Groundnut Soup

Filipino Poet Victor N. Sugbo

2010-05-07T03:46:00.000-07:00

Filipino Poet Victor N. Sugbo

I met the Filipino poet Victor N. Sugbo in Tacloban, Philippines last September just as a typhoon was heading our way. We spent a wonderful afternoon in a Tacloban literary café talking poetry and sharing our work. Sugbo is one of the Philippines most accomplished poets. He writes poetry in English and Waray. The selection chosen for this blog is a Waray poem that he has kindly translated into English. His poems in English have been included in national anthologies and journals. He has edited four books published by the Philippine National Commission for the Culture and the Arts, and recently released his first collection of poetry in Waray through the UP Press. He is also a professor of Communication and Literature at the University of the Philippines Visayas Tacloban College, Tacloban City, Philippines. He holds a Ph.D in Communication and two master's degrees, one in TESL and the other in Industrial Relations, all from the U.P. Diliman. He obtained his undergraduate degree at the Divine Word University of Tacloban. He has a number of articles published in reputable journals. His research interests are: language and literature,language and media, communication research, and language policy.

First, you can read the poem in its original Waray and enjoy the music of the syllables. Then you can read Sugbo’s English translation.

HI BATA SANTO HAN AKON PAGBISITA
by Victor N. Sugbo

Ano nga adi ka man?
Di ka na nananagat?

Diri na gad.
Waray ko na sakayan.
Linamon han dagat.
Hadton inmagi nga bagyo.

Diri ka ngay-an nahihidlaw han dagat?

Maiha na ako nga waray
Bumisita han dagat
Dinhi na la ako hinin
Daan nga sakayan,
Inin ak katurogan,
Kay kun nanngangawil na ako mas
Damo nga bitoon
Ngan mga isda
Iton nag-uurualirong
Ubos hinin akon binubugsaybugsayan.

ON PAYING UNCLE SANTO A VISIT

Why are you home?
Do you still go fishing?

I don’t fish any more.
My boat is gone.
The sea took it away
In the last big storm.

Don’t you miss the sea?

It’s been ages.
I have not been there.
I spend more time,
Riding this old boat,
This bed,
For whenever I cast a line
So many stars
So much fish
Come close
Under the water where I row.

Translated by Victor N. Sugbo

Samuela's Fufu

2010-04-28T01:57:00.000-07:00

This week, I am sharing a poem of my own. “Samuela’s Fufu” first appeared in November 2008 on the One Ghana, One Voice poetry website (www.oneghanaonevoice.com) and will be included in the anthology Working Words: Punching the Clock and Kicking Out the Jams, edited and introduced by M. L. Liebler (Coffee House Press, Fall 2010).

Samuella’s Fufu
For Rose Blankson-Austin

Maame Rose knows. She cuts
cassava in block chunks.
Splits plantains, opens
dark veins concealed
beneath pale, sweet meat.

Maame Rose does it this way, stokes a fire
with coal, tosses in skins.
They curl in on themselves like small hands
closing into fists. The iron pot sits there
like a hungry chief, swallowing

cassava and plantains into boil. Listen
to Maame Rose. She will not steer
you wrong. She says pound
that cooked fruit in a dahuoma mortar,
hard as your ancestor’s teeth.

Yes, the pestle is heavy, she says. Take this essan trunk,
thick as your arm, tall as your eyes.
Look at the way it mushrooms out
at its base, soft and pliant
like a good brush, like your tongue.

It must be that way, Maame Rose says, so it works
the fruit as you pound and pound.
You should smile because it is hard.
Everyone tires, she says, but it is the ones
who pound cassava and plantain

until their hearts’ ache, until they
have forgotten their children’s names,
until their ghosts show them
how to hold the stick with two hands.
Do it this way, Maame Rose says,

and you see she is right and pound
that cassava, that plantain until the tough fiber
is broken down, until the whole village
has pushed you up that coconut tree
and you never meet your grandmother’ s corpse.

Cape Coast, Ghana, 2008

Senegalese-American Writer Karima Grant

2010-04-22T02:05:00.000-07:00

Senegalese-American Writer Karima Grant

Born to a Senegalese mother and a St. Lucian father, Karima Grant is author of two children’s picture books (including the 2006 Sofie and the City), and a contributor to a number of young adult anthologies, journals, and magazines. In addition to facilitating leadership workshops throughout Africa, Karima also teaches literature and writing classes to developing writers. She lives in Dakar, Senegal, with her husband and three children. She is currently completing her second adult fiction novel.

Excerpt from Grant’s novel Teggin

Clare – January 1982

The house in Goa Residence was unforgiving, defiantly squatting in the slickly kept garden of sweet grass, swaying palm, coconut, and date fronds. Partially concealed by the towering concrete jasmine and bougainvillea covered walls, its insides were musky with the scents of the sandalwood incense cones and the gardenia that laced its courtyard. The house groaned from the weight and number of the hands that kept it: 13 maids rubbing to shining the imported teak wood interiors from a country they could neither pronounce nor imagine; 10 garden hands tending the lavish garden with the imported soil nutrients and regular watering even as the country entered its second decade of drought; four chauffeurs to support the comings and goings of the household and its four luxury automobiles (all privately owned, the chauffeurs were known to boast; state cars were another matter); and of course the innumerable kitchen staff, producing most of the requisite delicacies that fed the gargantuan appetites and ambitions that lived within the house. At its worst, the Petit Palais was a silent, teeming city; at its best, it was a well greased empire with Maryse Kane, her mother-in-law, fixed firmly in its center.

It was rumored that Moussa had chosen the Northeastern territories’ fiercest tribesmen as night guards. Reputed for their unflinching loyalty, the purple dye of their indigo robes and turbans seeped into their pitch black skin, casting them in a permanent midnight tint, so that when Clare awoke from nightmare, the movement of night bore human shape and an inhuman glow.

Clare sat up in bed, hands clutching the bed sheets. She pulled her thin legs to her chest and counted her breaths, a habit left over from childhood and its profusion of nighttime terrors. Only when her breath had slowed, the numbers peaking, and she knew herself safely away from nightmare, did she reach for the light.

Christ. Ablaye slept soundly, his head nestled in a cove of pillow and sheet. Had he noticed her bucking? Had he reached to pull her away from nightmare? Clare rolled her eyes, and reached for his cigarette pack on the bedside table.

Smoking (for women anyway, she had remarked) had been one of the first habits Ablaye had politely, repeatedly encouraged her to leave behind in America.

“At least at first,” he had soothed when Clare had sharply raised her eyebrows, “at least until everyone knows you and can forgive little things like a cigarette every now and then.”

Foolish, thought Clare now. Months already, and don’t they all know me? And not a soul likes me. She looked once more to Ablaye. One cigarette, one lousy cigarette, she decided and extracted it from the pack.

Grabbing a silk kimono (another on the long list of no-nos… Silk robes in public, God forbid!), she pushed the remaining pack into her pocket, and moved not noiselessly from the bedroom, through the small hallway and into the courtyard.

The moon was only a waning memory of its former self, casting the courtyard in a luminous whiteness that emboldened the gardenias. Clare lit a cigarette.

Funny how the moon in Virginia could be the very same moon here. All those years, watching it from her bedroom window, one more thing in her life cold and distant. Yet here, its eventual death and rebirth signaled the start of the season of fasting. Jesus, thought Clare, a country of near starving people voluntarily starving themselves some more. And they wonder why they’re still backwards.

Cigarette to her lip, Clare pulled at it impatiently. What the hell made the season of fasting any different from any of the other 365 days a year? And seasons? They had to be joking! The days dragged bitterly from hot to hotter, she thought, loosening the kimono.

Her eyes wandered upwards to the house’s second floor, to her mother-in-law’s room. I wonder if she’s up. If she’s up somewhere, watching me out her window. Or if that creepy servant girl of hers is peeping. Clare shivered. She had caught Bintou more than once in her drawers, touching the silk underwear, sniffing at her perfume bottles. Jesus Christ, she thought again, flicking ash away, where am I?

She sat on the bench, looking at the house that surrounded her on four sides. Not much different from home. She recalled her arrival, the black Mercedes easing down the long driveway, the house coming into view, ending the promise of the driveway bordered by all those bright bushes with an abrupt stone finality. She had half expected to find Louis Fury waiting: small, colorless, hair the exact steel of his eyes, the exact silver color of the dime pieces it was rumored he fed himself every day (Clare knew better. So much of the mountain’s cool thin air ran through his veins it was a wonder he wasn’t blue). He could be here now, she said, looking at the entryway to the house. Standing there, hands holding themselves across the small of his back like I was muddy disappointment and he didn’t dare get them dirty.

Clare shook her head, the light brown hair she had cut in a pageboy falling around her ivory colored face. That night -- already worlds ago, damn Ablaye! -- Louis’ voice had been gruff, and after her years in New York, impossibly Southern.

“Daddy?” she had screamed into the phone filled with impossible hope fueled by the frenzy of the champagne and clamor of their going away party.

“Hello?” Plugging her ears, rushing to the bedroom door, carrying the phone in her hands. “Daddy, it’s me.”

“Clare?” Not disbelieving, not wondrously, Clare had known. There was not one bit more of discovery left in this world for Louis Fury. “What in the name of God’s good earth would have you call me at this hour?”

Because it’s been four years, Daddy. Four long years, don’t you miss me?

“Why that’s just it, I’m going to be married. I am getting married!”

There was a pause, and Clare had feared the line had gone dead.

“Did you hear me, Daddy? Married, and he’s just wonderful – absolutely perfect!”

Louis Fury, the last pillar erected by those free colored men of the mountains, His voice did not waver.

“You finish your studies? You find work?”

“The school’ll mail the diploma.” I would have invited you, but would you have come? “Work? We-ell yes and no, but that’s another story… But him, Daddy, him!”

“What you mean another story? My money foot the bills for all this storytelling, what you become up there, girl, a damn storyteller? It’s an unreasonable time of the night! What’s this foolishness about? Marriage? By God, Clare Fury, no shotgun in there?”

Clare had flushed then, thinking of the baby her father still had no knowledge of.

“No, no . You don’t understand! HelovesmeandIlovehim!” A rush of words to get it all out, to have it make sense, but instead they had tumbled from her mouth haphazardly. “He’s from Africa, Daddy, but not jungle like we would think! His father for heaven sake’s is in government; he’s the Prime Minister, actually, and he has just finished a master’s at Columbia, and he is wonderful, simply wonderful! And his name is Ablaye, well really Abdoulaye, but we call him Ablaye for short—“

“Goin’ where? With whom? Clare Maty Fury, have you lost what little sense you was born with? “

“Daddy, it’s not like what you think. His father’s the prime minister, I said! And Ablaye is likely to become one too.” Can’t you see it? I am on my way! Life has finally named me hers.

