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Another Book for Obama?

Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano seeks to rescue history and reclaim truth-telling


 

In April 2009, at the Summit of the Americas in Trinidad and Tobago, Venezuela’s President Hugo Chavez handed President Barack Obama a copy of Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent by Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano. Published in 1971, this treatise details the history of European colonization of Latin America and argues that the United States has exercised a negative influence in the region throughout recent times.

Obama might now want to consider adding Galeano’s latest work—Mirrors: Stories of Almost Everyone, translated from the Spanish by Mark Fried—to his library.

A provocative and wholly original interpretation of human history, Mirrors consists of nearly 600 vignettes and succinct essays written in a meditative prose that leaves oneyou virtually breathless for its beauty and piquancy. Galeano’s writing style, which lilts in rhythmic back-and-forth exposition, then culminates into a final, salient point, parallels Gabriel García Márquez and John Dos Passos. However, neither magical realism nor surrealism is at work here—realism is.

Galeano believes the authentic history of mankind has been falsified by convention and the élites who retain ultimate authority over what is to be remembered, recorded, and propagated. His task is to unveil the realities of human existence that impact and form our shared identity throughout time—be they love, war, racism, creativity, repression, poverty, valor, prosperity, knowledge, diversity, death, memory, tyranny, or contentment.

Make no mistake, though. Mirrors is no easy stroll through the annals of centuries-old, oft-told chronicles of our past. While it offers moments of lightheartedness, it’s mostly a solemn book, free of smug congratulations, exalting the integrity of humankind. Galeano demands that the historical record be viewed through a revisionist lens, wresting history from its glut of constraining inaccuracies to reclaim truth-telling and exactitude.

In doing so, he creates a masterwork of mosaics. Stories of Harriet Tubman; Ho Chi Minh; Murasaki Shikibu and Sei Shōnagon, female Japanese writers whose novels "share the rare honor of being praised a millennium after the fact;" Hollywood; Vermeer; Queen Juana of Castile; Lenin; the Marquis de Sade; the Barbie doll; "outlawed writer" Isaac Babel; Peruvian liberator Túpac Amaru; Darwin; King Midas of Phrygia; Jomo Kenyatta; ITT, BMW, and IBM; Aphrodite and Apollo; and U.S. Secretary of State Dean Acheson appear in a wondrous and seemingly endless procession of people, places, epochs, and events.

You have to marvel at Mirrors’ magnitude and Galeano’s dexterity. In the space of a ten- to fifteen-line narrative, he constructs scene, personhood, and a moment in time with precise poetic finesse and pieces together the magnificence and savagery of our "human adventure" here on Earth. Here are examples of Galeano’s thrifty, yet profound style:

“Word Smugglers”

    Yang Huanyi, whose feet were crippled in infancy, stumbled through life until the autumn of the year 2004, when she died just shy of her hundredth birthday.
    She was the last to know Nushu, the secret language of Chinese women.
    Their female code dated from ancient times. Barred from male language, which they could not write, women founded a clandestine one, out of men’s reach. Fated to be illiterate, they invented an alphabet of symbols that masqueraded as decorations and was indecipherable to the eyes of their masters.
    Women sketched their words on garments and fans. The hands that embroidered were not free. The symbols were.

“Resurrection of Camille”

    The family declared her insane and had her committed.
    Camille Claudel spent the last thirty years of her life in an asylum; held captive.
    It was for her own good, they said.
    In the asylum, a freezing prison, she refused to sketch or sculpt.
    Her mother and her sister never visited her.
    Once in a while her brother, Paul the saint, turned up.
    When Camille the sinner died, no one claimed her body.
    It was years before the world discovered that Camille had been more than the humiliated lover of Auguste Rodin.
    Nearly half a century after her death, her works came back to life. They traveled and they astonished: bronze that dances, marble that cries, stone that loves. In Tokyo, the blind asked and were allowed to touch the sculptures. They said the figures breathed.

    Mirrors follows a chronology—beginning with the delightfully paradoxical "Origin Of Man"—but doesn’t adhere to a fixed timeline. In story after story, you learn about acts of virtue and contributions to cultural identity that aren’t commonly known or valued, because they’ve been "rewarded with collective amnesia." "Legacy Denied" describes the eight-centuries-old "Muslim legacy" left behind by the Moors in Spain, "whose culture shone there as nowhere else" and of which "[m]any Spaniards know nothing." "Another Missing Father" tells of forgotten founding father Robert Carter and the freeing of his 450 slaves 70 years before the abolition of slavery, a deed that "condemned him to solitude and oblivion."

And the attribute that may be most praiseworthy—that forces Mirrors to poke at your conscience and stay in your memory long after you’ve finished its last entry—is the way Galeano fuses past and present to demonstrate that there’s no veering away from time’s continuum. The present is molded from the past, just as the future is the fusion of every moment that precedes it:

“Guernica”

    Paris, spring of 1937: Pablo Picasso wakes up and reads.
    He reads the newspaper while having breakfast in his studio.
    His coffee grows cold in the cup.
    German planes have razed the city of Guernica. For three hours the Nazi air force chased and machine-gunned people fleeing the burning city.
    General Franco insists that Guernica has been set aflame by Asturian dynamiters and Basque pyromaniacs from the ranks of the Communists.
    Two years later in Madrid, Wolfram von Richthofen, commander of the German forces in Spain, sits beside Franco at the victory parade: killings Spaniards was Hitler’s rehearsal for his impending world war.
    Many years later in New York, Colin Powell makes a speech at the United Nations to announce the imminent annihilation of Iraq.
    While he speaks, the back of the room is hidden from view, Guernica is hidden from view. The reproduction of Picasso’s painting, which hangs there, is concealed by an enormous blue cloth.
    UN officials decided it was not the most appropriate backdrop for the proclamation of a new round of butchery.

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Commentary

The two Sanyas

Whose choice is it?


