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Songs from a Kansas stage

Kansas’ Old Settlers Inn is the best-kept secret in music.


When Miner Seymour started recruiting performers to Old Settlers Inn 12 years ago, he couldn’t pay them much, so staying the night at his family’s house was part of the deal. At breakfast, Miner asked performers for names of others he should call to book.

When he called singer-songwriter Susan Werner’s agent to see if Werner would come to south-central Kansas to play, Werner’s agent said, “Why would I send her out there?”

This is a story about a one-room venue in a small town. It’s the story of an Ohio transplant who envisioned a space for creativity. It’s a story about a piece of culture that blurs red state identity and paints a different picture than news reports on the state school board, evolution or Thomas Frank’s book What’s The Matter With Kansas?, which pondered why Kansans vote against their own interests. This is the story of the gathering power of music.

Old Settlers Inn is in Moundridge, a town of almost 1,600 people. It’s about an hour from Wichita and a half hour from Hutchinson. It’s an area thick with Mennonite culture and religion, where some people have distinctive Moundridge speech patterns and last names. There are six Mennonite churches, a history of high school debate and forensics championships, and an obsession with Moundridge Wildcats basketball. It’s an unlikely place to start a music venue for national performers.

Yet Old Settlers Inn has become a musical stand-by in the region. It’s the anchor date for performers on a circuit that includes Kansas City venues, West Side Folk in Lawrence, the Birdhouse in Manhattan, the Listening Room in Hastings, Nebraska, and sometimes the Blue Door in Oklahoma City. Cheryl Wheeler, a country-folk songwriter from New England, has termed this the “Silo Circuit.”

Old Settlers draws people from bigger cities to Moundridge for music. Almost half the crowd now drives in from Wichita, Kansas’s largest city. There are 40 zip codes in Miner’s audience database.

Still, Miner expects new performers to be skeptical. He imagines musicians driving toward Moundridge from Kansas City according to his directions: Highway 50, then 150, then 56 through the Flint Hills. He imagines they are surprised that Kansas isn’t flat at all. He imagines them driving west to where the land flattens, between the towns of south-central Kansas, where winter wheat pushes green shoots into wide, square-mile fields. He imagines them driving into Moundridge on a Sunday afternoon, when there is hardly a car on main street, and wondering, “Who the hell set this up?”

Main street, where Old Settlers sits behind a limestone storefront, is called Christian Avenue. The corner Conoco station is always open and the Country Kitchen is full on German Buffet night. Further down the block, The Lean-To bar has closed for good.

Inside the inn

Old Settlers isn’t a real inn, but people spend about a dozen Sunday evenings a year there, eating soup and listening to music in a long, narrow room with beige walls and black soundboard borders. A high white ceiling stretches above rough wooden floorboards and the stage, which emerges from the long left wall and is only a few feet off the floor. It’s covered in large marbled tiles and the wall behind it is painted as a marble arch over blue sky and wispy clouds. The face and dove of Picasso’s L’homme en Prole a la Paix, which he reportedly drew for the peace movement, is incorporated into the arch. A painted banister creates the vision of a performer on a circular, outdoor balcony in front of a perfect sky.

For the audience, the 150 seats are less romantic. Wooden folding chairs flank three sides of the stage and fill the floor. Some listeners sit on the bleacher pieces and church pews in the back of the room.

Behind the performance room is the lavender-walled kitchen, where people line up at the counter for the soup-of-the-day. Valetta, Miner’s wife, sells her famous cobbler and key lime pie. At the end of the counter a poster of Wendell Berry’s Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front hangs on the wall, declaring:

Love the quick profit, the annual raise,
vacation with pay. Want more
of everything ready-made. Be afraid
to know your neighbors and to die.
And you will have a window in your head.
Not even your future will be a mystery
any more …

Across the room, a poster advertises cider made in the Seymours’ orchard. Another wall is filled with autographed photos of Old Settlers’ performers, including Greg Brown, Tim O’Brien, Darrell Scott, Cheryl Wheeler, Janis Ian, Martin Sexton, Jeff Black, Susan Werner, Slaid Cleaves and Guy Davis. On the edge of this collage is a sign that says “Peace is Patriotic.”

The congregation

On the day of a show, professors, teachers, students, farmers, doctors, lawyers, business people and artists start arriving around 4:15 p.m. Miner, who wears a bushy, golden-grey beard and button-down plaid shirt, spends his time between the main room and a huge closet used as the performer’s dressing room. In his strident, ornery voice, Miner chats up the crowd and checks in with the musicians. It’s a mostly 30-and-older crowd, some dressed in suit jackets, some in sweatshirts, some in overalls. They are music aficionados who bring Miner new music to listen to. They are also friends who simply trust him to put on a good show.

People here know each other, and some have been at every show since Miner started Old Settlers. Once the entire front row — all season-ticket holders — went out for dinner before a show. Before the show starts, people mill and talk to each other. The ones who drove from out-of-state are soon chatting with regulars.

After 12 years, the Old Settlers audience is still mostly out-of-towners, although there are some local regulars. In general though, the population of Moundridge and the Old Settlers audience do not reflect each other. Miner thinks people like to go to other people’s towns to do things. After all, it’s a nice Sunday drive through rural Kansas. But he feels like Moundridgers still think, “If it’s in our town, how good can it be?”

Small stories

When songwriter Louise Taylor drives across Kansas, heading to her home in Arkansas, she likes listening to Midwest agriculture reports on the radio and trying to decode the beef and grain prices. Sometimes, Louise stops in Kansas and stays overnight at Miner and Valetta’s house. She first met them in 1996 when she played at Old Settlers Inn, and she’s been back to play three times since. Miner and Louise have become good friends, and Miner recently became her agent — his first shot at the enterprise. Louise says the main reason Miner is her agent is because of Valetta’s cherry pie.

Louise believes that people from small towns are more willing to listen to the kind of storytelling she does in her songs. Louise and Miner both say Midwesterners aren’t inundated with shows like those on the coasts, and Kansans are eager to have performers come to them.

When a song moves the crowd at Old Settlers, Louise and Miner can tell. There are no hoops and hollers. Instead, there’s a slight pause — a silence — after the song and before the applause begins.

When she plays at Old Settlers, Louise casts spells on the audience with her poetry and her heavy voice. She’s tall and imposing with a sturdy smile and long, curly brown hair. She fuses her singer-songwriter craft with country-blues, jazz textures, and finger-style guitar playing.

There aren’t many frills about Old Settlers, but Louise says it’s the perfect environment for performers. There are warm personalities, food, and a ready and willing audience. Old Settlers’ performers are treated — and paid — well. Miner can guarantee performers an unusual bonus for a venue this size: $1,000 and a full house. That’s because Miner doesn’t try to make his own living off the ticket price, which now averages $15 a show. Plus, the venue’s good sound and good stage aren’t terribly common in the world where Louise plays.

Coming home

There wouldn’t be an Old Settlers Inn if Miner hadn’t met his wife Valetta while doing pro bono accounting for a Columbus, Ohio, medical clinic. Valetta, who had just returned from working in Africa, was a nurse at the clinic. She was a farm girl from Kansas, not the kind of girl Miner was supposed to marry. His wealthy Ohio family expected him to be a professional, he knew, and to marry a Theta. But this wasn’t what Miner wanted.

In 1985, after living and working in the Northwest — and getting married — the Seymours moved to Kansas. Miner had been studying architecture and doing construction work, and he and Valetta began building a house next to the farm where she grew up. It was a few miles outside Moundridge, on North Old Settlers Road. Soon, their daughter Kate was born.

Valetta knew the Mennonites who farmed the flat fields and lived in Moundridge, but Miner had no connections to the area. He couldn’t believe people identified each other by which church they attended. He didn’t have a group — or a place — with which he identified. But he could relate to the Mennonite values of living simply, pacifism, and a passion for four-part singing.

The small town wasn’t an easy place to be a newcomer; regional history runs deep. Moundridge was born of railroad routes and transplanted roots of homesteaders from Europe, Canada, and other parts of the Midwest. The largest group of immigrants were the German-speaking Mennonites who migrated from Russia to the area in 1874 and brought with them a new winter wheat, which eventually made Kansas the leading producer of hard wheat. Around Moundridge, people still farm the grain.

The Seymours can see the horizon — the curve of the earth — from their front porch. Miner slowly fell in love with Kansas. Although standing in the middle of an empty square mile used to spook him, he likes the vastness now. Once, when they were snowed in on the day of an Old Settlers show, Miner and Valetta strapped on their cross-country skis and sailed across the stubble fields into town.

Putting down roots

It was soon after the move to Kansas in 1985 that Miner saw a building for sale on Moundridge’s main street. After living in the Northwest, he couldn’t believe the low price. He bought it immediately for $11,000 from the VFW without any idea what he’d use it for.

Then, he began to think about what he’d put into the 110-year-old structure that once held a pool hall, senior citizens center and a VFW. He and Valetta thought about opening a film house or a puppet theater for kids. The bottom floor was leased to a pizza joint, and pizza ended up paying the mortgage. The top floor, accessible only up a narrow, precarious and peeling stairway, was empty. It had been used for bingo and parties, so there were restrooms and a food service area.

Eventually, Miner’s songwriter friend Anne Zimmerman told him there was a shortage of venues for her kind in Kansas. Miner got his answer.

The first show at Old Settlers was in 1993, after the upstairs walls had been stripped of decades of wallpaper and painted white with mint green trim. Seventy people came to hear the Waffles, a local old-time string band, play on the foot-high, corner stage. Valetta made chowder and bread to sell to the crowd. People sat at square tables, coffeehouse style. Miner made $37.

By the time The Kennedys drew 80 people to a show in March 1994, Old Settlers had hosted 12 shows and Miner still worried every Sunday if people would show up. At one show, only 27 people had come, and four shows had ended in a net loss for Old Settlers. A few Moundridge residents came to shows at the beginning, but the majority of people came from surrounding small towns.

The Kennedys had been touring with Nanci Griffith’s Blue Moon Orchestra. At the time, Miner didn’t even know who Nanci Griffith was. But Pete Kennedy befriended Miner and started providing names of performers who might play there. In February 1995, songwriter Brooks Williams was the first to attract concertgoers from Wichita.

Tending the flame

As Old Settlers’ popularity grew, Miner decided to move the venue downstairs to increase seating and accessibility in 2001. The pizza place below had folded and left a kitchen and dining area. Miner did all of his own construction work. He brought down the wooden folding chairs he’d bought at a rental yard in Hutchinson. He also brought down the wooden theater seats, grouped in threes, that he acquired from Moundridge High School. He used two church pews and elevated wooden bleacher seats from a tiny high school in northeast Kansas. Seating is tight, but Miner has tried to make it more comfortable by providing foam seat cushions, printed with the Old Settlers logo — a candle with rays of light arcing outward.

Old Settlers Inn is now operated by the non-profit Acoustic Arts Association, which Miner started. It includes five board members and is directed by Miner. There is also a radio program on KMUW called New Settlers Radio Hour, which plays live shows from Old Settlers and other places in the area. Miner uses his connections from Old Settlers to bring musicians to local colleges and larger performance venues.

The Seymours have never expected to make a living from the venue, and Valetta works as a nurse practitioner in nearby Hesston. On show days, a local family runs the kitchen and makes and serves the soup, bread and dessert. But Valetta is also in the Old Settlers kitchen after the show, helping clean and wash dishes. People are employed to do this (they get free tickets), but Valetta can’t help herself. Miner says it’s how she is — it might have something to do with her farm-girl roots.

Musical testimony

By now, Miner has used Old Settlers to put down roots in the region. For him, developing Old Settlers Inn has been an exercise in creativity, and his goal has always been to foster an artistic space. The soul of Old Settlers Inn has everything to do with why Miner loves living in small-town Kansas. It’s the phenomenon of the clerk at the bank, the guy at the lumberyard, and the waitress at the café in the next town also being on your sports team or members of a committee to which you belong. They shop at the same grocery store. And maybe go to the same church on Sundays. Old Settlers is a hybrid soul that feeds on this community’s desire to hear stories and songs from beyond south-central Kansas.

One recent evening, Old Settlers hosted musician Paul Thorn for a Saturday night show. A few minutes after 8 p.m., most people were snug in their seats. Miner hates announcing anything in front of a crowd, so as the house lights go down he asked Billy, Paul’s agent, if he wanted to do it.

“Welcome to Settlers Inn!” Billy said. The crowd didn’t care that he left off the “old,” and they erupted with applause and hoots. In the swinging kitchen doors, Paul waited in a western-style, white button-down open at the collar, jeans and black lace-up shoes with heavy tread. He used to be a boxer, and in 1987 he shared the ring with Roberto Duran on national television. After he quit boxing, Paul worked in a furniture factory and started playing local gigs at night. Since then, he’s been onstage with folks like John Hiatt and John Prine. Clearly, he has some song material behind his shaved head and stubble beard.

Paul walked through the chairs and applause and into the spotlight onstage. He sat down in the chair, about three feet from the audience, grabbed his acoustic guitar, and smiled. Then he played a full night of southern gospel, soul and country-blues.

