Chicken Gravy

Today, a creative writing student at the University of Alabama, Birmingham, told us that in her family, as in most white families in Alabama, there used to be members of the Klan. But we don't talk about this, she added coyly. When we asked the class if they'd written about that, if they thought it important for an Alabama writer to face that recent Birmingham past, one student said that she was afraid to say the wrong thing. Another student replied that she preferred to write about the good things in Alabama. Like going to church. Like her grandmother's chicken gravy. I noticed that there were no black students in the class --no future black writers to write about the Birmingham future, or past. As I listened to the students, I couldn't help remembering the photo that I'd seen this morning, on the front page of The Birmingham Times, of a black man hanging from a tree. A supposed suicide. The family of the dead man disagrees. Either way, no one in this class is going to write the story of a dead black man hanging from a tree. Maybe none of them even know about him. In this country, one student was still saying, we prefer to move forward, and not dwell on the past.

A Small Prayer for the Unflummoxed Beaver

so unmoved by the boat’s slow approach – the boat

drifting across the flat green acre of water; a small prayer

for these acres of water which, in the low light, seem firm;

the squirrels, however, are never fooled or taken in;

a small prayer for the squirrels and their unknowable

but perfect paths; see how they run across

the twisting highway of cedars, but never crash;

a small prayer for the cedars and their dead knees

dotting the water like tombstones;

a prayer for the cedar balls that break

as you touch them, and stain your fingers yellow,

and release from their tiny bellies the smell of old

churches, of something holy; a prayer for the holy

alligators; you owe them at least that;

just last night you thought of Hana and asked them

to pray with you (the prayers of alligators are potent);

at night the grass is full of their red and earnest eyes;

a prayer for the grass that alligators divide

in the shape of a never-ending S; you lean over

to gather it because your friend says it can be cooked

with salt and oil; she says in Burma it is called

Ka-Na-Paw; a prayer for the languages we know

this landscape by; a prayer for the fragile French

spoken by the bayou’s fat fishermen, the fat fishermen

who admit to the bayou, we all dying. You understand?

Savez? A prayer for the bayou and its bayouness

and the fabulously unflummoxed beaver,

so unmoved by the boat’s slow approach.

Food, Inc.

Evening, 10^th April 2011

Setting: Crazy ‘Bout Crawfish Cajun Café, Lafayette.

Eaters: Natasa, Vicente, Maddie, Billy, Kei, Khet, Alice

Things we ate in collective total, during the course of one meal:

Crayfish po boy

Sweet potato fries x 3 serves

Salad

Seafood gumbo

Deep fried corn

Cajun rice

Massive steak

Mashed potatoes

Chicken breast smothered with French fries

White garlic bread

Bourbon Street rice

Pork sausage

Atchafalaya seafood jumbalaya

Corn and chilli crab shu mu

Fried mushrooms

Fried alligator

Six large crabs

Two potatoes

Boiled corn

Deep fried oreos

Deep fried bread and butter pudding

Every travel blog has to have one of these entries about food, accompanied by photos which we will later attach. Those last two desserts brought us closer to our respective Deities in more ways than one.

Two Houses

The cemetery of New Orleans is what I think of this morning, a Sunday, standing outside Trinity Bible Church in Lafayette, Louisiana. I'm looking for some other place to shelter but all I see are fast food restaurants, a highway, and Trinity Bible's electric signboard ("Find us on Facebook!").

After nearly forty-five minutes, I had left the crisp, air-conditioned church where the Pastor was rowing powerfully through the stories of Moses, Joshua, the chosen people and their first step into the bounty of the promised land. "'I will give you every piece of land you step upon,'" the Pastor had said, intoning the voice of God. "The country you are about to conquer: Syria, Iraq, Palestine, Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, they're not going to just pack up their homes and go. There's going to be a war." The Pastor's face radiated triumphant sunshine. "God never reneges on a promise. It's not about how good Moses is. It's about the goodness of God. 'I will give you every place where you set your foot.' God promised the land."

Soon after, I had stood up and left. It was clear to me that this House was not mine. Left to my own devices I might pick a fight (once again), and so I chose the wiser path: to stand amongst the shiny cars in the parking lot rather than inside the belly of the Old Testament. As I pushed through the double doors, the Pastor's voice followed me via a sophisticated audio hook-up system: "To navigate properly, you have to keep your eyes on the Word."

While waiting in the parking lot outside, it's New Orleans that looms large in my mind. To protect them from the rising water, the dead in New Orleans are buried above ground; the concrete chambers stand in neat rows like a city of the dead. John Biguenet, who gave us this description, then directed our attention to the living--men and women rebuilding after the levees broke in 2005, and those without the means to come home.

"No American understands what happened here," he said. "They don't comprehend what it is to lose a city." Immediately after the catastrophe, New Orleans was occupied by Humvees, military and mercenaries, including Blackwater. "Everywhere you went," Biguenet says, "someone was holding a gun." Terrified of looters, the powers that be set their sights on American citizens.

On August 29, 2005, the levees of New Orleans were breached in more than 50 locations, a catastrophic disaster caused by design failures "so obvious and fundamental" that the United States Army Corps of Engineers would finally, after months of about-facing, admit some culpability. In Biguenet's play, Rising Water, a man and woman wake to find their bed surrounded by a foot of water. They climb upstairs, and then up to the attic, and finally through a vent--except that one of them, Sugar, can't get all the way through. The play ends with Camille on the roof and Sugar unable to free himself, waiting for help "that does not come". Rising Water has an innocence and ease which makes it all the more harrowing: how easy it is to be left behind. How easy it is to become detritus.

During the service this morning, the Pastor had spoken of how God parted the waters for Moses. "He stops the river upriver... what they're left with is dry land. 'I'm gonna give you the land.' God has not changed. The promises of God have not changed." The Pastor asks us to celebrate to the blessings of God's constancy. "You got to believe those things."

One of my fellow writers asked someone here why this catastrophe befell the residents of New Orleans. "That happens," she said, "to people who put their faith in institutions other than God."

