Silvio Rodríguez, musician

I am reading What You Have Heard Is True by poet Carolyn Forché, a memoir about time she spent in El Salvador in the late 1970s, when the country was in turmoil and war was on the horizon. She is "recruited," if you will, by Leonel Gómez, a coffee farmer and political activist and also a cousin of Claribel Alegría, whose work Forché has been translating. And by recruited, I mean invited (urged, ordered) to El Salvador to observe and act as a witness, as they drive to campos, towns, and military installations all over, and talk to people of all stripes, from simple campesinos to high-ranking army officers.

Silvio in 1969

On their drives, they sometimes play music. One artist they listen to frequently is the Cuban musician Silvio Rodríguez (b. 1949), widely considered one of Latin America's finest singer-songwriters. I first learned about Silvio, as he is familiarly known, from my friend Tesi, oh, back in the 1990s maybe? He has a sweet voice and a gentle way with a guitar, but his words are full of purpose: revolutionary politics and idealism are frequent themes. Not that I understand the words, so I didn't get that listening to him. But in the book, Leonel teaches Carolyn a bit about how the simple sound of many of Silvio's songs belies their serious intent. Many of his songs are, apparently, simply love songs or songs about the human condition; so he isn't necessarily considered a revolutionary songwriter per se. Sometimes he is called the Latin American John Lennon.

Here are a couple of the songs mentioned in the book. With verses in Spanish; and I do not vouch for the translations, but they should make the songs more accessible for those of you who, like me, do not have much Spanish. (The titles are linked to YouTube videos. Listen while you read along!)

Playa Girón

Compañeros poetas,
tomando en cuenta
los últimos sucesos en la poesía,
quisiera preguntar —me urge—,
qué tipo de adjetivos se deben usar
para hacer el poema de un barco
sin que se haga sentimental,
fuera de la vanguardia
o evidente panfleto,
si debo usar palabras
como Flota Cubana de Pesca
y «Playa Girón».

Compañeros de música,
tomando en cuenta esas politonales
y audaces canciones,
quisiera preguntar —me urge—,
qué tipo de armonía se debe usar
para hacer la canción de este barco
con hombres de poca niñez,
hombres y solamente hombres sobre cubierta,
hombres negros y rojos y azules,
los hombres que pueblan el «Playa Girón».

Compañeros de Historia,
tomando en cuenta lo implacable
que debe ser la verdad,
quisiera preguntar —me urge tanto—,
qué debiera decir, qué fronteras debo respetar.
Si alguien roba comida y después da la vida
¿qué hacer?
¿Hasta dónde debemos practicar las verdades?
¿Hasta dónde sabemos?
Que escriban, pues, la historia, su historia,
los hombres del «Playa Girón»

Girón Beach

My fellow poets,
Taking into account
The latest trends in poetry,
If you would allow me to ask (I feel that I must)
What kind of adjectives should one use to write
A poem about a ship?
Without sounding sentimental,
Old fashioned,
Or sounding like a polemical pamphlet
If I should I use words
Like a Cuban fishing fleet
And Girón beach

My fellow musicians,
Taking into account
Today’s daring polytonal songs,
If you would allow me to ask (I feel that I must)
What type harmonies should one use to write
The song about this ship
With men who hardly had a childhood
Men who are just tough sailors on deck
Men black, red and blue,
The men who populate Girón beach

My companions in history
Taking into account
How unforgiving the truth must be,
If you would allow me to ask (I really feel that I must)
What should I say? Which rules should I respect?
If someone steals food and then gives up his life,
What should we do?
How far should we follow these truths?
How much do we really know?
Well, let them write the story,
Their own story, the men of Girón beach

 ¿A donde van?