“Abla-who? What on earth kind of name is that, Clare Maty Fury! What kind of savage have you gone and gotten yourself mixed up with, a Muss-lim or some type of Hin-doo?”

“I-I told you, he is African—“

“African! I always said you did always have the sense of a pea! What the hell you up there doing with an African after all I did for you, girl!”

“ I am in love, and he wants to marry me, Daddy and aren’t you happy for me and we will go there to live, we are going there in a month to live…” Happily ever after, Daddy, happily ever after.

“I don’t give a gilded rat’s ass if he’s the Goddamn King of the Jungle and you his Jane! This my repayment for all the investment I put in to you and your life. We talkin’ your inheritance, Clare, your inheritance! Thrown away for some cheap lowdown Black monkey ass selling you on his piece of jungle kingdom? What you playin’ at, Emperor Jones! Never expected much at all from you, Clare, but never this! Why, you proving yourself to be nothing but commonness, no better than the trash that surrounds these hills!”

And so it had continued, on and on, with Clare holding the phone a little ways from her ears, standing in the abuse falling around her like rain. Now, in the garden, Clare flicked the cigarette from her fingertips (they will complain tomorrow, probably dust the cigarette for tell tale fingerprints), and stood up. I never worry about you Daddy. You’ll live forever, living this long without a heart. She tossed her head at the memory of the phone line going dead in her ear, the flatness of the dial tone finally echoing the severance she had known life held for her. You have no people, Clare Fury.

Nevermind, Daddy, she had thought then. You’re wrong as always. I have someone now. Someone who loves me. Hadn’t Ablaye claimed Clare from the first time he had seen her? Hadn’t he forgiven all her imperfections, even the baby?

You could never see it, Daddy. Never understand what belonging might mean. You and your old ghosts of the mountains. All your people dead, buried, or crazy. I don’t want to be little Clare Fury, carrying all that. Daddy, someone chose me, can’t you see? Someone chose me and took me far the hell away from you and your mountain. I can be different now, I am finally free.

In the garden, Clare stood, casting a long glance upward to the bedrooms of the main house. You’ll know anyway, won’t you? You’ll know it was my cigarette, even though it’s Ablaye’s brand. Aren’t you lucky? One more thing to hate me for. One more damned thing.

Doesn’t matter, Clare told herself. Doesn’t matter one little bit. I will always have Ablaye. Always, always, always. And she turned and walked back into the apartment.

But she didn’t sleep.

The neighborhood mosque called out the dawn prayer. From the window of the bedroom, Clare watched, seeing and not seeing as the night guards bent and folded in their ministrations. Some place. Some faith. A little bit of hullabaloo from the mosque and everyone within earshot fell to their knees. The hall and walk spaces of the palace littered with people in various states of prostration. Ablaye had reminded her time and time again that she was never to cross the way of the praying, but Clare found it damn near impossible with a people willing to drop everything to grovel before God.

She had even caught Ablaye at it, one evening, and had laughed out loud.
“Since when?” she had queried, but Ablaye had shut his eyes and continued mouthing his prayers. When he was finished, he folded up the prayer rug and placed it gently under the bed and got into bed.

“Recent purchase?” she inquired lightly.

Ablaye had sighed and turned on his side. “Yes.”

“I never knew you were so…” she moved her hands in the air as if feeling for the word.

“I am home now, Clare.” He had said now simply. Tiredly.

Her heart had beat too fast in her chest and so she had slipped into bed silently. What harm can it do? She had told herself against the rapid beating of her heart. It doesn’t mean anything. Not a thing. She had reassured herself.

This place made her jumpy, she thought now. Brought out the absolute worse in her. No wonder Houraye had no plans on coming back, despite whatever she claimed in all those letters she wrote. Too many people, Gods, and ghosts all under one roof.

Growing up the only daughter (the fact that she was not a son tragedy enough it seemed), of the last of the last of a dying race, Clare recognized in the portraits that filled Goa Residence the same obsession with memory and forbearers she had run from. The pictures and portraits her father looked to from over the familiar crystal snifter of Johnny Walker Gold Label, were nearly identical to the red skinned Kanes, faces hidden beneath turbans and fabric, holding themselves and their guns with the arrogance of self made power. Underneath each portrait a name embossed in gold plate. Ancestral names, names given to all the boy children, echoing each other over and over again: Ibrahim Kane, Abdoulaye Kane, Moussa Kane. Ibrahim Kane. Abdoulaye Kane. Moussa Kane. Kane is close to God, they whispered in tones so hushed she could confuse them for the creak of the floorboards.

“My father’s people are from the far north of the country.” Ablaye had explained. Yeah, thought Clare, but they’re all here now. Ghosts united in their sentry of the house, of the Petit Palais as the stronghold of the Kanes.

What had been so different about her father’s people? Preservation specialists named Pride, Bullet, and Law who had long ago carved a society in the mountains far away from the creeping stain of slavery. Building their mansions so spitting close to God, the townspeople had claimed them unworldly. Piercing grey eyes, sight running from this world into the next, they could be cousins to the men on the wall of her new home, Clare knew. Like Goa Residence and the rest of the capital, her father’s people had forever turned its back on anything and anyone lesser or inferior. Like the Kanes, they lived forever from those portraits.

Not a damn difference between them and Louis, really. Both obsessed with themselves and their past. At least Moussa had his sons. Three of them at that. Louis had become the lone descendent, if you didn’t count Clare, and Louis had certainly stopped counting Clare long ago. But still, the houses were the same: contemptuous, insolent, the Fury home staring down time and the town below, withering both to broken and brittle leaves the wind scattered on Louis’ front wraparound porch.

Here, she thought, it’s the country. Moussa has a whole damn country at his disposal. The thought made her smile. Why Louis Fury, you should be jealous. Moussa Kane, ol’ Mr Jungle King himself has you beat!

Claustrophobic, all of it, Clare knew. No space for breath or life. When she was fourteen, she had watched as her father ordered men, both rusty and colored and dirty and white to construct and erect colossal pillars in the entry to his mausoleum. He will keep me here with him, she thought miserably. He will keep me with him forever. Then and there she had changed the shape of her dreams, forcing it from belonging to escape. Escape from Louis, the mountain, from a history that would choke her.

Clare moved from her place in the window and undid the kimono. She got into bed beside Ablaye, who obligingly, if unconsciously threw a heavy dark arm upon her.
Turning her head, Clare’s eyes fell upon the portrait of Abdullah Kane, Abdoulaye the 1st – a great grandfather namesake Ablaye had once explained to her, but Clare only half listening had played with his ear instead-- whose shadow dominated the room. As always he stood at attention, his robes muted only by the sepia tones of the portrait. His eyes, like the old velvet Jesus portrait in Mrs Green’s living room back in New York, peered at Clare unabashedly.

Yet more disapproval, she thought to herself, tiredly. Wasn’t there any other emotion in this damned country?

Lying next to Ablaye, Clare closed her eyes against the lamplight, but still the elder Kane pressed himself into her thoughts.

No, she sighed. Ghosts were as unlikely to vacate the premises here as they were back in Virginia. Nor leave Clare alone for that matter.

Now, with the small light weak against the stiffness of the teak furniture, Clare looked at Abdullah Kane and set her jaw.

It’s not over yet, pal. You’re not rid of me that fast, she sighed and kissing Ablaye’s shoulder, counted until the nightmare faded away to dark.

Caine Prize Finalist Mamle Kabu

2010-04-13T03:43:00.000-07:00

Mamle Kabu

In 2009, Mamle Kabu is the second Ghanaian to be a finalist for one of Africa's most important literary prizes, the Caine Prize. She is a writer of Ghanaian and German descent, was born and raised in Ghana and spent ten years in the United Kingdom during which she studied at Cambridge University. She returned to Ghana in 1992 where she has since been resident, and in addition to writing fiction she does research consultancy in development issues. In 2009 she was nominated for the Caine Prize for her short story “The End of Skill” published in Dreams, Miracles and Jazz: New Adventures in African Writing, edited by Helon Habila and Kadija Sesay, Picador Africa, 2008. Other shorts stories by her are “Human Mathematics,” published in Mixed: An anthology of Short Fiction on the Multi-racial Experience edited by Chandra Prasad, W.W. Norton 2006; and “Story of Faith” in ‘African Women Writing Resistance: Contemporary Voices’ edited by Jennifer Browdy de Hernandez, University of Wisconsin Press, 2010.

The poem “Orange Juice” is one of the many poems she has written about Ghana and Africa. It appears in print for the first time on this blog.

Orange Juice

My dying wish?
Orange juice
From oranges that are yellow
Not orange,
Oranges from the forests of Ghana
Grown wild in cool shade
And careless beauty

Why orange juice?
Because it’s the colour of the sun
And tastes like life,
And even better things
that have no name
But can be drunk

Oranges loaded onto mammy trucks
Piled high by the roadside
Hawked with peel neatly shaved
Sucked dry, turned inside out
For the last drops
Of trapped sunlight
posing as juice

That’s what I want
That dying day,
The sun distilled
Light as liquid
A mouthful of life
No, even better things
That can’t be named
But can be drunk

Sri Lankan Poet Ramya Chamalie Jirasinghe

2010-04-06T03:02:00.000-07:00

Ramya Chamalie Jirasinghe

Sri Lankan poet Ramya Chamalie Jirasinghe is the author of Rhythm of the Sea, a book on the Asian Tsunami and Trinity, on Trinity College, Kandy. Her book of poetry, There’s an Island in the Bone, will be published this summer in a beautiful handsewn edition in Sri Lanka. She was a runner-up to the UK Guardian Orange First Words Prize of 2009 and the Times of UKonline featured her in its 2009 selection of contemporary war poetry. Ramya was short listed for the Gratiaen Prize for her manuscripts of Poetry in 1998 and 2008. In 2001 she represented Sri Lanka at the Medellin Poetry Festival, Colombia, in South America. She was the winner of the English Writer’s Cooperative’s Poetry Competition in 1997. Her poetry has been published by the Tipton Poetry Journal, The Poetry Journal, and by Osprery, Scotland. Ramya is also a food writer and a panellist for the Miele Guide, Asia’s first independent restaurant guide, published by Ate Media, Singapore.