In New Orleans, we had visited St. Bernard Parish and the Lower 9th Ward. We saw the houses not yet rebuilt six years after the levees broke; we saw abandoned hospitals, boarded up schools, and many, many empty lots. "This place," the otherwise chirpy tour guide had said, as we passed through a collapsed neighborhood, "is not coming back." Some homes still bore the insignia of a spraypainted X on their walls, marking the date military units arrived at the property, the existence or non-existence of toxic water, and the number of dead people and animals. Charlie Duff had entreated us: "If you see something that doesn't make sense, ask why."

Here is my question: how can there ever be a recovery if a place, a country, does not notice that there is anything to recover from?

Back In Gettysburg: ‘They’ and Civil War Memory

It is now awhile since we passed through Gettysburg, an unbelievably neat and tidy giant diorama, with straight lines, wide avenues in parts, cute awnings and clean streets that disturbed my urban chaotic psyche. I invariably looked for some of the crazy energy, that ‘institutional’ madness of the ‘Afro-urban’ modern space, ‘cosmo-natives’ and their ‘life-energy’ and their dismissal of architecture, and the material. Gettysburg refused to indulge me. Between older spruced up buildings that had metal identity plates that said ‘Civil War History’, stood T-shirt and Civil War paraphernalia shops and possibly the biggest commercial game in town, ghost-tour offices. 
 

Next to this Disney-like apparition lay the memorial Gettysburg battlefield, green sweeping lawns sprinkled with all sorts, shapes and sizes of monuments, uneven dragon’s teeth. Giant grand figures on concrete horses, small and large headstones with memorabilia dotted this grand static vista open to a multitude of possible interpretations and mental re-enactments of America’s ‘Great War’, narratively, and in places, politically perpetually contested since it took place. American memory seems addicted to the epic form, and I felt its pull. Standing before the sweeping physicality of the actual battle-field, I expected hordes of old soldiers to appear before my eyes, horses to start galloping and the noise, heat and dust that re-enacters try and summon every year, that ghosts spotters claim to see every night, to come to life. Later that evening, I entered a tavern with waitresses dressed like 19^th Century maids, dead strips of ermine and mink decorated the walls. I wanted the ‘porridge’ on the menu but one of my fellow writers pointed out the fine print – the porridge was really soup, gruel. There was little heat, noise and dust in present-day Gettysburg as some wit described the whole American Civil War - but the present there tries to pull all the stops to re-live whatever can be transacted. At least for the 1 million visitors that go there every year. 

In a place where a ‘nasty, untidy, brutal’ war (in the words of our guide) was fought, everything seemed anaesthesticised. Gettysburg College was also a patchwork of green lawns, brick buildings with high ceilings, and pretty co-eds. Spring though delayed came through in the afternoons. All this did not lighten the shadow of weighty history. Our writer's attended a senior creative non-fiction workshop and encountered the largest possibly indifferent social group in Gettysburg to its grand ‘history’ - college students from elsewhere in America. One female student said the general attitude on campus to the ‘Civil War’ scene in town was that it was ‘cheesy’. As we discussed the challenges of ‘point of view’ in creative non-fiction and fiction, a male student observed that there was such a surfeit of knowledge of the Civil War in present-day Gettysburg that it was both ‘nutty’ and intimidating. And it's whole body of knowledge was held by a fearful and anonymous entity that the student described as ‘they’. ‘They’, he said, knew where every single body from the war is buried. So, all the students came to Gettysburg, imbibed a lot of Civil War information, and went back home to educate family and friends. These comments were mere footnotes to the session, the Civil War divided us; our writer’s group had travelled because of it and the students seemed shut out by its proximity. Even for writing it seemed faraway and forbidding to them. 

When I explained a piece that I had sent before-hand to the students, I later realized that the session was particularly fruitful, an excellent conversational exercise in cross-purposes, a micro-Gettysburg redux. I told the students, somewhat facetiously, that I came from a place where the difference between fiction and non-fiction was that I could be sued for the latter. That, the ‘truths’ of fiction and ‘facts’ of non-fiction could be used inter-changeably to say what I needed to say about where I come from. I realize now that this might have been of little significance to those students. The historical weight of the American Civil War, a huge institution in such proximity, could satiate natural curiosity to an endpoint, blur against one’s own ‘individual’ narrative concerns in non-fiction. And that Gettysburg’s T-shirt shops, ghost tours might close one to the absurd or comic art. Somebody in our group fortuitously reminded us at the end of the Gettysburg visit that being in one place for a day can produce a novel, being there for a week, a short story, and that it becomes impossible to write anything about a place after one has been there for a year. But what happens if the memory of a place or event has always been with you one way or the other through in ongoing never-ending ways, has become many things to many men for many ages. What can one write about it and how does this work with all the others struggling to do the same. That seems the struggle with the memory of the American Civil War. 

Ch-ch-changes

Breaux Bridge, Louisiana -- This blur of American cities. In the last five days, we've gone from the battlefields of Gettysburg to urban Baltimore to the French Quarter to the post-flood landscape of New Orleans to an unused oil rig in Morgan City to Cajun country in Louisiana. But we've been very fortunate to have excellent local guides and resource persons, to put what we're experiencing into some context.

At this point, one of the overarching themes that seems to be emerging out of this tour is change and how individuals and societies choose to respond to it.

In Baltimore, noted preservationist Charles Duff gave us a startling glimpse of the contrasts in the city by way of architecture. First through genteel neighborhoods with rows of elegant tall and narrow houses that evoke London and New York. Streets are clean, facades are painted, foliage is healthy and well-maintained. Then, mere blocks away, the terrifying sight of similar rows of houses, but with windows darkened, boarded up, and broken, roofs and ceilings fallen in, empty lots where houses had once stood. So great was the difference between East and West Baltimore that it was hard to believe that we were seeing not just the same city, but the same urban center.

From Mr. Duff's commentary, it was clear that he wanted nothing more than to restore the city to its former glory, even if it meant bringing in more immigrants to populate these areas abandoned by their former tenants for the suburbs.

On the set of Treme in New Orleans, show creator David Simon expressed similar views, agreeing that larger socioeconomic forces had caused Baltimore to decline. He also expressed a desire to see New Orleans restored to the vibrant cultural center that it was before the tragedy of the levees, saying that it was important to preserve the culture that was so important to the character of New Orleans.

