Explico Algunas Cosas

I like having books in random places. In the bathroom, there’s a picture book by Leunig, a big matt-khaki book on Arabic literature, my lonely planet guide to Africa and pieces by a few African women writing in French:

Marie Claire Dati, in Jubilation, writing about women who are like fruit, Femme mandarine, femme jus de fruit, a savannah, a spring, bamboo, colours… and in Je Déchire – I tear out - she tears out the pages of Africa with rainbow eggs that have angel flesh, an ongle de genie – fingernail of a genie, where her grandma was born on septic banana leaves, where her grandma, squatting, dropped the larme rouge de la fécondité – red tear of fecundity.

Tanella Boni writes of 'Bidonvilles' - shanty towns, where 'liberte' enchainee' to the marrow, with a banana tree that dreams, 'sous-hommes' - sub-humans, who shove and struggle to live. In Grains de Sable - grains of sand, images swim, women living, like dolls or toys, birth to death, 'sur l'estomac d'un nom d'homme' - on the stomach of the name of a man (father, husband). Like a flea. In 'Il n'ya b pas de parole heureuse' - there are no happy words, god created her woman's skin as un instrument de musique, unedited. In Gorée, ile baobab, she writes of slave ports, of stone walls that still remember cries and prayers. The 'porte du continent', memories of barbarity across the 'peau de mer' - the skin of the sea.

There's a woman whose name I love, she's called Werewere Liking, she wrote Est-ce bete! - isn't this silly! - sketching her body, 'contours et ligns elastiques' and curves, hollows, 'comme un jeu de songo' - like a songo game board - warmth, dampness, Une bouche qui remue - a mouth that moves, stiff fingers 'comme des mille-pattes sous le petrole', millipedes in kerosene.

Sans papiers (Dominique Aguessy), about immigrants drowned, perhaps on their way to the promised land. Ombres confisquées – confiscated shadows, au rhythm de traverses – in the rhythm of the crossings. Born of a nightmare told by a smuggler. All the drowned look the same, she says. Sans visage, sans nom, sans mémoire.

I flip the pages… ecstasy of a woman in orgasm. Petit mort. Beads around her waist. Poems by women who could not be traced after they wrote. A voice like a single string guitar.... Women for sale in the 'Marchand de femmes (Aminata Athie), where a woman is a heater, air conditioner, seed, talisman, jewel, body, cowry. Objet de premiere nécessité.

In 'Burkina Blues' Angele Bassole-Ouedraogo, sings of street children sleeping in makeshift beds, all over the Ouagadougou market, who quémander leur quotidien - beg for their daily meal, on the highways of Abidjan…but people want her to write that tout est beau...

La souffrance des enfants de la rue she will paint, she rages, on the walls of their chateaux. Pour into their luxury gardens, La misére de méres - the misery of mothers. Reminds me of ol Pablo in Explico Algunas Cosas: people ask why doesn’t he write lilacs and leaves and dreams and volcanoes?

Venid a ver la sangre por las calles! He howls. Come and see the blood on the streets!

venid a ver
la sangre por las calles

Syngué Sabour, Beijing Coma

Near Pathe cinema, on a side street going into Chinatown, there's a place called Eazie. Inside the walls are pictures of a city with Chinese signs. You get to chose 5 types of vegetable. I chose two types of mushrooms, onion, sprouts and tofu. Stir-fried in Thai sauce and poured onto fried rice. There’re chairs on the sidewalk, so I sit outside. I always start with chopsticks, lose patience halfway through and switch to the plastic fork.

I’m reading a book called Syngué Sabour. About an Afghan fighter (Taleban?) who's paralyzed (comatose? Never very clear on this, his eyes are open but you never know whether he sees anything) after getting shot and is taken care of by his wife. It’s mostly his wife talking to him, telling him stories, in a small rectangular room with curtains with pictures of migratory birds. The book is full of rhythm, like a poem, and time is measured by the breaths he takes.

I read Syngué Sabour in the tram and the train. I read it most times that I get the chance, except in the bathroom, where I have “the beats: from Kerouac to Kesey, an Illustrated Journey through the Beat Generation”. (with pictures).