Sri Lankan Nights in L.A.
by Ramya Chamalie

Crushed curry leaves, pounded cinnamon, dashed lime
And hand carried spices; Colombo to Narita to L.A.;
burst into vapour and swim with flaked tuna
into the centrally heated room.
The hot cutlets conform to the bite.
The wattalappan sits, wobbling gently in the tray,
faithfully oozing Thai condensed coconut milk.
Tables bear the weight of food, authentic recipes,
recreated for the pot-luck party.
Each morsel will soon pass or fail
the diners’ acid test of nostalgia, judged by palate-memories
cleansed by historical amnesia and geographical dislocation.
Soon Mala’s or Sumana’s culinary reputation
will be made or shattered in one gulp.

“It’s great to meet like this.
We must do something,” says Mr. Sumanapala.
So solutions are found to broken boundaries
in Sri Lanka.
Assistance given to those keeping illusions alive
about myths in written texts and the purity of our beginnings,
and the importance of preserving the
‘nation-ness’ of the nation.
“We might go there this summer,” adds Mr. Perera,
“but only if the war situation is not too bad, you know. ”

Tonight, the baila gets feet
stamping, sari-falls waving to comic rhythms:
the kids must see how we lived-it-up during
our Ceylon-days.

But there’s conflict on these shores too.
Picket fences are pushing aside the cinnamon stakes.
Jayasekera’s youngest son had refused to attend.
In some families, daughters are dancing to different tunes.

The cooks are losing control;
new ingredients are falling in.
There’s a dish of heartbreak
simmering on the stove
for those who refuse to stomach
Rosemary with Ambulthial.

Child of a Holocaust Survivor's Seder

2010-03-29T15:48:00.000-07:00

Faye Rapoport DesPres is a creative nonfiction writer who work has appeared in numerous publications, including The New York Times. Most recently, she is a graduate of the Solstice MFA in Creative Writing Program at Pine Manor College. Despres's father survived the ghetto and the camps during WWII before he immigrated to the U.S. To find out more about DesPres's work, go to: http://fayerapoportdespres.com/.

In Every Generation

By Faye Rapoport DesPres

Tomorrow night, on Passover, I will sit down with my husband to a two-person Seder at our house near Boston. I’ll have done my best to prepare a traditional Seder meal, even though I’m a vegetarian. I will leave the symbolic lamb bone off the Seder plate. My husband, who is not Jewish or vegetarian, will likely prepare some non-kosher chicken to eat with the kosher-for-Passover matzo I’ve already purchased, and the matzo ball soup I’m determined to make. We’ll read the story of the Exodus from the Hagadah to each other. In a way I’ll feel exiled, like the ancient Israelites in Egypt, ironically also from the land of Canaan. After all I grew up in Canaan, New York, where my parents and brother will sit down to a Seder the same night.

This will be one of very few years, since I left for college at seventeen, when I will not attend a Seder at home. When I was twenty-eight, I missed my parents’ Seder because I was living in Israel. For a couple of years in my thirties, I was living in Colorado. But this year I have no good excuse; the reasons I have given are practical and weak. The Seder falls on a Monday night, and my husband has to work. I just visited my parents last weekend, and the two-hour drive feels too long to do again eight days later. Really, it makes no sense.

Until I remember the pain.

Every year I have attended a Seder at home, my father has been depressed. He remembers his childhood Seder nights in Poland’s Warsaw ghetto. He thinks about the six million Jews who were killed when he survived. At the point where it is written in the Hagadah, "In every generation there are those who rise up to destroy us, but the Holy One, blessed be He, saves us from their hand," my father puts the book down and bows his head. Thinking about those who did not survive, he cannot say these words.

A year ago I had just finished reading book called “Daughters of Absence,” a collection of essays by daughters of Holocaust survivors, when the telephone rang. When I picked up the phone, I still had tears in my eyes from the feelings the book had stirred up. On the other end of the phone was my father. Sensing that I had been crying, he asked what was wrong, and I decided to tell him. This was, for me, an unusual decision, because bringing up the Holocaust to my father carries certain emotional risks. For many years he insisted that my brother, my sister and I had wonderful childhoods, that we were unaffected by his painful past. My father was and is a loving and giving man, but for much of my life he was in denial about the effects of his general depression and the anger that quickly turned into frightening rages during my childhood.

My father is a retired psychotherapist who holds a Ph.D. in psychology, and when I told him about the book I had just read and said it awoke some memories of my own childhood, he said something that surprised me. He told me that children of Holocaust survivors are no different from the children of any parent who has experienced severe trauma or violence. He insisted that the Holocaust did not cause people to be or act a certain way; instead, individuals are individuals, and they will react to their situation because of who they are. For him, he said, being a child imprisoned in the ghetto and camps and having nothing to eat was just the way life was; he adapted to his circumstances because there was no choice. He acknowledged some difficult aspects of our relationship for one of the few times I can ever remember, but he refused to blame the Holocaust for who he was and who he is.

The conversation made me reconsider some life-long beliefs I have held about being the child of a survivor. I cannot say that I fully agree with my father; I think his experiences during the Holocaust created lasting scars that permeated his being and affected our family life for decades. One of the few things he ever told me about his past was that when he was ten years old and living in the ghetto, he and his friends sometimes played with the dead bodies in the street. He also saw his best friend shot and killed by a German right in front of his eyes, and he once described begging his father for a cracker on his thirteenth birthday, when they were imprisoned in a camp and he was starving.

It is inconceivable to me that a human being would not carry the weight of such experiences for the rest of his life, and I believe that these experiences haunted – and still haunt – my father. When I was young and he became enraged, his anger seemed out of proportion with whatever had prompted it, as if it was actually coming from a much deeper place. My father once pounded his fist on the dinner table, for example, because the saltshaker had been left in the kitchen. For years I lived in fear of upsetting him, and in some ways, even as a forty-seven-year-old adult, I still do.

Still, my father had a good point when he claimed a person is who he is, and how he reacts in the short- or long-term to any particular circumstance is an individual thing. My father rarely talked about the Holocaust and refused to be interviewed for Steven Spielberg’s Shoah Foundation because he found it too painful. On the other hand his best friend Jacob, who survived Auschwitz and had a number tattooed on his arm, recorded his testimony willingly and was highly active in Holocaust remembrance events.

That conversation with my father caused me to think very hard, not just about him, but also about myself. I sometimes try to put into words, both in poems and in essays, aspects of my father’s life. But my words often stall or get mixed up, and I think, more and more, this is because I can't separate my father’s story from my experience as his daughter. This notion mirrors a basic fact about my life; I find it hard to emerge as an individual or a writer from the heavy weight of who my father is – the unmatchable significance of his story. Members of the so-called Second Generation often have this problem as artists and in life. In searching for the truth about their parents’ identity, they find themselves searching for the truth about themselves. But their own stories feel so inane compared to what their parents have suffered.

One day when I was eleven or twelve years old, I was crying at home over a boy who did not like me. My father saw my tears and said, “When I was eleven years old I was starving in prison.” This response was meant to silence my tears. Instead, it silenced my voice. I grew up with the sense that nothing that happened in my life would ever be as important as what happened to my father; no pain I felt would ever match his pain. Really, what right did I have in my comfortable American life, to feel any pain at all?

What about my father and his past has or has not informed who I am? Am I a separate individual with something important to say, even though I have lived my entire life in the shadow of the Holocaust, what one scholar called “the master narrative?”

My father told me on the phone that day that my pain is no less important or significant than his. Still, I struggle. Still, when he is depressed or when he cries, it feels as if everything inside me will break.

Tomorrow I will prepare my own Seder meal. I will light the candles the way my mother did at home, and I will say the prayers in Hebrew, translating them into English for my husband. We don’t have children, so I will ask the four questions that are usually reserved for the youngest child. One of the questions is this: “Why does this night differ from all other nights?”

On this night I will cry, because I will miss my father, and I will miss my mother. I will think of them sitting in their home two hours away, holding a small Seder with my brother and waiting for a call from my sister, who lives in California. And then I will go to the stove and pour out two bowls of vegetarian matzo ball soup.

Indonesian Poet Laksmi Pamuntjak

2010-03-22T14:09:00.000-07:00

When the Regional English Language Office the U.S. Embassy in Jakarta invited me to Indonesia last fall, I picked up a copy of Laksmi Pamuntjak's The Jakarta Good Food Guide in anticipation of writing an article for Gourmet. When I contacted Laksmi in hopes of getting her to give me a tour of Jakarta's restaurants, I found out that she would be in the U.S. when I was in Indonesia. To add to this, Gourmet closed its doors after more than 80 years while I was on the trip, which canceled my piece for them.

Despite these disappointments, my friendship with Laksmi blossomed, and though we have never met in person, I was fortunate enough to discover what a marvelous poet and novelist she is. I've included this poem in this inaugural post of the Groundnut Soup International Writing Blog. As a writer who often travels around the world and is the co-director of the Ghana Poetry Project, I am fortunate to meet and read a number of writers who do not have wide distribution outside their own country. This blog is meant to celebrate the many, many writers who are out there.

This week I share with you the poem "A Traveler's Tale" by Laksmi Pamuntjak. Laksmi was born in Jakarta. She is the author of a treatise on violence and the Iliad, a collection of short stories magazine entitled The Diary of R.S.: Musings on Art, the award-winning The Jakarta Good Food Guide series and two collections of poetry, The Anagram and Ellipsis. Ellipsis appeared on The Herald UK Books of the Year 2005 list. She has just completed her first novel, The Blue Widow. You find out more about Laksmi Pamuntjak at http://www.laksmipamuntjak.com/.

A Traveler’s Tale

Perhaps every journey begins
by going down the staircase

or trawling through a passage
in your granny’s house where

a door might lead to shadows
& ink stains, a fireside of charred

carbon. Folks often mistake
the soul for the spirit, and like the

key that falls to the sand, we
rise to the swarm but forget the

man. Or songs stitched in the sky
long before cities were erected and

signposts staked. The wind may be
unfaithful as light selects it aperture;

we may give praise to the wrong God,
and remember only what illuminates

the field, the glutinous parts of the map.
We scan the spread from the crest of

the earth as though the world were
merely the consequence of some cosmic

spillage, the mountains brittle before the
sun, the sea no more than water leaking

into space. But lately there is no telling
summer from silver, as islands sink and

fish gasp in the black hole of unseasonal
drought. What stories we may find

in our passage through imagining
are buried in dead men’s chests or

saved by the moon like the face of
a stray goddess. Such that it comes as a

gentle surprise that the pages that leap
from certain books hint of something closer

to the skin, a mother’s fingerprint, or a
bead of sweat that escapes a father’s neck,

bent over the very same lines, sending
him places with wide-eyed wings.