Paul told the crowd he wasn’t used to going to a new town and having such a big turnout; usually, no one knows who he is. He narrated stories to the audience in his slow, thick southern accent and at one point invoked his heritage as a preacher’s son. “I feel like testifying tonight,” he yelled to the crowd, and then moved into the song “Ain’t Love Strange.” At one point, he got two women on stage to sing backup. On his more spare and serious songs, Paul turned inward and closed his eyes, but the audience was perched and listening until the end.

And that’s why Old Settlers Inn isn’t a bad place to testify. The story continues, on Sunday after Sunday in Moundridge, before the work week begins. At 2 p.m., Miner drives in to town, opens up Old Settlers, and prepares the stage and dressing room. Within an hour, performers show up for sound check. Then the cooks arrive, and at 4 p.m., the doors open. The parking spots on main street begin to fill up as people arrive at Old Settlers Inn to meet their friends. They look forward to hearing stories. They gather to listen.

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Grappling with ghosts

In its post-colonial era, France rethinks its identity.


On a warm October night in Paris, a crowd assembles on a left-bank bridge overlooking the Seine. Dusky blue clouds hover on the skyline; Notre Dame Cathedral looms behind.

Spilling into the street and blocking traffic, 200-odd people gather in one of Paris’ perpetually clogged tourist arteries to commemorate a massacre that occurred in the vicinity 44 years earlier. On a north corner of the Saint-Michel Bridge, a plaque reads: “In memory of the many Algerians brutally killed during a peaceful demonstration, October 17, 1961.”

“I was thrown into the Seine, but I escaped,” says Mr. Tahar, an Algerian-born French resident in his 70s. “The police lined us up and asked who could swim. Those who said they could had their hands bound behind their back and were tossed over. I pretended I couldn’t swim,” Mr. Tahar adds, without a flinch. He is accompanied by another elderly man whose eyes well up with tears. The latter won’t give his name but says he, too, was there.

It was on that night, with France in the midst of a brutal war to suppress then-French Algeria’s independence movement, that 20,000 to 30,000 French Muslims and their supporters staged an unarmed protest against a discriminatory curfew in Paris. Police Chief Maurice Papon, once a Nazi collaborator who detained over 1,500 French Jews during the World War II German occupation, deployed forces to suppress the demonstration.

The following morning, officials announced only three deaths. Worldwide, media accorded the event relatively little attention, and public access to records was swiftly banned. Access to archives remains highly restricted.

Nearly half a century later, France has only begun to seriously consider what many historians say really happened that night: around 200 protestors shot, beaten to death, or drowned, 200 unaccounted for, and thousands arrested or tortured. In 1991, historian Jean-Luc Enaudi published The Battle of Paris, 17 October 1961, which set a new estimate of deaths at “at least 200.” Maurice Papon attempted to sue Enaudi for libel in 1999, but the latter won the case. Since then, though official estimates have not changed and those of historians vary, mainstream media and increasing numbers of scholars consider Enaudi’s figures plausible.

Nonetheless, October 17 has not yet been fully integrated into the country’s memorial fabric. The events of that night seem to occupy an uneasy place in France’s imagination, despite increased media attention, documentaries, and a feature film Nuit noire, released in October 2005. France has yet to officially recognize the massacre, and when Paris’ Socialist mayor, Bertrand Delanoë, inaugurated the Saint-Michel commemorative plaque in 2001, he was met with opposition from several conservative city officials. There is no “consensus of memory” around the massacre.

Henri LeGrand, a 72-year-old Parisian originally from Fort-de-France, Martinique, says he participated in the demonstration and witnessed “terrifying” violence. “I could have lost my life,” he said, explaining that the police asked for his “papers” and then advised him to leave the scene after confirming he was not Muslim. “They told me I’d better get out of there because there’d be shooting everywhere. On my way home … I saw people being beaten … I saw police throwing people over bridges.”

LeGrand is an activist and former educator. With his kind and slightly haggard features, worn collar, and nearly impeccable English — he lived in the United States for several years — he evokes the verbose muckraker Ralph Nader. Saying he has suffered heavily from racism and “colonial mentalities” as a French Antillean, he believes France refuses to face its past. Telling of being blacklisted in the 1950s for dodging the draft to fight in the Algerian War, Mr. LeGrand says France systematically fails to confront its colonial history.

But current trends suggest otherwise. If colonial history remained fairly obscured in France until a few years ago, today October 17 is a haunting symbol of a colonial legacy that has never been more passionately debated. Even while “collective colonial memory” remains hazy and taboos persist, Gallic society is in an unprecedented introspective mood regarding its past empire.

The legacy

French colonial history sweeps across four centuries and two main periods. The first era includes the annexation of modern-day Quebec, Louisiana, and the French Antilles in the Caribbean. That empire culminated with the independence of Haiti and the abolition of slavery in 1848.

The second empire began when France invaded Algeria in 1830. Over the course of the 19th century, France established Indochina in present-day Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos, and secured protectorates and trading posts over enormous swathes of the African continent. Algerian independence in 1962 marked the formal end of French colonial power.

The Algerian War in particular is a scar on the French imagination. The North African country was considered a full-fledged part of France for over a century. The war, which erupted in 1954, divided both native French and Algerians so sharply that it resembled a civil conflict. Comparable to the Vietnam War for its psychological impact, a majority of French and Algerians counted family members fighting in the conflict.

Independence resulted in Europe’s most massive exodus since World War II: the brusque flight of roughly one million people to France. The relocated included Pieds noirs (residents of Algeria who were of French descent), Jews who had found refuge in North Africa during the Spanish Reconquista, and harkis, native Algerians who fought to maintain French rule. The displaced, most of whom had never set foot in France, often resettled in Marseille and other southern hubs, where large communities remain today. Suffering from stigmatization and cut off from their birthplace, these colonial refugees are living testaments to a past that continues to haunt.

The specters of empire

That past is increasingly being confronted, head-on. Recent years have seen a vigorous stream of films, academic conferences, dissertations, and books addressing the specters of empire both directly and implicitly.

A 2005 film with Juliette Binoche and Daniel Auteuil, Caché, portrays a man tormented by his cruel treatment of an Algerian boy orphaned by the 1961 Paris massacre.

At generally traditionalist French universities like the Sorbonne, colonial history and “theory” have suddenly become hot topics, with social science and literature departments reluctantly embracing the primarily Anglo Saxon discipline of postcolonial studies.

A bestselling book, The Colonial Fracture, attempts to draw historic connections between social ills like racial and ethnic discrimination and unresolved colonial tensions.

The bestseller’s argument, called sensationalist by some critics, found resonance when riots swept through hundreds of economically depressed suburban areas around the country in November. Mostly involving French adolescents whose parents and grandparents emigrated from North and West Africa, the riots prompted newly pressing questions around postcolonial France’s success in integrating and fully including ethnic minorities. Many analysts pointed to soaring unemployment rates and discrimination in hiring and housing among young French Arabs and blacks.

The riots intensified soul-searching around colonial history. When Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin called a state of emergency November 9, asking “sensitive” municipalities to enforce curfews, some saw irony in reinstating colonial-era laws drafted in the heat of the Algerian conflict in 1955. In short, the riots have only intensified and lent a sense of urgency to France’s introspection.

Official reckoning?

The government, too, has made gestures signaling a more forthright approach to colonial history. Some recent legislative measures demonstrate this.

Often, the shift boils down to vocabulary. After decades of referring to the Algerian War as a “pacification” campaign or “maintenance of order,” a law passed in 1999 required officials to use the term “war.” Then in 2001, Guyanese deputy Christiane Taubira helped pass a bill bearing her name that made it obligatory to define slavery as a “crime against humanity” — particularly in school textbooks.

Diplomacy has also changed its tune. On an official visit to the eastern Algerian town of Sétif in February 2005, the French ambassador to Algiers called a 1945 reprisal campaign in the town “inexcusable” and a “massacre.”

He was describing the events of May 8, when, on the same day that the Nazis capitulated in Europe, French forces responded to a series of violent riots in the town by opening fire and killing between 15,000 and 40,000 civilians, according to widely varying estimates.

The ambassador’s comments marked France’s first formal acknowledgement of the town’s suffering.

Lost grandeur?

But current interest in colonial history is not limited to shaping semantics or recognizing atrocities. If some see colonialism through a prism of oppression and violence, others regard the period with wistful regret. Some argue that French colonial power brought valuable infrastructure to undeveloped nations, implying that ex-colonies have been worse off since — and that France just hasn’t been as grand.

While extreme-right groups and certain Pieds-noirs organizations make up the most vocal proponents of this positive take on empire, the center-right government took a dramatic role early last year.

In February 2005, the conservative-majority National Assembly passed a law calling for recognition of colonialism’s “positive” aspects, sparking an emotional polemic in France. One article of the legislation stipulated, notably, that history educators at secondary and university level should recognize “the positive role of the French presence overseas, particularly in North Africa …”

The law, ostensibly aimed at Pieds-noirs, harkis, and certain veteran’s groups reclaiming increased recognition, applauded “the national contributions [made by] repatriated French citizens.” It has drawn heavy criticism and calls for repeal from historians, educators, and human rights groups. Protests in Martinique and Guadeloupe prompted Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy to cancel a meeting with Martinique’s most celebrated poet, Aimé Césaire, in early December: Césaire refused to honor the meeting, citing his opposition to the legislation.

After months of controversy, the Chirac administration has recently moved to modify the polemical bill. After a January press conference in which Chirac promised the law would be “re-written,” arguing that shaping history should not be the province of the state, he called the Constitutional Council on January 25th to assess the validity of the law’s most contested article. While indicating that he supports the eventual omission of that article, Chirac wishes to retain the sections of the law that commend veterans and expatriated civilians.

On the Paris street, reactions to the law seem to fall along generational divides. “It’s a good measure … it recognizes … the people who helped develop those countries,” says Youf Aimé, a 67-year-old Parisian and retired printer. “In Algeria especially, they’re asking for us [back] again. It’s like [Algerians] were abandoned.” Mr. Aimé believes, however, that decolonized France is more economically sound. “It’s better now, with the money no longer going over there … it stays here now,” he adds.

In Saint-Denis, a working-class suburb north of Paris, a group of freshmen theater students say the law is misguided. “I think students should be left to think for themselves … nothing should be imposed on them,” says Chlöe, 18. Saïd, also 18, adds: “A historian’s job is to be objective. I don’t think colonialism had a positive side.”

Some see colonial nostalgia in the measure. Claude Lauziu, Professor Emeritus of History at Université Paris VII Denis Diderot, assembled a petition to overturn the law, drawing 1001 signatures from fellow historians. He analyzes the polemic as a “battle of memory” between intellectuals eager to bring more critical analysis to colonial history, and center and extreme-right wing “nostalgics” who mourn the “lost grandeur” of the French Empire. Himself a Pieds-noirs, Lauziu opted for Algeria’s independence because “It was not our France … the France of torture.”

While he notes a significant rise in research and media coverage of colonial memory, Lauziu believes a majority of French society remains basically indifferent to the debate.

“Young people, especially, very rarely talk about [colonial history] or feel concerned with it. It’s essentially a battle between fringes,” he said.

It does seem questionable whether the general public takes a passionate interest in the country’s colonial legacy. But media images suggest nostalgia for empire remains in France — on a mainstream level.

Last year, Paris metro tunnels and bus stops were plastered with a Negrita rum ad featuring a black woman in a head wrap, alluding to colonial clichés of the sensual slave. Banania, a popular drink for children, continues to use a grinning, wide-eyed Senegalese cartoon infantryman as a mascot, virtually unchanged from its early 20th century guise. Raja, a film released in 2003, portrays a wealthy middle-aged Frenchman’s efforts to seduce an adolescent Moroccan girl working at the former’s villa in Marrakech. As colonial critiques gather steam, so, it seems, does the popular appetite for nostalgia.

Why now?

It’s tempting to ask why these parallel — and polarized — views of colonial history have come to the forefront now. Why not a decade ago?

Françoise Lorcerie is a sociologist at France’s National Scientific Research Center (CNRS) in Aix-en-Provence. She attributes new interest in colonial history — both of the critical and nostalgic variety — to intense questioning around immigration, discrimination and national identity beginning in 1998.

On one hand, she says, self-reflection led to society taking ethnic diversity into account: no easy feat under France’s universalist concept of citizenship, which is supposedly blind to difference.

The 2004 ban on “ostentatious” religious symbols like the Islamic veil in French public schools and administrations, and the explosive debate that followed, underlined France’s difficulty in reconciling a notion of the “universal” citizen with the reality of cultural and religious diversity.

But Lorcerie believes that what it means to be French is shifting.

“This [soul-searching] modified the parameters of the question ‘Who are we?’” says Lorcerie. “[France had to] recognize that its ‘interior borders’ are ethnically diverse. Then a new national identity had to be forged, taking diversity into account.” To do this, she argues, probing a colonial history thus far “never mourned” became imperative.

According to Lorcerie, the new spotlight on ethnicity and integration also helped intensify a tendency toward nationalism and xenophobia in France — leading to a surge of colonial nostalgia. Citing Jean-Marie Le Pen’s passage to the run-off in the 2002 presidential elections and public rejection of the European constitution earlier this year, Lorcerie insists “nationalist regression” is variably present along the political spectrum, from extreme-right xenophobia to extreme-left hostility at globalization.

