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.”

 

 

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.”

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.

accustomed earth

It’s winter in Congo. After a week here,  I’ve settled into a nice familiar routine. I get up around 6:30 or 7 every morning, much to my stunned and my parent’s pleasant surprise. I let the Congostyle puppy outside to do his business, and in between pure squeals of joy at being watched and cared for, he manages to do what he needs to do. Then I shower, and beautiful, perfect mornings like today, I can take a warm shower. It is SO nice to have a warm shower when you know the cold bucket shower alternative, crouching on the wet cold tile, dousing yourself with a plastic cup, freezing, and not feeling totally clean because you only get a cupful of water at a time over your body. When we have electricity, I run into the shower and scrub as if I was taking my last shower for all time. I wash my hair carefully, rinse it twice, scrub my face, soap up twice, rinse twice, scrub my feet, enjoy every drop of warm perfect water. Small things, people. Small things.

Then I take the terrible puppy out again. He looks  and behaves like a live dustmop/vacuum. He is so dusty, because he rolls around on the sand in the school yard, like the nasty little bugger he is, and he picks up everything that he walks by. Rocks, leaves, shrubs, plastic bags, bottle caps, torn pieces of paper. I knew he’d escaped the kitchen and been in my room briefly before I woke up because there were two rocks, deposited next to my mattress.

After that I head to La Citronelle, the one cafe in Pointe-Noire. It’s gorgeous and perfect, they have lovely croissants and pains au chocolats, financiers (like rectangular madeleines, crispy on the outside, and made with cake mixture luxuriously laced with almond powder), and good decent coffee. Right now I’m reading Unaccustomed Earth by Jhumpa Lahiri. Another displaced soul who writes about identity and belonging, but does it to a level of beauty and mastery that one can only gaze at from afar. If only. It’s a really good book, and I’m enjoying every word of it. She’s dad’s favorite author, and I have to somehow break the news to him that I spilled one drop of coffee on page 15 this morning. I’ll have lead into that very carefully. He loves his books.

My next stop is usually the internet cafe with the awesome connection that I’m sitting at right now, where I put up a blog post, check my email, and surf around for about an hour at the student discount rate before heading over to dad’s office and helping out with administration, finance tracking, databases, English classes, anything he needs help with. I’ll usually do that until about 4 or 5 and then we’ll hang out, watch a movie or go to dinner.

Last night I went to the beach to grab a drink with a friend. The air was sticky and wet with sea foam. As we sat by the windy table on the edge of the patio over the beach, my glasses got covered in a layer of humid gunk, and our table progressively coated itself in humidity. On the horizon, ten of the hundreds of oil rigs were burning like ominous torches, pinning the black of the night against the black of the ocean, burning away the black gold that we see no proof of on the ground and in the everyday life of the common Congolese.

Dinner was grilled fish and plantain in the cite, and if you’ve had a chance to view my Trinidad video, the last bit where Kathy is driving me through Curepe is exactly what this was like. This is my earliest memory of home, accustomed earth. The bustling cite, your feet dusty with sand, in perennial sandals, sitting on a hard wood bench, eating grilled meat in the darkness, surrounded by laughing and talking people, the taxis swishing by, honking, fumes bellowing behing them, oil and gas-lit stands selling anything, hawkers selling tissue papers, glasses, flashlights, loud N’dombolo music blaring from three different outdoor bars. Life, occupying every available inch of space there is, and beating out, even in dusty, dark streets, until the wee hours of the morning.

My brother has been obsessed with pool since he got to Pointe Noire, and plays on the smallest lilliputian pool table you can imagine. Snooker maybe?  We watched the unbelievable results of the 2-o win of the US against Spain, currently the best team in the world. Frank, our taxi driver is convinced that this is a sign the US is going to win the  next World Cup and is due to Obama being president of the US. I tell you, Obama has a lot of love going to him from Africa. 

Today is shaping up to be interesting. It’s the last day of the school year so there’s a huge party planned starting at noon and taking up all afternoon. In fact, I probably  need to get off my behind and head over to help out. It’s grey and overcast outside, maybe in the sixties for you Farenheit people out there. For the rest of the world, it would be a cool 25 ‘C.

I don’t even know why I rambled on for so long.