Poya Day

2010-02-26T23:11:00.000-08:00

Last night I took my host Ranjan and his family out to the nicest restaurant in Colombo. I knew this was a place that he could never afford to take his family so I thought it was something I could do since the cost was about the cost of a medium priced restaurant in Burlington, VT. When I entered the restaurant, the strains of "The Girl from Ipanema" were playing over the sound system. I don't know what it is about this song, but in the last six months whenever I have gone to a high-end restaurant or hotel in Asia, inevitably Astrid Gilberto's classic is in rotation.

++++

Tomorrow is Poya Day, the Buddhist full moon celebration. Today is a Muslim holiday. Everything is closed for the entire weekend in Sri Lanka. I woke early today to go to the National Museum. I had been looking forward to going on my last weekend in Sri Lanka for a while. I am told it has an amazing collection of ancient masks and other artifacts. But today is a Muslim holiday and tomorrow is Poya Day so when I arrived I learned the museum was closed for the weekend. Disappointed, I made my way to a local coffee shop where the Sinhalese yuppies congregate. I arrived half an hour before it opened, but the security guard waved me in. He turned on the fans and AC. When the kitchen staff arrived, they made me a spectacular cup of coffee, almost as good as the cup I had a week earlier and SinhaRaja's house. Yes, I keep track of good cups of coffee like wine afficionados recall certain vintages. This is especially true in places where typically the only cup you can get is Nescafe.

Over the last six weeks the country or the Colombo University campus has been closed for nearly half that time. For those overly ambitious and driven souls who strive to accomplish one thing after another, I imagine Sri Lanka would send them to the loonie bin. I find Sri Lanka is a place, like Ghana, where I could live. Three days ago my computer hard drive crashed. Right now, I am sitting in the only open cyber cafe typing this missive, and to my surprise I am relaxed. I never thought I could ever live without "being connected," but I feel more connected to myself right now than I have in a long time.

++++

I love walking in an unknown town not knowing.

Prostration

2010-02-22T21:04:00.000-08:00

Groundnut Soup
February 22, 2010

Having a servant prostrate herself at my feet is not something I had ever imagined I would experience. It seemed so of another century. But this morning as I was leaving SinhaRaja’s home, the cook and her daughter came to the front room to bid me goodbye. The night before the daughter had made a superb meal for a dinner party. When I thanked them for their hospitality, the young woman knelt in front of me, bent over with her palms pressed together, and lowered face to the floor. She remained in that position for what seemed to me like an eternity, but was probably only a few seconds.

To say that her gesture gave me pause is an understatement. In that moment, purely on instinct, I made the decision not to embarrass her by saying that she should not do that with me. Somehow I thought that to diminish her prostration by invalidating it in some way was much worse than simply honoring her and thanking her for her graciousness. My overwhelming response was that I didn’t want in any way to strip away her dignity.

In moments like these, you can’t help but have multiple thoughts running simultaneous through your head. As I was instantaneously deciding to just “go with it,” I was also feeling like I was in a movie. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen a film where a Westerner is greeted in such a way. But somehow I have some sensory memory of this happening in a movie where the Westerner pulls the prostrate servant up and tells them that they should not do this. What I do know is that such an action is more about the Westerner than the servant. Deep down I knew that to do something like that would be even patronizing. As the same time, I understood that her gesture was a sign of respect and honor, and to negate her genuine expression was more humiliating for her than any discomfort I might have had.

Location, Location, Location

2010-02-14T03:41:00.000-08:00

As all writers know, writing is not like riding a bike. Every time you sit down to write, it feels like the first time. The same anxieties, the same doubts, the same indecisions that you had in the past happen again. It’s no wonder that so many talented and brilliant writers stop writing. I think it takes a kind of stubbornness and unwillingness to let go to be a writer. These traits are not necessarily healthy or admirable, but they are necessary to write. This is especially true when you haven’t written for a period of time. The more time that lapses between the last time you wrote and the next, the harder it becomes to manage these feelings and to move past them. When I write every day, my doubts are more like echoes of strict teachers who have no confidence in me. When I don’t write for several days, these apparitions become more and more material. And the longer I wait they emerge almost into an actual physical presence that is standing in my way. A barrier to my consciousness where perhaps my writer’s self or my voice takes refuge.

So now after two weeks of not writing, I am sitting down to write. I have tried to make the circumstances as pleasant as possible in order to facilitate my re-entry. Still, it is not easy. Over the past week, I have spent a day in a public ward of a remote village hospital because of food poisoning. My friend Ranjan believes it was the bad coconut sambal. He says that the fish curry is cooked so long that anything back would have been killed. The sambal is made from fresh coconut, chillies and other things. The hospital was a bit of a nightmare by U.S. standards. I was placed in a ward with 30 metal beds circa 1930. Thin plastic mattresses laid on each metal stretcher. Over these mattresses was a single sheet. When I arrived, the bed I was to use had someone in it. They moved this ancient man further into the ward. The sheet was covered in blood. They pulled the sheet from the bed and without wiping down the mattress replaced it with “fresh” linen. Smeared blood was on the floor about the bed. I stepped around it to lay down. At the end of the ward a stack of dirty bed pans waited to be cleaned. Feral dogs wandered aimlessly through the open space. Hundreds of flies swarmed everywhere. Since I had food poisoning, I had to use the toilet often. A row of stoop toilets were located out back. A man with a hose would occasionally come by and wash them down.

During the day I spent there, I was given three IV’s of saline solution. Someone from the university—the chairman of my department, the caretaker of the house I live in, the campus nurse—never left me alone. They sat vigil beside my bed and made sure I took my medicine and drank liquids. The doctors and nurses gave me excellent care despite the conditions. They clearly knew what they were doing. But in Sri Lanka, and in many countries, everything else is the responsibility of friends and family. At every bed in the ward, the patient had someone to attend to them—to wash them, to give them the medicine, to feed them, to change their linens, to give them clothes or blankets. Without someone there, I am certain there would have been little hope of these patients surviving. The nursing staff was just not capable with all their duties to provide such care. So I was fortunate that the people at the Sri Palee campus showed up.

When I thanked Ranjan and everyone else for their support, he said that this is what Sri Lankans do. When someone is sick they go to the hospital and take care of them. He said that when he lived in Japan it was just the opposite. You were not supposed to visit someone until they were well again. The Japanese did not want to be seen when they were vulnerable and ill. He found this incomprehensible and had difficulty restraining himself when a friend was sick.

After a day in the ward, I was still very sick, but I was strong enough to sit up and walk on my own. I knew that if I was to get better I would need to get out of this hospital. I had a cycle of antibiotics with me that I would continue to take for several days. The stress of the ward—its noise, its strangeness, its lack of comfort—were starting to get in the way of my recovery. So again doctor’s advice I checked myself out and returned to the Sri Palee campus. That night Samanth, the caretaker, insisted on spending the night in my room to ensure that I was okay. I equally insisted that he sleep in one of the other bedrooms in the house. He reluctantly agreed, but then he came into my room once an hour and turned on the lights and asked me if I was okay. My sleep or whatever you might call it was at the minimum fitful. The next morning at least thirty people visited me to ask about my health.

Apparently, the entire campus was in an uproar about my illness. This didn’t surprise me since anything that I do on this remote campus is cause for discussion. If I walk to town in the evening, I hear about it from students the next day who did not see me. By noon, however, I realized that I wasn’t going to recover without some privacy. Feeling so weak and raw, I didn’t think I could recover in such a public place.

The Fulbright Commission got me a room at a special rate at the Cinnamon Lakeside Hotel. Usually, I hate the anonymity and shopping-mall atmosphere of five star hotels around the world because they place you in the bubble of a completely constructed environment. But at this point, I needed to be in a bubble. I needed to baby myself and consume the bland Euro-American cuisine served up in their restaurants. I made a reservation for four days, but I was unsure if I would be able to last more than a day.

I arrived at the Cinnamon after a tense negotiation with a tuk-tuk driver who wanted 800 rupees for a ride that should cost 100. I bargained him down to 200 so he let me off across the busiest avenue in the city so that I have through walk into the sprawling hotel entrance on foot. Justice, who knows. When I went inside, they didn’t have my reservation. It turned out there were two Cinnamon Hotels in Colombo, the Grand and the Lakeside. I had mistakenly gone to the Grand, which was rather grand. I took a Cinnamon taxi to the Lakeside which cost me another 500 rupees for a ride that in a tuk-tuk would have been 100. From the street the Lakeside seemed, well, less Grand. I was a bit disappointed, but finally checked in, made my way up to my room and fell asleep.

Normally, I hate pools and swimming, but this morning I went down to the pool at 9am and had breakfast. I took in a swim and read the Sri Lankan Daily Mirror. In a long article on the arrest of General Fonseka, it mentioned that just two weeks before the general was holed up in this very hotel with 400 army deserters after he lost the presidential election. The hotel was surrounded by government police, and the president was claiming that Fonseka was planning a coup.

By now, Fonseka and about 1,000 of his supporters were in jail. At least four journalists were also in jail and another four had gone missing. Missing journalists was not new in Sri Lanka. Since President Rajapaksa came to power four years ago at least 14 journalists have been jailed or disappeared in the country. Most prominently, Tamil journalists working for the Outreach Sri Lanka website have been arrested, with J. S. Tissainayagam being sentenced to 20 years in jail for his postings.

With the state of Sri Lankan journalist the way it is now, it is hard for me or really anyone to know whether General Fonseka was planning a coup. Fonseka certainly could be considered a war criminal for many of the atrocities he committed during the recently ended civil war against the Tamil Tigers. He also threatened to execute several of the governments cabinet ministers if he was elected president, but Rajapaska is not gilded lily himself. He is just likely to fabricate the coup attempt to get rid of his rival.