Nationalism and fear of difference, Lorcerie explains, inspire nostalgia for the “former grandeur” of colonial France, a time when the “interior borders” of national identity seemed clear.

However, the researcher remains optimistic about France’s future as a multi-ethnic, postcolonial society. “I think the general sentiment is that we can live together,” she says. “More research is needed, but young people seem much less contaminated by nationalist fears.”

Living the remains

Barbes is a north Paris neighborhood where vintage tabacs, African markets, hookah bars and McDonald’s headily coexist. The streets are often packed with bargain hunters sifting through piles of discount clothes and wares. Tiny fliers advertising fortune tellers crunch underfoot. Southward, many of the residents are Muslim and of North African origin. A few blocks north are large West African communities.

Like every other quartier populaire in the city, Barbes is undergoing slow but certain gentrification. Virgin Megastore and Sephora cosmetics shops are springing up where family-owned boutiques once stood. Wealthier Parisians are buying and moving into apartments whose prices continue to soar. Barbes seems to exemplify the increasing proximity and overlap between working class communities and affluent ones in the City of Lights. It also gives a clear picture of just how ethnically and culturally diverse Paris is.

At the trade school where I teach English to future bank employees, students have slipped into French, unwilling to contain their animated debate on ethnic and racial discrimination in broken English.

They are drawing from their own experiences.

“Why should I have to work four times harder than others? I don’t want any special privileges, but I want to know that if I work as hard as someone else, I’ll get an equal shot,” says Mireille, 23, who was born in Ivory Coast, but came to France when she was three.

“I don’t feel like I belong anywhere,” she explains. “I’m cut off from my birthplace but nobody treats me like I’m French here.” Another student agrees. “Even if you’re born here, [if] you’re not white, or you have a different religion, people treat you like a foreigner.”

“I’m not justifying [the riots], but I understand why those kids do it,” interjects Ramata, 20. “How else can they get people to pay attention to their situation? I don’t think a peaceful demonstration would have interested the media as much.”

Tatiana, 24, raises her voice. “I really disagree! They’re just trashing their own communities. There’s a better way.”

Everyone seems to agree on one thing. “What makes me angry is the way people treat my black or Arab friends differently,” says Sophie, 22. “We’ll go into a bar and the waiter will use [the formal] vous with me, then turn to my friends and use [the informal] tu). It’s so degrading.”

Murmurs of agreement erupt around the room.

Getting a clear picture on discrimination in France is tricky: current laws prohibit classifying by race, ethnicity or creed in official studies. However, according to INSEE, France’s National Institute of Statistics, the jobless rate is as high as 20.7 percent for the general population in “sensitive urban zones,” compared to an already morose national rate averaging just below 10 percent. For young adults in “sensitive zones,” the numbers skyrocket to about 40 percent.

Daunted by the prospect of potential employers sending CVs headed with names that “sound ethnic” to the bottom of the stack, it’s not uncommon for French Arabs or Africans to adopt pseudonyms in hopes of landing interviews — echoing a similar problem of American employers discriminating against “black names” on résumés.

Recently, non-profits like SOS Racisme have staged “testing” campaigns proving candidates with the “wrong” color, name or address often get turned away, while similarly credentialed white candidates are not. In 2002, the Moulin Rouge was fined for discriminatory hiring after one such test. Last June, France created the “High Authority against Discrimination and for Equality” (HALDE), where discrimination victims can plead their case. Also last year, 40 top French companies, including Airbus, signed a charter committing to fair hiring.

For many, these measures would have been welcome years ago.

Eric, 35, lives with his wife and eight-year old daughter in the northeastern city of Metz. Born in Cameroon, Eric has lived in France from age five. Raised in one of Paris’ most brutal housing projects, he studied economics before going abroad to earn his Master’s degree in Marketing and Communications at Central Missouri State University. He then worked four years as a supervisor in a telecommunications firm in Houston, Texas.

Though he defines his time in Houston as “my best moment … the first time people treated me like a man,” he eventually returned to France to be with his family.

“I was raised by a single mother. I want my daughter to have a full-time father,” he says.

Gliding between French and English, Eric relates his painful search for a position that matches his qualifications. That search, after three years and roughly 2,000 résumés sent out, has yielded, he says, only three or four interviews.

“My worst experience was when I arrived for an interview, and the manager looked at me incredulously: ‘It’s you?’ Even if I have the best CV and the strongest motivation, they’re going to hire someone [else].”

An aspiring novelist who admires American writers like Toni Morrison and Paul Auster, Eric says he has no intention of leaving France. “My life is here with my family. And why should I have to go abroad? I have work experience and a degree. I prefer to stay and fight.”

“These days, I mostly worry about my daughter. What can I do to give her a chance? I want to fight so she doesn’t fall into the same trap.”

Define that trap? “Black or Arab, French society perceives you as coming from far away. Take someone from Martinique or Guadeloupe. They’re fully French, yet people often treat them otherwise. But nobody ever insinuates that Nicolas Sarkozy, whose parents are Hungarian, is a foreigner. Why is that?”

Eric rejects the idea of affirmative-action type programs. “I don’t want my daughter to learn I got a job because I’m black,” he said. “It should be like a jungle: the strongest should win the game.”

He pauses. Then his voice trembles.

“The problem is, you don’t understand why you’ve failed. It’s ridiculous … three or four times, I’d say it were a problem of competence. But 2,000 résumés? That’s frightening. Either I’m the world’s biggest idiot, or something’s wrong here.”

More brief silence. Eric concludes: “But you know, I had all odds against me and I made it. I’m proud. I’ve worked very hard, sometimes 18 hours a day. No way will I leave because of racist people. I’m going to be a citizen of this country.”

Eric’s experience echoes others’. But not all seem scarred by persisting discrimination in France. Sonia Tebbakh, a postdoctoral fellow and visiting scholar at Oxford, grew up in Grenoble, a city bordering the French Alps, to Algerian parents. She wrote her doctoral dissertation on French North African (Maghrebi) political identity. One section of her research explored the role of colonial memory and history in that identity.

Growing up in a community with few immigrant families, Tebbakh attended a school in a neighborhood more affluent than her own. Despite her difference, she says, she never felt stigmatized.

“I guess I’ve been sheltered — I wasn’t raised in the projects,” she says. “Also, academia is a specific milieu where most people are … less prone to discriminate.”

Believing that the French school system didn’t “allow Franco-Maghrebis to reconstitute their own cultural memory,” Tebbakh undertook to find answers herself.

“My parents have spoken very little about their experiences. But [they] come from a farming milieu, so they weren’t necessarily equipped to transmit memory, to explain the context of those experiences.”

Comparing French colonial memory to “a hot potato that everyone shifts around in their hands and has no idea what to do with,” Tebbakh says conflicting versions of that memory have not yet been reconciled. For those who lived through the colonial period, painful associations are nearly universal. But lingering “misunderstandings” result because few efforts have been made to open dialogue between communities, Tebbakh explains. “Taboos and continued silence create frustrations … and with new generations, [colonial] memory grows dimmer,” she says.

For younger Franco-Maghrebis, “[colonial] memory has little substance. It’s fragmentary and based on rather general family myths.” Drawing from anonymous interviews conducted for her dissertation, Tebbakh notes that young Franco-Maghrebis often associate their feelings of rejection from French society with the sufferings of their parents and grandparents under colonial rule.

“People use colonial memory to explain their exclusion … and to make a ‘neocolonial’ link,” Tebbakh says. “There’s often this belief that colonial power structures are still prevalent and can explain discrimination today.”

While saying that “colonial reflexes might still be at work” in contemporary society, the scholar finds it “annoying” when some attempt to explain discrimination solely in those terms.

“I’m not convinced racist attitudes are principally linked to colonial history,” she says.

Despite her skepticism, Tebbakh believes breaking through silence and encouraging dialogue about colonial history might help heal social barriers in France.

The (sweet?) hereafter

Several months have passed since stories of “France burning” stopped flooding the wires. Combined with the still-raging controversy over the February 23 law, the three-week November riots, which incurred an estimated €200 million in damages, have left far greater marks on the way French society perceives its heritage and its future. As passionate interest in problems of poverty and class in the United States eventually subsided following Hurricane Katrina, perhaps the current French preoccupation with colonial memory and equal opportunity will wane as well.

But debate being one the French national sports, it is just as likely that these inward-looking identity questions will keep France rapt for a long while to come.

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Commentary

Out of America

What the guidebooks to Guatemala don’t tell you about traveling in uncharted territory.


Exasperated by the armies of tourists in San Pedro, a friend and I take a short trip around the shores of Lake Atitlán on the back of a pickup. Few tourists dare to try this local form of transportation, since the roads are rumored to be full of bandits. We didn’t see any, and had a wonderful afternoon.

Tired of Washington, D.C.’s middle-class office workers screaming their shopping plans via cell phone to an entire bus, and its rich Georgetown University students name-dropping about their latest “awesome class with Madeleine Albright,” I flew to Guatemala last December, thinking it was far enough off the beaten track to be a natural getaway.

I couldn’t have been more wrong.

A single night on the shores of Lake Atitlán left me wondering whether I had left the United States at all. More than 20 English-speaking bars, screening the latest Hollywood blockbusters on portable LCD projectors, long ago transformed the once-traditional village of San Pedro into a winter break party-town filled with fun-craving American students looking for cheap beer and pot, I discovered.

Counting on the fingers of one hand the remaining days of my vacation, I determined to find some isolated, peaceful Mayan village with no tourists, whose traditional heritage was preserved intact; somewhere I could savor the beauty of this foreign land with only the locals to keep me company.

That was my thinking when I decided to head to Todos Santos, a tiny settlement squeezed between the ranges of the Cuchumatanes Mountains in the northwest of the country, five hours by bus from Huehuetenango, the nearest town.

On route to Todos Santos on the “chicken bus” — endearingly known by this name for the passengers’ propensity to use it for carrying chickens, and also ducks, pigs, and other domestic animals.

Village: Under construction

It was only when Todos Santos first appeared in my bus window when we turned a corner that I started wondering if I might have made another mistake. For some reason, the spot so gloriously described in my travel guide as a natural wonder, where tradition has kept the place intact for thousands of years, didn’t quite match the landscape I saw in front of me.

Steel poles protruded from the tops of the many single-storey buildings that made up the town, seemingly waiting for a time when the owners would have the necessary means to add a second floor. Where the houses were finished, their tops were covered with rusting metal roofs placed there three to four years ago, judging from their incipient state of oxidation. The thatched roofs and dilapidated barns of the solitary mountain villages in my native Romania had a more “traditional” air to them than anything I had seen here so far.

As I headed up the village’s main street and past the local market, I spotted yet another couple of American tourists. Even Todos Santos was not free of them. They were wearing lavish, white woolen shepherd’s outfits (undoubtedly stemming from a desire to fit in), laughing over some joke and buying fried chicken.

I gave them the customary American grin as I passed, and took a left at the southern corner of the town center — just as my travel guide indicated — looking for a cheap and hospitable place to stay. A small “hospedaje” sign nailed to the entrance of a house caught my eye. (Many Guatemalan families have turned their homes into backpacker hostels ever since the civil war ended in the late nineties.) I walked into what seemed like a living room opening out onto a central courtyard where a couple of girls were using a machete to cut some vegetables. There were no other guests in sight — and no Americans — and that was reason enough to make me decide to stay.

Although the travel guide wrote an ode to the beauty of Todos Santos, all I could see in the town center when I arrived was another “chicken bus,” a plain-looking church, and a woman returning from shopping with a bag full of vegetables.

When my rooming arrangements were settled, I took a short stroll around town, looking for some form of local entertainment. Not far from the town center, I knew I had found it when I heard music and loud voices coming from inside a small building. I was happy to come across the local pub. At one table people were playing cards; at another a group was laughing heartily while passing around a bottle of rum. There was only one thing wrong with this picture: everybody in the room was wearing a blue uniform. I had entered the police station.

I walked around a little while longer but couldn’t find a bar. Maybe because everyone in Todos Santos preferred the company of their family (or co-workers) when they felt like drinking, I reasoned.

Without much ado, I resigned myself to the idea of spending the rest of the day alone. I had one promising thing to look forward to after all: the sauna I had ordered for the evening when I rented my room.

A new metal roof in the village supposedly unchanged for thousands of years — this roof is still spotless, thus couldn’t have been more than a few months old.

“You’re not going anywhere!”

I headed back to my hostel, invigorated by the thought of my sauna. Behind me, trailed a group of assorted children, shouting “hola” to my back at accurately timed intervals.

But just as I was climbing the steep cobblestone alley back to my hostel I was startled by a burst of shrill wailing and crying, followed by prolonged moans of inconsolable grief. Looking up, I realized that the cries were spilling out from a window just about where my room should be.

Even the children behind me froze in their tracks.

“¿Que paso?” I asked them nervously but they shrugged their shoulders in bewilderment.

With caution, I entered the house, crossing the living room to the inner courtyard, and tiptoed toward the kitchen. The lady of the house — a fast-speaking, no-nonsense woman in her 50s — was busy selecting firewood, pouring water into gigantic pots, and removing corn from the bottom of a sack. I hesitated from interrupting her.

“What happened?” I finally whispered again in Spanish.

