Madam, I greet you

I had to share this story from the Writer’s Almanac, because of a few things.

1) As you all notice, I’ve been writing a lot since I’ve arrived in Congo. The adage “write what you know” is true, and I was happy to see it exemplified below, as a piece of advice to Margaret Mitchell from her husband

2) I loved what Mr. Mitchell decided to greet the new chapter in his wife’s literary life by the words:

“Madam, I greet you on the beginning of a new career.”

3) the manuscript of “Gone With The Wind”, when stacked upright was 5 feet high. That’s pretty badass.

4) This story reads as an encouragement to anyone (like myself) who has ever entertained pipe dreams of writing a novel of their own one day. You can never have too much encouragement.

 

“On this day in 1936 that Margaret Mitchell’s novel Gone with the Wind was first published.

In 1920, Mitchell fell off a horse and suffered terrible injuries. She sort of recovered from the fall, but she kept reinjuring herself in different ways, and a few years later she had to quit her job as a reporter with The Atlanta Journal and stay in bed. Her husband, a newspaper editor, would go to the Atlanta library and bring her back piles of books to read so she could occupy herself while bedridden. One day, he came home and said, “I have brought you all of the books that I think you can handle from the library. I wish you would write one yourself.”

 
He then went out and got a Remington typewriter. When he presented it to his wife, Margaret, he said, “Madam, I greet you on the beginning of a new career.” She asked him what she should write about, and her editor-husband gave her the famous “Write what you know” line.

 
So she wrote about Southern belles, and she expanded upon family stories and the stories she’d heard from Civil War veterans while she was growing up in Georgia. The one-bedroom apartment that she and her husband lived in was cramped, and she called it “The Dump.” She would sit and write in every nook and corner of the tiny place, working in the bedroom or the kitchen or the hallway.

 
She told almost no one except her husband that she was writing a novel. When friends came over to their place, which happened often, she’d hide the manuscript under the bed or the couch.

 

But one of her Atlanta friends, Lois Cole, had found chunks of the manuscript lying around that cramped apartment. Cole was now living in New York City and working in the publishing industry. Cole told her boss at Macmillan, Harold Latham, that her witty Southern friend “might be concealing a literary treasure.”
Latham went down to Atlanta to pay Margaret Mitchell a visit and ask her about the novel. Mitchell denied its existence. He spent the day with her, following along on outings with her friends, and asked about the novel again in a car full of her girlfriends. Mitchell changed the subject. But when Latham got out of the car, all of her friends in the car kept up the questioning. One friend was adamant that Mitchell was working on a novel, and asked why she hadn’t shown it to Latham.

Mitchell said that it was “lousy” and that she was “ashamed of it.” The friend goaded, “Well, I dare say. Really, I wouldn’t take you for the type to write a successful book. You don’t take your life seriously enough to be a novelist.”
That did it — Margaret Mitchell was furious and galvanized. She hurried back to her cramped apartment, grabbed the assorted piles of manuscript and shoved them into a suitcase, and drove it over to the hotel where Latham was staying. When stacked up vertically in one pile, the manuscript was 5 feet high. She delivered it to him in the lobby, saying, “Take it before I change my mind.”
It was published on this day in 1936, and immediately it was a sensation. Reports abound of people in Atlanta staying up all night to read Mitchell’s novel that summer of 1936. It revitalized the publishing industry. The next year, Mitchell won the Pulitzer Prize. Her book was made into a movie starring Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh, and when it had its premiere in Atlanta in 1939, Margaret Mitchell was there at the Loew’s Grand Theater with the movie stars.
The cramped apartment in which Margaret Mitchell wrote Gone with the Wind is now the centerpiece of the Margaret Mitchell House in midtown Atlanta, which reopens this weekend after a long period of renovation. There are tours of the apartment, historical performances, and a museum devoted to her life and work.”