¿A dónde van las palabras que no se quedaron?
¿A dónde van las miradas que un día partieron?
¿Acaso flotan eternas, como prisioneras de un ventarrón?
¿O se acurrucan, entre las hendijas, buscando calor?
¿Acaso ruedan sobre los cristales
Cual gotas de lluvia que quieren pasar?
¿Acaso nunca vuelven a ser algo?
¿Acaso se van?
¿Y a dónde van?
¿A dónde van?
¿En qué estarán convertidos mis viejos zapatos?
¿A dónde fueron a dar tantas hojas de un árbol?
¿Por dónde están las angustias
Que desde tus ojos saltaron por mí?
¿A dónde fueron mis palabras sucias de sangre de abril?
¿A dónde van ahora mismo estos cuerpos
Que no puedo nunca dejar de alumbrar?
¿Acaso nunca vuelven a ser algo?
¿Acaso se van?
¿Y a dónde van?
¿A dónde van?
¿A dónde va lo común, lo de todos los días?
¿El descalzarse en la puerta, la mano amiga?
¿A dónde va la sorpresa, casi cotidiana del atardecer?
¿A dónde va el mantel de la mesa, el café de ayer?
¿A dónde van los pequeños terribles encantos que tiene el hogar?
¿Acaso nunca vuelven a ser algo?
¿Acaso se van?
¿Y a dónde van?
¿A dónde van?
¿Y a dónde van?
¿A dónde van?

Where Are They Going?

Where do the words go that did not stay?
Where do the looks that one day departed go?
Do they float eternally, like prisoners of a gale?
Or do they crouch, between the cracks, looking for heat?
Do they roll over the crystals, like raindrops they want to pass?
Are they never something again?
Do they leave?
And where are they going?
where are you going?
What will my old shoes be made of?
Where did they go to give so many leaves of a tree?
Where are the anguish, that from your eyes leaped for me?
Where did my dirty April blood words go?
Where do these bodies go right now, that I can not stop illuminating?
Are they never something again?
Do they leave?
And where are they going?
where are you going?
Where does the common go, the everyday?
The barefoot at the door, the helping hand?
Where does the surprise go, almost daily at dusk?
Where does the tablecloth go, yesterday's coffee?
Where do the small terrible charms of the home go?
Are they never something again?
Do they leave?
And where are they going?
where are you going?

110 Miles

Toward the end of May I stumbled on an American Heart Association challenge that piqued my interest: to walk (or run or bike or what have you—in short, to move) 110 miles during the month of June. I signed up. Figured it might get me off my butt.

It was also a fundraiser, so I dutifully posted my request for donations on Facebook: $200 (it was the default amount). I quickly fulfilled the commitment, thanks to several dear friends.

Then all I had to do was walk. I bought a new Fitbit (who knows where the old one got to—the story of my life), and decided on a 10,000-step daily goal. Which amounts to about 4.3 miles. And yes, every day I've managed to do it. Some days, much more.

And today, I passed the 110 mile marker. 

It's gotten me back moving. It's given me a daily motivation. And although I'm doing this simply to get my ass off the chair, I am so struck and impressed by the many stories of people who are doing the challenge for a loved one felled by a stroke or a heart attack, or of people who themselves have a serious health issue and are trying to get healthier. 

Here are a few photos I've taken during the last 20 days of moving through the world:

I am a new big fan of the American Heart Association. I've enjoyed the camaraderie of the FB page, and the focus on health and movement. There are still 10 days until the end of the month, and you can bet I'll be walking at least 10,000 steps each and every one: a 150-mile June!

Book Report: The Window Seat

32. Aminatta Forna, The Window Seat: Notes from a Life in Motion (2021) (6/13/21)

I am delighted to discover this new (to me) voice, here in a collection of far-ranging essays. Forna, of Sierra Leonian and Scottish background, has traveled widely,  and observed closely, and then thought deeply about what she has seen and felt. The essays treat variously race in America as seen from an African perspective, being in the world in a Black female body, insomnia, the joys of flying, and the human-wild interface, or divide depending on your perspective (think: foxes, coyotes, and chimpanzees). She takes us to Sierra Leone and introduces us to family and acquaintances there, to Iran in 1979 as the revolution was taking place (she lived there then as a girl), and to the Shetland Islands where her great-grandparents hailed from. In "Obama and the Renaissance Generation" she compares Obama's story with her own, both being the children of African men who came of age during the wave of independence and traveled to Europe and the U.S. to take advantage of educational opportunities. In "The Last Vet" she profiles the only qualified veterinarian in private practice in Sierra Leone, Dr. Gudush Jalloh, whose passion is taking care of the street dogs of Freetown, the capital. 

Here is an excerpt from "Crossroads," in which she thinks about race.