Change is difficult, often painful. I believe human beings are essentially creatures of habit, seeking out the comfort of the same and the routinary as a way of imposing order upon chaos. In his columns for the New York Times, New Orleans native John Biguenet writes poignantly of the wrenching decisions that had to be made in the aftermath of the flood in New Orleans -- should he and his wife return to the familiar life he had built over the years, or start completely anew? He tells of Spanish moors exiled to North Africa who hung the keys to their old homes in Spain on the front doors of their new homes, believing in their hearts that their families would one day return. Mr. Biguenet also told of a New Orleans coffees shop destroyed by the flood, whose loyal patrons (himself included) brought their own coffee and paper to the site and enjoyed their morning routine there until the cafe reopened. The familiar grounds and centers people, provides them with a stable base from which to branch out and develop in new directions, or can lull them into stasis. But progress seems impossible to bring about in a state of flux.

On the "disaster tour" of New Orleans, the tour guide diligently pointed out homes and buildings that had since been rebuilt, and those that had not. The latter were evidenced by structures in decay, or by empty lots, a glaring absence where there had once been presence. The recurring theme of her commentary was "coming back," indicating her desire to see the spaces as they once were.

But do things need to come back, and do they need to come back in exactly the same form as before? A disaster can wipe the slate clean, and the terrible blankness also signifies endless possibility. In mythology, orphans are powerful symbols, the mystery of their origins suggesting they could have come from anywhere -- even royalty or the heavens -- and that, more importantly, they could become anything, unbound as they are by the limitations of any history.

Do Baltimore and New Orleans have to return to their former selves? Or can they be unfettered, allowed to grow in directions more appropriate for the changes wrought by nature, economics, politics, social upheaval, and time?

-- Vicente Garcia Groyon

On Blacks & Birds & Bayous

This wasn’t meant to be a postcolonial rant, but I cannot think of yesterday without thinking about the stories that don’t get told enough, the stories of ‘others’. Or to put it in the proper grammar of PoCo theory: the story of The Other. We do the ‘disaster tour’ through the city of New Orleans and our guide’s utterly unwitting racism is as hard to stomach as it is fascinating to listen to. We drive through black neighbourhood after black neighbourhood, and she tuts as we pass the ruined, abandoned houses (why don’t they just tear them down!). When we drive through white neighbourhood after white neighbourhood, her reaction is notably different. Her face is now almost pressed against the window of the bus, and she is cooing: Oh look at the pretty neighbourhood! Oh, this was such a good area. Yes, yes – it was a real upscale area. Look how lovely it is. And look, look at that house over there! Oh thank god they’ve restored it! It’s so big and pretty. It looks almost like a plantation. (Really, you can’t make this shit up.)

Still, I don’t blame her. The world is like this, and has been like this for some time. Often the story of the black man is only that -- the story of the black man. So too the story of the black woman, or of the black community, or of the Pakistani woman, or of the Pakistani community, and so on. The story of the white man, however, is more easily the story of Everyman. A universal story. And most movies too are just movies, until it has a black cast – then it becomes a black movie. And most books are just books, unless, let’s say, it’s about Indian people – then it becomes an Indian novel. But it’s hard to say these things with any freshness, or even with any passion. They’ve been said so many times.

I listen to this tour guide who I imagine is a perfectly nice woman on most days, and who maybe has grandchildren who she bakes warm bread pudding for on Sundays. She doesn’t mean to feel the heartbreak and triumph of one story, and to callously dismiss another. But this is what she does. She tells us despairingly of the predominantly black community: they don’t even have proper signs! I look out the window of the bus, and it’s true. Many of the signs on the streets ‘Children At Play’ ‘Slow’ ‘Bumpy Road Ahead’ have been hand-painted on discarded bits of wood. But I find it strange that she sees no beauty in this – that she doesn’t understand this as a way the community is fighting to come back.

Then she says something (I don’t see it coming) and just like that I crash with despair. I realize that all day I had been hearing another extraordinarily tragic story, and I didn’t even know that I was hearing it because no one was consciously telling it. But all day this other story was raising its hand; all day it was trying to raise its voice; all day it was squawking – listen to this. You haven’t heard this one yet!

You see, she drives through one of the pretty neighbourhoods and tells us, ‘This was supposed to have been a bird sanctuary, but it never became that. You will see that the roads all have the names of birds.’ I am stunned. I look through the window and now I cannot see the white community, or even the black community. I can only see another population that used to live here – a community of birds and a community of bayous. She tells us there used to be over 90 bayous in New Orleans. All except one has been filled in. So hey, let’s talk about places that have faced disaster. Let’s talk about communities that have been wiped out. There are more of them than we acknowledge.

I admit, I often find myself looking for the ‘human’ story that hasn’t been told enough. But maybe sometimes the most profoundly silenced story, the story of the most desperate Other, is the story of nature – this thing that man has so successfully separated himself from that the two are now usually billed as if in a wrestling match: Man VERSUS Nature.

On this tour through the disaster zones of New Orleans, our guide keeps pointing to empty lots, to empty shopping centres, to the empty hospitals, and saying, ‘I don’t think that’s coming back either. It’s hard to tell what’s coming back and what isn’t.’ I know I shouldn’t anthropomorphize, but I wonder if in their own language, birds have been having similar conversations. Maybe for many more years they have been looking down on their homes that have been cut down, on their swamps that have been filled in, and maybe this whole city for them is a disaster zone. Maybe they wonder, despairingly, if the bayous might ever come back.

So here is another difficult question I am asking: when nature hit this city hard, when the hurricane came, and the lake poured over – did the birds cheer? And when they tell us mournfully that on the map Louisiana is changing every day – that the cartographers can barely keep up because two football fields worth of land will have fallen into the Atlantic by the time you’ve finished reading this – what should we feel about it all? Is this not the fierce wet of nature claiming back the 90 bayous that were filled in? Shakespeare writes of humans, ‘If you poison us do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?’ Maybe this is also true of nature.