Determined to Find Paradise
A prominent British travel writer advised me several weeks ago to never begin any travel narrative with the destination’s airport. But in Sanya, a city in China’s Hainan province, its Phoenix International Airport announces the city’s aspirations to all its guests. Renovations in 2004 replaced concrete walls with teak paneling, a steamed bun diner with an al fresco cafe, and fluorescent lighting with a Plexiglas roof. Intricately carved details in the airport’s design suggest Balinese handiwork, like the carved wood pineapple, twice the airport’s height, which looms over the arrivals area. Natural light that shines through the roof’s glass slabs illuminates the eager faces of the mostly Russian and Chinese tourists waiting. I sympathize with their impatience.  One weekend is all I have to soak up the sun in my bikini while sipping on a tropical cocktail, as a warm sea breeze plays with my hair. Armed with straw hats and sunglasses, my fellow travelers and I are determined to get a taste of tropical paradise.

 

Tail of the Dragon

It is ironic then that Hainan was considered a backwater province during various dynasties in Chinese history. Previously known as the “tail of the dragon,” Hainan was a secluded region to which subversive poets like the Song dynasty’s Su Dongpo and ousted officials like Tang dynasty prime minister Lin Deyu were banished. Lin once dubbed Hainan “the gate of hell.” Away from cities and trading centers, the island was populated by aborigines and ethnic minority tribes who most Han Chinese distrusted and considered primitive. Dense, snake-infested forests, humid weather, and scorching heat made it a nightmare to live in, in an age before bulldozers, air-conditioning, and hygienic precautions helped ward off communicable tropical diseases like malaria.  Standing on a beach whose name translates to “the end of the sky and ocean,” it is easy to imagine early settlers thinking of this place as the edge of the earth.

 

There Is Always Room for More

The Chinese government saw potential in the island as early as 1955, when a Communist Party Committee member called the island “a treasure island.”   Today, billboard after billboard of glamorous real estate advertisements line the roads from the airport to downtown. The developments have names like Palmera, Twilight Lagoon, Sanya Peninsula Town, South Bay — “Hainan” literally translates to South Sea. Chinese actress and international star Zhang Ziyi adorns one such billboard. “It’s my choice,” reads the caption under her smiling, sun-kissed face. Closer to the city, shiny residential apartment blocks sprout from the concrete. Most of their units look empty. I ask my cab driver, Sun (pronounced "soon"), if there are more apartments than buyers.

He is quick to respond, "There are always many buyers." Sun is thinking of investing in some real estate himself when he has saved enough. “But it’s difficult,” he says, “prices keep going up… Where are locals supposed to stay?” 

When we reach the Sheraton, he gives my companion, Ray, a card with a list of tourist attractions and his number on it. He says to call him if we leave Yalong Bay to go sightseeing. He can give us a “special rate”. We nod.

Fitting In

The overcast sky looks unpromising, and the weather is colder than we expected, but we are intent on lounging by the beach as soon as possible. On our way to our suite, we pass a fair-skinned mother and daughter in identical floppy sun hats speaking Uighur to each other. The suite’s tiled floor and generous sitting area reminds me of our Westin room in Macao nine months ago. The Chinese flag across from our window flaps in the breeze. Yalong bay’s private beaches are exquisite in the way most private beaches are exquisite: clean sand, clear water, designated lounging areas that suggest the hotel guest need do nothing but relax and be pampered.
The Sheraton’s stretch of sand is dotted with cushioned deck chairs under umbrellas, and the waitstaff serves cocktails, fresh coconut juice, and a variety of snacks like nachos and Buffalo wings. A Russian couple, one in a black bikini and the other in trunks, are whistled out of the water for swimming in an unrestricted zone. Upon entering the water and walking to knee-level twice, Ray holds his breath and charges into the cold waves. We could be on any beach, anywhere, I think to myself, before a woman with a northern accent rolls her r’s at a man trying to take her photograph, adjusting the collar of her pink polo shirt. A Chinese toddler a few chairs down from me leaps from beach chair to beach chair, punctuating each jump with a war cry, to the delight of his grandmother. A family glides past on electric Segways.  I wave at Ray and take another sip of coconut juice before continuing to read, curled up in sweat pants and a leather jacket under a beach blanket, a T-shirt over my bikini top. The wind blowing my hair back feels more like a chilly monsoon heralding rain than my much-hoped for warm sea breeze. This is not how I’d imagined my tropical getaway from Hong Kong. My reading is interrupted by a tanned woman dangling a long string of pearls in front of me. She wears black trousers, a black vest over her printed button-down shirt, and a scarf in her hair, unlike the T-shirt and capris-clad tourists around me. She seems to be an ethnic minority; I can’t identify her accent. She walks up and down the beach hawking her pearls to supine tourists, exchanging glares with the Sheraton staff, who tell her to leave the area.

 

Amalgamation

For dinner, we decide to venture downtown, exiting our tourist safe haven. The city is half an hour from Yalong Bay by cab. We are advised to walk down the pedestrian street off Jie Fang Lu, or Liberation Road. The pedestrian street is busy and neon sign-lined, like Beijing’s Wang Fu Jing and Shanghai’s Nan Jing Lu. I didn’t expect Sanya to resemble other Chinese cities in this regard. Impressed by the number of Uighur Muslim food options available, we feast on lamb skewers, sauteed vegetables, and papaya juice. We ask our tired-looking waitress about Hainanese chicken rice, and she says immediately we are thinking of Wenchang chicken, named after a city in Hainan. According to her, the version of Hainanese chicken rice Ray and I are familiar with, which is from Singapore and Malaysia, also has elements of Cantonese cooking. It seems she has answered this question before. She speaks to us in the same accented Chinese the peddler of pearls used, and talks to another waitress in another language.

