Making of Niko na Safaricom
The Safaricom Proudly Kenya, advertising campaign was produced with a 600 member choir singing in Swahili in scenic locations around Kenya. The locations are Mt Longonot crater, Mt Elgon, alongside the Tana River, Ndere Island, Porror Ridge, the Aberdare Range, Lake Victoria, Kericho, and in the hills at Suguta Valley south of Lake Turkana
David Burnett
Dinaw Mengestu is also the author of The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears. Born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, in 1978, he moved with his family to the United States in 1980.From Dinaw Mengestu, A 'How To' With Few Answers
November 2, 2010
How to Read the Air
By Dinaw Mengestu
Hardcover, 320 pages
Riverhead Hardcover
List Price: $25.95
November 2, 2010In his 1988 memoir called, simply, A Life, the controversial director Elia Kazan told a World War II story I've always wanted to believe is true. Kazan wrote that he was present in 1945 on the Pacific island of Biak when his newly released film A Tree Grows in Brooklyn was shown to a battle-scarred audience of American soldiers and nurses. The movie was projected on an outdoor screen in the rain at night, and the audience was rapt despite planes circling overhead and the other noises of war. In the middle of the movie, the film reel broke and Kazan recalled that "a great groan" of disappointment erupted from the audience before the film was fixed and the show continued.
The next morning, rumor went around the base that some Japanese soldiers still at large on the island had climbed to the top of a nearby hill and also had watched the movie. I guess they groaned, too, when the film broke. After all, everybody loves a good tear-jerker about immigrants and promises just out of reach.
Of course they don't make 'em like that anymore. The stories and memoirs written by newer waves of immigrants to America — writers like Julia Alvarez, Junot Diaz and Gish Jen — commute back and forth between the old world and the new. And the immigrant "community," unlike the one that populated Kazan's lively Brooklyn streets, is much less sentimentalized and more fragmented and mobile.
Dinaw Mengestu is also the author of The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears. Born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, in 1978, he moved with his family to the United States in 1980.
Add to this canon of ambivalent new chroniclers of the dream of America Dinaw Mengestu, who was born in Ethiopia, immigrated to the United States as a child, and was educated at Georgetown University (where, somehow, he managed to avoid taking any of my courses). I don't know him, but I do know some of his work. Mengestu has just published his second novel, How to Read the Air; it's a sad stunner of a meditation on the illusory idea of asylum.
Mengestu's main character, Jonas Woldemariam, is not even at home in his own skin, let alone in his adopted home of New York City. A first-generation American, Jonas grew up in the Midwest, the only child of Ethiopian refugees who barely spoke to each other during the decades of their troubled marriage. "What we were was something closer to a jazz trio than a family," Jonas says, "a performance group that got together every now and then to play a few familiar notes before dispersing back to their real, private lives."
Jonas has earned a hard-knocks advanced degree in alienation: He works, first, at an immigrant aid society; later he gets a job teaching composition at a snooty prep school in Manhattan. The hasty marriage that Jonas has embarked on with a lawyer at the aid society is falling apart. As it does, Jonas keeps thinking back on his family legacy of rootlessness: his parents' transplanted lives in Peoria, Ill., and, before that, his father's rough exodus from Ethiopia to Europe, sealed in a box smuggled aboard a cargo ship. The narrative jumps around restlessly among all these time periods, but the description Jonas relates secondhand of his father's odyssey is especially evocative:
In Italy [my father] was given asylum and set free. ... He met dozens ... of men along the way, men who promised him that when they made it to London, the rest of their lives would finally resolve into the picture they imagined. "It's different there," they always said. ... For most that [place of difference] was London; for a few it was Paris; and for a smaller but bolder few, America. That faith had carried them thus far, and even though it was weakening, and needed constant readjustment ("Rome is not what I thought it would be. France will surely be better."), it persisted out of sheer necessity. By the time my father finally made it to London ... he had begun to think of all the men he met as being ... crippled and deformed by their dreams.
At the three-hankie end of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Francie Nolan and her kid brother look out from their tenement rooftop to the skyline of Manhattan: They're certain that a bright American future is theirs, just over the bridge. In Mengestu's beautifully written and wearier update of the coming-to-America story, refugees and their offspring cross a lot of bridges, but none of them ever find the clean well-lighted place of their dreams. It seems that the wanderers in this novel are destined to be a country unto themselves.