 

 

This traveling life

(caveat: This is a shameless plug for radio, and for TAL)

Before I embarked on my trip, I dumped 130 This American Life radio episodes onto my iPod, cleared of anything else, to make space for the audible gems. I miss music sometimes, but I’ve never been one to listen to music all the time, so it’s a missing that is temporary and quickly fades with Ira’s voice. In the end that decision was a great one. My trip to Congo took four days, and many of those long hours on airport benches, chairs and lounges passed by swiftly with stories after stories. You can stream, buy, and sometimes even download for free all of the shows I talk about on the TAL site. I had ten minutes before I left the house to pick the shows, and I chose the ones whose titles intrigued me:

#70: Other People’s Mail

#99: I Enjoy Being a Girl, Sort Of

#127: Pimp Anthropology

 #137: The Book That Changed Your Life

#157: Secret Life of Daytime

#189: Hitler’s Yacht

#220: Testosterone

#260: The Facts Don’t Matter

#278: Spies Like US

#306: Seemed Like a Good Idea At The Time

#319: And The Call Was Coming From The Basement

#359: Life After Death

#361: Fear of Sleep

 

I could explain for pages (and you know I mean that literally) the intensity of my love for this radio show. It’s one of the few things in life, like the photography of Elliott Erwitt, The Little Prince, the paitings of Hundertwasser, the spilling of Sabrina Ward Harisson, the poems of Billy Elliott, that reflect instances of my inner state, my interests, curiosities, loves, desires, fears, hatreds, obsessions and idiosyncracies. The things I hear on This American Life have such a profound effect on me that I sometimes write about them for days in my longhand notebooks until my hands feel like they are going to fall off. So far, I’ve only gotten through a few of them, but I wanted to take a few minutes and share what struck me in each of the stories I listened to.

#28: Detectives

An 11-year old girl reads from her detective journals. David Sedaris talks about his mom and sister’s obsession with detective shows, and goes off on a diatribe against women painting their toenails that is positively hysterical.

#30: Obsession

Ira Glass talks to a rabbi who compares and contrasts religious rituals and OCD disorders and how they connect to identity. Listen all the way to get through the guy who records people’s screams and the artist who beaded an entire kitchen. I love the story about the girl with the obsession with the number 2, and David Sedaris’s hilarious account of his OCD that compels him to conclude that he was born to smoke. Listen to the story to see how he makes this insane claim.

#33: A Night at the Wiener’s Circle

A night in Chicago’s mythical and insane restaurant. The byline of working at the restaurant would be, and this is a quote from the show “So, basically, if you couldn’t scream, it would just be another job). The place is haunted by David Schwimmer. Listen to the way the customers are identified: “two-ashtray Al” “the scone man” “the is-there- wheat-in-this lady” or the “mustard man”, named after orders that seemed ‘designed to have the server pay as much attention to him as possible.’ I particularly liked the section about the limo driver, “pursuing a new line of work, but, like a middle-aged man pursuing a spot on the Olympic decathlon team, a new line of work may be out of his reach.”

#35: Fall Clearance Sale

I think this is the one where David Sedaris goes to a nudist colony. I like the quote from this show where a woman says “I don’t like to think about it while I’m drinkin’ my cocoa.” Or when she says “We don’t lock our doors because we have nothing to hide.”

#42: Faustian Bargains

Do not miss the first story, a truly horrifying tale of what can go wrong when your book gets made into a movie, about the woman who wrote the book “My posse don’t do homework” which got turned first into the movie “Dangerous Minds” and then a TV show, owned by Disney, and where her entire persona as a teacher, her intent, her life’s work were completely obliterated.

#51: Animals Die, People Ponder

This one will blow you away. Each of the stories are gems. The short story The 400-pound CEO is a rare piece of literary work that is haunting, disturbing, but absolutely fascinating.

#52: Edge of Sanity

3 stories about the edge of sanity. An excerpt from the book “Girl, Interrupted”, the chronicles of a person working in a psychiatric hospital, entitled “You don’t have to be crazy to work here but it helps.”

#55: Three Women and the Sex Industry

This one was so good, I don’t know what to say about it other than, listen to it. The gem is probably the third story, about a social worker/psychotherapist and her client.

happy birthday, mon prince

I found out (thanks to The Writer’s Almanac) that today is Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s birthday. He’s one of my favorite authors and The Little Prince is, bar none, my favorite book. I carry it with me everywhere I go and read it many times each year.

The Little Prince is singlehandedly responsible for my ability to connect with any child, any time. I took the opening words of the book (see below) to heart when I was around 7 or 8, and never forgot them, so I managed to be a grownup that isn’t stuffy. I never wanted to be one of the grownups you had to make excuses about in the opening pages of your book. And I think I managed that. It’s no great accomplishment, but victory lies in small goals being met. You just need to string them together.