 

Oh…random TV moment. I was watching an African morning show before I left the house, and this lovely well-spoken girl host was reviewing Star Trek and talking about how Spok and Kirk are basically a perfect team because together they make a very balanced individual, Spok being left-brained and Kirk being right-brained. Anyway, she was describing Vulcans and their logic, rational thinking, and the guy next to her, muttered under his breath, while nodding his head intently, “like men”. He then proceeded to equate right-brained with emotional and feminine qualities.

gluttony, asceticism, goddess-worship

I just finished this book, and I couldn’t wait to write about it.

I. Facts

Elizabeth Gilbert writes a best-selling novel, or in the words on her own web site:

A NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER

#1 on the NYT Paperback Nonfiction List for over a year!

American Booksellers Association Acclaimed Best Seller

#1 on the Booksense Paperback Nonfiction List for over a year!

However, she still still expect readers of her book to go along with anonymity on one of the main aspects of her book: her Guru, who is spoken about at length throughout.

Anyone who has read the book can find out what “Richard from Texas” “Ketut Liyer” or “Sofie” looks like by going to her web site. If you want to visit any of the “other” healers, you are given directions to their practices in the very pages of the book. Gilbert is more than forthcoming about the address to Pizzeria da Michele, helpfully throwing in the exact order — “double mozzarella pizza”. It’s only fair, though she is strangely and unexplainably secretive about it, that anyone who wants to, should as easily be able to find out who her Guru is, what is the form of yoga she practices, where is the Ashram she went to. Consistency, people!

[ Fairness remark: she has a note at the beginning of her book explaining the anonymity, because she cannot speak for her Guru, and she wants to spare the Ashram unwanted publicity. I don't buy either. There are diplomatic ways around it, without teasing your readership the way she does.]

The name of the female guru is Gurumayi Chidvilasananda. “Swamji” in the book is Swami Muktananda who founded the Ashram and wandered India in search for a Guru himself.

The type of yoga that Elizabeth Gilbert practices is called Siddha Yoga, and the Ashram she visited is Gurudev Siddha Peeth, about 3 hours out of Mumbai, in a location called Ganeshpuri in the Tansa Valley of Maharashtra, in the Thane district. It’s pretty much impossible to find on a map. The site I linked to has information that dates to 2001 but at least the location and corollary information is probably correct.

Here is Elizabeth Gilbert’s own FAQ page from Eat, Pray, Love where you can see all the pictures I mention above.

My reactions to this book were unfolding, varied, and somewhat contradictory.

I was really impressed with the first two pages of the book, where Gilbert explains the structure of her book starting with the history of prayer beads, the ancestors of rosaries, japa malas, 108 beads, a three-digit multiple of threes, like her three-part book of 36 stories each, each in a country starting with I (Italy, India, Indonesia) in her search for balance, etc.

I responded very strongly to her…I guess you could call it a “mid-thirties freakout” that I can relate to, as well as I’m sure other women in their thirties. You’re either married, or you’re not, and whether you accept it, know it or not, your ovaries are old. Ageing. Dying, if I wanted to be dramatic. You’re getting your first wrinkles. It’s just what being a woman is about. If you’re single, you start thinking about your countdown to be able to have kids. If you’re married, you are probably thinking about it too, if you’re not getting ready to have (or raising) your first (or second) child.

I liked reading about the Freakout, because I kind of freaked out too, albeit imperceptibly, when I turned 30. The big three-oh. A “multiple of three” if you will.

I was looking forward to the structure, only to realize that it only appeared once in the first page of the book never to appear again. The rest of the book, although neatly divided in three (more or less equal) parts of 36 vignettes each, is rather quite messy. You don’t really see any structure in any of the individual sections. I’m not being nit-picky, I’m just saying…if you announce a perfect, cosmic structure to your book, your readers are going to be keeping their eyes peeled.

Focusing on pleasure (Italy = Eat), mysticism, or spirituality (India = Pray) and balance between the two (Indonesia = Love) worked for Gilbert, as she was basically starting from scratch after her divorce, and re-surfacing her life, starting from the bottom up. You probably would have to go through that kind of destruction to be able to understand, but from where I was coming from, I can’t imagine, for one minute, eating that much pasta and gelato for four months, praying for 5 hours a day in total silence, and having so much sex that you get violently ill from it.