The odd thing is that recently, I also read Beijing Coma, about a Tiananmen Square protest organizer who’s in a coma after being shot in the head. His thoughts, his memories, detailed descriptions of what’s happening to his body. His mother. The bird that visits his room.

Both about people who are paralyzed, and peoples who are paralyzed.

Café Surfing

I like sitting in cafés. I know the menu of the bookstore café by heart, especially the unusual bits. There’s NO STRESS! (orange juice, carrot, ginger and a shot of royal jelly) and Energy (fruit juice, organic yoghurt, lecithin and bran). (wtf is lecithin?). There’s also the cinnamon-and-raisin-bagel-with-walnut-and-honey-cream-cheese.

But today, I haven’t made it to the bookstore yet. I’m at Dendy, near the square where they have the Sunday antique market under the trees. On the pavement outside, watching people go by. Bright summer clothes. A man in faded check pants with his two daughters. The older one holds a flower. Mischievous half-smile on the slightly chubby younger one. She runs her hand along the silver backs of the chairs, one after the other. Almost does the same to my shoe, which sticks out at chair height, but catches herself and staggers-off happily.

A craggy-faced man sits next to me, sipping no-nonsense plain coffee from a medium size cup. I picture him thinking dour thoughts, like Clint Eastwood in Gran Torino, mocking my café latte. Craggy face turns out to be not alone. His visitor is a woman in crutches. Her clothes are expensive but too young & shiny for her. Not the woman I pictured for craggy face. They leave.

There’s a shop across the street, Blooming Art. I wonder whether it’s a shop for paintings about flowers. Lot of flowers, only one painting, so I’m probably wrong. Above, on the second floor, there are plumes behind the window. Greeny yellow and faded orange. They look like the feathers that burlesque dancers wear, or the wavy things you see on coral reefs.

Odd noise, like a horse wearing metal coco-nut shells for shoes… a bride and groom come around the corner on a silver and white Vespa, tin-cans tied to the back. She’s wearing the lacy head-dress thing that brides wear. I’m worried for a moment, because she’s brown-skinned. I’m always nervous when brown people do something weird, hoping that people won’t laugh at them and so at me. Ever the brown sahib. Two middle-aged women (they took craggy-face’s chair) laugh, but it’s not a condescending laugh. I relax. Flip open my trusty lappy. With the scratched copper cover and the thumb marks on the screen...

Helping IDPs - Ongoing Projects

http://rebuildlanka.wordpress.com/projects/

Anthem

The war is over

Blogs, newspapers, my
Gmail inbox
alive with

Bravado

Only patriots and traitors
now.

Ripe
jackfruit juice, sound of tabla music smell
feel of milk rice wattalappan
after breaking
fast, sound
of Tamil guttural
to my ears but full
of memories
my fathers friends
of trips
in the rickety old van
with the loose seat through
tea estates. Big
chariots wheeled deities in a
Kovil with the hundred (thousand?) steps in
Hatton town. I was
in a Sinhala version of Macbeth
once I liked the way my worlds mixed
came together in an island the bard had never
heard of...
Like the wooden
stage of the Lionel Wendt
the soil in Madinnagoda
is full of the past. Warm
between my toes
Through my fingers. Young priest
in the Wattala temple
didn’t shave too often chewed
betel his sermons
in our living room…
In college my team-mate prayed
prostrate Mecca-wards 3
times a day, memories
of my father struggling
to explain children’s stories
in Sinhalese,
my mother
treating an injured
man on Hatton estate
Dettol, gauze &
broken Tamil

I’m angry

Trying
to hold on
to dreams of rainbow
nation (s?) fusion, compli-
-cation, inter-
racial
marriages… hybrid
island
at a cross-roads, time
to forge, (iron's-
hot), grab this
chance for a melting pot, enough
monoliths, scarred lathe!
enough tin-pot-
monarchy-math,
time to play
with our United-Colours-of-Benetton-
clay, mix-match-
make hay
before the sun fades
to a mono-chrome mono-
tone 'with-us-
or-against-
us'

There's
no disloyalty
in refracting light,
no necessary
treachery
in devolving might,
no need wipeout-(by-
white-van) lives
because they turned-on
a flashlight on
the maggots in the machinery
of state

Seamus Heaney wrote a poem
once, about a Republic of
Conscience, whitens
my knuckles
yearning for a
benign Babel, a
home an anthem public
offices of many
tongues
Songs…