From the daily almanc email:

“It’s the birthday of the aviator and author of The Little Prince (1943), Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, (books by this author) born in Lyons, France (1900). Saint-Exupéry wrote it in America, and it is a kind of fable, about a Little Prince who visits earth from his own tiny planet where he keeps a single rose that he loves. In The Little Prince, Saint-Exupéry writes, “Grown-ups never understand anything for themselves, and it is tiresome for children to be always and forever explaining things to them.” Saint-Exupéry insisted on serving in the air force during World War II even when he was too old to fly, and he flew his last mission 1944, when he was reported missing after a reconnaissance flight.”

dear white brother

 

This is a poem called “Cher frère blanc” by Léopold Sédar Senghor, a Senegalese poet best known for having created the concept of Négritude (He is also one of the only African ruler to ever have resigned from the Presidency):

 

Cher frère blanc,

 Quand je suis né, j’étais noir,
Quand j’ai grandi, j’étais noir,
Quand je suis au soleil, je suis noir,
Quand je suis malade, je suis noir,
Quand je mourrai, je serai noir.

Tandis que toi, homme blanc,
Quand tu es né, tu étais rose,
Quand tu as grandi, tu étais blanc,
Quand tu vas au soleil, tu es rouge,
Quand tu as froid, tu es bleu,
Quand tu as peur, tu es vert,
Quand tu es malade, tu es jaune,
Quand tu mourras, tu seras gris.

Alors, de nous deux,
Qui est l’homme de couleur ?

 

Dear white brother,

When I was born, I was black,
When I grew up, I was black,
When I am in the sun, I am black,
When I am sick, I am black,
When I die, I will be black.

While you, white man,
When you were born, you were pink,
When you grew up, you were white,
When you go in the sun, you are red,
When you are cold, you are blue,
When you are scared, you are green,
When you are sick, you are yellow,
When you die, you will be grey.

So, between you and me,
Who is the colored man?

 

Disappearing act

 

This is something I’ve been thinking about for a week, but also most of my life. It’s about the disappearing act of moving to a place like Congo.

My mom and dad moved here when they were a young, artistic couple, with a toddler. Mom is French and at the time was a trendy young thing, a trained soprano singer, singing along with Maria Callas vinyls. Dad was an artist, a fantastic photographer, grad of Stanford’s French lit department with a thesis on absurdist theater. They left a pretty cool lifestyle to move to Kinshasa in 1981, shutting the door to that life. We lived in Limete, for the first years. A dusty, bustling, populous “Cité” neighborhood, and we had a busted-up sky-blue Renault R4 (4 standing for 4 horse-power) that usually broke down on the way to my primary school.

I have no concept of what it was for them, and honestly, if I ask them, the troopers ususally chuckle and shrug. That was 28 years ago. They’ve lived through birthing a kid in a Kinshasa hospital, raising two kids into adulthood through 2 countries, 4 kinasorta wars, 2 evacuations, one in an Israeli military plane and one in a French tank. A TANK. Dad spent 4 months under fire during a full-blown war, running out of food to the point where he was rationing himself a limited number of almonds a day, and to the point where his dogs ate grass. He lived through bombs falling inside the house, alone, being robbed and nearly attacked on a daily basis, driving out into the forest with a carfull of possessions. He was almost executed by a doped-up rebel. So, honestly, when your kid asks you “what did it feel like when you first moved here?” you just drop and roll, chuckle and shrug.

I do have to say…I remember one thing very vividly about moving to Mobutu’s Zaire in the 80’s: the first thing people would tell you, and this is engraved in my mind is:

“If you run someone over, don’t stop. The mob will beat you to death. If you run someone over, drive away, as fast as you can.”

That’s not something you forget, even if you’re five years old when you hear it said. And for all of its alarmist, over-dramatizing undertones, that shit was REAL. And it still is, although DRC-Zaire was and always will be more more violent than Congo.  I remember being a kid and seeing a guy beat to death for having stolen someone. I assume he was beaten to death by the mob, but I didn’t stay and watch, I was whisked away as it started.