Far from a search for balance that just strikes me as a race towards a happy medium of excesses. I didn’t relate to a lot of the extremism. The foodi-ness, the mysticism, the one-sidedness (of at least the retelling in the book ) of her relationship with Felipe. Felipe is her fantastic, caring, and according to her web site, current, lover. She meets him in Bali, he’s a divorced, older, Brazilian businessman, father of two, he’s just…perfect, I guess. From Gilbert’s description, he is a monolithically kind, loving, emotionally mature, affirming, caring, nurturing, passionate companion, a fantastic cook, an attentive lover, a patient and understanding man, a good listener, an interesting conversationalist, and (she says herself this is a huge plus) he’s had a vasectomy–how romantic. He worships the ground she walks on, and you get pages and pages of descriptions of their relationship, you can form a mental image of their lovemaking (in retrospect, I think she should have called the book, Eat, Pray, Sex). It was just retold in a very one-way direction, which, at the end of a book of excesses, was tiring.

The other excess I’ll mention is that she pines for David (the ex-boyfriend who introduced her to the Guru) and laments the pain of her divorce endlessly, describing in more agonizing detail the levels of suffering she has endured. It’s hard to relate to if you’ve never been divorced. I don’t even think a broken heart will get you to relate. It’s out there. It’s like…the end of the world, AND September 11, AND the Tsunamis, and a broken heart, and the death of your childhood pet. Multiplied by ten.

On for the things I did like.

I loved the characters. Particularly the Balinese. Every single last one of them had the most fascinating story, with details that go on for pages, that I simply relish
ed. The medicine man, the woman healer, the unsung musical genius who was deported from the US, the Brazilian goddess who used to work for UNHCR.

I loved learning about so many things I’d never heard of: yogic history, life in an Ashram, the history of rosaries and prayer beads, Hindu scripture, the meanings of chants, descriptions of transcendence and meditation, Italian addresses for food delicacies, Balinese lore and mythology.

I loved the fact the book actually got me meditating and looking forward to prayer.

That was priceless.

The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears

A beautiful first book by Dinaw Mengestu, about America through the eyes of an Ethiopian immigrant and his two African friends, a Zairean and a Kenyan…Their interactions and comments are so authentically African, I’m enjoying it immensely. It correlates the American experience by Africans, ties into details of their lives. The small prides, the meaningful accomplishments, the struggles. Peppered with connections back to their former lives, statements that are amusing and profound, like this one, where Sepha talks about Joseph the Zairean and his Kinshasa chess-playing days:

“Clusters, and in some cases, surrogate families of young men formed around the game. Some were illiterate and had spent years fighting from the bush; others, like Joseph, were born into affluent families who had paid for French and English tutors before losing everything to Mobutu and his corrupt, bloated government. They had a religious devotion to the game, a respect for its handful of rules and almost infinite variations born, as Joseph said, out of a shared sense of gratitude for having at least one space where their decisions mattered. “Nobody,” he said once, “understand chess like an African.”

Am not done with it, but here’s a lovely passage, about one of the sweet moments of the book, the main character, a shopkeeper named Sepha Stephanos befriends a twelve year old force of nature, named Naomi who just moved into the poor DC neighborhood with her intellectual mom, on a sabbatical from her teaching position. It’s really a detail, a funny slightly wild passage about almost nothing, but the writing is beautiful.

“When I finally rang the doorbell, Naomi answered. Her mother had tried to braid her hair into a row of plaits, but it had come out as a half-dozen uneven, lopsided braids that erupted into a tuft in the back. It gave Naomi an oddly menacing look that somehow seemed intended. She stood in the dorrway looking like a lunatic and stared at me as if I were the man responsible for all the world’s frustrated desires, a fool who accidentally gave bad directions to people on their honeymoons, contemptuous but good-natured.”

I think what I like most about it, is that because it is written by a real African, it rings true, for once, in small dignified and subtle ways. It’s all in the details. I’m so grateful for that I could tear up. I never find solace in the portrayal of Africa in the media, and especially the recent blockbuster movies, like “Constant Gardner” “Blood Diamond” or “Last King of Scotland.” Even when they are profound and incredibly well done (“Gardner”), or even superbly well acted and authentic (particularly Forest Whitaker in “Last King”) there is always that untruth, that compromise that takes it awyay from its potential, and put at the forefront a love story of whites to make it palatable for the audiences.

The subtlety of African life is always missing, and that is what this book has in great quantities. In its quiet, understated way, it is a sort of “Lives of Others” of Africans and something I’d been looking for, for a long time.