In Sierra Leone, before the war of 1991–2002, a certain kind of traveller disembarked regularly from flights from the United States, alongside the missionaries and Peace Corps volunteers. Around their necks they wore leather pendants in the shape of Africa, they dressed in shirts and skirts made of printed kente cloth and they had African names, which were not the names they had been given when they were born. They were African Americans come home. . . .
     If I am truthful, I felt embarrassed for the returnees, to have come all the way here, to our little country dragging itself along the developmental floor, seemed like an act of desperation. I would later feel a similar discomfort in the United States faced with the same longing in African Americans, which found expression in Kwanzaa, books and posters about African kings and queens, tie-dye clothing. They seemed to know more about the history of my   continent than I did. They yearned for what I possessed and took for granted, worse still, failed to cherish or perhaps could not cherish. Sierra Leone is a beautiful country: a coastline composed of curved beaches, pale and bright as cutlass blades, iridescent sunbirds that drink nectar from hibiscus cups, city streets lined with trees so heavily jewelled with fruit that in mango season you buy from the street sellers merely to save yourself the effort of reaching up with your own hand. But Sierra Leone is no Eden. People were always trying to fleece the returnees and treated them with contempt. I knew because on the streets sometimes I was mistaken for one of them. There were other reasons, though, why I could not share in the romance. My relationship with my paternal country was an abusive one; I was the daughter of a murdered political activist.

In this same essay, Forna, in 2000, learns from an aunt the story of her great-grandfather Pa Morlai, "a warrior at the time of the Gbanka wars," and one of his wives, Ya Beyas, her great-grandmother, who was gifted to Pa Morlai by a chief of Temneland. Eventually, Ya Beyas earned her freedom and independence.

My aunt Adama died one year after we sat listening to her in that Freetown courtyard. She was the last member of our family who held the story of Ya Beyas and Pa Morlai. If I had not asked her to tell it to me, we would have lost it. So many things. We would have carried on thinking we were Temnes and never discovered our great-grandfather had been a Loko. The Sierra Leonians who landed in South Carolina and settled there and in Louisiana and around me here in Virginia and all over the United States brought with them only what they could carry in their memories and in their hearts. When I realised that I began to understand, in some small way, what it might feel like to lose the story of who you are.
     To have it taken away from you.

I loved Forna's sensibility, her wide range of interests, her language, the ways she connected experience, information, and story. I will definitely be reading more of her work (which seem to be chiefly in the form of prize-winning novels). 

Japanese woodblock triptychs

I am taking a writing seminar, and one of our jobs over the next couple of months is to assemble a scrapbook of items related to the pieces we are working on. The pieces being: a study of place or environment; a triptych—basically, a three-part essay, each part being no more than a page or so; and a longer in-progress piece. I am choosing to pick up my moribund project on Japanese internment camps for at least the first two of these—get back into exploring the characters I've met already, and continue learning about and reimagining that dark time. 

Today while searching the internet for information on art materials used in traditional Japanese art, and ranging outward into woodblock prints, I stumbled on . . . triptychs! One of my characters is an artist. Although he doesn't do woodblock art, someone else in camp surely does. And I think they are going to start a school. 

Anyway, here are a few of the pieces I found (click on them to see them large):

Utagawa Fusatane (fl. ca. 1854–1897),
Comparison of Beauties with Spring Flowers:
Cherry, Mountain Rose, and Plum
(Shun shoku hanami: Sakura, yamabuki to ume),
8th month 1852

Utagawa Kuniaki II (1835–1888), Professional Sumo
Wrestlers Practicing (Ōzumō keiko no zu), 1866

Utagawa Hiroshige (1797–1858) and
Utagawa Kunisada (1786–1864),
Snow View (Yuki no nagame), from the series
Fashionable Genji (Furyu Genji), 12th month 1853

First half of 20th century; artist unidentified

Utagawa Kunisada, The Tama River at Chofu, 1854

Utagawa Toyokuni (1769–1825) (?),
Deep Snow at End of Year (Seibo no shinsetsu)
[the ? is because I'm betting this is actually
the work of Utagawa Kunisada, but the site where
I found this image only specifies "Toyokuni"]

 

Utagawa Kuniyoshi (1797–1861),
Takiyasha the Witch and the Skeleton Spectre,
c. 1844

Tsukioka Yoshitoshi (1839–1892),
Dueling on Gojo Bridge from an Episode
of the Life of Yoshitsune, 1881

Tsukioka Yoshitoshi, Fujiwara Yasumasa Plays the Flute
by Moonlight (Fujiwara Yasumasa gekka roteki), 1883

Utagawa Kunisada, Artisans (Shokunin), 1857

If you're wondering why so many of the artists are named Utagawa, it's because they took the gō (art-name) of the founder of the ukiyo-e school to which they belonged. From there, it just gets complicated. But yes, I was surprised to learn that the famous Hiroshige belonged to this school.