One last thing: our guide tells us that after the water subsided, sunflowers rose up all around the city. She says this was because the flustered birds had dropped the seeds everywhere. I think maybe the sunflowers are just like those hand-painted signs she had dismissed earlier; maybe the birds were trying to replant their own cities.

We pass another ramshackle house. It is rotting and the vines are creeping in. Our guide tells us, ‘The last thing we need is for the place to get wild, with vermin and all those creatures taking over!’

-Kei Miller

Executing History

When I went to Cambodia for the first time last year, my father was going to go with me to Tuol Sleng, the death prison that used to be an old primary school. In Tuol Sleng faces stare at you from the walls, photographs of prisoners before execution. Not just men, but women with babies, children. Some of the faces have blood noses, others have an eyeball almost beaten out of socket, all are still alive but know they are going to die.

We never went in, never even came close to seeing the prison. Halfway there, and entirely unrelated to our visit, I vomited in my uncle’s car. I was just dehydrated, unaccustomed to the climate. The chauffeur drove us straight back to the air-conditioned comfort of my uncle’s bank, where my auntie sighed and said, “see, you shouldn’t visit such bad places. The bad spirits have gotten to you.” They took me instead to the Royal Palace with its floor of silver tiles, to Angkor Wat with its apsaras flying all over the columns, and to their private beach at Sihanouk hotel. They wanted me to see recovery, not annihilation.

Yet how do I know about what is in Tuol Sleng prison? How can I describe the photographs, the bloodstains on the floor, the hairs stuck to the iron railings of the torture beds? These images are readily available to anyone – even a seven year old – if you entered in the right google terms. What makes the eyeballs of us writers more legitimate? The fact that we are more articulate? What makes historical suffering more ‘real’ than historical ‘joy’? I really liked Kei’s tongue-in-cheek line, “Blessed are the poor for they shall inherit reality.” Why do we get to define reality for the poor and oppressed, to interpret their desire for lives of material comfort?

What if all my genocide-surviving father wants to do is invest in a string of properties back home and confine himself in a leady cul-de-sac suburb, happily believing that the worst thing that could happen to me as a writer is a paper cut, grateful I was brought up in a country where I would have a wealth of words to bend and mould into innocuous nice-sounding sentences?

But let me think about a different kind of writing (one in which I can never do for my lack of life experience); where each word is carefully mustered by a prod to the small of its back, assembled with precision, not artistry; and pushed into the firing line. A tree is simply a tree, though a gun might be something else. The kind of writing that comes from a writer living in the immediate midst of everything we are studying. One of our writers has been in prison, so I suppose secretly I am glad we’re not going to visit Birmingham jail. For some of us, this trip is visceral, for others it’s spiritual and others still, we see places that make your insides feel like they’ve been scooped out with a spoon.

I felt this way in Gettysburg, standing on the battlefields, in a way I had not felt in any other place before on this trip. Almost exactly a year ago, I was standing in another empty field, this time in Cambodia. This field had red dust and yellow sand, not green grass; and it was the field where my father buried the dead starvation bodies under the Khmer Rouge, when the floods came. There were no markers, no bones, just dust. “Human fertiliser,” my father said, “is probably the best in the world, because the following year after we buried the bodies, when the rice grew, it grew twice as high.” Yes, they planted rice on the same field. A human life was compost, and before it was compost it was a slave of the revolution.

I have loved reading the other blog entries of my fellow travellers. This blog was inspired by the last three entries of my friends and fellow writers, ‘Life Goes on or rather’, ‘On the Realness of Places’, and ‘Thoughts from Gettysburg.’ I may post again later from my current location, Lafayette, Louisiana. But these are my morning thoughts, after a full week of travel.

Thoughts from Gettysburg

The area can be seen as bright and yellowish today although it once had been a bloody red spot over one hundred years ago. Gettysburg city in Pennsylvania is shining under the radiant spring sun most of the time, daffodils and clusters of saffron bell-flowers that bloom in large amounts make me feel warmer. Covered in bright and yellow colors, the area has the sense of warmness while the actual atmosphere is still a bit chilly. I am perceiving warmness in my heart in such a chilly spot. This place was the setting of a crucial turning point in American history: 8,900 people were dead and 22,000 became disabled in this very area. At the time being, it hosts millions of tourists and visitors annually.

Peter Carmichael, who ushers us into the area, is a professor in civil war study and director of Civil War Institute. He introduced himself as an Ohioan. But his keenness to explain to us about Gettysburg is probably superior even to the locals, I think. He explained how the Army of Northern Virginia (the Confederacy) commanded by Gen. Robert E. Lee and soldiers from the Army of the Potomac (the Union) commanded by Gen. George G. Meade were marching, mentioned the geographical surroundings so that we can visualize the whole event. In every prominent place, he told us the story of the person who belongs to that place and read us a letter of an American soldier who was involved in American Civil War, sent to his family. Then we found ourselves standing in accurate spot that was blanketed in blood during the war, imagining true tragedies, empathizing with the authentic characters of the Civil War story.

The battlefield zone which was one of the important events within the Civil War is wide four acres proximately. In these bare four acres, a single battle occurred from 1 to 3 July. The total toll of dead and wounded of the Civil War was as much as a million. ‘Love for nation, they fought and they died ’, I remember the sentence among the many other words told by Peter.  

Although the yellow flowers are blossoming, the trees are still in their bony figures. I am standing in such a place, learning about its blood-stained past and I start to reminisce about my native land where the leaves are green throughout the whole twelve months, the sun shines throughout the whole year. Our native land suffered civil war as well. The people of the same country have to kill each other, these sorts of battles are continuing in our native land. The ethnic groups of the country, particularly from north-east and south-east were attacked by the military junta. In my country, there is not a single day that is not stained by a drop of blood due to battles or land mines. It has been many years; the people from our native land have persistently passed away in silence. The number of refugees who fled to neighboring countries has reached the millions.

I am standing on a bloody spot searching the souls whose bodies were destroyed here,  feeling melancholy. My current presence is thousands miles apart from my native land. I have to note, in both my brain and my heart, how many Americans fought for their mother country, how many died and wounded in the war, which force marched from where and another force had to withdraw by which path and so on. But I am absent in my native land where my closest of kin were destroyed. I haven’t the slightest idea how many were killed there, how many were wounded and when it began. To this point, I feel upset and a bitterness that I am not sure to whom it is directed.