See

I'm listening
to Outlandish
they
sing Hip-hop,
from Morocco-Paki-
stan-Hondu-
ras-Den-
mark
they
are Muslim-Catho-
lic. The lyrics
wash over me.
RacismpovertyH-
IV, a
hint-of-a-
-possibility
raises Goosebumps. I
wonder

what if

A Tamil
and a Sinhalese
bought an exercise book. One
with lines and a little square
on the cover
which said 40 pages.
like those
we used
for tuition classes
after school.
wrote songs. Beautiful
songs.
jammed
together into the wee-
hours, T-
shirts saturated
with the sweat
of creation.

scribbling

If their
Instruments were to mi-
ngle and
the beats
entwine

would girls
still
be told to marry "OUR
people"?

Would
history books
and poli-
-tical
crooks

still
spout
Aryan-
-Dravidian-
-Yin-
Yang
sh*t?

Would people
still sing
of bombs exploding
so
proud-
-ly? Would an airbrushed
Dutugemunu
return
to the movies?

If the hybrid melody

Was heard by a
roomful of
kids

mebbe
mebbe!

they'd take the colours
smells, letters, the
different feels
of
different types
of sand

ENERGIZED

to the light
of a lamp
(no
rubber stamp!)
round-which Meroo
fly

as
the
bass
tremors the
air, memory
darkening the stare,
of those who
sit

in a circle on the floor
who

SYNTHESIZE

take the chances take the
Stances that my
generation
Failed
To take.

Can you? (can you!)
Can you

Feel the beat?

Mallemolen

In the spring, we moved into a tiny house on a street named Mallemolen ('crazy mill') named after a mill that (milled?) there till 1693. Mallemolen is a cul de sac. You turned off the main street and suddenly disappeared into a jumble of old houses with small gardens and ivy-hung, whitewashed walls.

There’s a decent kitchen, so I’m more inclined to cook. When I’m hungry, sometimes I read about Thai food. Red curry, yellow curry (vague memories of chanting 'red lorry yellow lorry') green curry, massaman, tom ka...the smell of lemon grass... Sometimes, when cooking, I feed the craving for spice by scooping seeds of green chillies into stir-fried tuna. Later, as we eat, watching re-runs of Midsomer Murders, (aging laptop balanced on a shoe box on the bed), the chillie bites through savoury shreds of fish. (The first time I made shrimp Thai red curry I shaped a hill of white rice in the middle of the plate, turned it into a minaret with a cone of pateh bean sambal. Spooned the glutinous shrimp in a half-circle round the hill. my flatmate photographed it, with a silver fork laid alongside)

I'd wake up every day to the sound of seagulls. Dull light streaming through the blind of the skylight. The bathroom is in the attic. Has an aluminium floor with a herringbone design. The shower head looked vaguely like an old fashioned telephone. There’s a skylight as well. Sometimes, when I shower, I see a bird circling, way above. And a chimney. Shaving mirror on an extendable metal arm. On holiday mornings I listen to the kettle boiling-up the morning tea and picture the croissants in our tiny fridge, waiting to be eaten with honey from Clingendael park. The label tells you which bush the bees fed on. Metallic clinks of spoon against china. The tv switches on. Animal Cops. News. ('A cell phone video captures justice, Taliban Style.')

We bought a white couch with a comfy, worn look. I like lying on it and watching the garden, people, the huge orange cat from next door, who looks perpetually concerned. (Once, when we returned late at night, he was in a solemn conference with Percival, the black rabbit, who is also our neighbour.) Another cat, (black, with a small moustache of spotted white fur, bushy tail) likes to perch on a stump in the fence. When we cook, he arches on the window sill. Peers in curiously. Rushes in whenever the door is open, runs upstairs and disappears under the bed. Strange chap.

Outside, there’s a small iron table, three chairs, flowerpots, and an old fashioned garbage can. When it’s sunny, I like to sit in the garden. Read Coetzee ('Disgrace'). (I'm trying to read it in French so half of it is guess-work. It's a dry, Japanese-garden of a book. Bleak as an office desk). Feet on another chair. Listen to rustling in the hedge. Bees. Mug of tea (sweet, with condensed milk) on the window ledge.