So this Saturday morning as I sipped a freshly brewed cup of coffee (and not Nescafe) while trying to baby myself and recover, I looked up at the balconies overlooking the wide, infinity pool and could imagine Fonseka standing up there either contemplating murder or planning some sort of “exit strategy.” When my neck tired and I lowered my gaze, I saw across the shimmering, sunlit water a beautiful woman disrobing. She unzipped her incredibly tight jeans and wiggled them down to her ankles. Then she crossed her arms and grabbed the hem of her spaghetti-strapped tank top. In one fluid move, almost a pirouette, she lifted the fabric up and over her head, dropping in a pile with the jeans. She shook her long dark locks out, shoved on a pair of bubble sunglasses and set to reading a fashion magazine. As I watched her settle into the lounge and bake in the hot morning sun, I tried to reconcile the simultaneous nature of the Cinnamon Lakeside Hotel as a staging ground for a military coup and a playground for the vain and gorgeous.

The incongruity of these two moments made it certain I would stay the full four days at the Cinnamon Lakeside, or at least until I could gather the words to describe it.

Drowning the Bodhi

2010-01-30T03:31:00.001-08:00

Groundnut Soup
January 30, 2010

Drowning the Bodhi

Sunlight blazed on the orange robes of a half dozen Buddhist monks strolling along the Kandy Lake outside the Temple of the Sacred Tooth. (Catholics have nothing on Buddhist fetishes!) The color vibrated in the lowing light the way day-glo hunting vests glow among the surrounding flora during deer season in Vermont. I am struck by vast chasm that cultural codification that span. Where my initial recognition of the orange color is a connection to hunting culture, here the color orange has a decidedly different contextuality.

The color orange is one of five sacred colors in the Buddhist religion. Blue denotes confidence; yellow, holiness; red, wisdom; white, purity; and orange is the color of being without desire. After seeing the monks in the Western Union money transfer office the other day, I have come to conclude that such huge and vibrant orange robes are necessary to be reminded of living without desire at every moment of the day. Otherwise, one might be tempted by the most trivial of materialisms.

As I circled the Temple of the Sacred Tooth, searching for the entrance, I was directed by several three wheel taxi drivers into the Kandyan Cultural Center, a building right up against the temple. Thinking that this might be the entrance to the temple, I went in and paid 500 rupees, which led me into a theater seating about 500. On stage was the first dance in a performance titled “Traditional Kandyan and Low Country Dances of Sri Lanka.” As I glanced around the audience, I quickly realized that this performance was solely produced for tourists. Half the seats were filled with Westerners, mostly husbands and wives of retirement age who had booked a tour package that including Kandy as one of the destinations.

Without hesitation, I immediately decided the entire proceedings were not something for my more refined and sophisticated tastes. I mean, I was traveling with Dr. Sinharaja Tammita-Delgoda who was producing the first truly traditional vannan dance performance in more than 20 years. How could I, someone with such elite connections, deign to sit and observe this bastardization of Sri Lankan culture constructed purely for the uninformed Western masses. By the time I found a seat, I was ready to turn around and leave, but I didn’t. How different am I, really? I’m here to gaze on a culture that is as foreign as landing on the Mars. Why not accept the fact that I am not so different than these pensioners with a hankering for something beyond the trimmed boarders of their own backyard.

So I sat.

This event was not something covered in the pages of the Lonely Planet’s guide to Sri Lanka. The Kandyan Cultural Center’s performance was below their standards for inclusion, though they did find it important to include the British Garrison Cemetery and the Victoria Gold & Country Resort, which to my mind offer even less interest than a incredibly energetic and musical tourist scam.

What we witnessed was a sort of amuse bouche of ten traditional dances from around the country. Each one lasted about three minutes so I assume it was an excerpt of a longer dance. At times the performers seemed thoroughly engaged in the dance and at other times bored out of their minds. I’m not going to transcribe the “Programme English” that was supplied, but I will say that the drumming was spectacular.

The drum is the traditional instrument of Sri Lanka. They have no wind instruments. In this way, perhaps, Sri Lanka has more in common with Africa than India. The complexity of the drumming patterns were so powerful that I felt my heartbeat shift to follow the rhythm. This is not the first time I have seen drumming here. In fact, I attended a party a week ago in Colombo where a group of young men gather monthly to sing and drum. We sat in chairs and on the floor until 4am as various participants picked up a drum and began a song. It was a strange experience to see these well-educated young men—yuppies, in fact—so connected to their traditions. The host Chamila, Ranjan’s brother-in-law, got his MBA in Britain. Most of the others also did their graduate studies in the West, but every month they got together to sing and drum as their parents and ancestors have done for generations.

I could see this degree of devotion when I finally found the entrance to the Temple of the Tooth. After passing through a security checkpoint where I was patted down (In 1998, the Tamil Tigers set off at bomb at the entrance to the temple.), I stepped into a world that was almost exclusively Sri Lankan. Nearly all of the audience members from the Kandyan Culture Center did not make their way a hundred feet down the street to the temple, but instead climbed onto their buses to meet a dinner schedule that I am sure was running tight.

This evening was the Full Moon Poya celebration, the first of the year. In Sri Lanka, the arrival of the full moon each month is a national holiday. The January full moon is important because it is the first one of the year. This evening thousands of Sri Lankans crowd the steps leading up to the temple. We are all lined up to look through the door into the room where the gold coffin that contains Buddha’s tooth resides. According to legend, the tooth was removed from Buddha’s mouth while he was burning on the funeral pyre and then spirited away to Sri Lanka for safety. Here in Kandy, the seat of the Kandyan kingdom, it resides after being stolen by the invading Indians, confiscated by the Portuguese and crushed to a powder, and stolen by the British, only to be returned in the 20th century to its rightful place in the Temple of the Tooth. Much of this history is disputed however. According to the Sri Lankans, in all the instances where the tooth was taken, it was actually a fake tooth that was spirited away and the real tooth lay hidden in a secret place. So the real tooth was never destroyed by the Portuguese.

What I could see of the relic was a three-foot tall dome shaped sarcophagus made of gold. Though I could get no closer than one hundred feet to it, the power of the relic to everyone around me was clear. Women were crying. Others carried offerings. Whole families sat on the hardwood floor and prayed. All the while drummers beat the hide of long drums secured horizontally across their abdomen. The smell of incense and bodies was overpowering. Even though the evening was cool in the mountains, the interior of the temple was as hot as an oven. At one point, I wasn’t sure I could breathe so I pushed my way down the steps and outside where rows upon rows of oil lamps and incense were lit in prayer. As I breathed the cool night air, I stood and looked at the oldest Bodhi tree in Kandy across the courtyard leading from the temple. More than three hundred years old, this fig tree is just beginning to mature as it can have a life of 3,000 years. According to legend, it is under the Bodhi tree where Gautama Buddha found enlightenment. This tree is festooned with colorful prayer flags. This evening hundreds of adherents make their way to the tree to pour a bowl of water on its roots and say a prayer. I wonder if it is possible to drown a tree with a diameter of 20 or more feet.

Selwood and British Colonialism

2010-01-28T01:59:00.001-08:00

Groundnut Soup
January 28, 2010

Selwood and Re-Visioning Colonialism and Post-Colonialism

Well, the election violence turned out to be more myth than truth. It turns out that General Fonseca lost by a wide margin in this weeks Sri Lankan presidential election. Fonseca had been promising to imprison the president’s cabinet for corruption the day after the election if he won. People feared that if Fonseca won his actions would cause violence in the streets. For better or worse, depending on who you supported, he lost by thirty percentage points, and the only thing close to violence was the setting off of random fireworks around Colombo.

I spent from Monday through Thursday at Dr. Ranjan Hettiarachchi’s home with his wife, two daughters and infant son. We spent Tuesday and Wednesday holed up on the second floor of his magnificent home watching the election results. The only violence we experienced was the house being struck by lightening around 6pm on Wednesday evening, leaving us in darkness for the night. An electrician arrived this morning to replace the circuit breakers.

Since I don’t speak or understand Sinhala, I spent most of the day reading student papers, watching the monkeys just outside the balcony break coconuts, and reading a marvelous little volume by Sinharaja Tammita-Delgoda called Selwood: Nuwara Eliya and the story of an English cottage.

Temperamentally, I have to admit that reading about the colonial era of Sri Lanka was something that I was hoping to overlook. Despite a colonial history of more than 500 years, somehow I thought that true Sri Lankan culture only existed before colonialism and after independence. Tammita-Delgoda’s elegant essay in this small book of photographs narrates the inhabiting of the high mountain valley of Nuwara Eliya in the late 18th century and traces the history of the Selwood Cottage from the early 20th century to the present. His window into English colonialism through the world of Selwood exposed an intimacy of family life and a strange hybrid landscape that seems both Sri Lankan and English at once. In a way this portrait of a place perhaps reveals how a place can represent in one sense a particular, individual identity and a more global world view. As I travel through Sri Lanka, I can see this in evidence everywhere, from the bilingual Sinhala-English culture to the Western clothing factories that crowd Colombo. For better or worse, this is the way it is now. What Sinharaja Tammita-Delgoda does is reveal the beauty that can come from such a collaboration, rather than a colonialism or a usurption of one culture over another.

***

Riding down the hill from the Sri Palee campus of the U of Colombo, I spotted a crocodile monitor at least four feet long. It is the longest lizard in the world. As it swayed back and forth across the road in front of us, the van slowed and I said a prayer for its survival. Monitors eat snakes, and poisonous snakes are common on the road down from the campus. At night, it is recommended that you walk in the middle of the road because snakes “lurk” in the shadows of the brush.

***

On the road into Colombo this morning, I spotted the Murray Hindu Cultural Center. I wondered if it was a spinoff of the Murray Dance Studios of my childhood.

***

In the Majestic City Mall today, I spied five Buddhist monks dressed in orange robes lined up in the Western Union Money Transfer Office. I always through monks took a vow not only of celibacy, but also poverty. Perhaps they were sending their extra cash home to support their parents.

Earlier, I came across a Buddhist monk store. It reminded me of the Chief store I found in Cape Coast Ghana where you could buy gold crowns and all kinds of chief paraphernalia. This store sold primarily orange and red robes since Buddhist monks didn’t dress up much. The store did have several sizes of plastic Buddha’s that lit up from the inside like the Christmas Santas and Snowmen that people place in their yards in America. The Buddhist store was located next to the banana store where you could buy at least six different kinds of bananas, ranging in size from a couple of inches to two feet or more.

Three Legged Dogs

2010-01-22T22:09:00.000-08:00

Groundnut Soup
January 22, 2010

Three Legged Dogs

On top of the giant rock hill where my Chinese-inspired home overlooks the Sri Palee campus of the University of Colombo in Harana (what a mouthful!), four short-haired dogs have made their home. Every time I leave the house, they circle in front of me pointing their rear ends in acts of submission. One has soars on its flank and another is missing an ear, but all of them run on three legs. Whenever they dash across the yard and try to follow me down the steep stone steps to the campus, they hurry with one rear leg held off the ground. They hop and scoot and follow me everywhere.