French Lessons

“French Lessons” by Alice Kaplan

She carves out such beautiful writing from words I know and experiences I’ve had. She expresses these so sparingly, elegantly, sometimes even so crudely that I can’t imagine what I could add.

She writes a memoir, and her memories of childhood are so precise. Detailed. Vivid, worth retelling. Her writing is compelling, true and pulls out of the readers their own experience. Read the reviews from the link above, proof if there ever was that a book is good: what it can elicit from readers about the book that has become a mirror where they see the reflection of something they share.

Kaplan’s fusional and painstaking relationship to a foreign language she is trying to absorb is fascinating if you’ve ever tried to learn another tongue. Reprogramming your thought process, speaking differently, forming alien sounds with previously unused parts of your mouth-tongue-throat-vocal chords.

I don’t know if you will find this passage as interesting as I did, but it is a small example of what I like about the book…maybe not the best, but it is compact:

“I spent a lot of time reading, and sitting in cafés with “l’équipe,” my team of girlfriends, and writing in my diary about André and what he meant. He wanted me to be natural, and I wanted him to make me French. When I thought back on the way the right side of me had swelled up, my neck and my ear, and my eye, it was as if half of my face had been at war with that project, Half of me, at least, was allergic to André.”

The way she ties in language acquisition, cultural experience, her longing to become one with French, with a skin eruption is brilliant because she elevates a crass physical symptom to a higher meaning, and she wraps all the facets of her life experience into the language.

And that’s what language is. It’s everything, skin eruptions, cafés, difficult sounds, grammar, vocabulary, Céline, controlling new sounds, meeting people and being alone. That’s why it’s so hard to learn well, because it requires you to let go of what you already know and embrace a completely different way of saying even the most elementary of things.

It doesn’t happen too often for me to read writers who erase the desire for me to write. That’s my criteria for a good book. 1) I can’t put it down 2) It makes me feel there’s no reason for me to write because they’ve said it all and better than I can!

Writers so good they make me feel like I’m a blank slate, like there is no other book but theirs, and like they’ve spoken all the words, and there are none left for me.

The last time I felt this way was with the Poisonwood Bible….

A fumbling search for Africas

Sleep is eluding more and more, because of those devastating bats which are now no longer as darkly charming as they initially were, my first night here. I hate them and I’m thinking of calling the exterminator or climbing up the tree and throwing a mosquito-net over their branches so they can’t rest on them like the rabid maniacs that they are, folding their stupid little sticky wings over themselves like Nosferatu in his black coat. Yukeddy-YUCK! They’re blind, so why couldn’t they just be mute too?

So I spend my nights reading by the smelly petrol lamp and my shrinking candles until I doze in and out of sweaty sleep criss-crossed by the strangest dreams involving elephants and Tiffany stained glass bookmarks and reading the motley crew of books that line my four walls, compliments of dad’s shopping in used bookstores from Pasadena to Capetown.

I read about two books a day, now, and in this reading frenzy I read pretty much everything, like a termite burrowing through soft wood for sheer survival, and it’s amazing to me that I can actually digest the pages that I flip feverishly.

So yesterday I read “A Sunday by the Pool in Kigali” by Gil Courtemanche.

He was a French Canadian journalist in Rwanda and this is a book of fiction based entirely on true facts and real people whose names he hasn’t changed. It is beautifully translated by Patricia Claxton, because the only version I have is in English and not in the original French. The only shame of this is that the poetry of Paul Eluard, which occupies an important place in the book had to be translated, and it’s impossible to translate poetry. You just have to re-write it.

God that book was hard. It’s an Africa I have never really admitted to. One of semen and machetes, sweaty sex and butchery, and it’s incrediby graphic and traumatizing in both. I suppose if I could have put the book down, and processed that the information would scar me in some way, I really would have, but I just couldn’t put it down. I had to go deeper into the madness, the horror, the beast, the sex, the violence, the carnage, the holocaust. I hate reviewers, but they said that it was the most important book about Africa since “Heart of Darkness” and I just had to know what about it was that important. And frankly, it was so graphic that I was gripped. For me the best introduction to the book is the one Courtemanche himself writes in the first two pages where he relates how the novelist wrote the events that the journalist saw.