After poking around a store selling Hangzhou merchandise, Ray and I decide to call it a night and get a cab. We wait five minutes at the bustling entrance to Jie Fang Lu for a cab. Five minutes turns to ten, ten to fifteen. We walk down the main road with our arms out. We wait at the entrance of a pink and orange Bahama Hotel.

Where have all the taxis gone? It seems China’s rising middle class. that celebrated target market discussed in business publications around the world, becomes a running joke between Ray and me. China’s rising middle class is to blame for the disappointing weather, the greasy food, the noisy construction. We finally grab a taxi dropping passengers off downtown and hurry back into the embrace of our five-star hotel suite, sorry to have ever left.

 

Another Try

The next day, we lunch at the nearby Ritz, where we are given fortune cookies. Having never eaten fortune cookies on the mainland, I break mine open to read the paper strip: "Celebrate a special occasion at Sophia." We find out from a waiter Sophia is a restaurant in the Ritz That night, we stay at the Banyan Tree. Our pool villa’s layout makes it even easier than before to spend all day within the hotel’s confines, away from the Sanya we encountered last night, the local Sanya with its local businesses and local consumers. We ask the concierge about restaurants and dining nearby. We’re told Da Dong Hai has candlelit restaurants by the beach and is good for barbecued food. It sounds romantic. On the way there, we see a green and yellow Subwave Deli sign, an ostentatious building with Roman pillars called Royal International Club, and a surprising number of Cyrillic signs. We step out of the cab to hear a blasting mix of European techno, Backstreet Boys, and Chinese karaoke. “Everybody, rock your body…” Music emanates from a fun fair, which consists of a Viking ship, a reverse catapult,and apprehensive tourists lining up to try a ride called "Crazy Wave" that looks nauseating. The announcer’s voice drowns out the screams of roller coaster riders. I can’t tell if he is speaking Chinese or English. He sounds like a Chinese rapper.

 

Where Two Roads Meet

We pick the restaurant playing European techno music over the one with a karaoke bar. CCCP/USSR is one of the many businesses in Sanya that caters to Russian tourists. Its signboard and menu is in Cyrillic; its menu includes Russian borscht, skewered meat on sticks, and standard Chinese fare. Its unfriendly waitress gets impatient with our indecision. As we vacillate between barbecued lamb and hot plate egg tofu, mosquitoes feast on my legs—I  should not have worn dark colors. A series of peddlers wander by. One of them tries to persuade Ray to buy me a bouquet of red cellophane roses wrapped in pink and green tissue paper. "Buy a bouquet for your lady."

When Ray says, "No thank you," she turns to me smiling sweetly and offers the bouquet.

"Pretty flowers for a pretty girl."

I smile back, but it takes a while to shake her off. When she thinks we’re not looking, she makes a face. I watch her saunter into the dark. As we tuck into the hot plate egg tofu, a man belts out a Mandarin power ballad from the ‘90s in the nearby karaoke bar. His tour group applauds at the end of the song. Here, it seems, is where the two Sanyas meet.

The sun comes out on our last day. Sapphire skies remind us why we were excited about our trip to begin with. Instead of deck chairs, the Banyan Tree has beach beds—full mattresses on bamboo frames and gauze curtains. Across the way, in place of buildings or another forested bay, is the horizon, kissing the blue water. The tide comes in. We could be on any beach anywhere, I think to myself. It recedes.

Making a Choice

As Ray and I wait to board our afternoon flight home, a strange melody makes its way through the departures hall. It comes from a store selling remote control cars, bikes, and other memorabilia not specific to Sanya. While speaking to a father and son, the store’s sales assistant gestures absently at a Barbie doll seated behind a Ken doll in matching white-and-lime green track suits. They are on an indigo bike with training wheels, which is playing the eerie, chiming melody in a minor key. Round and round they go. The dolls’ smiles remind me of Zhang Ziyi in the real estate advertisement, but without the caption that reads, It’s my choice.

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Commentary

Cebu, Philippines

The last place on Earth…


Baptism by Water

     A large splash.

     Silence.

     I open my eyes and take a long breath. I’m in another world, specifically, off the coast of Moalboal, in Cebu, Philippines. I’ve been diving here for the past five days, and everyday has provided me with new reasons to shout mindless obscenities into the air, for lack of a better way to express my complete and utter astonishment at the world we live in.

     Today, I’m diving with what looks to be about a million sardines. All I can see are these agile little fish darting back and forth to a symphony only they can hear. It’s a beautiful day, and the beams of sunlight break through the ocean surface. These rays of light reflect off each individual fish scale, creating a sea of diamonds. At any moment I genuinely expect a “Wizard of Oz”-like face to materialize and explain my greater destiny to me. Ten minutes later I am disappointed when nothing happens and head back to the surface.

     Back on the boat I look back at Pescador island, my dive site and home to the occasional whale shark and manta ray, and I silently think to myself that if I didn’t owe so much in student loans, I would love to recreate an episode of “Survivor” and live on this island by myself. Then I realize that watching episodes of “Survivor” wouldn’t even be remotely possible on this island, and I return to better senses as the boat heads back to the mainland.

 

 

 

The Mango

     Later that day I realize that I have a lot of time to kill, so I head into town. In town there are many fruit vendors, and with a quick glance, I immediately zero in on the mangoes being sold.

     Cebu, this small island in the Philippines, is probably the most famous mango-producing location in the world. You’ve probably seen their dried mangoes packaged in your nearby supermarket.

     I make a beeline to the nearest vendor and ask for the freshest mango she has. The woman working at the stall complies and slices up the mango for me so it is ready to eat.

     Think back: Do you remember your first kiss with that person that you really cared about? How perfect was the world at that moment? That moment in time will stay with you forever. Now, think about how special that moment was, multiply it by ten, and you may get a sense of how I felt while I ate that Cebu mango.

     The following is a brief transaction of my thoughts while I ate that wonderful fruit:

     Bite. ‘Oh my goodness, this is good.

     Bite. ‘Hate doesn’t exist in this world; everybody loves each other!’