A couple of days ago, I saw a dog with four good legs. A moment later as he stood in the middle of the road, he was clipped by the three-wheeled taxi. As I watch the dog skitter to the side of the road holding his left rear leg up, it occurs to me that it is so hard on three legs to astonish, but it’s been done. Not often though. Not often.

***

Late last night, I rode in a taxi back to the campus. As we turned onto the track that led up the hill, a cat crouched in the middle of the road. My driver slowed and honked his horn. The cat ignored him. On either side the narrow, one-lane road dropped into muddy ditches and was impassable. The driver flicked his lights on and off. The cat didn’t even look at us. He punched on his brights. The cat turned his head and his yellow eyes seemed to glow brighter than the headlights. We laughed and the driver inched forward. The cat remained stationary. After a few minutes, the driver got out of the car and shooed the cat away. We climbed up the steep incline to the campus gate where we were met by a dozen barking dogs.

***

Dr. Sinharaja Tammita-Delgoda took me to my first restaurant in Colombo last night. It was a European guest house with Sri Lankan infusions. When we entered the outdoor dining room, the quiet, gentle notes of a lounge-style “Jingle Bells” being sung in Singhala welcomed us.

***

Sometimes the world is much smaller than we can ever imagine. While having drinks at the Barefoot Café yesterday afternoon, an elegant man arrived carrying several copies of a new book, The Ink of Lanka. He was introduced to me as Talik Samarawickrema, a successful architect, artist, and textile designer. In the 70s and early 80s he lived in Milan and was part of the Milan Design School where he made a name for himself with his architecture and textile design. He produced weavings that have been sold in the MOMA Art Store and fabrics that have been featured in Karl Lagerfeld’s clothing line. The book was a beautiful collection of his ink drawings and copperplates. His spare drawings were marvelous in how their thin, graphic lines articulated such volume and weight in the empty spaces. I had actually opened the book in the Fulbright office the day before so was delighted to meet the artist in person. He invited us to his house to see his exquisite wire sculptures.

When we arrived, I was introduced to his daughter Methra. After talking for a few minutes, I discovered that she had graduated from Ithaca College in the US. I mentioned that a friend’s son also attended Ithaca. I told her a little about him, how he was now dating a French woman who had gone to Ithaca and then on to Cornell’s School of Architecture.

Methra smiled and said, “Do you mean Juliet?”

Juliet had come to my house for dinner with Isaac several times over the past two years.

“Juliet was my roommate and Isaac is a good friend,” she said.

***

On the way into town today, our Land Rover was engulfed in a wave of thousands of people marching in support of the current president in anticipation of the elections on Tuesday. It has been mentioned by several people that this election was critical, and if the opposition leader won there would be violence. The opposition leader is the former general who led the military in victory last spring over the Tamil Tigers and ended the thirty-year civil war. This general has been described numerous times as a Sri Lankan Idi Amin. His win would be the end of democracy in Sri Lanka.

As the crowds surged around our vehicle, marchers slapped the hood, roof and windows of our vehicle. Loud booms echoed inside. A few young men began rocking the car from side to side. Gauges were mounted just above the windshield to measure altitude and vehicle’s horizontal angle. Gleeful men pushed the truck back and forth, and the little illustration of the rover in the horizon guage swung like a Weeble, tipping but not falling over.

Just as suddenly, the marchers moved on and the road opened. We drove on through nearly empty roads to Colombo. On Monday my host Dr. Ranjan Hettiarachchi is taking me to his home in suburban Colombo to wait out the election and its aftermath in safety.

Feeding an American

2010-01-19T20:12:00.000-08:00

Groundnut Soup
January 19, 2010

Feeding an American

The first order of business after being met at the airport by Ranjan Hettiarachchi, chair of the department of media studies at the U. of Colombo, was to feed me. It was six a.m. I had arrived at 4:30a.m. It had taken an hour and a half to pass through customs and collect my bags. We hopped into a Range Rover-like vehicle made in China and our driver had pulled away as a policeman shouted at us for stopping in a no-stop zone.

As we made our way through the streets of Colombo, I was reminded of Accra and the low buildings with kades, street-side market stalls, and tiny shops lining the roughly paved streets. We headed out of the city. I was surprised by how quickly the city limits turned to rural farming villages. Paddy fields and rubber plantations dotted the landscape. Coconut, jackfruit, banana, plantain, and mango trees grew like weeds in just about every available space. The huge oddly shaped jackfruit hung like tumors while giant orange clusters of coconuts were interspersed.

The first question after how was your flight:

“Have you eaten Sri Lankan food before?”

“No.”

There was a hurried conversation in Sinhala between Ranjan and our driver. I quickly realized that they were discussing what do you feed an American.

“I love spicy food. I have a Thai friend, Chananya, who makes curry in the traditional way. What she calls Thai hot.”

A smile spread across Ranjan’s face. “You like hot?”

“Yes, hot. The hotter the better.”

More discussion.

We drove in silence for an hour. According to Ranjan the Sri Palai campus of the University of Colombo was 30k from the city. But with the winding, unimproved roads, the drive was much longer than the 30 minutes I had predicted.

After some time, we pulled over to a small food shop. A window was rolled down and conversation with proprietor ensued. He seemed to be shaking his head. Ranjan rolled up his window and we sped off.

At 8 a.m., we pulled off the main road into what appeared to be a residential community surrounded in dense vegetation. Along this track the driver turned at a sign that said “Guest House” in English. I figured this must be where I’m staying. As we drove up the driveway through the dense brush, the truck turned into a courtyard with a one-storey colonial type building spread out around it. On the wide porch that wrapped around two sides were wicker lounge chairs that seemed to come out of a 1940s film set during the British Empire. Our driver stopped at the front entrance. The place was desolate. It seemed at first as if the place had been abandoned. The truck idled as we waited.

Finally, Ranjan went inside. A minute or so later he returned.

“Let’s have breakfast.”

We entered an unlit hall with tables and chairs scattered around. Someone came out and turned on the television. A Sri Lankan cartoon played loudly.

According to Ranjan, the guest house was owned by the Tourist Board and was not a guest house, per se, as it was a restaurant. But not one that seemed to get a lot of business. While we waited for our meal, out of nowhere six old men in saris appeared. They swept the courtyard, the porch. They stood at the edge of the room and stared at us.

“This is not where tourists come,” explained Ranjan.

Our meal consisted of cold string hoppers (tangles of steamed rice noodles), coconut sambal, dahl, and mackerel curry. Ranjan made sure that the waiter brought out a fork and spoon for me, but our driver and Ranjan ate with their hands. After a couple of bites with my fork, I felt foolish and used my right hand as well. Ranjan seemed amused that I ate the food.

He kept asking me, “It’s not too hot?”

And when I replied that it was not hot at all. He seemed skeptical. I suspect that he told the waiter to make the sambal and curry very mild because I could barely detect any hot pepper.

Later, after we had arrived on campus and driven up the partially paved track to the top of a mountain where my house was located, Ranjan, the driver, and Samantha, the caretaker/house person, drove me to a food market in the tiny village of Harana where we spent more than an hour buying food for two days. The difficulty was that no one seemed to know what an American might like to eat, but at the same time they weren’t inclined to ask me. We roamed up and down the aisles of the small store with Ranjan and Samantha discussing heatedly what should be purchased. One of the difficulties was that even though I had a kitchen with a gas burner, there was no refrigerator. Anything that might spoil could not be purchased.

At the strangest times, show tunes can pop into my head. In the food shop the song “What to do with a girl named Maria” from the Sound of Music” began it’s endless loop that would not end until I fell asleep three hours later after being awake for almost 48 hours straight. But the lyrics were changed to “What do you feed an American”.

After much discussion, we came away with canned tuna, two frozen chicken drumsticks for lunch and dinner, rice, coconut powder, coconut oil, Ceylon tea, and spices. Then we crossed the road dodging a large parade of people in support of their presidential candidate. The road was lined with military, armed with AK-47 and those menacing banana clips dangling from the stock. We squeezed through a group of marchers and stopped at the fruit and vegetable stand. Ranjan bought leeks, potatoes, carrots, green beans, cucumbers, eggplants, hot peppers, kaffir lime leaves, limes and onions. Enough to feed me for a week. The only fruit the stall had was small bananas so we bought two dozen of these as well.

That afternoon Samantha prepared eggplant in coconut curry, a carrot/onion/hot pepper sambal, and a chicken in a dark gravy. Though the food was mild, Samantha kept worrying if it was too hot, despite my assurances that I loved my food hot.

No matter how much I assured them I wanted authentic Sri Lankan dishes, they didn’t believe me until lunch two days later when Ranjan and I had food brought in from the canteen. As the two of us sat at the table eating with our hands, three faculty members and Samantha stood around and provided a commentary on my eating in Sinhala.