I can’t say I liked it. In fact, I would simplistically hate it if it wasn’t too simple an attitude. If it didn’t stir up so many complex emotions in me. I didn’t care for the writing because it was the simple, un-beautiful writing whose words doesn’t move, not simple in the Hemingway style, because that simplicity is eloquent. It was simple in the sense that it was a sort of a litany of acts, very gross violent acts and sexual acts, and a simplified, stick-figure tracing of complex historical events, even if I don’t know everything about the Rwanda massacres, I know it’s a lot more complicated than the simple interactions between the simplified characters.

And the people that gave the book rave reviews were people who’ve usually not set foot in Africa. Other people in places like New York or Paris who think “yes, to me that is what I think the place and the events were probably like, two thumbs up, mate!”

But I have to say it affected me, and shocked me, because I have witnessed much more watered-down version of some of the characters’ behaviours, and I have been around to hear some version of them recounted by people who lived through them.

I’ve always known of some of these things. The way that a certain class of white male expats treat and rape African women, sometimes for money, and sometimes not, the violence of the military, the rapes, the butcheries.

It’s as if, in my later years of growing up in the Congos, I sometimes saw the dark tips of these other faces of Africa rear their ugly head, warning of the darknesses beneath, sort of like the fins of sharks that dip in and out of hte dark waters, but never revealing the violent flesh-eating beast they are attached to.

I’ve always turned a blind eye to that reality because I didn’t want to dwell on it even though I always knew it was there, I didn’t want to write about it, I didn’t want to share that side of things. Ugly dark things.

And even when the fins raised through the waters, I had a choice to turn away and focus on other things, not spend time with certain people or in certain places where I would have been exposed to them at length and in depth.

When you write things down, you give them power. I would rather give power to things I know and things I’ve experienced. Thank goodness I haven’t experienced the things Courtemanche writes about.

I suppose that sometimes they need to be talked about, and I’m glad that people like Gil Courtemanche and Joseph Conrad do, because I certainly couldn’t.

In the face of this reality, AIDS, and reckless sex, and carnage and orphans, real-life troubles real-life tragedies that affect people’s lives, maybe my essays about people in flowing robes on the beach are childish, or innocent, or in denial.

But you know…I’m not really sure that they are.

This is something I was thinking about a few months ago and that I started talking about when I read Dan Eldon’s diaries. (I can’t remember when I posted that, but it was a while ago). He was a photojournalist in East Africa who died at 21 stoned in Somalia. He photographed the dark and the light side of Africa, reporting to the world events that needed to be broadcast and outraged over, and taking for himself snapshots that conveyed the beauty of people and places.

I think for people living in Africa, working in Africa, writing and shooting in Africa, there has to be a struggle inside, just like the one inside tortured Dan Eldon. A struggle that the juxtaposition of horrible events and unspeakable realities and beautiful people caused inside of us who know and care deeply about this complex multi-faceted place.

I suppose the book caused doubt within me. I don’t want to lie. I don’t want to show a white woman’s Africa that is blemish-free and perfect, like some natural Eden where the natives are pure. That’s not true, I know that this place is fallible and dangerous and real. But I don’t want to dwell in the mud, either. That’s not how you participate in building a better world.

But how then, do you straddle informing people about what they need to know, while not dwelling on it so as to make the information useless? And how do you keep a sensitive eye out for the beauty while not idealizing the country and the people?

I put down Sunday by the Pool in Kigali and sort of stunned, walked around in a daze, that evening, sweating. I picked up Steinbeck’s “Travels with Charley” and plunged in.

I think I got another perspective from this, and I’ve been turning the plages with anticipation and a restfulness that comes from reading someone who perhaps looks at the world with the kind eyes of a certain type of writer, closer to my sensitivities. Of course, he’s not writing about Central Africa, but he is writing about a place changing and about people in it, which is, in a simplified essence, what Courtemanche was doing in his corner of hell, and what I love to write about.

Steinbeck travels thoughtfully through America with his poodle, making thought-provoking observations and looking at everything with the opinionated eyes of someone who’s lived on this earth sixty years, but with the open mind of a man who’s educated enough to know things aren’t black or white, and even though he hates submarines, can find some place in his heart to look at them a bit differently than before after a conversation with a young officer on the deck of a boat, for example. That’s the kind of sensitivity I’m talking about. Firm but open-minded.