Insect netsuke

I just finished proofreading a book about nineteenth-century Japanese antiquarians, and in it a book by an entomologist, Sasaki Chūjirō, was mentioned, titled Japanese Netsuke. I find no online reference to that book per se, so I do not know what he covered, but I did get curious to find out whether there are netsuke that feature insects. And of course there are! Those wacky Japanese.

First, let me quote an NPR article to explain just what this art form is: "Netsuke emerged in the late 17th century during Japan's Edo period, when men wore kimonos every day. Those garments didn't have pockets, so men stashed items such as pens, tobacco, or medicines in pouches or pillboxes, called inro, which hung from their kimono sashes, or obi, by cords. The containers were attached to one end of the cord; a netsuke was attached to the other, and served as an anchor, hooking over the obi. What could have been purely functional—like a toggle, button or zipper—became tiny works of art, eventually coveted by collectors in the U.S. and Europe after Japan opened up to the wider world in the late 1800s."

The mouse is on the inro; the decoration
at the end of the cord is the netsuke

Here are a few of the delightful insects I found (including, aptly this year of the 17, several cicadas), unfortunately without any details on when or by whom they were made—but aren't they beautiful? (Click to see them larger.)

 

And that last one could send me scouring the Web for netsuke featuring sea life and fish, but I think I'll leave it right there, with the bee, or is it a wasp, and what is it doing to that little crab anyway?

Book Report: Geography of Home

31. Akiko Busch, Geography of Home: Writings on Where We Live (1999) (6/7/21)

I read this book for a writing seminar I'm about to dive into. The seminar leader loves minute detail, and there is plenty of good detail here. Busch takes on the "geography of home" literally: by exploring the various areas of a house. Starting with the front door—which she deems virtually useless, since where she lives, people always go right round to the back door, or the kitchen door, or through the garage. Right there, my hackles rose, since she was framing the "uselessness" of the front door in universal terms: "we" do not ever use the front door anymore. That "we" does not include me. The front door is the main entrance into my house. Although I did appreciate being reminded of the variety of ways we experience our homes, that wasn't her point.

The short chapters are these: front door, kitchen, dining room, laundry (which she also dismisses, or elides into a "utility room," but no: we have a [tiny] laundry room, even if it's not as elaborate as a Victorian-era one—the Victorians often ending up being a point of comparison, since Busch lives in an old house, with an old floor plan, which evokes the Victorians), closet, home office, library, front porch, bedroom, dressing room (dressing room! I ask you!), bathroom, garage, and living room.

In the end, the book is a confection—slight, sometimes sentimental or cliched. Busch does explore public vs. private space some, and modern desires vs. older ones. (The fact that the book is over 20 years old was occasionally telling.) There is also a distinct sense of privilege (e.g., her mention in the garage chapter of Ranger Rovers and Lexuses in the same breath as "the residents of many Third World countries"—but what about the residents of many American cities?) that I found offputting. I could almost picture the author blithely typing out her thoughts (in her home office, no doubt), one idea to the next, all from her personal experience—though she does try to enlarge the picture by quoting other writers and scholars, and Freud.

One thing I did get from this book is that in 1669 Louis XIV decreed that only knives with rounded tips would be used in the dining room. No bloodshed over dinner! That same chapter also got me googling Victorian forks. Wow!

Here's a passage to give an idea of the writing style:

If there is any part of the home that does not belong exclusively to the people who live there, it is the front door. Whether and how we choose to acknowledge this may say something about the degree of comfort and security we feel inside—and outside—our homes.
     But knowing this doesn't bring me any closer to using my front door. Nor will I eliminate it altogether and replace it with a closet, or anything else more practical. It will instead remain just where it is to remind me that the spaces in a house are layered for a reason. When  you enter a house through the front door, you discover its interiors in a logical progression, passing from public to private realms—front hall, living room, then maybe later, kitchen. The front door is the first step on this journey of progressive congeniality.
     And in our houses, as in our lives, congeniality comes naturally before intimacy. With its white porch and benches, its pale blue ceiling and transom window, my front door will stay just where it is. A small landing where propriety and poetry converge, it will serve perhaps its most important function of all, a brief reminder that there is an interior logic to the way people's houses, like the people themselves, are revealed.

