she realises that she is attracted more to women than to men, but, like many then and now, remains for a long time unable to fully acknowledge as much to herself; also, she falls in a complicated, near-unrequited relationship with another married woman, a love which remains an abiding passion for many years and which makes it even more difficult for her to successfully bond with other women. This emotional un-fulfillment keeps affecting her professional life as well; she loses her job and is unable to make good on the record deal which could’ve propelled her to stardom. Yet, Elias narrates all this with a direct, hard-hitting equanimity which neither self-victimises herself for her missed opportunities nor glorifies her incessant social and personal rebelliousness.
This equanimity is what is commendable: Elias lives dangerously, recklessly and self-destructively, but she never appears in the least bit swayed by self-pity in the narration of her life and times. Be it her engagements with armed mafia or with armed police, with music moguls or with drug lords, she tells her shocking, complex tale clearly, straight-forwardly and simply. Elias’s mad downward spiral took her, literally, to the streets, to being a homeless squatter in Tompkins Square Park in the dangerous late 1980s, to repeated drug rehabilitation and even to a stay in prison. The title ‘Harley loco’, an appellation she received in prison, is itself a testament to her grit and determination, as well as to her uncaring craziness: “the women who ruled the house nicknamed me Harley loco after that because those Harley Davidson boots were my trademark, and of course I was crazy”.
Ultimately, it is this craziness, coming through consistently throughout the text, which provokes and questions the reader, for Elias’s insistence to take things her own way coupled with her desire to be loved and accepted are what make this a provoking and exemplary self-narration. Harley loco is also significant as a text which quietly raises pertinent questions about ethnic genocide, drug abuse, family life, sexual freedom and citizenship, issues which continue being addressed unsatisfactorily in mainstream public domains. For these and other virtues, for the way in which it lives and redefines the edge, it’s a book definitely worth the read.
The reviewer is an Assistant Professor of literatures in English with Bharati College, University of Delhi