In the battle of Gettysburg, people had to sacrifice their lives, and it resulted in the ending of slavery. Learning from the past failures, it was such a turning point with recovering processes leading to a better future. Its cost was enormous while its historical value also was noteworthy. By maintaining and valuing such a historical place, the next generations have the chance to catch a glance at the history, sense magnitude, and engage in evaluative thinking. Plus, attracting the millions of annual visitors means it also has the practical advantage of avoiding destitution.

We still have to sacrifice many lives in our country though it cannot end any unjust system or any misdeed yet. We are even ignorant of accurate figures of the destruction; let alone recovering from the decline and fall. As long as such places exist, our dream to create the peaceful earth would still be our daydream.

Khet Mar

Translated from the Burmese by Tazar

For the original version, go to http://moemaka.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=8611&Itemid=1

On Splinters and Floods

My friend and mentor often tells me this story – of being allowed back into his office after the bomb had hit Manchester. The IRA blast meant that his publishing house, Carcanet, was closed off, even to him, for months. So what he tells me is this – that for years after he would take a book down from the shelf, open it, and splinters would fall out.

John Biguenet is talking to us in New Orleans. He is talking about levees and lakes and not about Katrina. The difference, he says, is important. It was Lake Pontchartrain that hit, not the hurricane. It gets emotional and is a lot to take in, but one image stands out for me. Again – it is the books. These, destroyed. And heavy, John tells us. You would not believe how heavy a library of soaked books can be.

I am thinking now about books that hold on to the basic evidence of disasters – splinters, and ounces of lake water. I am thinking too, what does it mean to write a book that could drown you, a page that could cut your fingers?

Life goes on, or rather...

We tend to believe that things are replaceable. Our clothes last hardly a season or two, we throw away eternal lasting plastic dishes as soon as we quench our hunger. By tomorrow, everything we have will appear in a better, smaller, more perfect version. The only problem is that we slowly start to believe that people can be replaced much the same way. No doubt, our job could be certainly done equally well by many others. There are also those waiting in a line to jump into our lives, to love our lovers, take our kids to kindergartens, put their clothes into our closets.

Because whatever happens, life goes on… There are very few things so encouraging and yet so frightening as knowing that there is so much truth in a well-worn phrase that life goes on. Sometimes slowly and painfully, with hesitance, other times easily and energetically, without fear, but one stands up after falling down. And then what. We shake it off, count our loses and move on. We round off casualties to the nearest number (History rounds off skeletons to zero, a thousand and one is still only a thousand …). On anniversaries, we pay our respect, fix what’s broken and quickly put on the mask of normality. We hail the recovery as a sign of strength. Should a tear appear after some time, we’ll quickly wipe it away, secretly, with a feeling of uneasiness…

One can have a pleasant time in New Orleans oblivious of what happened here six years ago. The city has been given a makeover for tourists, it has put on a smile, opened its shops and restaurants, offering souvenirs, massage, sightseeing tours. New Orleans again gives what everyone has come for – a place of great and unlimited fun where one can smoke in bars, listen to the street music and be free. The Music Festival is on and the French Quarter is swarming with people. Old people dance passionately in front of the stage looking as if the faith in flower power has never died. A group of people are laughing under a small tree, talking shelter from the warm spring sun: they’re wearing cheerful red lobster hats on their heads. Beautiful students dressed up in a carefully careless way, moving their hips in the rhythm of the music. Life triumphs. There is no yesterday. We don’t look backwards.

This abundance of colors, aromas and sounds, a sunny day that always makes the world look more beautiful, all that fights against the gloomy thoughts and calls for oblivion. Amnesia is healing, it makes life easier. How else could we live. On a day like this, how would it feel to think about which one of those nice and hospitable people, a few years ago, was the first to make step towards bestiality, the first to pull the gun. And who was standing hopelessly on the roof, with no one to expect.

Blissful in our forgetfulness we taste gumbo, throw coins to street musicians, drink cocktails and expose our pale bodies to the warm sun for the first time this year. And everything is happening for the first time. It is the power of life that makes sprouts break through the earth in April which indeed is the cruelest month. The explosion of that magnificent cruelty is happening before our own eyes. All the way in the corner of the picture, a young mother with ample bust is feeding her baby on a lawn, they’re both unperturbed by the noisy clamor around them. Relentless and unstoppable, life goes on… The shivers going down the spine of a bystander may just be those of excitement over the power of nature and not of bewilderment and horror.

On the Realness of Places

Now this isn’t a paid advertisement – but I’ve always liked Hugh Ferrer. He is (I guess) one of our chaperones – one of the organizers of this trip through America. And his has always been a genuine pleasantness, never over-performed or disproportionately eager. Strange for an American. And his is an intellect that never patronizes, is always willing to engage and to push. So when he checks us into the hotel, and he asks the man at the desk, quite seriously, if there are places we should avoid – and the man at the desk, quite seriously, tells us we best not go anywhere in that direction (oooh no, you best avoid that area) and Hugh, who also used to live in New Orleans begs us to avoid wandering even a block over on the left, I know this isn’t an attempt to be over-protective or anything. And yet, I know myself. I know that in the morning, that’s exactly where I'll be heading.

The signs on the road that I decide to take seem designed to say, You're making a mistake, Kei. At your age, you should give up this kind of childish rebelliousness. In pairs, the signs tell me DO NOT ENTER, twice. Of course, I enter. One block, two blocks, three blocks in.

And no, nothing dangerous happened. I’m sure it could have. Someone could have snatched my camera or my bag. But it didn’t happen.

And no, nothing transcendent happened either. No one invited me up on the porch to eat some boiled crayfish and to tell me how they were so glad that a nice young man like me had come through, coz people mostly avoided the area.

The place was just a place in its own way. And the people were just people in their own way. And the houses were just houses in their own way.

And no, I didn’t feel as if I was suddenly seeing the REAL New Orleans. I’ve been suspicious of that particular discourse for a while. A friend recently asked me – ‘what is it like writing about Jamaica without having grown up in the real Jamaica?’ I stuttered. I told him I was sorry, but that before his question, I never knew my whole life was made-up. I grew up in a house in Jamaica, went to school and University in Jamaican, had Jamaican friends, still travel on a Jamaican passport, but somehow this was all made up – matrix-style.