The only thing I can say is that Zaire in the 80’s and 90’s was not what living here is like now. No phone lines, no internet, no email, no cell phones, and snail mail was literally delivered at a snail’s pace if it was not confiscated or censored, or just plain lost.

One time, we got a letter in the mail that was six years late.

We lived in complete isolation from our previous life, and mom and dad kept in touch only with family. They lost touch with every single other person, only to get back in touch, decades later, and be greeted as if they had returned from the dead, which of course, in a sense, they had.

It’s obviously not the same now, but there is something that happens, when you’re in a place like Congo and your friends know how far it is: you lose touch gradually, almost imperceptibly. It’s a fact of distance, it’s a fact of isolation, it’s a fact of life far away from your friends. It just happens. One day, months or years after you’re there, you realize…hey, I used to know this person, whatever happened to them?

I know what you’re going to say…Facebook is AWESOME for exactly this!

I just don’t do that. I deleted my account a couple of months ago, and haven’t regretted it. I didn’t feel that the type of “keeping in touch” that Facebook was providing me was worth the junk, the neverending trivial applications, the getting showered with information you can do nothing with, the constant buzzing of information that you have to prioritize and sort through, and the generally shallow level of communication. It wasn’t cutting it for me, so I deleted it from my life, and have not gone back on that decision, but I do miss out on some things. And I’ve caused quite a disappearing act of my own. :-)

clean is not an absolute

I will say this, I cannot adapt to relative cleanliness, and that is the most “American” comment I am embarrassed to make on this blog, a quasi-admission of guilt, ridden with shame.

I’ve lived outside of Congo for the better part of the last 15 years, and well…cleanliness is a few things.

Cleanliness is something you get used  to. And you not only get used to it, but it’s something you learn to revel in, and enjoy with delectable pleasure. I get intense satisfaction out of vacuuming my apartment, walking into a spotless room with bare feet that will remain clean all day. I love washing dishes and then scrubbing the sink so that it gleams, taking a shower in a clean bath-tub, folding laundry that smells clean for days.

Pasadena is entirely clean, and also, shockingly to Angelinos, so is LA, as a city. You know those parking signs that prohibit parking on street cleaning days? That’s a weirdness that you learn to love. A society so clean they sweep the streets.

Pointe-Noire has two things in common with Santa Monica:  it’s on the Ocean facing West, so you see the sunset every night, and it’s on the beach. Santa Monica has street sweeping, so it looks like a city, and the roads are free of sand. Pointe-Noire doesn’t, so all  the years of sand, blown in from the beach by constant sea-breeze and light winds, has accumulated along the streets in mounds and mounds of dirty, trash-ridden sand.

So you might leave your house clean as the day you were born, but then you walk out onto the street, and immediately, your sandal fills with dirty sand, and you’re not clean anymore. I wash my feet three, four, five times a day, and every time I do, the bathtub trails with sandy remains. That’s another thing. You know how you wash your hands in the US, and generally, the water is clear, because what you’re washing are basically invisible germs? Here, no matter what you do, when you wash your hands, the water is dirty. Like you’ve been trolling around the garden. Everything is dirty, door handles, cabs, money, and if you walk around for an hour or two, when you wash your hands, you’ll see evidence of it.

The soap melts in the soap dish, so when you lather it up, it feels sticky and wet, and that doesn’t help to feel clean. Even in the dry season the air is a little sticky from the sea breeze, so the towel you reach for is slightly damp, both from the air and from yesterday’s shower (because it doesn’t really have time to dry in 24 hours), so that’s not 100% conducive to feeling clean.

It’s so humid that the shower curtain and the tiles always have a little bit of mold even if you scrub them, and the sand is omnipresent, brought in, through the mosquito screen by enemy breezes and even if you clean every day, so when you step out of the shower, your feet will get sandy.

We don’t have a washing mashine or a dryer (with no electricity half the time,  what’s the point?) so clothes are handwashed, air-dried and then ironed to kill off potential fly eggs that can embed themselves in your skin as worms, in a nightmarish turn of events. That notion is pretty gross, but if the clothes have been laid out and waiting, when you put them on, they wont’ smell fresh or be perfectly dry, they’ll be a little damp.