She didn’t acknowledge my presence at first. Then suddenly she looked up, as if to ask what I was doing in her kitchen.

“What do you mean, ‘What happened?’” she shouted at high velocity.

Before I could attempt an answer, the cries from somewhere within the house began again. She raised her head to listen for a moment.

“Oh, that,” she said and resumed her housework. “The grandmother just died.”

My eyes bulged. I looked up in the direction of the wailing, wondering what was the appropriate thing to say. I felt genuinely sorry for the woman’s loss, but wasn’t sure what Guatemalan etiquette demanded. Fearing to do the wrong thing, I simply tried looking somber and observed a moment of silence in my head.

I was thinking about why my landlady had used the definite article in Spanish, “la” and not “mi abuela” as if the old woman had been everyone’s grandmother, when it hit me: I would have to spend the night under the same roof — maybe even in the same room — as the corpse. I would be sleeping with a dead body in a remote village in the middle of the mountains! Scenes from Night of the Living Dead and Dracula immediately came to mind and I panicked. (You would too if you had been born in a part of Romania called Transylvania.)

“That means I have to go! I must pack! I must find another hotel room!” I tried explaining in incoherent Spanish.

“What do you mean, find another hotel room?” my hostess thundered. “You are not going anywhere!” She gave me a menacing look. “You already paid for the room. And besides, the sauna is fired up and almost ready to use. What should I do with all the burned wood? Let it go to waste?”

She was right. There was no way I could leave now. It would have been simply rude.

I was still feeling guilty when a brigade of villagers dressed in brown suede jackets and cowboy hats entered the house and began hauling all the living room furniture out into the courtyard.

This was my chance to redeem myself. Without understanding what was going on, I grabbed a piece of furniture too — an armchair — and ran with it into the courtyard.

In 10 minutes, we had emptied the living room of all its contents, leaving only a massive refrigerator of the kind bars keep for storing cold beverages. But a few of us heaving together managed to move even that giant to a new location inside the courtyard.  
As my new workmates pumped my hand after a job well done, I blushed with gringo pride. Just then, another monster — this time of sturdy oak, painted a deep maroon — entered the room we had recently emptied: the coffin.

Now it all became clear: the living room was to be the place where grandma would lie in state for her last face-to-face gathering with the village. Pall bearing looked to be the next outdoor group activity, so I was most relieved when the lady of the house came rushing over to tell me my sauna was finally ready.

I took a trip up the mountain to admire the vista from above. I was a little disappointed when I realized the village was still “under construction.” None of the age patina characteristic of a traditional village — such as we have in Romania — was present here.

Last Rites

Naked except for a towel wrapped around my waist, I was not quite dressed for a wake.

My landlady had led me to a corner of the courtyard, to a bathroom where I had just taken off my clothes. My sauna was supposedly at the opposite end of the courtyard. I would have to walk past the kitchen and the newly assembled crowd to reach it. (By now half the village was chanting hymns in the courtyard.) However, my landlady’s matter-of-factness and the general chaos all around gave me enough courage to brave the crowds. But as I tried to whiz head-bowed through the assembly, the cold mountain air nipping at me, I was accosted by a silent, fast-moving girl of no more than 10 who handed me a thin candle stuck into an empty Coke bottle and motioned to me to follow her.

The structure she led me to resembled nothing so much as a fallout shelter, barely taller than a doghouse and sporting three wooden doors clumsily stacked one upon another as an entrance. I later found out the three doors provided for different levels of ventilation. If you wanted more air, you opened all three; if less, you cracked open just one of them.

I crawled through the entrance on all fours trying to hold on to the towel and my bending candlestick at the same time, while from the doorway, the girl quickly explained in Spanish how everything worked. Before she left, she dropped a molded bar of soap next to the wax-spotted plate on which I laid the candle.

The inside of the sauna smelled of smoke. Next to a smoldering fire in the corner, four copper vessels were arranged in the order of the temperature of the water they contained. My honorary seat was made of five wooden boards placed side by side on top of a drainage hole. Even with my feet folded under me, I could barely sit upright. A little taller and I would have gone through the burned earth ceiling now grazing my head.

With the girl gone, I removed my towel and proceeded to mix the water in the pots with gusto. The faint sounds of chanting trickled in from the cold, and the smoke from the wooden fire tickled my nostrils. I poured a cup of birch-scented water onto my shoulders careful not to hit the ceiling, and let it slide over my skin. As the chanting outside turned into a ritual beat and the water kept falling over me, the experience started to resemble an ancestral Mayan ritual.

As night fell, the cries from the funeral assembly grew louder. I peeked through the cracks of my hideout and saw the grandmother for the first time as she was slowly carried downstairs in her giant maroon coffin. She looked at peace but the women around her were wailing and throwing their hands to the sky. I watched her slowly disappear into the living room, like an apparition from another world.

But I felt her admonishing eyes still on me after she was gone, scolding me for using the firewood she probably chopped herself and brought to the house the day before. What was I doing in the midst of this people whose language I barely spoke and whose customs I didn’t understand, shamelessly pampering myself in the midst of their grief? I felt as fake as the American tourists clad in their shepherd’s coats. A single tear of sorrow and regret, mixed with sweat from my heated forehead, trickled down my face — my small acknowledgement of this old woman I had never known.

A girl was carrying food on her head as I was returning to the village on a rarely traveled footpath. She didn’t see me as I took a picture.

Two’s company

Once I had put my clothes back on, I tried mingling with the crowd but the odds were against me as my Spanish wasn’t good enough to express my condolences. I didn’t even know if condolences were expected of me anymore. The crowd seemed to have shed its earlier forlornness and to the sound of reggaeton music coming from the kitchen, people were loosening up.

Feeling even more out-of-place now, I thoroughly welcomed the arrival of a confused tourist, attracted by the crowds and the flames from the cooking fire that had by now reached camp-site proportions. He was a tad surprised when he learned what the crowds were really about, but since this seemed to be the only spot in town (other than the police station) vaguely resembling a social scene, he chose to stay.

My landlady brought us two beers and, with them in hand, we went to the living room to pay our short respects to the reposing grandmother, and then found a relatively quiet corner to sit and chat.

It felt good to find someone who related to this whole strange affair from the same perspective I did. For once, I was happy to be just another tourist, and to have another one to talk to.

We shared impressions from our respective travels and exchanged itineraries. The 50-something-year-old American was traveling the same route as I was, but pretty much in reverse.

We gave each other tips about places to visit and places to avoid. We even agreed to see each other again a few days later in a bar in Antigua, our joint final destination. Hanging out with an American backpacker didn’t seem like such a terrible ordeal anymore.

I went to bed content, thanks to a few beers, my visit to the sauna, and a good conversation. Having the body of a dead grandmother downstairs in the living room now seemed the most natural thing in the world.

When I was finally ready for bed, I returned to my room on the second floor. Underneath it, people were still paying respects to the grandmother, who was lying in her coffin in the living room.

As expected, I never saw the American tourist again. The next day, as I checked out of the hostel on the way to the bus station, I threw a last look at the coffin, unmoved from its location in the living room. I knew I wasn’t going to see my Mayan grandmother again either.

Bouncing in my bus seat as Todos Santos disappeared behind me, I realized I wasn’t all that different from my fellow tourists. I finally accepted that, like them, all I’d truly wanted from my vacation was a place to relax and unwind. And that’s what my vacation to Guatemala had been, even if I had had to share it with a dead grandmother. The adventure to places where no man had gone before would just have to wait a little longer.

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Commentary

Arrange me, arrange me not

In India, marriage is a very complex process.


A Brahmin priest presides over the fire with offerings of coconut and turmeric, flowers and fruit.

The temperature is a sultry 97 degrees when the Air India flight touches down at 2:14 a.m. in Chennai, the city formerly known as Madras. My brother and I have just come from New York City to visit our parents, who are living in India for the year. My American mother is settling easily into retirement in this country she has previously experienced only as a visitor. My Indian father is hard at work back in the land of his birth after 46 years in the United States.

We have also come for my cousin’s wedding. Four hours after we land, the festivities begin on my uncle’s rooftop under a temporary thatched structure that provides a refuge from the strong morning sun. From this roof a good arm could toss a hefty stone and hit the beach where the tsunami’s wave struck in 2004, but today the sea is calm. This morning it is just our side of the family — aunts, uncles, cousins and their kids and one beloved grandmother Paathi — along with a handful of priests, half-naked men with cell phones tucked into their dhotis. All the elements of any Hindu religious function are there: a small fire fueled by dried cow dung and ghee; silver platters filled with gifts and offerings, such as silk fabrics, fresh turmeric, bananas, and gold jewelry; and an abundance of fragrant flowers.

My cousin is 31, the youngest of three brothers but the first to get married. This has been more than a minor point of contention. As a general rule of matrimony, sons should be married off by, say, 30, in a logical descending fashion from eldest to youngest. Daughters start “ getting introduced” in their early 20s. With each trip to India, my unmarried status seems to become more and more of a pressing issue. Paathi repeatedly asks when I’m getting married. “Apparam, apparam,” I answer evasively. “Later, later,” although at 35, I’m already a decade behind the coupling and copulation curve. “Can we find you a boy? We can find one here. We can find one in America. Will you marry an American?” Anyone, she implores. Just get married. The obsession wears thin on my hopelessly romantic self, and Dr. Seuss rhymes float through my head. “I will not marry him, Sam-I-Am, I will not marry your choice of a man.”

Most of my cousins’ marriages are arranged. Resumes are exchanged that include educational and employment standings, the marital status of siblings, specifications of caste and subcaste, and declarations of lineage. Attractiveness and height-weight proportions also are matched appropriately. It’s a market thing really, where one advantage can help offset a less favorable characteristic. Maybe it’s not red, but it has a really nice stereo system and power steering. Astrological signs also play a major role, but ultimately the match is a practical one. We romantics do the exact same thing on many levels, but somehow it feels less official. There’s more time for mulling.

The groom leads his new wife across the stage by the big toe.

My cousin is marrying a woman he has known for six weeks. They met over dinner — with both their families present — and agreed to spend the rest of their lives together. Between the meeting and the wedding they hardly saw each other. He didn’t want her to discover that he drinks and smokes, and I imagine she had her private habits as well. When he later found out that she has terrible vision and wears contacts, he felt betrayed. I don’t know what she thought the first time she saw him smoking with a beer in his hand, but perhaps it was close to the same.

The wedding begins early the next morning, and my cousin’s house is chaos. It’s still dark outside, as I sit in the main room, wrapped up in 18 feet of shimmering green silk trimmed with gold thread. I savor my tumbler of Indian-style coffee, with its hint of chicory, loads of sugar, and sweet creamy water buffalo milk. I feel like the eye of a storm, trying to stay out of the way. The groom pulls freshly laundered underwear off the drying rack. An aunt pulls a plastic comb through her long hair and then distractedly weaves it into a braid. The sound of my uncle’s morning puja prayers drifts from the corner, where he prostrates himself in front of the large wooden wardrobe filled with burning oil lamps and pictures of deities. I send his wife off to finish getting dressed and take over the task of cutting to length the intoxicating fresh strands of jasmine blossoms that the women wedding guests will tuck into the long braids that travel down their backs. There is a rush to leave the door by 5 a.m., an auspicious time on this auspicious day to begin new endeavors, according to the Hindu calendar. When we leave, the clock reads 5:10, and I wonder if anything that may go wrong in their lives could be traced back to this very moment, when we couldn’t quite get it together and walked out the door 10 minutes late.

In the stifling mandapam, or wedding hall, none of the 300 guests pays much attention to the activity on the dais. Instead they visit with each other or roam about, trying to find a breeze or an effective ceiling fan. Every time I’m about to complain about the heat, I need only look up on stage, where the couple is planted on the floor, dripping with sweat, in front of a smoky fire. The 26-year-old bride sits stiffly in her nine-yard sari and heavy gold jewelry. My brother and I bring water to our cousin, whispering promises of an ice-cold Kingfisher Lager as soon as possible.

I have yet to see the bride and groom look at each other.

The rest of the morning is a Sanskrit litany performed by the priests. They pour ghee onto the small fire that burns at the center of the ceremony, as gifts are exchanged, fruit blessed, and children and fertility prayed for. Neither bride nor groom seems to have a clue what to do. My cousin has not been a practicing Hindu, and his bride works in a call center answering our 1-800 help calls during our QuickBooks crises. They lean their bodies toward the priests, listening carefully to their instructions and following their directions.

At certain moments, the lights for the video camera illuminate the stage, refracting off the smoke, and we all focus our attention on the couple. My cousin leads his bride across the stage by the big toe of her intricately henna-decorated foot. They walk around the fire seven times, making a promise with each round: to cherish one another, to be lifelong friends, to provide for their children. After another female cousin and I help the groom fasten a string around the bride’s neck, they have officially “tied the knot,” but the ceremony continues for another two hours. We the guests drift upstairs for lunch.