Of course I knew what he meant – it’s that old compulsion to elevate the lives of the poor as actual lives. Here is a new beatitude for you: Blessed are the poor, for they shall inherit reality. Everyone else is disinherited, even from their own countries.

In truth, every place in this world has so many concurrent realities happening at the same time. Even the touristy bits of New Orleans are their own realities. I spend the rest of the day walking through these bits – the beautiful ramshackle of the French Quarters. And later in the day I am on the set of the HBO post-Katrina series, Treme. How is that for walking in and out of reality?

All the shops in the French Quarter are of course trying to convince you of their realness. They offer real Cajun cuisine and authentic voodoo dolls rather than tourist trinkets. And that reminds me -- I’m probably doomed to a bit of bad luck I’m afraid. In one of these stores I accidentally touch a voodoo altar despite signs that expressively warned me not to. I hadn’t seen them. The woman behind the counter shouts at me, her voice like a whip. Don’t touch that, please! It’s real! It’s real.

-Kei Miller

The Imagined Community

From Baltimore, we have landed into the heat of New Orleans, into music, reconstruction, and the middle of a film set: Treme, David Simon's series set three months after Hurricane Katrina, now filming its second season.

For the first time on our journey, life elides into art. A New Orleans night club, The Blue Nile, plays itself. The gorgeous Wanda Rouzan is bluesing up the stage. Cameras roll, scenes are acted and then re-enacted, New Orleans is dismantled and then rebuilt as drama: Wendell Pierce waiting on the sidelines, speaks his lines to himself; Wendell Pierce metamorphosing into Antoine Batiste, strides up on stage, trombone in hand.

Later on, someone in our group makes an observation: behind the cameras on Treme, she says, is an all-white production team; meanwhile African American actors, musicians, and extras are directed like chess pieces across the set. This says something, she contends, about power structures, about who tells the story, and how the story gets told. Against my better judgment, I pick a fight. For me, Treme is a moving collaboration between an artistic vision, a city's reality, and a community's regeneration. The series is both a story and a city in progress, and music is its continuity. I make my argument (inchoately, most likely, thanks to the drink in my hand), and then we agree to disagree.

Collapsed in my drink, I think of Charlie Duff who yesterday led us on an intricate, profound, and troubling journey down both the gracious avenues and modern ruins of Baltimore City. Race relations in America, he said, do not bring out the best in anyone. What we need, he argued, is an "atmosphere of equality", we need to find a way beyond the current demarcations. In 1962, after black Americans had begun buying homes in white neighborhoods, Baltimore City bought a street and demolished the buildings. Why? To create a "fire break", to stop the "fire" from spreading. Crossing this demarcation, this boundary, was designed to be unpleasant.

Later on, we stand with David Simon on Decatur Street, where production crew, extras, residents and tourists move in nebulae along the pavement. He tells us how life has fed his art, how he went from being a newspaperman to a dramatist, how he found a route, via fiction, to talk about what matters to him. Treme, he tells us, is about how New Orleans is rebuilding itself, and how culture is one of the avenues by which it is traveling back. He tells us that The Wire and Treme are about ordinary people and that the stakes are human scale. "It sounds small compared to 24," he tells us, laughing. He says he intends to tell the story of what's there, what's here, but he does not expect it to change anything.

Back on the film set, a tall beauty in golden stilettos walks across The Blue Nile. A slender man dangles two bottles of beer by their necks. They do this over and over again, each time a little better, a little more perfectly themselves. When I look at Wendell Pierce, I can't help but see both Bunk Moreland and Antoine Batiste, Baltimore and New Orleans. Fiction has a value. If some vision of these two cities, past and future, doesn't exist in the imagination, human scale, will anyone fight to bring the cities back?

Too Important

I know this isn’t a travel log, or that it isn’t supposed to be. But anything you write as you travel becomes just that --a kind of fragmented diary of the places you visit and the people you meet. Thinking comes later. Reflection comes later. Now you just travel while trying to keep your eyes open and your step firm and your coffee warmer than your clichés. You go to the battlefields of Gettysburg, and everything there --the trees, the monuments, the crowds of tourists, the t-shirt shops and ghost tours-- makes you feel like a cynic. You’ve been there before. Perhaps in a high-school field trip. Perhaps with your parents. Perhaps through history books. You’ve already seen those fields and monuments. You’ve already heard the stories of Lee, and Meade, and Pickett’s charge. But now, suddenly, through the smoke and noise of a theme park, you sense it. There it is. You can’t yet name it, but you know it’s there, and you decide to hide it away somewhere so you won’t have to sense it too much, or talk about it, or even think about it, and you drive down to Baltimore. You also know about Baltimore. You’ve been to Baltimore before. You start walking through the streets of west Baltimore. You see all the boarded-up houses: blocks and blocks of abandoned houses. You take a few snapshots. There’s no one there. You think of dead bodies decomposing. And there it is again. Unavoidable. Unmistakable. Now you have to see it. You have to write it down in your travel log. You have no choice. It’s too large, too ominous, too important.