     Bite. ‘I’ve never liked cats, but why? They’ve never done anything to me. I will love cats forever now.’

     Bite. ‘Jesus? Is that you?’

     Being from Canada, the mangoes I’ve eaten have usually been from Mexico. These mangoes usually have a very fuzzy quality to them and are sour. The mangoes I ate in Cebu were not only the sweetest mangoes I’ve ever had, but their texture was similar to that of a ripe peach. To this day my descriptions can’t do justice to how good that mango was.

 

 

 

What I’d Thought I’d Lost

     After my out-of-body experience, I went to grab a bite to eat at a restaurant where I had made friends with the owners. The meal I ate was wonderful, and after the meal, the store owners asked if I wanted to join them and some locals in a game of pick-up basketball. I eagerly agreed and off we went to the basketball court together.

     You see, as far as I’m concerned, there are three main religions in the Philippines: Roman Catholicism, Manny Pacquiao and basketball. Manny Pacquiao is the Philippines’ legendary boxer who graces the covers and billboards of, well, everything in the Philippines. However, other than him, nothing or no one is as popular as the sport of basketball in this country. I’ve played basketball most of my life, but when my friends at the restaurant asked me to join them and some locals in a game of pick-up basketball, I didn’t know what to expect.

     We arrived early at the basketball court. The run-down court was directly in front of what looked to be the town’s old city hall. My friends and I shot around until people started showing up. When they did I was a little surprised: They all came to play… in flip-flops! I wasn’t exactly wearing basketball shoes, but at least I was still wearing shoes. My misgivings of how they would play immediately disappeared once the game started.

 

 

 

     Immediately after the jump ball, I witnessed possibly one the greatest, most improbable athletic feats achieved by mortal men. These Filipino basketball players were running and jumping like gazelles in their flip-flops. After my initial shock, I focused on the game since there was now a fair-sized crowd focusing on me, the starting foreigner. I bricked my first two shots and thought to myself, ‘This is going to be a long game.’ However, later on, I started to find my stroke. I let my muscle memory take over and just shot without over thinking, and voila, my shots started going in. It was a close game and the crowd started chanting ’Lebron James’ whenever I shot the ball. It was the first time (and probably the last) I’d ever been called Lebron James, and the antithesis of what I’m usually called (something along the lines of ‘towel boy’). We ended up losing the game on a last-second shot. Tired and exhausted, I sat down on the sidelines trying to absorb where I was and everything that was happening.

     Having worked abroad in Japan for the past year, I had longed to return back to Canada; being so far away from family and friends, my emotional state consisted of frequent peaks and valleys. Yet, as I sat on that bench, in that small town in the Philippines, playing basketball with new friends, I was overcome by an overwhelming sense of clarity. I had finally felt at home, and this was the last place on Earth I expected it to be.

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Commentary

South America’s best-kept secret

Finding volcanoes and meaning in Ecuador


As I stand patiently in line at the dusty immigration office awaiting my prized passport stamp, I am drawn to the thoughts and memories of my time in Ecuador.  I first arrived in the country knowing absolutely nothing about it.  Let’s be honest: when imagining Latin America, we see Christ the Redeemer in Rio, or the Mecca of Machu Picchu. For most backpackers, Ecuador is nothing more than a small country sitting north of Peru.  And as selfish as it might be, part of me hopes that it never becomes a highlight, because right now it feels like I have it all to myself.

A welcoming place

I have traveled South America extensively, and Ecuador reminds me a lot of a couple of its Central American cousins: Costa Rica and Guatemala.  Ecuador has all the tourism potential of Costa Rica, but it has somehow managed to fend off the mob of backpackers and resort-stayers that now dominate its Central American counterpart. Like Guatemala, Ecuador has a varied population of people who are eager to welcome you regardless of your particular origins.  People here wave to passing cars, welcoming their passengers without a second thought.

Insignificance and awe

Towns like Baños de Agua Santa offer everything a backpacker could ever need and more. It sits in an ideal climate where the temperature is never too hot and rarely cold. In this lush mountain town, I spend one day jumping off a bridge, attached only by a not-so-reassuring rope, and the next day rushing down swiftly moving rapids on a six-person raft. The prominent features of cloud and water are inescapable.  Images of the cloud forest lend nostalgic notions of scenes from Hollywood movies, where tall volcanoes, over 5,000 meters tall, stand guard over countless towering waterfalls.  The clouds hang carelessly low among the lush green mountainsides.  They billow into puffy white and grey cotton balls, seemingly in constant motion, as if they have somewhere important to be.  In a world where most cultures and societies worship the sun to some extent, in the cloud forest you learn to cherish the rain.  In the cloud forest, the rain means life:  it greens the foliage, fills the rivers and feeds the valley’s impressive myriad of tall, whispering waterfalls.

Ecuador’s share of the Amazon basin also leaves visitors standing with a sensation of overwhelming insignificance and awe.  At the surface, the endless valleys of green shrubbery in la selva (the jungle) appear shallow and monotonous in color and form.  But as you dig down beneath the numerous layers of the forest’s canopy you can only begin to understand the diversity and character of the Amazon basin.  As I hike through a narrow canyon surrounded covered by the thick canopy, a troop of squirrel monkeys chants above me and bats shriek as they rush past my ears.  The jungle is never quiet.  The rain forest is constantly breathing; it is full of life and, in turn, provides more than we can imagine.  To us, the jungle usually provides a setting for adventure, reserved for the likes of Indiana Jones and Lara Croft, but to the indigenous people, their trees, flowers and their food all come from this tropical provider.  As is the case with the cloud forest, the jungle is one of those places so rich with beauty it can leave you at a standstill, and even cause you to forget to take a picture. Most people spend their time trying to add meaning and significance to their everyday life.  But in travel, we spend our time trying to find the places that make us feel insignificant; Ecuador’s piece of the Amazon gives that to us.