After an afternoon siesta, we return to the mandapam to eat again, an evening meal made up of no fewer than 24 separate dishes, an onslaught of tastes and textures, including rice and curries, sambar and rasam, pappadams and pooris, chutneys and pickles. Men ladle hefty portions from stainless steel buckets onto fresh green banana leaves, and we eat, scooping up the feast with our fingers. The sounds from the traditional musical performance drown out our attempts at conversation, and cousins wait impatiently for it to end so they can put on Tamil and Hindi film music. Once the musical coup is complete, we all dance in a bouncing clump of sweaty bodies, silk saris saturated, shirts stuck to men’s torsos like wet paper. Every part of my body is sweating, my eyelids, my ears, my fingernails.

My other cousins call on me to use my authority as an elder female cousin to drag our new family member onto the dance floor, but the bride begs me, “Please, Meera. Nooooo.” I am torn between respecting her self-consciousness and wanting her to feel welcome among these strangers. Earlier in the day, she sat on her father’s lap and relinquished her family’s lineage to become the 83rd immediate family member of my grandfather’s clan. There is no turning back. Tonight she will sleep in my cousin’s bed, under the same roof as his parents and grandmother, a stone’s throw from the sea. It is the start of a new life. I pull her into the circle, and we dance.

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Commentary

Taking flight

When escape spells courage.


I’ve always had a thing for wings. Dragonflies, birds, planes, butterflies — if it flaps or soars, I’m interested. But while flight represents freedom and forward motion to me, many others equate it with running away.

Americans are socialized to believe that fleeing a difficult situation is the coward’s way out. We view flight as an escape from something one should face head-on, as the weaker side of the natural “fight or flight” dichotomy. We are taught that winners never quit, and quitters never win.

But when is “flight” actually a form of “fight”?

Escape from slavery is the most illustrative example of “flight as fight.” For a slave walking out of the South into the unknown territory of the North, freedom was a mystery. Imagine what it was like to flee from the only home — albeit an oppressive one — that one has ever known. And toward what? Conventional wisdom of the day dictated that blacks belonged in slavery. Imagine summoning up the courage to flout the status quo and venture out alone.  

We do not view the slaves’ flight as cowardly, but it is difficult for us to comprehend the depth of courage it took to seek freedom. Two centuries of hindsight enable us to see the value of their choice. At the time, escape constituted a life-altering plunge into the profound and intangible unknown.

Society has similar responses toward survivors of domestic violence. A friend of mine once confided in me about problems with her husband, as their marriage of several years was nearing its end. From the outside looking in, I immediately recognized the signs of physical and emotional abuse and, as gently as I could, told her my impressions. Just as gently, she demurred, declaring their mutual love and commitment.

Weeks later, after a particularly troubling episode at home, she came to me again. We walked through a park together. I listened as she cried, and beyond my distress over her situation, I felt lucky that I had nothing to tie me down, that I had never relied on another person to keep my life in line.

For the longest time, she could not see how to leave him. How easy it seemed to accept her life as it was, even a life so fraught with pain and fears, because that pain and those fears were familiar. She was afraid of her husband — but more afraid of herself. She knew he would hurt her. But she did not know whether the world might further hurt her without him.

It’s impossible to explain freedom to someone who has never experienced it. Concepts of independence, self-direction, and discovery fell on a blank slate. I felt as if I were pushing buttons on a cash register, and no numbers were coming up. For my friend, embracing independence required a leap of faith the distance of which I could not fully comprehend. The day she decided to leave her husband, her eyes radiated fear. She trembled, her body suffused with a terror so strong she wept in my arms from the pain of it.

But then, she lifted her head, dried her eyes, and went on. She gritted her teeth, dug through the uncertainty, fear, and loneliness, until one day she said, “My life is my own. I made it that way, and no one can hurt me again.”

Socially, it has become easier for people to leave abusive partners. We now recognize that staying married for marriage’s sake is not always best. And with that shift in thinking, we’ve adopted the perception that walking away from abuse is the right thing, the logical thing to do.

What is our common reaction to abuse survivors? Pity, perhaps. We feel sorry for the difficult experiences that bring them to places so low. We look at them and see fragility and sorrow. But while we may see crumpled wings, we must also recognize the cocoon and the shape of something being built, something beautiful and stronger than before — a being with dreams and distance to travel. Strength exists in uprooting the status quo, in finding the courage to stand alone.

On my own personal level, the choice between “fight” and “flight” arose in a decision to change my career path and escape what I call the “professional treadmill.”  

American society glorifies law and medicine as the epitome of success, the end result of a long road of study and hard work. But we often forget how prescribed that journey can be for the person who, at age 16 or 17, decides how the rest of his or her life will play out, with little room for variation. Science classes in high school lead to science classes in college, which lead to med school, rotations, internship, residency, and ultimately, work as a physician. I deeply admire the dedication it takes to complete that path; our society admires it also. But for me to have stayed on that path would have been dedication without courage.

The day I chose to stop pre-med classes was one of my highest points of courage. I did not feel like a quitter as the world would have had me believe. I felt free. I was not walking away from a fight. Rather, I felt myself gearing up for the greatest struggles I expect to face in my life: learning who I am, deciding what I will be, and how to make my contribution to this world before my life runs out.

Few things are scarier than stepping off that treadmill onto the regular sidewalk, where you have to choose your own way and get there under your own power. It’s terrifying to step out of the known into the unknown, to lift your feet off the ground and hope your wings have what it takes to go the distance. At those moments, only faith and courage are with you.

And yet stepping off, for me, was to experience texture — the rocks and sand and grass beneath my feet. It meant traveling in my own direction, not in a straight line, and it has led me to places the nervous high school junior who marked “pre-medicine” on her college applications never could have predicted or imagined.

In big and small ways we each have the power to forge new paths for ourselves, and we mustn’t let others think us cowards for defying expectations. We do have to fight many internal — and external — battles to escape, to remove ourselves from negative equations, to cancel out the things that drag us down.

Changing trajectories when our current paths are failing us is not weakness. It is decisive action. Slaves who ran for freedom knew that somewhere in the unknown was a better place for them, despite the world telling them “stay in your place.” Abuse survivors who find the courage to discover their independence do so only by leaping into uncertainty. Such actions must be taken, for to exist solely within prescribed boundaries is to risk never knowing our truths and our potential. By leaping, we learn to fly.

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Fiction & Poetry

The best of it

Every year she was forced into a new place.


I am up in my tree. The sky is spotted with stars — JD used to say stars are vanilla freckles on the darkest chocolate face. I look into that face for a sign of a smile. A night breeze moves the leaves.

The leaves in my tree are green-gold, but you can’t tell at night. Not unless you scrunch down so the streetlights shine through — the streetlights in front of our house — Mama’s and my house.

Mama says it’s not right for a girl like me to be out climbing trees — ‘specially at night, and me only nine years old. I can just see her standing there in her nylons on the scratchy grass in our perfect, tiny yard. Her hands would be on her hips, each one holding one of her grown-up-lady shoes from work. Her big sweet face looks up at me. It wrinkles itself into a get-outta-that-tree-right-now-Young-Miss look. Even though my name’s Antoinette, that’s what Mama calls me, “Young Miss.”

I would climb down and say “Sorry Ma’am.” Mama’s big on Ma’ams — it’s just the way she is.

Mama puts a big soft arm around me, and we head for the house. Can’t you just hear her say, “ooh, ouch,” in a squeaky voice as we walk over the scratchy grass? We would laugh and go inside and order next door for Chinese.

Here I am stuck on the top bunk. The ceiling is too close — all those little bumpy pointy things. They feel like dirty chalk. If Deandra hadn’t gone and broke her leg she’d be sleeping up here and I’d get the bottom bunk.

Up in my tree I can see the whole city. It sparkles out there, so far away ‘cause our place — Mama’s and my place — it’s up in the hills. We got a lot of land around us ‘cause that’s the way Mama likes it after a hard day at the office.

She says, “Who wants to be sleepin’ surrounded by a million folks they don’t know, in a million hotels and apartments, and that ratty old downtown shelter, too?”

Downtown’s full of nothing but people and you can’t even see the stars at night. I should know.

We got lots of stars at our place — Mama’s and my place. Every so often at night Mama comes and wakes me up. She stands there by my bed, all tall and spiky. The beads in her braids say click-click.  She takes my hand and says, “Come on out here, Netnet.” She calls me that sometimes.

We walk out in the yard in our lacy nightgowns. “Look at all them stars,” she says, and we just stand there and shiver together, Mama and me, knowing it’s nice and warm inside.

There’s a little river making its water-noises in back of the house, and all the frogs are croaking a nightsong, and there’s even a firefly out by the shed. Mama’s big on nature. That’s just how she is.  

Are Frances and Deandra gonna keep moving around all night? All those plastic crinkle sounds keep me up. I stay still as I can so I don’t make any plastic crinkles, myself. Most rules in this place are okay, but not the plastic sheet rule. Plastic sheets are for babies.

In my tree I look down at my watch. It’s on my left wrist. I told Mama I didn’t need a watch so nice, but she insisted. She said “Little Toni Girl” — that’s what she calls me, you know, it’s short for Antoinette. She said. “Little Toni Girl, anyone pretty as you ought to have a pretty watch.” Then she put that watch on her credit card. I don’t know which one. She’s got ‘em all: Visa. MasterCard, American Express — she’s what you call one of those golden customers.

I think about how I shouldn’t be climbing trees wearing my new watch and nice clothes. How I should climb down and go in the house. I should go to my room I don’t even have to share with anybody, and look through all the clothes in there for some tree-climbing clothes. I think I should, but I don’t. I just sit up here and study those vanilla freckles.

Maybe when I climb down tonight I’ll go inside and read. There’s books in our house — Mama’s and my house — whole big wooden bookcases like at the library, with those little numbers and everything. They’re all filled up with piles and piles of books, and me and Mama read ‘em all the time.

Mama’s so smart she’s always reading. Did I mention she’s got glasses? Mama loves books so much she’s got some of those gold-frame glasses. Mama says keeping her hair so short and wearing those gold glasses make her look dignified. I like that — having a dignified mama.

Sometimes Mama just sits in her big soft chair and reads all night. And so do I — right next to the fireplace — we got us a nice fireplace, you know. That’s where I read all those books, next to Mama’s big chair by the fireplace.

“Yeah?” I say.

It’s Deandra. I thought she was sleeping.

“Girl,” I say, “you shoulda gone pee before you went to bed.” I climb down and help her stand up. I hand her the crutches and she clumps on down the hall. I go back up the metal ladder and try to keep the crinkles quiet.

Frances is breathing soft and slow over in her bed. The toilet flushes down the hall. Deandra clumps in and leans her crutches against the ladder. She crinkles a lot when she gets in bed, but she’s got that big cast so I try not to get too mad at her.

JD used to say only little monkeys climb trees, but really he just knew he was too big. A man that big could never climb a tree, so he was just grouchy about it. If he hadn’t eaten all those pancakes every morning and bought himself double-triple french fries and left all that trash in the van maybe he would’ve got skinny enough to climb a tree. Then he wouldn’t have to go calling me a monkey.

But who wants to think about old JD? That was two placements ago. I’m up in my tree now, with its creaky noises when the wind blows like tonight. Right now I’m thinking about Mama and me coming out here to the garden where my tree’s lined up with a whole mess of other trees. We got bananas and pumpkins and kiwi fruits growing in our garden, and all that green grass all over the yard, and our pretty little house all warm and cozy.

Did I say how Mama bought this house here in this neighborhood back when I was born? That way I live here all my life and never have to change houses. All the other houses on the street are nice, but not so nice as ours — Mama’s and mine.

There’s a click-click sound and a whoosh when the front door opens. 11 o’clock. They’re changing shifts. I hear Suzanne whispering to whoever, telling all her little secrets about all of us and whatever happened today. Then she’ll go in the office and write a bunch of notes while whoever is getting settled in. Will it be Joanie Rae? I hope. Or maybe Elizabeth, or that substitute lady with the jingly bracelets?

Deandra is making a snuffly sleep noise and I can’t hear any of those secrets they’re talking about, but I think they’re in the kitchen now, cause somebody’s pouring a cup of coffee. That coffee gets poured a long time. Must be Joanie Rae.

After a few minutes she pops her head in our room. She’s got her favorite monster coffee mug. The hall light shines through her hair.

She walks over to Frances’ bed and looks down. Joanie Rae’s a big woman, but she walks like she’s made of cotton balls. The coffee smell follows her in. Then she turns and reaches out to touch Deandra’s crutches leaned up against my ladder. She shakes her head real slow.

Joanie Rae puts a hand on my bed and says, so quiet, “You still awake, Toni-girl?”

“Yes Ma’am,” I say.

“You know you don’t have to Ma’am me.” She pats my shoulder.

“I know.”

“You just get some sleep,” she says. “You just look out the window at your tree and get some sleep.”

“Yes Ma’am,” I say. “That’s what I’m doing.”

Joanie Rae’s all right.

Nobody else ever climbs up my tree. It’s all mine. Mama had this great idea — she built me a fence around my tree so nobody would come up and bother me. So I don’t have to fight off people like those boys that jump in front of you in line at lunch, or laugh at what you’re wearing. I don’t have to fight off people like Ted at the car wash, or old Mr. Hinkley at Eastside Shelter or Rita’s nasty brother.

Up here in my tree I wonder. I wonder about Joanie Rae. Where does she go when she’s not here? Suzanne talks about where she goes home. She says her man doesn’t treat her good. I wonder about Joanie Rae. I sure hope there’s somebody out there who treats her good.