Eduardo Halfon

The War Anew In Baltimore

I first travelled to Baltimore through the ‘The Wire’. This was a Baltimore, somewhat of the ‘popular’, safe from afar because of its mediated dangers and shared by hundreds who had never actually visited or will visit the city. It was a Baltimore of certain frames, T.V sets: the gritty docks, boarded-up street exteriors and corners, a canvas that became the larger inner city – universe of ‘The Wire’. So I ‘know’ the Wire’s battle-weary cynical but ever-intense cops, sociopathic well-rounded gang-banger ‘street outdoor’ types, aggressive bureaucrats, and slick-drawl politicians in heavily carpeted ‘jungle’ interiors.
I am lucky but more knowing – I will never see ‘The Wire’ only through the eye of a ‘crime reporter’s with a feeling for sociology' again now that I have been in the city over the last two days. I have walked on, been driven and talked through Baltimore’s other key landscapes beyond the ‘The Wire’s camera lens; the pretty chi-chi brick-paved Fell Point waterfront, the oldest Catholic cathedral in America (an uncanny life-like dove flutters in a ceiling reaching the heavens, the gentrified leafy swathes of brick-front Victorian apartments that retain a feel of a London without its grey and low skies.
About 150 years of Baltimore’s ages interlock; 1960’s modern apartments and State government blocks also stray into my mediated lens from The Wire; a Baltimore that is a much slower movie with less project-browns and concrete grays। Not unlike the D।C and New York’s Harlem and Brooklyn, cities that spilled over with immigrant ethnicities and African-Americans over the last hundred years, it is a History Channel whose drama is one of evident tensional temporalities। The Wire’s gritty pixels and brilliant characterization loses the spread of a wider map, the stretch and context of the City’s history.
Mapped and spread out, Baltimore is also the material manifestation of the tug of hundreds of years of capitalism spiked with white superiority till the Civil Rights movement with all its attendant exclusions and inclusions. There are bonsai exercises in aesthetic aspiration, miniature gardens, small parks, and squares just as there are grand continental squares from the City’s European historical roots. There is a 2-mile highway that leads and comes from nowhere, an ill-advised attempt to build escape routes into the suburbs in the 1950s for a white middle-class, with the promise of freedom from racial integration many years after the end of war that had fought for that same exact goal. The Battle Of Gettysburg is just an hour’s drive away – and the Baltimore suburbs are both its hinterland and also the city’s if for different reasons with connotations within America’s racial history. If blood was spilt for Lincoln’s grander multi-racial vision for America on those grand battlefields that include Gettysburg, the city’s center is partially what it is because of a racial hysteria and fleeing from the center by a white middle class between since the 1940s. The automobile also helped ruin Baltimore’s core just as its slow adaptation to a post-industrial world.
And so I came into Baltimore from Gettysburg where our guide into American Civil history had prepared a thick dossier of military maps that showed strategy, movement, thrust and parry, relative positions of combatant regiments and so on. The dossier also contained letters that have unique individual sketches of those 3 days that were fought there during the American Civil in the month of July 1863. And after I toured the Baltimore I describe, I felt that I required a 3-dimensional map like the Gettysburg military showcase with letters from Baltimore over time that would tell a bit more of the City’s history denoting things like land tenure and property ownership, inter-ethnic migration, micro-economic patterns within the blocks of the city and macro-economics relative to America’s East. This would help explain Linden Avenue, where 1500 houses were destroyed in 1962 to create a colour barrier, a fire-break as described in public record and that now separates Baltimore as a racial and economic divide. One requires that kind of map too to explain Lafayette Avenue, one of the main streets through the city, both kaleidoscope and vertebrae into all these various historical ages and economic present(s).
West Baltimore is ‘Wire’ territory, if not worse in some parts, the main black district thoroughfare and commercial street holds bailbond offices, cheque-cashing stalls and the odd T-shirt outlet with unrecognisable labels. East Baltimore though is on the up and where most of 'The Wire' was shot too and that says it all, mostly. Only that there are definitely more people on sets the ‘Wire’s streets, I saw only solitary figures float by out in West Baltimore. Years ago, a bargain ‘dollar’ sale was held not far from the West, crumbling houses were offered on auction, sold and restored into what is one of Batimore’s finest areas। I attended a neighborhood meeting in up-market residential Baltimore and the minutiae of household/street economies discussed showed glimpses into the process called ‘gentrification’ beyond such emergency interventions. What trashcans to use, how to handle dog-shit was discussed by home-owners amongst other macro-problems. But at the other end, trash is evidently the least of concerns for ‘slum-lords’ who I guess will stall any emergency bargain sales required to save West Baltimore. And so ‘gentrification’ and the slum lord fight over Baltimore in a new separatist war.
—Billy Kahora

On Places That Vanish

Baltimore(Day 2)

Our guide, Charlie, is a nostalgic. Though saying it like that might give you the wrong impression. Yes, the man does love the city -- loves it with an incredible love; and yes, he remembers its past -- remembers it beyond his own memory. For when he tells you about Baltimore in 1862, it's as if he is talking about his childhood (oh this house used to be so wonderful then, the windows were draped in red, and it smelt of grandpa’s cigar). But Charlie’s nostalgia isn’t the kind that is content to just daydream. There is serious knowledge underpinning it; academic degrees too; and years of struggle that have been worthwhile, that have seen parts of the city change for the better. And also, behind the nostalgia is a pragmatism that doesn’t waste time being optimistic about the bits of the city that are slowly dying, and that cannot be stopped from dying. Though this is what fascinates me – just the fact of it - that sections of a city can die, and can begin to vanish.

I have seen places like Baltimore before – but they were never cities. Last summer I found myself driving around Jamaica and visiting villages tucked away, behind the red bauxite roads. The new industrial roads exposed them, but they had always been there, deep in the mountains of St. Ann. And some of these villages had fancy names like Alexandria or Thebes, as if they once had the ambition to be somewhere worth mentioning. But their names were a mockery, for I understood then that villages (just like people, and just like entire species of animals) die. To drive through the vanishing villages of Jamaica was almost the same as sitting by the bed of your uncle whose skin has turned grey, who is now on a high dose of morphine. The dying has already set in; you cannot stop it.

In those mountain villages in Jamaica, there were houses that no longer had people to live in them. Perfectly good houses -- but they were boarded up and had begun to rot. And this is what West Baltimore is like. Boarded up houses. Emptied. Dying. The statistics are staggering. 15,000 empty houses in the city. I thought before that the problem of urban centres was ALWAYS overcrowding. People living on top of people; everyone living on top of diseases. I never knew before that those people could just up and leave with no one else to move back in - the city, waiting on a population that is never coming.