The hustling, bustling stillness

In Ecuador, one should not forget to experience the cities as well.  The urban enclaves of Cuenca and Quito combine the benefits of the modern world with the charm and character of the colonial era.  Stuccoed houses with balconies and narrow, cobbled streets line the old, colonial parts of these cities.  I wander through the cities’ massive, hallowed churches, government buildings and bustling plazas, which form the social centers of the cities and I realize that these parts act as the heart and the lungs of Ecuadorian society.  In these plazas and squares, people seem to still have to time simply to sit, share, and converse as the world continues around them.

Interconnected

Like any adventure-oriented travel destination, Ecuador still provides volatility and intrigue.  The indigenous people of la selva still often set up roadblocks intending to slow the damage to their home and their local natural environment, on which they so greatly rely. Less than 15 years ago, the country was still involved in both inter- and intra-state conflicts, many of which still seem to simmer in the undercurrents of Ecuadorian society.  Natural disasters are still a part of everyday life. Mudslides, torrential downpours and earthquakes are all a possibility at any given moment.  Moreover, many of Ecuador’s volcanoes are still very active.  In fact, the large volcano which guards the entrance into Baños has been growing steadily in activity, and spews off large amounts of lava on a regular basis.

Ecuador remains just a small blip on the global tourism radar.  However, its rawness is, in large part, what makes this country such a jewel.  It is well worth the exploration, time and challenge.  In Ecuador you can find yourself navigating your way down narrow, waterfall-lined canyons one day, rafting down segments of the Amazon basin the next, and then soaking in the urban colonial atmosphere the following night. Regardless of its lack of a Machu Picchu or Carnaval de Rio, Ecuador has a diversity and untouched beauty that may make it South America’s next hot travel destination — much to my dismay.

For more of Brendan’s adventures, go to: http://www.brendansadventures.com

 

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Fiction & Poetry

‘A threadbare foreword to the fleshy book of living and dying.’

Prayer flags and dowdy dot coms.


Ma Dreams

“Get a job now, son,
got to build our house.
Get me a bride too,
one for you
and one for  your brother.”

Pouring hot tea
on the stale crumbs
in the Chinese bowl
for her cat, throwing
abuses at the intruding
dogs, the mother speaks.
Her words fall softly
on the feverish bottom
of my sinking heart.
“Got to build a brick house.
Can’t work anymore,
lying on life’s threshold,
waiting for the dark
word to drop
from the heavens…
Can’t bring water
from the distant wells.
Can’t carry heavy
water pots. Last time,
I fainted near the well,
fell flat in the slimy ditch
beside the water well…
aging you know!

Get a job now,
get me a bride too,
one for your brother
and one for you…”

The cat’s lucent
tail curls in the air.

Bridge

Rickety bridge
a lonely heir to my secret world

Rickety bridge
an abandoned leaf in forest of my gloom

quaking like
shoulders of a hillside porter

thrumming like
strings of a blind singer
 
waking from the sleep
in the slums of screaming cities…

Exasperated, I approach
wet spongy openings of your breezy body
 
moistened mouth
of a water spout oozing energy
 
rim of
a hotspring’s bellybutton

odor
of earth’s secret sex

waft of fragrance
stemming from a forest

buried
beneath centuries of snow

Rickety bridge
lonely heir to my secret sanctuaries

palaces of pleasure
in the hidden valleys,
 
and rain forests and plateau beyond

a threadbare foreword to
the fleshy book of living and dying.

Return,
(Taramarang)

Return from
the valley of the Buddhist flags

and singing monks

return from
the brass pitchers of millet wine

and silver pipes
singing songs of the hidden Himalayan canyons

return from
the fragrance of juniper

Himalayan maple
and larch and the forests of rhododendrons

return from wilderness and sweet potatoes

carrot slices drying
on the stone slabs of the monastery

beside a lurid chorten
aflame from a parakeet’s yellow tail

and singing thrush’s laugh.

Return from
a world of bright colors

Green, Blue
Yellow, Ochre, White, Black

to the cities
of noisy sirens and

drab,
dowdy dot coms.

 

Links of interest:

Author links:

www.yuyutsu.de

http://yuyutsurdsharma.blogspot.com/

www.niralapublications.com

Related links:

Prayer flags: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prayer_flag

Bhuddist Bhutan warns that felling trees (to make prayer flags) is a threat to happiness:
http://in.reuters.com/article/topNews/idINIndia-42386620090911?rpc=401&

Tibetan singing bowls: http://www.bodhisattva.com/about.htm

Chendebji Chorten: http://www.cs.unm.edu/~shapiro/BHUTAN/MIDSIZE/nepalesestupa.html

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Fiction & Poetry

March hare and Eire green

The poet wanders through Carrollian vistas of wonderland and the aching hills of Inis Fáil.


as time waits to exhale

the white rabbit
turns his pockets out
to search for a mislaid watch

chess board squares
stretch their boundaries
and the unseated knight
grapples with the bishop

the king and queen
sip dandelion tea and dine
on radish sandwiches

(the cucumber cannot be spared
for the dormouse refuses to serve it)

but does it matter
the mad hatter is detained
alice absent as well

even the cheshire cat
misremembers the time
and so quilt free slumbers beneath
a mushroom bereft of company

still you and I will dine awhile
then slip back through the mirror
resume the schedule
of clocks not our own

and leave to memory
the taste of an idle afternoon

fractured reality

delusion becalmed
masks surreal surrender

as the crest of consciousness
constrained by doubt and insecurity
morphs into a journey
we did not choose

this struggle for normalcy
rides chaotic waves
as rose colored skies
fade to uncertain fog

then vassalage
is bartered for the surety
of tomorrow’s children

but is the ransom enough

unfretted

long haired tresses
resistant to a brush
seem like fishing nets
tossed by an angry current

as time swims by
fingers coach snarls free
and locks of burnished gold
released
taunt the clip
that once tried
to contain them

Recalling the Exodus

A solitary tear is but the beginning of a deluge.
The Banshee’s wail the keening for generations lost.
Stone, thatch and grass remember as aged
rocks weep and the mists of yesterday
weave shroud-like through hills and valleys.