Lots and lots and lots of money can help with this. If you have enough money to afford a $10,000 gasoline-powered generator, you have air-conditioning all the time, which dries out your air, and makes everything feel clean. Your windows are closed all the time, so your house stays clean, you wash and dry your clothes in machines and fold them into cupboards that are dry from the air-conditioning. But you live in a self-contained bubble, that has no contact with Africa.

If you have contact with Africa, open windows and all, you open yourself up to the relative notion of clean. Clean enough is good enough. Absolute clean is a plane ride away.

Need and love

It’s interesting that this is the poem I got in my inbox this morning from the Writer’s Almanac.

I’ve been doing my own meditation the past few months on need, love, want, desire, loneliness, companionship and meaning. And that’s the thing about poetry. I’ve probably darkened a hundred pages of writing with my large messy longhand, and in a few stanzas Linda Rodriguez covers what I’ve been writing and thinking about and struggling to express succintly.

I’ve always been a person with a surplus of love. The kind of love that can feel smothering and oppressive to humans (and boys in particular) and is better directed to objects of affection that don’t second-guess intensity: kids, puppies, flowers and plants, writing and art projects, squirrels and birds to be fed on California balconies.  The opposite sex doesn’t do well with my kind of love, possibly because it’s a productive kind of love, that wans to fix, create, transform and express, that wants and needs to be constantly called upon, so yeah, puppies don’t mind.  

 

 

Meditation on the Word Need

by Linda Rodriguez

The problem with words of emotion
is how easily meaning drains
from their fiddle-sweet sounds
and they become empty instruments.
I can say love
and mean desire to give—
open-handed, open-hearted—
or I am drawn to the light
shining from your soul—
or my life is empty without you—
or I want to run my hands
and mouth down the length of you—
or all of these at once.

Need, now, is a plain word.
I need a nail to hang this picture.
I need money to pay my bills.
I need air and light,
water and food,
shelter from storm and sun and cold.
To be healthy,
to be sane,
to survive,
I need you.

The Antipeople

 

This is a book by Sony Labou Tansi, a very famous Congolese writer. If you want to read what Congo/DRC are like like from the very mouth of one of their native sons, pick this book up, it’s powerful and heartbreakingly well written. I don’t have any idea how it translates, it would be best to read it in French, but you’ll still get the gist of the feeling in translation, though some things obviously get lost.

I love the dedication page. I’ll give you the French which can never truly be translated because there’s a fantastic play on words, but I’ll give an English approximation anyway, inadequate as it may be.

 

 

A mes morts –

Pour des mots

Qui soient des têtes de mort –

Et parce que mourir

C’est rêver un autre rêve. 

 

(To my Dead, for words that shall be skulls, and because death is dreaming another dream)  

Note: ’skulls’ literally translates as ’heads of the dead’ in French.

 

I think it’s a crying shame that the US Wikipedia site has one miserable line on this fantastic author.

 Here’s a good biography, from this site:

Congolese novelist, poet, and dramatist, a member of the African avant-garde, whose critical but hopeful satires met with a great deal of censorship. Tansi’s central themes were the corruption of power and the possibilities of resistance. He often provocatively broke common Western literary models, styles, and genres, switched point of views, employed carnival-like exaggeration, dismembered language, and anti-naturalistic aesthetics. Although Tansi did not abandon in his later works political satire and criticism he often touched on such universal themes as love, life and death.

 

“They are blind, like th elaw. And equally brutal. The only escape from the brutalities of the shabby law of the uniform is to be big–big as in bigshot. And there is also a communicable kind of bigness, the bigness through contact that comes from being a relative or friend of the original bigshot. Dadou remembered something else he had read: Africa, that great shit-heap where one will take his place. What a putrid shit-heap the world was! Neither more nor less than a great big shit market.” (from The Antipeople, 1983)

 

Sony Labou Tansi was born in Kimwanza, Zaire, as the oldest of seven children. His father was a Zairian and mother Congolese. Tansi learnt French in a school – in the then French Congo on the other side of the river – where using one’s own language was forbidden and mistakes were punished by ridiculing the pupil. Later he stated that French was the language “in which I myself was raped.” At the age of twelve Tansi moved to Brazzaville and completed his education at the Ecole Normale Supérieure d’Afrique Centrale. In 1971 he was appointed to teach French and English at Kindauba. In the same year he started to write seriously. He taught English at the Collège Tchicaya-Pierre in Pointe Noire and then worked in Brazzaville as an administrator in several ministries, before devoting his time to writing and to the theater.