This morning I am second in the bathroom. The rule is fifteen minutes each, but those older girls fog things up so bad you can’t even read the clock. I like getting done before they’re even up.

When I get back to the room, Deandra and Frances aren’t up yet. I fold my sleeping t-shirt on the bed and slip down the hall. Joanie Rae has the table all set for breakfast. The big bag of pancake mix is on the counter.

“Morning, Ma’am,” I say.

“Hey Toni-girl,” she says. She puts down the papers she’s reading and gives me a hug. I finish up, but she’s still hugging. I guess that’s okay. Joanie Rae’s all right. She smells like coffee and maple syrup.

When she lets go I see her eyes are all wet.

“They’re moving you,” she says. She waves some papers. “Again,” she says, then she throws them down on the table.

I pick up the papers and put them in a neat pile. One is all sticky from the syrup bottle.

“Saint Bernadette’s,” Joanie Rae says. “It’s on the Southside. I sub there, sometimes. The kids call it Bernie’s.”

I keep my eyes on the papers, all straightened up. I put them on the table, right on top of the tired yellow folder that says Antoinette Beeler Jones – that’s me.

Joanie Rae’s voice is high and funny. “I can’t believe it. Lost your mother so young, then the streets, the shelter, and a new placement every year since. Why can’t they let you be?”

I shrug.

Joanie Rae stands there cleaning up her face with a Scooby-Doo napkin, and I wonder if it would be okay to ask. I wonder if it would be okay to wish.

I take in a breath. “Do you think from my new room,” I say, “at Bernie’s? Do you think I can see any trees?”

“Oh God in heaven,” she says, then her face crumples all up and she hugs me again. “They have trees, yeah, they do,” she says in between sniffly cry noises, while she holds me up against her big soft chest.

I never knew Joanie Rae cried. She takes a long, messy breath, then says “You’ll be okay, Toni? You’ll settle in and stay awake half the night there instead of here. You’ll make the best of it, won’t you?” She asks.

I nod my head and say into her chest, “Yes ma’am,” but she just keeps on crying.

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Commentary

The anti-pleasure principle

On the scorecard of sins, Lust usually gets top billing. But what about the others?


Perhaps the Grand Old Party (GOP) should change its name to the Party of Galatians (POG). After all, verses in that book of the Bible outline the crux of the modern day Republican ethos: “Walk in the Spirit, and ye shall not fulfill the lust of the flesh. For the flesh lusteth against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh: and these are contrary the one to the other: so that ye cannot do the things that ye would” (Galatians 5:16-17).

The Christian Right, the Bush administration, and its acolytes have been trying to fight sins of the flesh for decades. Under Dubya, today’s Republicans have successfully defined morality solely in terms of sexual attitudes. As the movement continues to splinter over issues like uncontrolled spending and the legality of wiretapping Americans, one reliable bugaboo never fails to galvanize the right: Lust, defined as “unlawful craving for pleasures of the body.”

A controversial speaker at an event for Texas Governor Rick Perry caught the attention of The New York Times. Columbus, Ohio senior pastor and “Silent No More” author Rod Parsley said that Christians would not cave to requests for legalization of gay marriage because “we are not to sacrifice our children on the altar of sexual lust of a few.”

Similarly, Billy Graham’s son, Franklin, said that New Orleans — the City of Sin — was rightfully in the Lord’s crosshairs for a hurricane disaster because of its libertine mores. “This is one wicked city, okay? It’s known for Mardi Gras. It’s known for sex perversion,” Franklin Graham said. His rant also included references to the Big Easy’s “Satan worship” (aka Santeria) and laissez-faire attitude toward drug use.

Whether it’s the recent Senate porn hearings held by Kansas Republican Sam Brownback or the reliably loopy Senator Rick Santorum’s equating same-sex marriage with dog-shagging, calls to action taken under the aegis of Christian values have meant calls to thwart non-Church-sanctioned petits morts.

In pursuing sins of the flesh with such a vengeance, the modern GOP-Christian Right amalgam has taken on just one-seventh of the biblical battle against sin. Lust prevention occupies much of the Right’s time and efforts, often trumping niggling questions of health policy and common sense. Last year, conservatives stated their intention to block mandatory vaccinations of young girls against HPV, a sexually transmitted disease that can lead to the development of cervical cancer. Why? They feared that newly protected girls may (as a spokeswoman for the Family Research Council said) “see it as a license to engage in premarital sex.” For all the fervor surrounding Lust, the GOP seems downright lackadaisical when it comes to curtailing the remaining deadly sins: Avarice, Sloth, Gluttony, Envy, Wrath, and Pride.

As one of its calling cards, Republicans.org touts Proverbs 14:34: “Righteousness exalts a nation, but sin is a reproach to any people.” Perhaps it’s time to take a close look at the other six sins. Scattered throughout the book of Proverbs, the seven deadly sins have evolved into shorthand for the basic tenets of Christian thought. The big guns of Christian theology — Pope Gregory the Great, Thomas Aquinas, Milton, Dante — have referenced them for centuries. When he first cobbled together the sin scorecard, Gregory himself deemed Lust the least serious of the transgressions.

Avarice

Ranked as a sin more grave than Lust, Pope Gregory’s list named Avarice — the insatiable desire for wealth. The greedy have been called upon to answer for their lapses, thanks most recently to lobbyist Jack Abramoff. Christian Coalition founder and Georgia gubernatorial candidate Ralph Reed’s ambitions have been thwarted by his Abramoff ties, with a Christian Coalition member telling The Washington Post, “it became pretty obvious [Reed] was putting money before God.” Concurrently, the Securities and Exchange Commission’s probe into Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist’s stock sales, Tom DeLay’s charges of money laundering and conspiracy, or California Republican Representative Randy “Duke” Cunningham’s tearful apology for his long-running bribery scheme, demonstrate the need to tend to this particular sin. But while the investigations into these Republican Party members continue, so does a party-wide commission of what beliefnet.org’s Phyllis Tickle called “The Mother of All Sins.”

Quoting former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, Tickle said that to blame “infectious greed” for the rash of corporate scandals associated with Enron and Tyco “feels a bit like a betrayal. We’d been told all along that greed — well harnessed and regulated — was good, not only for corporations, but society as a whole, even the poor.” Indeed, the Bush administration takes that tack when promoting the elimination of the estate tax, higher standards for filing bankruptcy, and tax cuts for Americans in the top 1 percent income bracket. Nearly five months after Hurricane Katrina, Gordon Gekko’s Wall Street mantra “Greed is good” isn’t as popular as it once was.  

Sloth

Affected residents of the U.S. Gulf Coast were not just victims of great rains, but of another Republican sin — Sloth. This sin might appear to be the biggest anathema to today’s GOP members, who have long prided themselves on the “hand up, not hand out” meme and who extol the virtues of hard work and entrepreneurship. They seemed to follow the advice found in Romans: “Never flag in zeal, be aglow with the Spirit, serve the Lord.” Then came a certain former commissioner for the International Arabian Horse Association, and their sin was revealed.

Few would argue that saving the residents of New Orleans from the storm would qualify as God’s work, and Michael Brown’s less-than-zealous attitude toward his job as head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) became apparent within hours of the hurricane’s deadly landing in New Orleans, Mississippi, and Alabama.

Brown, a Bush crony with questionable emergency management qualifications when appointed to the post, penned some telling emails while the storm was at its height. According to CNN, some of those missives included, “Can I quit now? Can I come home?” the morning of the hurricane, as well as questions to his aide about what to wear when appearing on television. “Tie or not for tonight? Button-down blue shirt?” he asked. The reply was “Please roll up the sleeves of your shirt, all shirts. Even the president rolled his sleeves to just below the elbow. In this [crisis] and on TV you just need to look more hard-working.”

Gluttony

FEMA’s inability to get food and water to Katrina victims puts the Republicans at risk of committing yet another transgression — Gluttony. Withholding food from the needy, after all, is part and parcel of the sin, which refers specifically to overindulgence of food and drink, and, more generally, to consuming more than one needs. In the realm of resources — oil, money, and the like — modern Republicans are hoarders of the first order. In Congress, Alaska Republican Don Young showed himself a glutton for federal dollars (and punishment) when he insisted on using $200 million in federal spending on his “bridge to nowhere,” connecting two communities with a combined population of only about 14,550. Despite entreaties from his fellow Congress members, and even some of his own constituents, Young would not relent when asked to forgo his project in favor of allocating the funds to hurricane victims. Today’s economic policies (see Avarice above) seem geared to keeping resources concentrated within a small group of … Republicans.

Envy

A while back, some characterized the Republican hatred of former President Bill Clinton as stemming from an obsession with the 40th president’s lifestyle. With his supposed in-your-face sexuality, his recreational drugs, his rock and/or roll, Clinton exemplified the longhaired hipitude that the Republicans despised precisely because they wished they had his job. The result of this GOP envy was a two-year, $40 million investigation and a Starr-penned book that, one could argue, read like the same soft-core porn the Republicans were trying to eradicate (see Lust).

Wrath

The doggedness involved in toppling Clinton was part of a phenomenon that’s grown exponentially since the days of impeachment — Republican anger. One sees it in the face of the aforementioned O’Reilly whenever he’s confronted with Mexican undocumented immigrants, or Bob Novak when he’s about to be asked about his role in the Valerie Plame case. Fox News traffics in a type of anger that is both frightening and, if they weren’t being paid quite so much, quite hilarious.  

On the topic of trying to get at the root of Islamic terrorism, Ann Coulter famously wrote:

“They hate us? We hate them. Americans don’t want to make Islamic fanatics love us. We want to make them die. There’s nothing like horrendous physical pain to quell angry fanatics. So sorry they’re angry — wait until they see American anger.”

Her response probably wouldn’t have sat too well with the apostle James who advised that “everyone should be quick to listen, slow to speak and slow to become angry, for man’s anger does not bring about the righteous life that God desires.”

Pride

Listening is not chief among current Republican priorities. The president’s inability to hear any voice other than his own has contributed to his commission of the sin of Pride. Most recently, the New Yorker’s Seymour Hersh has documented that the president’s current policy in Iraq is being guided not by information from his generals on the sandy ground, but by the belief that in five or 10 or 20 years, his mission into the desert will be deemed an unparalleled success, catapulting him into the annals of history as one of the nation’s greatest commanders-in-chief. “Mission Accomplished” was a boast (also a no-no according to Corinthians) that, ultimately, could not be backed up. And yet, here is America in the middle of an intractable war, which originated with a deadly presidential sin.

So, is Lust (Gregory’s least concern) the sin which has gotten the Republicans and America into its current state of disarray, or do the six other transgressions really deserve a closer look? The fourth book of James hints at an answer:

“What causes wars, and what causes fighting among you? Is it not your passions that are at war in your members? You desire and do not have; so you kill. And you covet and cannot obtain; so you fight and wage war.”

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Photo Essays

Vanishing Heritage: Thailand

Best of In The Fray 2005. An up-close look at the ethnic minorities of China, Bolivia, and Thailand. Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer John Kaplan explores indigenous culture and the threat of industrialization on its preservation. Part three of a three-part series.


Click here to enter the visual essay.

The Akha society in Northern Thailand is in rapid transition, despite the good work of NGOs such as the Akha Heritage Foundation and DAPA. As electricity comes to each village in turn, its inhabitants begin to realize the homogenized and idealized life portrayed on satellite television. The young often choose to leave the simple village life behind, in search of work and the other lures of city life. At the present time, women, particularly the old, still wear traditional headdresses, but men and children no longer dress as their elders did even a decade ago, instead choosing the same practical, non-descript t-shirts and pants found anywhere in the world. I sought to document the traditional customs of the Akha Hill Tribe people, an ethnic minority who are losing their cultural identity.

Thailand was photographed in 2004, as part of an ongoing multi-year project. In 1998, I documented ethnic minority groups in Tibet and Southern China, and in 2000, I traveled to Bolivia to photograph the Aymara. I believe that it is of significant importance to document the traditions of indigenous cultures that are rapidly fading throughout the world. As a documentary photographer, it is my goal to document such traditions before they disappear, and it is my hope that viewers may consider assisting in their preservation.

Part 1: China

Part 2: Bolivia

For information on obtaining prints from the Vanishing Heritage series, please contact John Kaplan at kaplan-at-writeme-dot-com.

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Photo Essays

Illuminating evil

Capturing the dark underbelly of humanity may well be what Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer John Kaplan does best. But why — and how — does he bear the weight of this heavy burden of proof?

Winner of BEST OF IMAGE (SO FAR) for “Life after torture”


Many magazines, InTheFray included, call their photographers, writers, and editors “contributors.” This was John Kaplan’s description when InTheFray published “Life after torture,” his photographic essay about victims of torture, last year. However, the word “contributor” extends beyond this one-time event to characterize what has driven Kaplan’s efforts over the past few decades.

“It comes from a psychological need to give something back,” Kaplan reflected. “I’ve gotten a lot of help along the way.” The 1989 Photographer of the Year began making pictures in his teens. “A group of extremely talented, yet giving people, were my mentors at a young age,” Kaplan said of the staff on his hometown newspaper in Wilmington, Delaware. Three of these photographers went on to work for National Geographic; two were awarded Photographer of the Year.  