I liked and didn't like this book, both at once. It has the potential to provide food for thought: on how we use our personal spaces, our communal spaces; on where we find comfort; on intimacy: sex in the bedroom, home cooking in the kitchen, heart-to-hearts in the living room; on what things we actually need (why don't old houses have enough closet space?). Et cetera. I'm glad I read it. And that it was short.

Book Report: The Bone People

30. Keri Hulme, The Bone People (1985) (6/4/21)

The other week I met my friend Barbara for lunch in Moss Landing. (I had huitlacoche crab enchiladas—as usual at said restaurant, the Haute Enchilada. Where else can you get that, I ask you?) While we were waiting for the doors to open, I inspected the Little Library out front. I spotted The Bone People, which I'd read ages ago, probably just after it came out—it having been the recipient of the Booker Prize—and remembered being impressed by. So I took it. 

The next day, on a drive down the coast, my friend Lynn asked if I’d ever read . . . The Bone People! I was gobsmacked. A book I hadn’t thought about in decades, and here it comes up not once, but twice, in so many days?

Then, when I got home and checked Facebook, what should appear as the memory of the day? No, not The Bone People. But this quote:

In Repo Man, Miller [played by Tracy Walter] says, “A lot of people don’t realize what’s really going on. They view life as a bunch of unconnected incidents and things. They don’t realize that there’s this, like, lattice of coincidence that lays on top of everything. Give you an example, show you what I mean: suppose you’re thinkin’ about a plate of shrimp. Suddenly someone’ll say, like, ‘plate,’ or ‘shrimp,’ or ‘plate of shrimp’ out of the blue, no explanation. No point in lookin’ for one, either. It’s all part of a cosmic unconsciousness.”

I don’t especially look for such coincidences—like, if I were thinking about shrimp, and someone mentioned shrimp, I’d just laugh and say, “I was just thinking about shrimp myself!” But the two encounters with the long-forgotten Bone People plus that quote, all in a cluster? Too weirdly cool. It basically determined that that book would be the next one I picked up.

And now I've finished it. It is a beautiful, harsh story of three lonely, damaged people, physically, psychologically, spiritually, and how they come together and, perhaps, by the end begin to heal one another. They are Kerewin, a stuck artist estranged from her family and living alone in a stone tower; a mute seven-year-old boy, Simon, who appears one day in Kerewin's home; and Joe, Simon's guardian, having found the boy washed up on the beach several years earlier, and who subsequently lost his wife and son to flu. The story takes place in New Zealand: Joe is mostly Maori, Kerewin is one-eighth Maori and although she appears European she identifies with Maori ways, and Simon is a pale white boy with flaxen hair and startling green eyes. As they come together we learn—and arguably, they discover—what they really want and need in life. There is lots of drinking and some extreme violence, which drives them apart and into a sort of spiritual rebirth, each individually. 

Some of the writing gets a bit OTT (Hulme famously spent 12 years writing the 500-plus-page book, then had it rejected by every publisher she approached, who told her it needed serious editing, which she in turn rejected). But the bones of the story are solid, and you learn to care about these vulnerable souls. One can, too, find in the story—which toward the end invokes Maori spirituality—a sort of parable about colonialism and the balance of old ways and new, of give and take, and of respect. I'm very glad I read it again. 

Here's a randomly chosen section to illustrate the style, from the POV of Kerewin:

     That's an odd child. And an odd man.

          The coal sinks down in its red bed, and the little violet
          flames run flickering over it.

     She wanders across the room and lifts her golden guitar down from the wall. It is easy, leaning over the ambered belly, to put thought through a filter of slow-picked arpeggios.
     An odd child, with its silence, and canny receptiveness.

          Orange-red sparks climbing in skewed lines to die out in
          the glimmer dark pile of the soot.

     An odd man, looking so bitter until he smiles.
A harmonic bells out under her fingers.

          Why the wariness and drawn-eyed look of the child?
          Why the bitterness corrupting the man's face?
          And why, above all, the peculiar frisson of wrongness
          I keep getting from some of the conversation?
          O it's riddles, and no thing of mine

and she quickens her chording to a heavy downbeat strumming.