In 1979 Tansi founded the Rocardo Zulu Theatre and published his first novel, La Vie et demie, which won the Prix Spécial du Festival de la Francophonie. His plays were staged in Paris, Dakar, and New York. However, in his own country Tansi was criticized by the Parti Congolais du Travail for his ideologically doubtful views. “Africa is a volcano;” he later wrote in Les Yeux du volcan (1988). “The whole world is another volcano. Our peoples are volcanoes and their eyes are watching us.” During the era when Congo underwent a transition from a Marxist-Leninist people’s republic to a pluralist democracy, Tansi was active in the Mouvement Congolais pour le Développement de la Démocratie Intégrale (M.C.D.D.I.), a group opposed to Congo’s single political party system. In 1992 he was elected deputy for Makélékélé in Brazzaville. As a consequence of his public activities and involvement in tribal politics his passport was withdrawn. Tansi suffered from AIDS, but he was for a long time unable to obtain the medical attention he needed; after being in hospital in Paris he sought help with his wife from traditional African herbal medicine and incantations. Tansi died on June 14, 1995, in Foufoudou of AIDS-related illness. (note from V: his wife, Pierrette, died two weeks prior)

Tansi won several literary awards, including the Grand Prix Littéraire de l’Afrique Noire for L’anté-peuple, the Palme de la Francophonie in 1985 for Les sept solitudes de Lorsa Lopez, and in 1988 the Ibsen Foundation Prize.

The Antipeople (1983) was partly based on the story of a refugee, the author’s friend, who was falsely accused of the murder of a young woman. In the bitter satire Nita Dadou, director of a girl’s school, is tormented by thoughts of Yavalde, a student who has a crush on him. Yavalde is made pregnant by another man; she kills herself and Nita is accused of the tragedy. His family is murdered by a mob. The dead girl’s father, a politician, pulls strings and Nita ends up in jail. He manages to escape but in freedom, as a poor fugitive, he must prepare himself to assassinate, in the name of an ideology, a State and Party official during a mass in the cathedral. “The most important, the first revolution: the heart, the brain, against the soldier”, says an old fisherman in a small river village.

La vie et demie (1979) was set in an imagined African country, Katamalanasie, which has 228 national holidays. A self-proclaimed “Providential guide” has banned the words “hell” and “pain” from the nation’s lexicon. The guide has the chief opposition leader cut up into pieces, but his spirit refuses to die and he continues to speak and torment the cannibalistic dictator.

Les septs solitudes de Lorsa Lopez (1985, The seven solitudes of Lorsa Lopez ) was a set of stories which took the reader into the city of Valancia, an African Macondo. Tansi got the idea for the novel from a real event, the sight of a body, surrounded by a crowd, outside the Brazzaville hospital where his wife worked. A woman is murdered by her husband, an esteemed citizen, Lorsa Lopez. When the police fail to investigate the death, and no one can remember the murdered woman’s maiden name, Estina Bronzario advocates a ban of sex, and demands that men take their wives’ names. In the background of the story is international politics, corruption, mixed with an account of chaos and some hallucinatory scenes: “One morning, unprecedented crowds gathered in the Plaza de la Poudra, not to await the arrival of the police, nor to bury Estina Benta’s bones, nor even to watch the departure of Sarnata Nola’s troupe. The multitudes jostled for position to see the fish with the death’s head that the fishermen. Fernando Lambert and Luizo Martinèz Lopèz, had just caught. It was a winged monster at least seventy feet long and weighing some three tons. On its hide, covered with scales, feathers and hair gleamed the seven colours of the rainbow.” The stories are told by the female narrator Gracia who at the end removes herself from Valancia to Nsanga-Norda, swallowed by the sea. In the foreword of the book Tansi wrote: “Art stems from its ability to enable reality to express what it would otherwise have been unable to articulate through its own means or, in any case, that which it ran the risk of consciously passing over in silence.”