He felt very lucky. “As I became successful in my career, I felt a real need to give something back, to give people a leg up on their own path,” said Kaplan. “It’s been an evolution for me.”

After graduating from Ohio University in 1982, Kaplan spent the next decade photographing, designing, and editing for newspapers. In 1990, he founded a journalism consulting firm called Media Alliance. “Basically that was an outgrowth of wanting to contribute to the profession,” he said. “The goal … wasn’t focused on the business itself. It was focused on the education.” Kaplan shared his design, editorial, and staff development expertise with newspapers throughout New England, the South, the Midwest, and Canada.

This venture led to his becoming a fulltime educator. After first teaching for the Syracuse University London Centre in 1993, and leading countless workshops and seminars, Kaplan, who wanted to become a professor, returned to his alma mater for graduate studies in the late 1990s. Now a faculty member of the University of Florida, he was named the College of Journalism and Communications Teacher of the Year in 2002 and, in 2005, the International Educator of the Year. Just three years before, the Academy of Educators in Journalism and Mass Communication voted him second place in the AEJMC Promising Professors Competition.

In 2003, Kaplan developed a third way to help other journalists: through writing. He noted that university and workshop students asked the same sorts of questions over and over: “What are top editors and photo buyers looking for?” The need for a book emerged. No one had written a book about compiling a portfolio since 1984. Kaplan’s Photo Portfolio Success addresses a variety of photographic genres and media of presentation.  Courses in several academic programs, such as the photojournalism sequence at the University of Missouri, use his book.

Through his teaching, Kaplan became involved with photographing torture victims. Among his workshop participants was a doctor who had treated these individuals. Kaplan contacted the Center for Victims of Torture, with whom his student had been involved, to discuss the possibilities of a photographic essay. “My idea was just basically to give a voice to the voiceless,” he said. “Torture was absolutely an under-reported issue when I approached it.”

Kaplan became one of the first journalists to go to new refugee camps constructed by the United Nations in Guinea after guerrilla war spilled over the border from Sierra Leone. Between 1991 and 2002, 50,000 people perished in a civil war in impoverished Sierra Leone, a country where a woman can anticipate living 42 years and a man 39. According to the BBC, a signature mark of one side was to chop off the hands of their enemies.

Kaplan’s plan for his two-week trip was to make a portrait of each victim, and record first-person accounts of what each had witnessed and endured. After introducing his project to various NGOs and other groups assisting the refugees, he had only six remaining days to photograph and interview. During that time he commuted four hours to and from the town where he stayed to get to the camps. By the time he was done, he had photographed 20 to 25 people. “I could have easily photographed a hundred if I [had] wished,” he said.

Reporting the darkness in human existence exacts an emotional toll upon journalists. Knowing this, Kaplan devised a plan to process his feelings. “I spent some quiet time alone every evening to really think deeply about what I’d witnessed, who I’d met,” he said. “I try not to distance myself emotionally.” When in difficult situations, journalists, like emergency and medical workers, focus upon the task at hand. There is a delicate balance of permitting feelings to guide, but not overwhelm, reporting. “While you’re photographing and while you’re interviewing, you do need a certain type of distance that allows you to concentrate, not to cry for example, and to maintain a sense of objectivity,” he said. “In my case, I do not believe in absolute objectivity, but I do believe in fairness. The best way to put it is you’ve got to keep your shit together while you’re working.”

Rewards for his efforts came in different ways. Kaplan had hoped that his documentation would be used to bring about justice for the torture victims, so he did not hesitate when the UN asked to use his work in the war crimes tribunal in Sierra Leone. Surviving Torture has been shown in Asia as well as published (as Life after torture) in InTheFray. Visitors to the Visa Pour L’image festival in Perpignan, France, were the first to experience the multimedia version.

Acclaim poured in from colleagues. In 2003, the project received the Overseas Press Club Award for Feature Photography and the Harry Chapin Media Award for Photojournalism, as well as citation by the Robert F. Kennedy Foundation. Survivors of Torture also placed in the National Headliner Awards, Best of Photojournalism Competition, Pictures of the Year International, Society of News Design, and the Photo District News Best of Photography Contest.

Observing that much renowned photojournalism executed in the past century focuses upon despair at some level, Kaplan recommends that photographers enlarge their vision. “I think the bigger issues need to be looked at,” he conveyed, noting that his two experiences judging the Pulitzer Prize helped him form this view. This is exemplified by one of Kaplan’s ongoing projects — documenting disappearing cultures around the world. (InTheFray published the three-part Vanishing heritage essay in its October, November, and December 2005 issues).

The use of torture is growing around the world, according to Amnesty International, Kaplan says. “What’s interesting to me about this topic is that at the time I pursued this a few years ago, torture was seen as completely apolitical. For example, if you asked members of Congress on either side of the political spectrum, you got a universal response of outrage against its use.”

“I believe that any rationalization of the use of torture in the greater war against terrorism is misguided to say the least, and stoops to the level of barbarism,” Kaplan adds. “It’s very shocking to see that in our culture we’re having a national discussion about its perceived use.”

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Reviews

Stroller pushers at El Barrio’s gate

Chango’s Fire takes on gentrification and a clash of cultures in East Harlem.



(HarperCollins)

Two sights illustrate the gentrification that has crept into New York’s East Harlem: On one block in the neighborhood, known as El Barrio by its largely Puerto Rican residents, a Starbucks has opened and welcomes white newcomers and Latinos who choose the trendy cafe over the old corner bakery. Up the avenue, the Salsa Museum attracts tour buses full of outsiders eager to discover the neighborhood’s musical gift. It seems that El Barrio has become known as a “cool” place to visit and live.

The Starbucks and the tour buses, both unthinkable in the area until a few years ago, provide context for Ernesto Quiñonez’s new novel, Chango’s Fire. Much has changed since the author’s first novel, Bodega Dreams, garnered acclaim upon its release in 2000. That book was set in an East Harlem where the hulks of apartment buildings burnt down for profit still laced the streets. They had done so since the 1970s in many New York neighborhoods, as a physical reminder to residents that their community and even their lives were expendable to authorities and absentee landlords alike.

By the time Quiñonez’s latest novel was published a mere four years later, much of the arsonists’ work had disappeared from East Harlem. In its place is gentrification, and Quiñonez is there to breathe life into this troubled phase of his neighborhood’s history. As in his first book, he does not simplify events; there are no clear good and evil forces here. While at one level the story is charged with politics, it is also a very personal tale about one man’s drive to be true to himself.

The story’s narrator and central figure is Julio Santana, a young man who works on a demolition crew by day to pay for college and the mortgage on his family’s condo. At night he supplements his income by setting fires, usually to vacant suburban houses whose owners want to collect the insurance. Downstairs from Julio, a white woman named Helen moves in, and soon she and Julio are a serious item. With their divergent views of the changes in the neighborhood fueling tension between them, Quiñonez cleverly brings them together to mirror the larger drama playing out in the neighborhood with the onset of gentrification.

A strange and uneasy transition

When the first white people start venturing north of 96th Street to fix up and buy condos, the reaction from the locals is often openly hostile. People who have lived through disinvestment know it wasn’t their own people who arranged for their homes to burn. But that isn’t why they’re angry at the newcomers. They are angry because many of the gentrifiers show little interest in or respect for the customs brought from the island by Puerto Ricans in the 1950s. In fact, many whites seek to bar the old culture from invading their new enclaves, socializing inside, rather than on their front stoops, and building gates to privatize these spaces.

But not all the new folk are oblivious to or uncaring about the hurt their arrival causes. Helen, for instance, knows the culture shock her family experienced when they moved from the liberal college town of Ithaca, New York, to a small rural community, Howard City, Wisconsin, where their foreign cars and Helen’s mother’s protest of the arms race aroused suspicion. Helen, then, is not wholly ignorant of what her presence in East Harlem implies. She wants to meet people in the community, partly because she wants her budding gallery to fit into the neighborhood’s Latin-inspired art scene. Still very much an outsider herself, she is also far more sensitive to injustice. But she still doesn’t see the animus she encounters as justified.

Here Quiñonez tries to show how underneath the surface, outsider and native-born have quite a bit in common. Helen brings her feminist sense of outrage with her into a culture where machismo has always ruled, but then observes a crowd of women who attack a child rapist in the street with their brooms. Curiously, Quiñonez stops short of making his point in this scene, sidestepping what seems to be Helen’s moment of awakening, her entry point into what is otherwise an unfamiliar culture. Instead, he dwells on her inability to grasp why no police car appears to take control of the situation. Julio is then able to educate her that the people in El Barrio do not share her assumption that cops serve and protect. Quiñonez does give Helen credit at many points in his book for making sense of the community’s problems. In this scene Helen might not only understand the problems, but have her own insight on how to address them.

Meanwhile, another wrinkle appears in the gentrification tale. The whites with money aren’t the only new faces in the community. Immigrants from Mexico have arrived, too, opening restaurants on avenues once dominated by the Puerto Ricans, and they board, 10 to a room, in hovels that have been subdivided several times over. They take the jobs on construction sites that the Italians (who were poor immigrants in Spanish Harlem before it was Spanish) see as beneath them. The Mexicans’ presence doesn’t seem to throw the neighborhood into a fit the way the whites’ does, but their arrival could mean just as significant a shift in the population.

Eddie is one of the few Italian holdouts who didn’t flee to the suburbs or Queens when the Puerto Ricans arrived after World War II. He has made a living over the years burning down people’s homes, sometimes with people still inside. He probably burned down Julio’s first home, forcing him and his family to move into the projects they occupied for the rest of his childhood.

Interestingly enough, Julio goes to work for Eddie as a young man, since the pay from construction work is insufficient to pay for his condo and get him through college. Like the Bodega Dreams lead character who was employed by a drug hustler who doubled as a housing developer, Julio has a job people in so-called normal neighborhoods can only wonder about. The arrangement works well for Julio until he slips up, leaving behind evidence that one of his house-burnings was no accident. Then, as in the first book, the illicit nature of the local economy shows its true colors, as Eddie forces Julio to pay dearly for his mistake.

Here Chango, the Santeria god from the book’s title, comes into play. One in a pantheon of deities of both African and Catholic origins worshipped in parts of Latin America, the god is represented by fire and lightning. The proprietor of the neighborhood botanica tells Julio a legend about how Chango made a great error and, realizing this, hung himself to extinguish his fire. But Chango lived on because he was not in the fire itself, but in the heat it generated. As Julio’s nighttime profession gets him into trouble, he looks to Chango to teach him how to compensate for his transgressions and give himself a life beyond the flames.

The politics of politics

Quiñonez’s artistry in depicting the sudden changes in his neighborhood adds context to the stark public policy questions being raised in East Harlem and other gentrifying communities. Should a percentage of housing built by developers, scrambling to respond to the influx of yuppies, be set aside for people who have been there through the bad times? If so, should there be a racial component to this set-aside? Should local community boards ask developers to build their courtyards and entryways in a way that respects the cultural traditions of the low-income and non-white groups?

Puerto Rican residents have yet to respond to this challenge, Quiñonez suggests. Day by day, they watch as newcomers stream in, and some grit their teeth, but they don’t get organized. This inaction isn’t uncommon; local groups often don’t begin to seek political solutions to gentrification until the population has been transformed and the storefronts appear unfamiliar.

Quiñonez is responding to that lack of action. At a 2004 book signing at East Harlem’s Carlito’s Café, he characterized his book as a protest, a way of bringing attention to gentrification. At the same time, he wants to point to positive examples from that community, rather than dwelling on the negative aspects of ghetto life. As a comparison, consider Jonathan Lethem’s lead character of color in Fortress of Solitude, who went to prison and couldn’t fit in when he returned to his gentrified ‘hood. Quiñonez is drawn to Puerto Rican characters who are ambitious (like Julio and the narrator of Bodega Dreams, both college-educated) or entrepreneurial (like businessman Willie Bodega). Julio and Bodega suggest that prosperity can be found without gentrification.

It is probable that many residents of East Harlem would have trouble relating to Julio, however. For them there would not be a question, as there is for Julio, whether to enter the Starbucks or the bar where whites gather — they simply can’t afford to.

While Julio has dreams that may take him out of East Harlem, he also feels a strong attachment to the neighborhood. Perhaps the most authentic aspect of his character is his nostalgia for the days when he played on abandoned cars in vacant lots. Just as the neighborhood is spruced up, it feels somehow alienating to its own people. Besides, moving out would mean a tremendous loss for him and others who have made their own world within a few square blocks. As Julio says, “Helen’s people don’t seem to have mystical places like ours. They don’t have poor, holy places that speak to your soul …”

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Commentary

Shelter from the storm

What Hurricane Wilma taught a gringa about the meaning of “community” in Cancún.


During my first year in Cancún, there were times I forgot I was in Mexico. I’d be working on an article — conducting interviews in English, reading and writing in English, discussing the story with my husband, Kinich, in English — and would step outside for a break and be momentarily startled to feel the blazing sun on my face and catch sight of the little store sign across the street that reads Nuevo Paraíso, New Paradise.

Angela, who owns the Nuevo Paraíso corner store, waited until I had been patronizing her business for months before she asked me, “¿De dónde eres?” Where are you from?