A lone seagull caresses the waking sky.
Storm-like cries of unseen shadows shake
the deserted coast. Seaweed is ripped and tossed.
Here tears are measured with grains of sand.
Yesterday’s pain the haunting echo of forgotten kells.

Bright green the countryside, fair blue the sky, but hollow
are the empty shells that others once called home.
Their sacrifice stains yet the doorways of their land,
reminders of a belief in a promise that led the souls that left.
Then famine raised hopes that dreamed of more than bread.

Links of interest:
Alice in Wonderland
Lewis Carroll Society of North America
Lewis Carroll’s poetry
Eire.com
Chicago River dyed green for St. Patrick’s day

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Fiction & Poetry

Alexis, stone walls, and butterflies

Three poems that begin with endings.


For Alexis

The body of 13-year-old Alexis Glover was found Friday, January 9, 2009 in a shallow creek near PWC’s McCoart Administration Building, two days after she went missing. Alexis was adopted when she was six. She had reactive attachment disorder, among many medical problems. Her adoptive mother has been convicted of murder.

One needn’t know the river
to know the way it flows —
that’s the way the Buddha knew
beneath the Bodhi tree. He
emptied his mind into water,
washed his thoughts away,
came to know an afterlife:

The feather becoming the fawn,
dawn passed into Banyan Tree,
the no-shores-needed mind.

The shell of every walnut
rises up to drink, parched
Orchid tongues finally wetted.

Speaking in the language of trickles —
that is how it is
even for the smallest stream:
flowing, rising, flowing,
then weeping one more time,
go peaceful little girl,
into ocean again.

The jail cell

Brentsville Courthouse Historic Center, Brentsville, Virginia

The jail cell. Claw marks
in cemented walls, cold air.
They think it’s the ghosts.

My daughter says

butterflies are the souls
of people. Yes,

I say. They are
the souls of all good soldiers.

Read more from Katherine Mercurio Gotthardt at Poems from the Battlefield.

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Reviews

Airborne anxiety

Two starkly different air-travel voyages are explored in Walter Kirn’s Up in the Air and Jonathan Miles’ Dear American Airlines.


 

The protagonists of Walter Kirn’s 2001 novel Up in the Air and Jonathan Miles’ 2008 book Dear American Airlines represent opposite ends of the air-travel spectrum. Consultant Ryan Bingham, the narrator of Kirn’s book, spends virtually his entire life in transit, professing to prefer the rhythms of travel to a more stationary existence, while translator Benjamin R. Ford of Dear American Airlines finds a once-in-a-lifetime family obligation a good reason to leave his Manhattan townhouse for the first time in decades. Still, both these characters reflect that, however ambivalent Americans may be toward air travel, it’s a privilege they take for granted and are loath to give up.

Up in the Air’s Bingham has just resigned from his job as a “career transition counselor,” called in to talk to employees who have just lost their jobs — an occupation he fell into because he “wasn’t strong,” though it’s not hard to imagine him returning to it in this current economic downturn. (A movie adaptation starring George Clooney as a noticeably older Bingham, this time tailed by a bright-eyed trainee who openly challenges his lifestyle, is scheduled for release later this month.)

Bingham’s primary means of entertainment during the near-constant traveling (so intense, he has even given up his apartment) comes from racking up miles on the fictional Great West Airlines in pursuit of the elusive one-million-mile mark. He’s idealized the moment down to where it ought to happen (over the Great Plains) and how he’ll celebrate (with a disposable camera and a copy of a story he wrote in college about his happy childhood).

Bingham sees himself as a citizen of “Airworld,” a largely anonymous, sanitized life in which recognizable chain restaurants represent open arms and every city is a series of ring roads, while simultaneously aware that his ardor for it is perhaps the most unique thing about him. As he faces the end of his traveling days, Kirn suggests he won’t be able to give up his highly mobile lifestyle by writing in a love interest (who, in a twist, was laid off by him on a previous trip) and dangling in front of him the prospect of working for a mysterious international conglomerate called MythTech, which Bingham believes is spying on him at various stops. While Kirn begins his book with the itinerary of Bingham’s last week, his destinations are unimportant; for Bingham, the cities are meaningless without the miles that will allow him to achieve his goal.

Bingham would never want to get in line for security behind Benjamin R. Ford, the narrator of Dear American Airlines, whose lengthy complaint forms the text of Miles’ debut novels. (Both narrators are writers, though Ford is largely a translator; Bingham’s book The Garage, which he discovers he unwittingly plagiarized from one of his counselees, is a vacuous management parable.) Unlike Bingham, Ford is not a frequent traveler, nor is he on the road on business. After receiving an invitation to his estranged daughter’s wedding in California, he decides to book a ticket based on a long-ago gibe he made to the girl’s mother about walking her down the aisle. (Both women are named Stella; since Ford formerly lived in New Orleans, inevitably he finds himself locked out of their shared house before his wife leaves him, yelling out her name before feeling properly foolish.)

Ford catalogs the indignities of his position — stranded at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport — as if experiencing the well-known inconveniences of air travel for the first time: Each type of seating is uniquely uncomfortable; the best offer of a diversion is Sudoku; and the stores in the terminal don’t carry his brand of cigarette. As Ford periodically leaves the terminal for a smoke break, he believes that one particular guard has been singling him out for extra searches. For a middle-aged white man, such scrutiny is merely an irritant, but his predicament hints at the very real debate over racial profiling at security checkpoints.