In Les yeux du volcan (1988) a mysterious colossus, Affonso Sombro, arrives at the town of Hozanna, where Benoit Goldman reads Genesis aloud, to avoid sex with his wife, and Claudio Lahenda announces: “Comrades, the revolution has been postponed.” In his plays Tansi showed the inventiveness, absurd humour, and political commitment of his fiction. La paranthèse de sang (1978) was about a group of soldiers who are sent to kill a rebel leader who is already dead. They proceed to interrogate the family, and after a massacre they receive news that the “Capitale” is no longer interested in the deceased Libertashio. In Qui a mangé Madame d’Avoine Bergotha a dictator throws out of his country nearly all males. The secretary Hortense says in Je soussigné cardiaque: “Today, ‘our own’ do it from the heart. They mistreat us as though they had our permission. It’s worse.”

 
Novels:

 
La Vie et demie, Seuil, 1979.
La Parenthèse de sang, Hatier, 1981.
L’État honteux, Seuil, 1981.
L’anté-peuple, Seuil, 1983. Grand Prix Littéraire de l’Afrique Noire.
Les Sept Solitudes de Lorsa Lopez, Seuil, 1985. Palme de la Francophonie.
Les Yeux du volcan, Seuil, 1988.
Le Coup de vieux, Présence Africaine, 1988.
Le Commencement des douleurs, Seuil, 1995.
L’Autre Monde’, Revue noire, 1997.

Plays:

 
Moi, veuve de l’empire, L’Avant-Scène, 1987.
Qui a mangé madame d’Avoine Bergotha, Lansman, 1989.
La Résurrection rouge et blanche de Roméo et Juliette, revue Acteurs, 1990.
Une chouette petite vie bien osée, Lansman, 1992.
Théâtre complet, 2 volumes, Lansman, 1995.
Antoine m’a vendu son destin, Accoria, 1997.

Poems:

 

Poèmes et vents lisses, Le Bruit des autres, 1995.

Graduation Day

 

Yesterday was graduation day at The Stars International School. Preparations started at 7 AM, with chicken skewers grilled over charcoal fires, benches dragged out of classrooms into the courtyard, garlands and decorative flowers pinned in the trees and bushes, musical instruments tuned and set up on a wooden stage, colorful posters hung all around the inner walls of the school, cases of soft drinks and boxes of cookies brought in to the kitchen.

I got ready and went outside about twenty minutes before the ceremonies started and stopped, jaw dropping.

Imagine almost 600 children, aged 4 to 11, dressed to the nines, the boys mostly in three and two-piece suits, the girls in prom dresses, hair done up in the most elaborate, fantastical African dos, colorful ribbons, pins, barrettes holding tresses, braids, cornrows neatly in place, ruffles socks inside mary-janes, lace-up shoes too big for the boys with their ties slightly sideways.

I couldn’t believe my eyes.

It was like the tiniest prom I’d ever imagined. Never having been to prom, I have no idea what prom looks like, but I imagine teenagers awkwardly stepping in uncomfortable clothes, self-conscious and sort of confused, which is exactly what these kids looked like.

Each class came up onstage with a presentation, sometimes poems, sometimes songs, and were congratulated by dad. One student read a “student address to the school” and the principal with authoritative, quasi-professional diction.

Dad was onstage, addressing the classes, the students, the parents. He requested a moment of silence to honor the death of one of the ffith grade teachers in mid-year, a teacher who had been stellar and would be sorely missed. He gave a stirring speech to the students and parents, talking about how important being present in your child’s education was for parents, and reminding everyone that these little ones, standing up onstage would one day, not so long from now, be the leaders of this country and of their families and communities.

The top five students of each class were called up and rewarded with certificates of excellence and gifts for the top three.

After all the ceremonies, food was laid out for the parents and the kids, the band played, the kids danced, and I sat there, bowled over by the party, the proceedings, the lace and the taffetas, the ties and th smiles, the little grownups you could almost start to decipher in kids dressed like adults who just wanted to run around and have fun.

blog of words

Since the connections are so slow here and I’ve been posting blogs of words without any photo uploads, I’ve started to feel differently about photos in my posts. I was looking back at posts from California, and maybe it sounds harsh, but I feel I was masking the lack of stuff I had to say by adding nice pictures, web site links, posting You Tube videos. The blog was prettier back then, but I feel that it has substance now, and maybe photos are the sacrificial pixel. I prefer the Congo you imagine than bogging down your thoughts with reality. Reality is so over-rated.