“New York,” I answered.

As I turned to leave, I overheard Angela tell another customer that perhaps she would ask me for English classes. Shy person that I am, I continued walking out of the store instead of swinging around and telling her I’d be happy to teach her my native language.

Angela never did ask me for English lessons. And the rest of my neighbors were equally distant. I exchanged no more than a few words here and there, a smile, buenas tardes, with a couple of them when we passed each other coming or going. I told myself that they were busy with their lives and I with mine. But I still felt a twinge of loneliness when I saw them gather together on Friday nights: members of an inner circle of which I would never be a part.

My Mexican husband’s parents and sister, her boyfriend and two children, warmly welcomed me as a new addition to their family. With them, I found a sense of belonging. But all I felt for Paraíso, a residential neighborhood 20 minutes and worlds away from Cancún’s hotel zone and the place I had chosen to call home, was a sense of disconnect. A year after coming here, I was still the outsider, la gringa.

That is, until this October, when Hurricane Wilma came rattling into town.

A flooded parking lot in the recently constructed shopping
center known as Hollywood Plaza, which is located in one
of Cancún’s residential neighborhoods. Some businesses here
have yet to re-open. (Kinich Ramirez)

Preparing for the worst

Initially listed as nothing more than a “tropical storm,” Wilma barely caught my eye at first.

But once I read reports of preparations in Florida, I began to worry. And by Wednesday afternoon, as the weather updates became increasingly ominous, I headed to the supermarket to load up on food and other necessities. The next day, Kinich and I hurriedly organized ourselves in anticipation of the hurricane. Not wanting to face the hordes that had descended upon the supermarket, I decided to buy extra water and other odds and ends from Angela’s corner store.

It was frenzied madness at Angela’s as well. Customer after customer came in, searching for flashlight batteries or tape for their windows. Most seemed panicked now that it looked like the storm would bear down right on us. It had been nearly 20 years since a storm of similar magnitude — 1988’s Hurricane Gilbert — wreaked havoc on the area, and many people had grown complacent during the intervening years.

On Thursday evening, Kinich’s parents, sister, and her children arrived. We had arranged that they would ride out the storm with us, and their arrival brought an almost festive air to our apartment.

But where was Morocco, the family dog?

Apparently, there had not been enough room for him in the car, so my mother-in-law and I drove back to get him. On the open road, we felt the full brunt of the rising wind as it swooped down from a foreboding gray sky, shaking the tree branches forcefully. A stoplight swung violently back and forth in the wind, looking like it could snap off its pole at any moment.  

Morocco seemed filled with nervous energy on the car ride back. Jerking his head from window to window, he could barely keep his balance as we zigzagged through the streets, trying to avoid other drivers who seemed too preoccupied with getting home to pay attention to the road. It was a relief to pull into my apartment lot at last.

The apartment was a flurry of activity. My father-in-law and husband were nailing up wood outside to protect the apartment. My mother-in-law began putting away the extra food that the family had brought with them. And my sister-in-law, niece, and I set to work covering the windows with tape.

Our movements carried a sense of urgency, as the shrieking wind and sporadic rain reminded us that we did not have much time to get things in order before the storm descended upon us.

Neighbors from Cancun’s Paraiso neighborhood
form a conga line at an impromptu street party held
after Hurricane Wilma passed. (Kinich Ramirez)

Nature’s fury

That night, we ate dinner and watched television, trying to behave as if it were just another family gathering. But despite our best efforts, there was a palpable tension inside the apartment as we heard the wind growing ever fiercer outside.

My niece and nephew fed off our nervous energy, jumping about and refusing to sleep when my sister-in-law called them to bed. Finally, close to 10 p.m., we all settled down to our respective rooms: My sister-in-law and her two children in the guestroom-cum-office, my in-laws in the master bedroom, and my husband and I in the living room.

I couldn’t sleep, kept awake thinking about what Wilma had in store for us. Around midnight, a loud noise sounded in the distance, jerking Kinich out of his sleep. “What was that?” I whispered to him.

“One of the transformers just blew,” he replied.

Right then, we heard another explosion: the second transformer.

Later in the night, the third and final transformer died, and with that, we lost our electricity.

By Friday morning, the wind had died down somewhat, but conditions were still miserable enough to keep us trapped inside the apartment. When I peered out one of the few windows we had not boarded up, I saw that the steady rain had shrouded our neighborhood in a murky darkness. It was difficult to make out much else. I turned away from the depressing scene outside the window and focused my energy on helping with the kids and catching up on sleep for the rest of the day.  

That evening, the battering of our city reached full force. By this time, we had all moved into the guestroom because water had begun to seep into the living room and master bedroom. It was like a family sleepover, complete with joking and play-fighting amongst all of us, as we tried to keep our spirits up.

But by about 7 p.m., the amount of rain cascading into the master bedroom had become a serious matter. One side of it looked like a wall of water. With the bedroom windows rattling so hard they were on the point of shattering, we all took turns mopping up the deluge with towels, until Kinich devised a barricade to route the rapidly rising water into our bathroom. Utterly exhausted, we turned in to sleep at 9:30 p.m.

Once again, I was too nervous to sleep, imagining that every clatter and boom I heard was something crashing into our windows. The gales of wind had reached such a crescendo that I was sure the roof was going to be torn right off our third-story building. The force of the wind was so strong that at one point, the building began swaying. In the wee hours of the morning, my father-in-law and I rose to check on the water level in the master bedroom. We spent an hour mopping and then went back to bed.

On Saturday, we woke to a subdued weather situation. Since the only radio station broadcasting news about the storm had abruptly gone off the air, we began making calls to friends and family in other parts of the world, in the hope that they could give us any information about the storm. I finally got through to a friend in Texas, who told me that Cancun was now in the eye of the hurricane.

So, despite the eerie calm outside, the storm had not yet passed.

We shared the news with our next-door neighbors, the Guzmán Martinez family, and then decided to reinforce some of the front windows, as the wind was slated to change direction once the eye of the storm passed over us.

My father-in-law and I went out on the front terrace to nail an air mattress up over the wood, but a gust of wind lifted him right off his feet. He managed to regain his balance by bracing himself against the wall and, together with Kinich, we hurriedly finished securing the air mattress before rushing back into the safety of the apartment.  

Finally, on Sunday morning, after hours of being shut up inside, we woke to the news that Hurricane Wilma had moved on, heading for other unlucky destinations.

My three-year-old niece, overwhelmed with giddy happiness, began singing a song she composed on the spot that translated into something like, “The sun is shining and now we can play. The hurricane is gone!”

An overturned phone booth overlooks a
deserted beach in Cancun’s hotel zone, a week after
Hurriance Wilma wreaked havoc on the area. (Erin Cassin)

It takes a village

By a minor miracle, our apartment had remained completely intact through the hurricane. The only damage sustained were the holes in the walls where we had nailed up wooden planks for protection against the wind. There was also mold growth in nearly every room.

I compared notes with Doña Ramona from next door. Their apartment had lost some of its windows and water was still leaking into every room. My problems were minimal in comparison.

Yet, our next-door neighbors took care of us those first days after the storm passed.  Ramona gave us fish, chicken, and barbecued meat, from her seemingly endless supply of food. Her husband bestowed a couple of cold beers upon us, a luxury since no home had refrigeration capability due to the loss of electricity and the city had forbidden the sale of alcohol.

That first night after the storm, my husband, his sister, her boyfriend Javier, and I sat down for a meal of steaming hot fish soup and a couple of chilled beers while the children slept. Javier had been the first to check on us, stopping by briefly during the eye of the storm and returning once again after the hurricane passed.

We were chatting after the meal when we were interrupted by the sound of a drum and then cheers from the street below. From our balcony, we saw that a group of neighbors had gathered in the darkness of the street and were dancing to the beats of a skilled drum player. My husband grabbed his camera and practically flew down the stairs, with me clumsily stumbling behind him. Soon, we were in the midst of an impromptu street party.

Other drummers arrived and one neighbor, who I had never seen before, began honking her car horn in time with the percussion music. Another neighbor gestured at me to dance in the middle of the circle. People had been showing off their skills one by one, but I shook my head. She pulled me into the middle of the circle anyway and I performed my usual routine of snapping my fingers for two beats before heading back to the anonymity offered by the circle’s outer fringe.

My neighbor Angela was in the crowd and we greeted each other with hugs and talked about how liberating it felt to be out of the house after so many days of being trapped inside.

Soon, we had formed a conga line and started doing the limbo. Then, someone pulled his car up and started blasting music. Various couples paired up to show off their intricate moves. My husband and I twirled about, making up for our lack of skills with plenty of laughter. After about 40 minutes, we headed back to the apartment with the sound of the music following us.

Ceiba del Mar Spa Resort stands forlornly on
the shores of Puerto Morelos, which neighbors Cancun
to the south. The ravaged spa will be closed for at
least six months due to the damage caused by
Hurricane Wilma. (Erin Cassin)

Paradise lost and found

The following week was a busy one, as we cleaned up our apartment and organized night watches with neighbors. The lack of electricity that first week drew people out of their apartments, onto their balconies and into the street. Without computers or television, many of us re-learned the old-fashioned art of neighborly conversation to occupy our time.

When I went to hang up laundry on the roof of our building, I ran into the neighbor who had pulled me into the dance circle. We started talking and Lupe told me that she was from Mexico City but had moved to Cancun to give her children a more peaceful life. We spent a good half hour up on the roof chatting and I left feeling like I had made a friend.  

And for the first time, I hung out inside Doña Ramona’s apartment, when I stopped by to present her with gifts of candles and hand sanitizer that I had picked up at the only open supermarket in the vicinity.

Ramona has lived in Paraíso for 15 years. She tells me that it doesn’t look like the same neighborhood anymore after Wilma. She was accustomed to looking out her window and seeing the vibrant green of our street’s vegetation. It pains her to see a wasteland of dead trees instead.

It has been heart-wrenching to see the damage in and around Cancun. The storm has left a maze of destruction in its wake, as the city’s resplendent foliage has been replaced by rotting stumps and withered branches. Much of the beachfront’s glistening white sand has been supplanted by menacing-looking rocks, and the hypnotizing turquoise of the sea has been churned into a dark grey froth. Nature will restore herself eventually, but for now, my oasis has been shred to tatters.

I am saddened by the destruction but it is heartening to see the rapid pace of the recovery efforts and the ingenuity of everyone working to return the neighborhood to normalcy.

And for once, I truly feel part of the community. While looting and chaos broke out in other parts of the city, my neighbors, my family, and I were dedicated to protecting all of us on this street from any further misfortune.          

This sense of community has remained with me, even now, a month after the hurricane hit.

Doña Ramona and I spend more time talking on our shared terrace than we ever did in the year leading up to the storm. She is busy now that she’s returned to her regular routine, but I’ve made her promise to come over for coffee once her schedule calms down a bit.

As for Lupe, I bumped into her in the corner store last week and she hugged me like an old friend. She told Angela to make sure to include me the next time they plan a night out with the other women of the neighborhood. Angela agreed, saying it would be a good way to “integrate” me.

It looks like there is place in that inner circle for me after all. It just took a hurricane for me to realize it.  

The author browses through a rack in front of
a closed shop on Avenida Tulum, the main
street in downtown Cancun. Various vendors flocked to
this area in the week following Hurricane Wilma, as
many of the usual marketplaces were not open for business. (Kinich Ramirez)

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Commentary

Rising above words

My grandfather and I share volumes in silence.

Winner of BEST OF INTERACT (SO FAR) for “Tofu and toast”


We don’t chat in living rooms filled with cherrywood furniture or sip tea in gold-trimmed china cups.

No, there is no small talk, no family gossip, no storytelling between us.

Instead, Grandpa and I bond each summer when I sit down cross-legged on the floor beside his La-Z-Boy recliner. His feet are both propped up, which is especially good for his left foot, the one pierced by World War II shrapnel. The jagged piece of metal has lodged inside his ankle bone since World War II.


Grandpa and baby Rhian share a moment together.

Side by side we watch old Japanese warrior films that I cannot understand. But the movies are secondary, because I am busy learning about Grandpa by osmosis. I study his facial expressions for reaction to the plot. When does he lean closer to the screen? Or twitch with empathy for the characters? At what moment does he lose interest and shift his weight back into his favorite chair?

During commercial breaks I prepare a hot water foot massage bath and add Hawaiian rock salt to help draw the yellowish pus from his foot. I then help my mom cut Grandpa’s toenails and disinfect his wounds with a Q-tip saturated in iodine. We place bandages on his sores.

He nods, smiles, and softly says Thank you” before absentmindedly scratching the dressings off, as he watches the TV screen.

Grandpa is the only man I would ever think of learning to cook for. I want to cook tofu just right — golden on both sides. I sprinkle furikake seasonings over white sticky rice and slice omelets diagonally so they resemble floating buoys on top of steaming miso soup. And I serve it to him right before Wheel of Fortune.  

As Vanna White reveals the letters on screen, I can tell when Grandpa knows the answer: His eyes bulge forward slightly, and he chews a little faster.

My father wonders how my Grandpa and I fill the silent spaces, how we can build love from a relationship with no words.

My grandfather and I never speak.

At least not on a level where people can hear us.
“

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