It's All Relative

2010-01-16T23:57:00.001-08:00

Groundnut Soup
January 16, 2010

I didn’t realize what it meant to be flying to Kuwait until I arrived at the Dulles Airport gate. It only came to me when I saw the four hundred or so large, beefy men, in their forties and fifties, gone slightly or more overtly to seed wearing Carhardt carpenters pants and Budweiser t-shirts, and young men in their twenties, featuring “high and wides” and digital camo backpacks. I counted four women in all. Until this moment the consequences of Kuwait being the launching point for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan never really hit home.
Just the day before I had listened to Terry Gross on “Fresh Air” interview a journalist about the dangers of unsupervised contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan. And here they were. Men in their forties and fifties plowing through a mountain of MacDonald’s and fast food meals like this would be their last for a very long time. They moved amongst each other with the camaraderie of a NASCAR tailgate party.
At first, I had a sense of dread as I scanned the waiting area. I wasn’t worried abut a terrorist bomb secreted someone’s shoe or underwear. Hell, these men face I.E.D.s almost daily. No, I dreaded having to sit in economy class next to a four hundred pound truck driver in the center seat next me, his girth spilling over not only onto me, but into the aisle beyond. I could see myself suffocated by the time the landing gear drops. A twelve-hour flight next to a man who made the Michelin Man appear undersized caused me to almost pay a thousand dollars to upgrade to business class. The announcement that there were still three business class seats available ten minutes before boarding surely tempted me, but to be honest, I’m a cheap bastard. I reason I can endure almost anything for twelve hours, even at my advanced age of seven months shy of fifty.
I held steady and luck won out.
My aisle seat was next to a tall, slight young man, no more than 25 years old. Even better, he immediately went to sleep and slept almost the entire twelve hours, skipping dinner and breakfast. He wasn’t sporting a “high and wide” so I wasn’t certain if he was military or not, but he certainly adhered to the military dictum of sleep when you can.
Before we took off, I pulled out my Amazon Kindle. I love not having to haul twenty or so books in my suitcase when I travel for six weeks or searching desperately for a bookstore with English language books in a place where there aren’t even bookstores. So I pull out my Kindle and immediately the guy across the aisle says, “Hey, buddy.”
I looked over.
“I was thinking of getting one of those.” He was a man about my age, in his early fifties, grey hair, about 5-foot-9. He looked about as threatening as a country pastor.
I went into my schtick about how great Kindles are and then I noticed he held a mass market paperback of Stephen Hunter’s I, Sniper. I turned on my Kindle and showed him my copy of the same book. As an author Stephen Hunter holds a special place in my heart because his novel Dirty White Boys got me through a particularly bad stretch of depression in the 1990s.
It was a conversation starter. Bob told me how he was returning to Iraq for four months to pay for his daughter’s college tuition. He said it had felt great to be able to write a check to pay for the spring semester without taking out loans. This was his second trip to Iraq, and he thought it would probably be his last.
When I told him I was going to Sri Lanka he said he’d never go there. He said that even though the Tamil Tigers were defeated he didn’t think the tension between the Buddhists and Hindus would ever really end. It was then that I asked him what he did in Iraq, thinking that he must be some sort of desk jockey ensconced deeply on some military base. But it turned out he was a retired narcotics police officer from Syracuse. He told me his undercover car was registered under the pseudonym Bob Lee Swagger, after the mildly sociopathic Vietnam vet sniper in Stephen Hunter’s novels. We both agreed that Hunter’s best was his Swagger first novel, Point of Impact.
Then he went on to explain that he was embedded with an army patrol training the Iraqi police. According to Bob, there was nothing safer than having a dozen heavily armed men whose sole duty was to “protect the old guy.” Seriously. He never felt in danger.
As we began to descend into Kuwait City, my neighbor finally woke. I asked him if he was going to Iraq, and he said, no, Afghanistan. It was his fourth deployment. He told me a story about being in a bizarre and looking up on a hill and seeing a massive fort. He said his translator told him that since the 9th century whoever controlled that fort controlled the entire region.
It took a moment for me to realize that he wasn’t in the bizarre shopping, but was on patrol. I interrupted him and asked stupidly, “So you go on patrols. Is that dangerous?”
“Well, it’s all relative.” He turned and looked out the window.
Relative to what? I wanted to ask. Relative to shopping at the Gap in the local mall?

***

Stepping off the plane, a crowd of people holding signs for Dynacorp and Force Protection stood at the gate, having gotten past customs to meet their people as they stepped off the plane. It’s all relative.

***

The flight to Dubai was empty. I wonder if a year or two before this flight would have been packed since Dubai seemed to be the center of the financial boom. Now that the emirate is teetering on bankruptcy, no one seems to be headed there. The flight was short and as we descended into the airport I looked for the world’s tallest building, but it was past midnight and the lights were turned off.
On the flight from Dubai to Colombo, I watched a Sikh action movie and was amazed at how the actors could open a can of whoopass on each other without losing their turbans. Even the hapless bad guys being kicked on the ground kept their turbans firmly in place.

***

First sign that I was entering a new place

On Sri Lankan Airlines the salad contained whole raw birds nest chilies. It's all relative.

Padang Earthquake and Key Fobs

2009-10-15T19:55:00.000-07:00

It has taken me two weeks to write about this. On my first day of talks in Jakarta, the Friday after the Wednesday earthquake in Padang, I spent the morning at a small Catholic university discussing pluralism with about 50 English language students. Their enthusiasm was palpable. They so wanted to know about the United States from someone who lived there. They had been watching movies and television their entire lives, but the opportunity to speak to a flesh and blood American about American culture was something that they had never done.

Though the air conditioner labored, the air in the crowded room was thick and heavy. About fifteen minutes into the discussion, I noticed George Scholz, my embassy host, pull out his Blackberry and begin typing (“stabbing furiously” to quote Dan Brown in The Lost Symbol). A moment later, he stood and exited the room without looking up from his PDA. I barely noticed because I was so keyed into the students and our discussion about how America could go from people of color being barred from restaurants and public spaces in the early 1960s to electing an African American president forty-pus years later. By the end of the session, George was still out in the hall and I was thanking the students and faculty for the gifts of a pen with laser pointer, a key fob with the school emblem, and a wooden business card holder with the school emblem engraved on it.

Barely noticing that I was done, George whisked me away to a waiting SUV where he continued to work his Blackberry. His assistant Dian Safitri was also buried into her PDA. As we pulled from the university grounds, George looked up and explained, “We had given micro-scholarships to 60 high school students in Padang to study English. The three-storey building they were in collapsed. We have reports that 40 made it out safely, but 20 were injured and five of those were dead.”

George had never met these students, but now he was responsible for contacting the families and expressing the embassy’s condolences. “These kinds of accidents happen more often than you imagine, but it is always a nightmare when they do,” he said.

You would think that waiting two weeks to write about this tragedy would have given me some small modicum of insight into that moment, but I am still at a loss. At the time, I was focused on the high of traveling in Indonesia to talk to students about things I care deeply about. That I was so close to tragedy, both here in Java and in the Philippines just two days before, seemed to underscore and reveal just how we can hold to opposing ideas or feelings in ourselves at the same time. I felt deep sorrow for those suffering in Padang and still feel sorrow—particularly because of my close proximity—because they are still suffering. Only now are some of the stranded people in the remote areas finally getting help. At the same time, I have had my picture taken with at least a thousand people over the past weeks and signed countless certificates of participation and autographs. I have been friended on Facebook by at least 50 people. This discrepancy cannot be resolved, but we experience them simultaneously nevertheless.

Rushing from Manila

2009-10-03T03:27:00.000-07:00

I am sitting here in the Four Seasons Jakarta smoking a Cuban Cohiba cigar. It costs 36 dollars, which made me wince when I asked, but I felt, what the hell, I’ll never do this again. As well, the $36 is on the U.S. Embassy who is paying my hotel and expenses. I like the irony that the U.S. government, which has an embargo on Cuba products, is financing my extravagance. Here’s to you Barak Obama!

The last time I had a Cuban cigar was in Paris in 1989. I wrote about it in Cigar Aficionado (http://www.cigaraficionado.com/Cigar/CA_Archives/CA_Show_Article/0,2322,529,00.html) where I wrote about my grandfather smoking cheap five cent cigars in contrast to the luxury and sense of wickedness at smoking such an extravagant thing in a café on the Left Bank. Today, I am waiting, and smoking seems like a good way to wait. Elise arrives around 10pm tonight and then we leave at 4am for a flight to the interior of Java. I don’t envy Elise who has been on the road from Burlington since early Friday morning.

This has been a crazy week. I have spent more time in airports and in route to one place or another than in any place. Last weekend, I sat in the Hong Kong airport waiting for the typhoon to pass through Manila. While I was waiting in Hong Kong, the embassy driver J. R. Carcueva was going above and beyond his duty. The electricity was out in Manila, and Mr. Carcueva’s home was completely flooded. As a consequence, he could not find out that all the flights to Manila had been cancelled. Instead, he hopped on his motorcycle in the middle of the storm and risked his life to make his way to the embassy to pick up the Suburban, the only vehicle that could make it through the flooded areas to the airport to pick me up. It took him several dangerous hours of driving through the flooded city to get to the airport and find out that I would not be coming in. I was stunned when I arrived on Sunday and found out that he had left his family and his devastated home to ensure that I was met at the airport. I have written to the embassy commending his dedication. At the same time, Connie Hsui, the embassy’s RELO assistant and the person responsible for hosting me, found a way to contact me in Hong Kong via her personal email from home to ensure that I was informed of the changes and what was happening in Manila during the storm. Connie and Mr. Carcueva where the only staff at the Manila embassy to contact me during the storm.

On Monday I flew to Tacloban to run a writing workshop at Leyte Normal University on Tuesday. Tuesday evening I found out that all my scheduled events were cancelled in the Philippines because another typhoon was on the way. The embassy wanted to get me out of the country right away so they didn’t have to worry about me as well. So I took a 6am flight out of Tacloban to Manila and had a 2pm flight to Jakarta. When I landed in Manila, however, Connie was waiting for me at the terminal to take me to lunch. She didn’t want me to leave the Philippines without having at least one traditional Filipino meal. They took me to the Mall of Asia, billed as the largest mall in the Pacific, where we ate at Moe’s Fried Chicken. Connie did the ordering and we ate Kare Kare (tripe and oxtail soup made with peanut butter) chicken sigsig (chopped chicken with fresh hot peppers), two noodle dishes and bubble tea.

We finished by going to a Chinese restaurant for Halo Halo, a fusion desert that has the best of Western and Eastern sweets. It’s a strange dish of crushed ice topped with jackfruit, mango, sweetened soy beans, green jello squares, red jello balls, nuts, and ice cream.

Connie had made dinner reservations at Chef Bruce’s exclusive restaurant for Thursday evening, but those plans had to be cancelled. Chef Bruce has a restaurant where he cooks for twenty people only on Thursday nights. He has his own TV cooking show on local television where he celebrates traditional Filipino cuisine from all over the archipelago. His Thursday evening dinners are supposed to be the finest in Manila. Here’s the menu that was planned.

Chef’s Table Menu

Roasted tomato clam cream soup
Fresh clams simmered in white wine and enhanced with a roasted tomato puree and fresh cream.

Cold Pancit
Large Sotanghon noodles topped with steamed mussels, fresh vegetables and dressed in sesame vinaigrette.

Pan Seared Sea bass
Local Sea Bass pan seared and set on a medallion of steamed rice and topped with local greens dressed in bagoong vinaigrette.

Chicken Confit with kalabasa gratin
Chicken legs seasoned with Asian spices and slow cooked in duck fat sat on a bed of kalabasa gratin and topped with warm balsamic vinaigrette.

Mango Parfait
Creamy mango mousse topped with double thick orange cream

Like MacArthur, I have to return to the Philippines if not for anything else than an exquisite dinner at Chef Bruce’s restaurant.