Lonely Planet Guide to Africa

At the top of the wooden rack next to the bath, the extra soap (tiny stones of olive soap, bought at Dille & Kamille and never used) and toilet paper with the picture of the puppy (my favourite) and the shower-gel sit in a square white IKEA basket.
They’re crushed beneath the weight of the 30th Anniversary Edition of the The Lonely Planet Guide to Africa.

I tell myself I should read it in some sort of organized fashion. Start with the Swahili-speaking places in the East? Or with South Africa because of the townships and Table Mountain and Wilbur Smith?

Often, I get stuck reading the bio-blurbs about the writers. They have amazing lives. And names like Firestone and Clammer and Ham…

Or I read the Itineraries. One hour and twenty minutes before work, 30 minutes before I have to knot my tie, I mouth words to myself, like “Nampula” and “Quirimbas Archipelago”…. Picture Arab-African houses of stone…and dhows…and obscure books of explorers, anti-slavery activists that I could read so that I could re-trace the steps of the author….S would busily take pictures of rooftops and eaves of houses. Squeak sleepily on trains. Mebbe there’d be night trains. (I love night trains).

We could start from Maputo, at the bottom of Mozambique. (mebbe during ZIFF festival, for the afrojazz and hiphop and food and films…)

(In the American bookstore there is a book called Africa Art Now. Its big and almost 40 euros. Every Saturday after studying at the café, I drop in and read a little bit. There’s an artist from Mozambique in it. He collects guns left over from the civil war and works them into art.)

Then head to Beira…see the ruins of Sofala (an old gold-trading port) and Ilha do Mocambique, the island from where the Portuguese ran their chunk of East Africa. There are two towns. Ones Makuti, (reed), the other, stone. The book says that north of there, “…you’ll start to hear the lilt of the Swahili language with its mixture of African, Arabic and Portuguese words…” . We could take a dhow from Mocimboa da Praia to Mtwara in the South of Tanzania.

The take an overnight boat to Dar es Salaam. See buildings from the German occupation and where Mobutu came to meet Kabila….

And then to Zanzibar and Mombasa and Lamu….

ADD prompted by the sounds of people waking up… I begin to flip quicker…past Botswana’s Okvango Delta…Mali’s Dogon country…the mud mosque of Djenne, Timbuktu, the film festival in Ouagadougou…

I have to shower now.

The off-white (once-fluffy)towel hangs off the shower-curtain rail, accusing.

Office

I like the office early in the morning, or on weekends. Its like an abandoned spaceship with flat blue-grey carpeting, thin white walls and shredders that eat paper and CDs.

Behind me there's a faded, water-smudged painting, dedicated "to Sumwun, love Nora". Nora is my ex-boss's daughter. She was around 5 when she drew that. Precocious kid. She could never figure out my name.

For a long time, I had a card on my computer from my sister which said "Happy Birthday Monkey's Uncle"! (she calls her son Monkey. He calls me Munkle. Christ we're weird.).

In my drawer I have a stash of instant Cappucino and Weiner Melange. I'm a coffee nerd. as in, sometimes, I read about coffee on wikipedia. So I know that a Latte Machiato is a lot of milk "marked" with a dash of coffee. I know an Espresso Machiato is an Espresso "marked" with a bit of milk. I know that a Ristretto is not necessarily twice as strong as an Espresso. I like to watch coffee powder pour out of a sachet into my green mug with the Chinese squiggles. I even own a (single shot) Moka, inherited from an Italian flatmate. She wrote out how to use it on blue exercise paper ("instructions for dummies"), and stuck it on the back of the stove the night before she left.

There's a map on the wall. I like maps. I like knowing where places are. I wish there was a giant world map in our apartment. I would point out Turkey to visiting friends and we'd talk about how it faces Central Asia and the Middle East and Europe. Sometimes I wish Istanbul was the biggest city in the world so I could work there but still explore another country every month or so.

I listen to music on YouTube as I work. I have the most extensive YouTube playlists in existence. I have "Upper" lists and "Downer" lists, one called "No Pigeonhole" (much of this is Cat Empire, the closest songs have come to poetry for me after the Counting Crows). Sometimes I type to ryhthm. Nodding, eyes focused, feeling like a train carrying a bongo drum going over a bridge...