Anyway. He compares how he and a travel journalist guy went to Prague and got two completely different takes on the ancient city. He went with the gypsies and bohemians and the other guy read the maps and the histories. This is what he tells us to warns us about his book on America:

“For this reason I cannot recommend this account as an America that you will find. So much there is to see, but our morning eyes describe a different world than do our afternoon eyes, and surely our wearied evening eyes can report only a weary evening world.”

That calmed me and I came to a peace with the pool in Kigali and my flowing robes on the beach.

There is a lot written about Africa from the point of view of white people. Not often do you have books from African writers like Chinua Achebe’s “Things Fall Apart” a book of huge stature that really makes it and is widely read. Often it’s books or movies like “Out of Africa” “Nowhere in Africa”, “I Dreamed of Africa”, “Hatari”, “Born Free”. Works that sometimes idealize the continent a bit.

It is that sort of nostalgia I think is human and that Steinbeck addresses later in his book with a simple beautiful sentence: “What I am mourning is perhaps not worth saving, but I regret its loss nevertheless.”

I don’t much believe in nostalgia, and I don’t want to dwell on the dark side, and I want to stay away from idealization, so I have to think and work hard to find my voice, a voice that I can stand by, and not be ashamed to re-read later.

Maybe in digging to find that voice, I will come to a greater sense of peace, in my relationship to my only home, that I sometimes belong to but that never really belongs to me.

Losing my originality

I have progressively felt less and less original, but maybe now it’s at an all-time low because the Calvin Comic strips illustrate my life. I feel like I have original thoughts only to see them displayed for the entire world to see. But then Seinfeld does that too.

Just tonight, actually, I was watching a crappy DVD and Seinfeld made a comment about why we need constant reassurance about things we already know. He said that when he drives by store windows, he checks them to see if he’ll see his reflection, driving his car at the wheel, something he already KNOWS, lest one day, instead of him, he sees a small Korean woman.

I thought that was funny because I do that all the time.

And end up totally disappointed after I do a double take, invariably, regardless of who it is I walk next to, and realize that the “midget” walking next to them is me. So maybe I, unlike Seinfeld, need to be reminded of something I don’t already know, since it seems to be news to me everytime, just how short I really am.

I’m reading “Reviving Ophelia” (at the same time as I’m reading “Mandela, Mobutu and Me” and Bill Bryson’s “Mother Tongue”, and “Memories of Nine Years in Akka”, and this amazing hilarious French book called “Kiffe Kiffe Demain” just to keep myself totally confused. I think I finally gave up on “War and Peace”) and this book is so interesting. I tend to be militaristic and have thoughts that some books should be required reading. Like “Poisonwood Bible” should be required reading for people wanting to pioneer, and this one should be required reading for anyone interested in women’s psychology or for any woman.

But it’s interesting because it explains how some women start out in life such confident, super-hero like tomboys, very positive and outgoing and loose their selves as they start hitting puberty and don’t recover until much later or at all, suffering from very high rates of depression as young girls. It’s interesting, because one thing you really get to think about as a woman is how not easy or obvious it is to be one.

There are some things you can’t do, and some things you have to take into consideration and some things that become complicated and some things that are just “not the same” because you’re a woman. What’s fascinating about this book is that it tracks what the process is like for girls when they start taking this fact into account. The place where girls are so confident and powerful is a place and an age where they haven’t started grappling with their identity as women, or where that isn’t a reality yet. So they just act in the world as if they’re just the same as their brothers.

Then when they hit puberty, something changes and they feel they can’t be the same person they were before. And they withdraw for a period of time, and grapple with that for some time. The author made an interesting point that androgynous people are some of the most socially well-adjusted people.

Sometimes more than others it just feels like the world is a boy’s playground, but I have to keep reminding myself it isn’t. It’s just that most prominent people, presidents, lawmakers, academics, writers, historians, fashion designers, media-controllers and remote-control holders are men.

Sure, it’s changing.

But in the mean-time I am holding on my crones, my wise older women that I can look up to. I collect stories about strong women and surround myself with women I admire, just because, as the world around us changes to accomodate more and more women of capacity, it’s nice to remind myself that they are closer to me than I remember at times. And they are in the flesh.

pipe dream

This is a great list of author interviews from Powell’s.

Jhumpa Lahiri, Tom Perrotta, Khaled Hosseini, Paul Auster and others.