Meeting Frank in Tacloban

2009-09-30T22:47:00.000-07:00

Monday night in Tacloban: I dreamed that Frank Sinatra ran me down in a pedicab. Don’t worry. I wasn’t hurt. Instead, Frank stepped out of the sidecar and serenaded me with “To Dream (the Impossible Dream),” whose words miraculously lifted me from the pavement like Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead.

Now, I’ve known a number of people who claim to have met Elvis at the Dairy Queen in Twin Falls or at a bus station in Toledo. Years ago, my friend Peter Temes wrote a poem about picking up Elvis hitchhiking outside of Buffalo, but Frank has never seemed to resonate with the kind of cultural viscera that is always so promising for writers desperately longing for dense figurative material. I’m not sure why, perhaps it’s generational, but there is no anthology of Frank poems the way there are several in tribute to Elvis, or even Miles Davis. In fact, I’ve even written a poem about Elvis:

Older

I’m older
than Elvis
when he
croaked
and I
was seventeen
wearing
a Prince
Albert frock
and a mus-
tache smear
of grease
paint across
my upper
lip because
Groucho died
around
the same
time and I
couldn’t give
a crap
about Elvis
until now.

I have never been inspired to pick up pen for Frank, until now. Perhaps it’s because arriving in Tacloban was like traveling back into the 1940s and 1950s. On the flight out of Manila the only other Westerners on the plane were two 80-something men. Stepping off the plane, I was met with MacCarthur’s famous pronouncement, “I shall return,” painted on the wall of the terminal. Just outside of Tacloban the U.S. Navy landed in the Philippines to retake the archipelago. Since then, this island has been a favorite stop for vets who battled in the Pacific. As I watch these two ancient veterans gingerly step into the overheated humidity, I wonder if I’m seeing one of the last of these journeys.

A frayed and moldy colonial capital of Leyte Island in the outskirts of this archipelago, Tacloban is best known as birthplace to Imelda Romualdez, nee the Shoe Queen Imelda Marcos, Tacloban, and seems frozen in time at some point between the landing of MacArthur during WWII and the mid-Sixties at the most extravagant period of the Marcos reign. The tallest building in the city is the five storey Hotel Alejandro, which has not changed in at least fifty years and is a museum to both MacArthur and Imelda, which photos documenting the Tacloban exploits of each. In the hotel, a five- by three-foot portrait of a young Imelda hangs over the bar and an endless loop of Frank Sinatra coming from the speakers.

Tacloban does however have a vibrant literary scene with poets who casually quote Denise Levertov and other American writers. At the center of this scene is Victor N. Sugbo who leads a renaissance of writing in the Filipino language of Waray and is the mentor of a number of really wonderful younger poets such as Voltaire Q. Oyzon and Janis Claire B. Salvacion. Here Victor’s translation of a short poem he originally wrote in Waray:

Two Ways of Touching a Woman

A woman when touched
Without warning
Is like a blowgun
That rattles.
Almost always she will
Not stop chattering.

But when you touch
A woman tenderly
She will smile and glow.
Her words like bats will
Cling to you.

I was fortunate enough to spend the early evening with Victor after I gave an all day creative writing workshop at the Leyte Normal University. The workshop was one of the best I have taught. Most of the two hundred or so participants were college teachers and fluent not only in English but in contemporary literature. I have to admit that I was surprised and delighted to find such a “cosmopolitan” environment. It is more a comment on my own ignorance and bias, than on anything else. Once again, my prior assumptions are slain in a dramatic way and Victor, in his quiet and unassuming way, was at the center of this illumination.

Bossa Nova Time Warp

2009-09-27T16:23:00.000-07:00

Bossa Nova Baby

Yesterday, when I arrived at the Manila Hyatt Hotel and Casino, just off the “pulsating night life scene and the magnificent Manila Bay,” I went to the registration desk where I was promptly sent to the 10th floor to register in the Executive Lounge. I was told that U.S. Embassy guests get this special privilege. As you can well imagine, I felt special.

Sitting in a rust-colored lounge chair and gazing out on Manila Bay, I was served a cup of coffee and a plate of cookies. The view at one time was probably spectacular, but today seems a bit moldy. The cement high rises along the bay were covered with that black mildew that I’m constantly battling along the edge of my bathtub. The bay was empty except for an ancient cargo ship. The music piped into the lounge, that bossa-nova classic “The Girl from Ipanema,” was also reminiscent of a long-gone era. It made me think of the Marcos’s.

This morning when I returned to the Executive Lounge for breakfast, “The Girl from Ipanema” was playing again. I haven’t yet left the hotel, but I’m feeling like I’m in a sixties time warp.

Airline Math

2009-09-27T00:05:00.000-07:00

3 cancelled flights + 800 stranded passengers divided by 300 available hotel rooms = one amazing lie

Yesterday it was clear that Manila airport was not going to open. Cathay Air refused to cancel their flights. Instead, they had us wait for six hours. Then they announced that they would be putting us up in hotel rooms. We needed to find a partner to share a room. I found Bart Tan, a physical therapist from New Jersey. We signed up together and received a yellow sticker that we were told to wear on our clothing so that we would be easily identified. It wasn't until midnight that we realized that what we were being identified for was to get the run around. Cathay kept moving us stickered passengers around the airport in a group, telling us that rooms would soon be available. They bought us dinner at a Burger King. Then two hours later they bought us another dinner at a Chinese buffet. Finally, at midnight Bart and I realized that we weren't getting a room, but Cathay was not going to tell us that. Somehow they thought that if they just kept us moving around the airport all night they wouldn't have to deal with the fact that they did not have enough rooms. Bart and I raised hell, and we got a room. We also discovered that there was an entire floor of empty rooms available at the airport hotel. We were given a room only because we were becoming a problem.

Neither Bart nor I slept however. We sat up and talked like we were in summer camp the entire night. I learned all about his life, his kids, and his family in the Philippines. I grilled him about places to eat in Manila. He told me about Chef Bruce who has a segment on Corazine Aquino's daughter's TV show. Chef Bruce goes all over the Philippines and does a kind of Bobby Flay Throw Down with traditional dishes. I'm not bugging the embassy to introduce me to him.

16 Hours of Flight Entertainment

2009-09-25T20:04:00.000-07:00

What do you do on a 16-hour flight? You sit. Then, if you feel like it, you stand. When you stand, you generally stand by the toilets. A steady stream of the four hundred plus passengers elbow past you entering and exiting. You nod and indicate that you’re not waiting in line. They nod back and disappear into the strange cubby toilet.

About six hours into the flight, after a double Eddie Murphy feature on the in-flight movie, the stewards and stewardesses frantically set up to deliver beverages of choice. By now, I’m made the acquaintance of my neighbor. He’s Ralph Nygeun from Boston. He’s on his way to Vietnam with his wife Rose and his one-year-old son John to visit family. Fortunately, John has slept most of the way. The plane is filled with families with mostly well-behaved small children.

As Ralph and I watch the attendants set up, someone across the aisle mentions that the team on the right is made up of the stewardesses, while the left is stewards. I nudge Ralph.

“A dollar on the women,” I suggest.

He surveys the teams and their carts. “Make it two.”

We smile and settle into watching the competition. The stewardesses get off to a fast start, but get hung up when a string passengers order white wine and they run out. The stewards surge ahead with mostly juices and sodas, which require only filling a cup of ice and setting it on the tray with a can. The tiny bags of miniature pretzels fly across. Both of these teams are fast and efficient, but it’s clear that the stewardesses won’t be able to recover.

I slide two bills over to Ralph. He tries to refuse them, but I remind him that this is the only fun I’m going to have in sixteen hours. If I don’t feel the pain of the loss, it would not have been worth it. He nods. He’s from Boston.

Settling into the boredom once again, I can’t help but reminisce on other races. This past summer my friend Richard Donnelly and I would wager on the mustard and ketchup races at Burlington’s Single A Lake Monster baseball games. For the uninitiated, a ketchup and mustard race is a seventh inning promotion where two little kids are chosen from the stands to dress in ketchup and mustard costumes and run around the bases. The kid who makes it around the bases first wins three pounds of McKenzie hot dogs.

Our wager was always two dollars. In an effort to be fare and not handicap the runners before the race, I always put my money on ketchup and Richard on mustard. I lost my two dollars every time. I only attended about five games this summer. Richard had season tickets so he played the race with whoever he was with. Ironically, at the games I did not attend, ketchup always won and Richard lost.

At each game I attended, during the lead up to the seventh inning, Richard and I would argue about who was the biggest loser. Since Richard went to more games than I, he asserted that he lost more times than me. I would counter with the fact that I always lost to the biggest loser, him, and so must be relegated to a lower level of loserdom than he could ever achieve no matter how many races he lost. By the seventh inning Richard would wave his beer, spilling it a little, and sagely (or drunkenly) object. He refused to accept this logic. By his own reasoning I could not assume his losses as my own, but must stand alone on my own losses. Thus, if I want to be loserier than him, I have to attend more games and lose more times. I would mutter that ketchup only lost when I bet on him, and we would end the discussion at an impasse.

As we cross the Pacific and near Hong Kong my arguments with Richard reminded me of the dugout canoe races last year between the Asafo Militia Companies of Cape Coast. During the Oguaa Afehye Fetu, one of the highlights of the weeklong festival is the canoe race on the Bakatue, or lagoon, celebrating the opening of the lagoon to fishing after a two week rest.

The companies raced three times. One team won the first two heats and another team one the third. The prize for the winner was one thousand cedis, about seven hundred dollars. At the end of the third race, the team that won this one insisted that they deserved the prize because they won the last race and so they were the most recent winners. The team that won two races insisted that they deserved the prize because they won the majority of heats. The argument almost came to blows until the chief decided that both Asafo companies would be awarded the prize. I hadn’t bet on any of the races because Kwesi, the teenage cousin of my Fanti teacher Rose, was escorting me, and he had no money. I probably would have chosen the team that won no races anyway.

The first thing I saw when I left the Hong Kong airport was a Hong Kong Jockey Club betting parlor. I was tempted to place a wager just for the pleasure of losing one more time.

Welcome!

2009-09-22T09:22:00.000-07:00

Hi Everyone,
This is a travel blog. Since I'm on the road several months out of the year, I thought I would formalize my travel commentary for those who have been receiving my posts over the past year. In two days, I'm off again. This time I'm going to the Philippines and Indonesia with a day stop in Hong Kong and Tokyo. Woohoo!