I cannot think about Baltimore without thinking about the villages in Jamaica that so moved me – that made me nostalgic, that made me remember them beyond the thirty year limit of my memory. One day soon, I want to write a book about them – these villages that are not only tucked away in the mountains, but that will soon be buried there, to be discovered maybe a thousand years from now by a bright archaeologist. And I imagine in this future that someone will be surprised, just as those who walk around any excavated temple or palace is surprised, that entire places really do vanish, going deep down under the earth like the rest of the dead. I’m not asking for these villages to come back or be renewed or be gentrified (if villages, like rotting cities, can be gentrified). I just want to write a proper eulogy for them – and to say that the things that will be buried with them, those little bits of our culture – anansi stories, rolling calf stories, the recipe for dukkunu, a real nine-night service that doesn’t become a street-dance complete with tall loud-speakers stealing electricity from JPS – it isn’t foolish, or backward, or unhealthy to be a little sad that they are going the way of the villages.

I’m glad that Charlie is here to be sad for Baltimore -(not wailing in sackcloth and ashes, not histrionic or anything, just a little bit sad) - for the parts of this city that are vanishing. I am glad that he is here to mourn the crumbling Victorian architecture, the cornices, the high windows. I want to be sad for it too, but I can’t really. Because these bits of concrete suddenly seem to me, no more real than the other things I’m thinking about – the bits of peasant culture that we let die every day. Part of me feels that cities ought not to protest their deaths, for the life of every city has caused the death of a hundred or so villages. And that’s just the way of things, goddammit. Places die. They vanish. Everything that rises, falls.

-Kei Miller

Memorials, grieving, transcendence

Gettysburg, Pennsylvania -- Spring hasn't quite arrived here, so the trees stand bare, the sky is more gray than blue, and a biting wind whips across the fields as we visit significant sites in the Battle of Gettysburg. It's Monday, and Gettysburg National Military Park is quiet and uncrowded. Our guide, the historian Peter Carmichael of Gettysburg College, is energetic and emphatic, helping us to locate our positions on maps of the battle and to visualize troop and artillery movements across a landscape of gently rolling knolls and ridges just starting to return to their usual green. Occasionally we stop to read from the correspondence of Civil War soldiers and their families, reconstructing the stories of individual men who experienced the gruesome battle. We are suddenly brought down from the god's-eye perspective of history into smoke, dust, and blood.

The battlefield is peppered with memorials commemorating soldiers, divisions of infantry, and important events. Statues stand in heroic poses -- charging, standing ready, or gazing at the terrain -- already contributing to a narrative of glory and redemption. The serenity of the park belies the political wrangling that determines what is to be memorialized, how, and where. There is much talk of the "presentation" of history, the official master narrative versus the smaller and quieter individual narratives of the war.

In the afternoon conversation with Peter and his colleague Kent Gramm, a question arises: Is redemption, the quest for transcendence, a typically American impulse that underlies the memorialization of catastrophe? This leads to a discussion of how history is often beautified to facilitate understanding and transcendence. History's eventual form is mythology, and myths are notoriously difficult to revise once they have acquired an authoritative, definitive patina.

There is a need to articulate pain, to speak it, to tell its story, as a way of making sense of inchoate tragedy. At a wake for a loved one, the bereaved are compelled to tell the story of the death to visitor after visitor in a key part of the grieving process. Then the grieving ends, becomes memory, and the story starts its slow hardening into myth. Peter's project seems to be to slow down the process to speckle, streak, and texture the narrative before it sets. He understands that it might already be too late, and that his lone voice might be just that -- an echo across a quiet field whose horrors have already been laid to reluctant rest.

--Vicente Garcia Groyon

Meanings & Monuments

The thing about being cynical, or at least performing cynicism for whatever reasons we perform it (I think for me it is an attempt to balance out what, at heart, is a desperate optimism) is that it has a way of coming back to bite you – and very quickly too. Like karma on crack. So when I watched all the reports of the last disaster to hit my little corner of the world, and I watched artist after artist rushing to the Caribbean, to Haiti specifically, and tweeting and facebooking and blogging about their breaking hearts, I admit it now -- I rolled my eyes. I said to myself then, affecting the utmost contempt: I guess this is some new kind of industry -- ‘disaster tourism’. I know too well, as an artist, that we are all so full of elegies. We are almost constipated with them. And so we wait for the next event, the next tragedy that will so move us that we can pour our elegies into. You won't catch me doing that, I had thought smugly.

How could I guess then that a few months later I would be invited here, on this two-week tour of Gettysburg and Baltimore and New Orleans and Birmingham, Alabama and Washington DC. The stated remit? To consider how places have faced disasters and how they have tried to bring themselves back from it.

Of course, of course, I’ll try to justify my own excursion, however weakly. I will say, this isn’t a messiah mission at all; it's not promoting, in equal measure, the desperation of the survivor and the heroism of the rescuer. And neither is this a tour into a landscape full of rubble and news-cameras (Hey! Get a picture of me writing a poem on the stone of a crumbled building! Hey! Get a picture of me crying over a body just pulled from the ashes! Come, get this on film, my artistic heart breaking beautifully). No. There are no fresh bodies here. The cameras are gone. Some of these disasters that we will be looking at happened more than a hundred years ago. Still the land tries to recover, or even tries to forget. And yes, still artists try to re-imagine and make sense of it all.

We walked through Gettysburg park today, that massive, sprawling battlefield of the civil war. The park seemed to me an incredible achievement, just as much a constructed work of art as Lincoln’s Gettysburg address. Both try to structure and make sense of the same awful event. And this park, while holding so many monuments, obelisks and equestrian statues, is itself its own gigantic, many-acred, monument. But I was completely taken by an argument that our guide, an eminent historian, didn’t himself share but was kind enough to share with us. So consider this: here at Gettysburg Park is a landscape that has begun to change. The changes are natural. New trees, especially, have been growing. The land is doing this by itself. The land itself is trying to move on. These new trees usher the park into another future; but they distort the park as ‘monument’ – as reminder of disaster. So they’ve begun to cut back the trees. To preserve it as shrine. Our guide is in agreement with this. But I think I am on the side of the trees who don't want to die as uselessly as the soldiers.

Perhaps it’s my cynicism come back again, but it all seems a terrific metaphor – for writers and their books are always destroying trees to memorialize something or the other. So here is one of my early questions: by throwing metaphor, and meaning, and monuments towards the suffering landscape, as if to structure it, do we help it to move on from its tragedy, or do we trap it in its mourning?

Kei Miller