As one of thousands stranded at O’Hare due to an undefined error, Ford is on the verge of not being able to fulfill his promise — “Dear American Airlines,” he writes, “since when did you start canceling flights in midair?” — but his request for a ticket refund blossoms under author Miles’ careful cultivation into an homage to a life well lived as well as a laundry list of regrets. In the final pages, he confesses that he was thinking of committing suicide at his destination, making his unexpected layover a Beckettian pause, not just a disturbing interruption. Like Bingham, Ford is on a quest, and he is never so insistent on his right to travel as when he believes that it is about to be taken away by the titular airline.

In believing himself alone in “Airworld,” Ryan Bingham errs; more Americans than ever took to the skies in the past 10 years thanks to discounted rates and the rise of new carriers to challenge the legacy airlines. But if the doomsayers are correct, Bingham’s way of life may become the stuff of fiction in a generation or two. Even though oil prices have fallen from last year’s highs, experts continue to predict the demise of affordable mass air travel.

In “Airworld,” it’s the Binghams, not the Fords, who fill most of its seats. Take away the road warriors — or make their journeys unnecessary with videoconference equipment and “greener” office policies — and the legacy carriers will be courting bankruptcy within a year. But the Fords, who choose to travel, will suffer the most as commercial flights become more expensive. In the closing pages of Dear American Airlines, Ford is finally headed to his destination, planning to make it if not to his daughter’s wedding, then to the reception. The obstacles to his journey have, if not exactly melted away, only served to convince him of its necessity.

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Photo Essays

The marina is too shallow

An album is born.


The creative process is fleeting and difficult to quantify. Where does inspiration come from, and when will it strike? It is a mystery as old as art. Watch Portrait of a Drowned Man, an instrumental band from Duluth, Minnesota, wrestle with these questions in the video below.

[Click here to view video.]

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Fiction & Poetry

Circles of memory

The chorus of life’s song, echoed in three poems.


Summer poems
The jolly men hold their bellies
and rock and rock, as they laugh

at the women holding their skirts
above saggy knees and elephant ankles.

How they laugh at the idea of tanning
such baggy, blobby legs.

Who’d ever want to look at them?
The women stir, fan hot red faces,

and talk a mirage of romance beneath boardwalks,
sunbrown muscles luring eyes and hands

to places parents forbade. Their talk weaves them
into the silky girls they once were, weaves them

into tapestries of memory.
The jolly men lapse to stillness

as they feel again the drift of sand
shuffled down between the planks
across bare backs.

The glass gate

When the sky is yellow
children chatter on the front step.

Speech, scented with the fragrance
of rainbow beetles trapped in a jar,
slips around glass like insect legs.

The young embrace each other’s disbelief
with acceptance. Amazement
has more possibilities than truth.

A child is a gateway, as is a story.
They are the open collar of a jar —
freedom, if we had wings to lift us out.

Stories are irresistible,
open arms like rosy children,
ask to be picked up and held —

They carry us to grassy fields,
through long corridors
stretching back inside ourselves,
the beginning of a journey home.

Tomorrow’s child

Dance in the pleasure of your skin —
palest camellia flesh.
A spring garden glistened
with rainbulbs and cobweb skeletons
against wet black boughs.

Feel your body bloom in expansion,
ticklish fish slip between cells.
You are the powder of stars,
in the course of your dream
Tuatara and deer spring from your feet
swallows and marigolds from your fingers.

You are the child beyond
the seventh scroll
bitter belly soothed and sanguine,
the trumpets of angels silenced
in your hair,
your song a circle of memory.

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Reviews

Chick lit, Bhutan style

A look at two sisters’ separate journeys in a Buddhist country in Elsie Sze’s The Heart of the Buddha.


 

The Heart of the Buddha is a moving novel about a woman who travels to the remote Asian country of Bhutan in search of her beloved twin sister. Author Elsie Sze uses the journey of Ruth Souza to shed light not only on a country that is fascinatingly different from the western world, but also on the Buddhist religion and the relationship between two very different women. Call it, perhaps, “chick lit” Bhutan style.

Ruth’s sister Marian is a librarian from Toronto (like Sze herself). She writes regularly to Ruth while working in Bhutan, but disappears after completing her six-month contract. Concerned about not hearing from Marian in over two months, Ruth embarks on her journey. The novel interweaves Ruth’s first-person account of her experiences with a “memoir” Marian had written about her life in Bhutan, which is Ruth’s “only key to the mystery of her disappearance.”

In the memoir, Marian reveals herself as impulsive (maybe an alter ego for Sze herself) and more in touch with her sensuality than the more straight-laced Ruth. She has gone to Bhutan to have “an experience few will ever have” and, on an excursion into the Himalayas, ambles by a naked man preparing an outdoor steam bath. “He had an athletic form, with broad shoulders, brawny arms, a well-proportioned torso: an Apollo in action,” she writes in the memoir. She is interested yet embarrassed when she realizes he is a Buddhist monk.

Six days later, they bump into each other under ordinary circumstances (dressed), and while conversing, seem to find themselves falling head over heels for each other. Unfortunately, Buddhist monks aren’t allowed to experience carnal love (reminiscent of Catholic taboos), but since the librarian and the monk cannot ignore their passion, they take a secret and dangerous journey into Chinese-occupied Tibet to retrieve lost Bhutanese religious writings in order to atone for the sin that will be committed when he leaves monkhood. The countryside and religion of Bhutan are revealed to us as the memoir unfolds.

For her part, Ruth finds herself attracted to her Bhutanese travel guide. She too tries to deny these feelings, but passion, again, is hard to resist. “At last we were no longer (just) sending signals with looks and touches like high school boys and girls,” she says. Marian, who is usually guided by her feelings, becomes more rational, while Ruth, the logical one, becomes more passionate. Sister stories are often tales of integration of conflicting aspects of oneself. As Ruth says, “Perhaps, like the yin-yang circle, we complement each other, and our differences make us whole.”

Sze is Chinese-Canadian herself and identifies the sisters as Chinese-Portuguese. She lived in Bhutan while researching the book and lovingly evokes the atmosphere and landscape of the country. Ruth visits a small town to attend a religious event, and she describes the scenery as “golden terraced mustard fields, scattered with farmhouses and prayer flags, sloped down to a river valley. In the further distance were hazy layered foothills ranged across the sky like a blushing dream. A majestic chir pine decked with a white prayer flag at its top trembled by my balcony.”

However, the focus is more on the Buddhist religion of Bhutan than its everyday culture. The use of phallic symbols and statues to portray sex in the Buddhist tradition is depicted humorously. Ruth listens to a loudmouthed couple from Texas who describe their experience at a special temple:

“As soon as I walked in, this young monk touched my head with an ivory phallus, then a bamboo one,” Marge said, breaking into a brassy chuckle. “At my age, it will take a lot more.”

“He hit me with them too. I bet they’re more potent than Viagra. I feel I can carry on until I’m ninety,” her husband cackled.

Sze suggests that this way of combining sexuality with religion is strange and very different for those who come from the Christian-based world in which body and spirit are separate.

What’s intriguing but confusing is that the handsome young monk who Marian meets isn’t allowed to indulge when he desires the librarian. Sze doesn’t explain why monks can’t have a relationship. Is it similar to Catholicism insofar as clergy are committed only to their service to God? Since Buddhism appears to appreciate physical love, it would be fascinating to know why the monks can’t express their sexuality.

The parallel stories of the sisters are interesting, but the flow of the story seems a bit stilted. Sze says she wrote this book in English only and doesn’t feel proficient in Cantonese. But the book feels like it was written by someone whose second language is English, and Sze’s prose has a slight hesitancy. Or maybe the writing style just demonstrates the innocence of sheltered young women as they experience first love. Ah, charmingly shy naïvete!

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Reviews

Snakehead

A review of Patrick Radden Keefe’s account of a Chinese-immigrant-smuggling operation.


   

     The rescue in June 1993 of nearly 300 illegal immigrants from a ship called the Golden Venture which had run aground off Queens, New York, was the culmination of a harrowing voyage that had begun 120 days earlier. The immigrants were from China’s Fujian province, lured, like so many others, by the promise of freedom in America. Considering their ordeal and the repressive regime from which they had fled, they might have expected to be welcomed with open arms. But as international crime reporter Patrick Radden Keefe shows in his incredibly well-researched The Snakehead: An Epic Tale of the Chinatown Underworld and the American Dream, they instead became unwitting victims of the ambiguities of U.S. immigration policy. Some would be held in prison for nearly four years while applying for political asylum.

    The ill-fated voyage of the Golden Venture was arranged by Cheng Chui Ping, a grandmother and Fujianese immigrant to New York known around Chinatown as Sister Ping, who had thrived as a “snakehead,” shuffling mostly young Fujianese men from country to country with fake passports and visas, eventually landing them at New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport. She was, says Keefe, “something like a village elder in the claustrophobically intimate corner of Chinatown where she resided.” One admirer told a local newspaper she was “even better than Robin Hood.”

    Smuggling-by-air was expensive so, hoping to increase her profit margins, Ping partnered with a Chinatown gang member in purchasing the Golden Venture to make regular trips to the United States. The old vessel survived the crash off Queens, but just barely — the crew was so clueless that it nearly docked the boat off South Street Seaport in Lower Manhattan. Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) officials took the passengers into custody.

    The grounding of the Golden Venture happened on the watch of President Bill Clinton, who, according to Keefe, was still smarting from the June 1980 riot of thousands of Cuban refugees from the Mariel Boatlift who had been housed in the Fort Chaffee Reserve Center in Arkansas. Amid outrage over his decision to accept the refugees, he lost his bid for re-election as Arkansas governor later that year. Clinton, suggests Keefe, wasn’t going to give his critics any more ammunition by appearing “soft” on the Golden Venture passengers.

    Bill Slattery, director of the INS’ New York office, led the charge to classify the passengers as criminals, not victims. Shipped out of state to Pennsylvania and Louisiana for their asylum hearings, they were out of reach of the pro bono representation they could have gotten in New York, where many more immigration cases were handled. At the time, notes Keefe, “asylum caseloads were exploding, and immigration judges were often underresourced and overworked. As a result, this most solomonic determination — who should be saved and who should be sent back — became an arbitrary and erratic activity.”

    The Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 made the United States more sympathetic toward Chinese immigrants, but that attitude didn’t last — the State Department, working with Slattery, felt secure in disregarding most of the Golden Venture passengers’ stories of persecution. One passenger told Keefe he left his home in Fujian at age 17 after police told his family he was being targeted for arrest. Of the boat’s total payload, only about 10 percent were granted asylum.

    These days, ambitious sons and daughters of China are just as likely to move to a different province to learn English and management skills, as chronicled in Leslie T. Chang’s excellent Factory Girls, as they are to stow away on a ship to an uncertain and low-paying job on foreign shores. But human smuggling on a global scale is far from over, and those who formerly came to the United States from China will be replaced by those from Iraq or Morocco or Ecuador. As Keefe points out, “spoiler countries” have not ratified the United Nations’ anti-smuggling protocol, effectively making them portals for “snakeheads” and their passengers. Those traveling on the Golden Venture passed through at least two of these countries — a low count compared to some of Sister Ping’s other voyages.

    Was the Golden Venture an aberration? The current debate over health care reform certainly suggests future refugees could suffer a similar fate (anti-immigration activists have portrayed immigrants as a costly drain on any publicly-funded health care system). “We don’t need illegals,” one protester yelled at a town hall meeting last month in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. “Send ’em all back. Send ’em back with a bullet in the head the second time.”

    As for Sister Ping, she was arrested in Hong Kong in 2000 after six years on the lam from U.S. officials, using false passports and contact with her husband to continue plying her “snakehead” trade. She is now serving a 35-year sentence in federal prison — mandatory retirement in the land of the free.

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