Excerpt: 'How To Read the Air'
Part I
It was four hundred eighty-four miles from my parents' home in Peoria, Illinois, to Nashville, Tennessee, a distance that in a seven-year-old red Monte Carlo driving at roughly sixty miles an hour could be crossed in eight to twelve hours, depending on certain variables such as the number of road signs offering side excursions to historical landmarks, and how often my mother, Mariam, would have to go to the bathroom. They called the trip a vacation, but only because neither of them was comfortable with the word "honeymoon," which in its marrying of two completely separate words, each of which they understood on its own, seemed to imply when joined together a lavishness that neither was prepared to accept. They were not newlyweds, but their three years apart had made them strangers. They spoke to each other in whispers, half in Amharic, half in English, as if any one word uttered too loudly could reveal to both of them that, in fact, they had never understood each other; they had never really known who the other person was at all.
Learning a new language was, in the end, not so different from learning to fall in love with your husband again, Mariam thought. While standing in front of the bathroom mirror early in the morning, she often told herself, in what she thought of as nearly flawless diction, "Men can be strange. Wives are different." It was an expression she had heard from one of the women at the Baptist church that she and her husband had begun attending. A group of women were standing in the parking lot after the sermon was over, and one of them had turned to Mariam and said, "Men can be so strange. Wives are just different."
At the time she had simply repeated the words back, almost verbatim, "Yes. That is true. Men can be strange," because that was the only way that she could be certain that what she said was understood by everyone. What she would have liked to say was far more complicated and involved a list of sizable differences that by any other standards would have been considered irreconcilable. Regardless, since arriving in America six months earlier, she had pushed herself to learn new things about her husband, like why, for example, he spoke to himself when no one seemed to be looking, and why some days, after coming home from work, he would sit parked in the driveway for an extra ten or twenty minutes while she watched him from behind the living room curtains. On some nights he would wake up and leave the bedroom, careful not to rouse her but always failing because most nights Mariam hardly slept at all. He would lie down on the couch in the living room naked, and from the bedroom she would eventually hear him let out a small whimper followed by a grunt, and he would return to bed and sleep soundly until the morning. My mother learned these things and filed them into a corner of her brain that she thought of as being specifically reserved for facts about her husband. And in just the same way, she pushed herself to try new words and form new sentences in English, because just as there was a space reserved for her husband, there was another for English, and another one for foreign foods, and another for the names of streets near her house. She learned to say, "It was a pleasure to meet you." And she learned individual words, like "scattered" and "diligent" and "sarcastic." She learned the past tense. For example, I was tired yesterday, instead of: I am tired yesterday, or Yesterday tired I am. She learned that Russell Street led to Garfield Street, which would then take you to Main Street, which you could follow to I-74, which could take you east or west to anywhere you wanted to go. Eventually they would all make sense. Verbs would be placed in the right order, sarcasm would be funny, the town would be familiar: past, present, future, and husband, they could all be under stood if given enough patience.
At this point in their marriage they had spent more time apart than together. She added up the days by rounding up some months, rounding down a few others. For every one day they had spent together, 3.18 had been spent apart. To her, this meant a debt had to be repaid, although who owed the other what remained unclear. Is it the one who gets left behind who suffers more, or is it the one who's sent out alone into the world to forage and create a new life? She had always hated numbers, but since most of the English she heard still escaped her, she now took comfort in them and searched for things to add. At the grocery store she calculated the cost of everything she brought to the register before she got there: a can of peas, seventy-eight cents; a package of salt, forty-nine cents; a bag of onions, forty cents. The smiling faces behind the register always offered a few words out loud before saying the total. All of them were lost on her, but what difference did it make if she didn't know how to take a compliment, banter, or understand what the phrase "two-for-one" meant. She knew the number at the end, and that number, because it didn't need translation, was power, and the fact that she knew it as she went up to the register filled her with a sense of accomplishment and pride unlike anything she had known since coming here. It made her feel, in its own quiet fleeting way, as if she were a woman to be reckoned with, a woman whom others would someday come to envy.
She never knew what her husband had gone through in the three years they had been apart, nor had she ever really tried to imagine. Say America enough times, try to picture it enough times, and you end up with a few skyscrapers stuck in the middle of a cornfield with thousands of cars driving around. The one picture she had received during those three years was of him sitting in the driver's seat of a large car, the door open, his body half in the car, half out. He kept one arm on the steering wheel, the other balanced on his leg. He looked handsome and dignified, his mustache neatly trimmed, his thick curly hair sculpted into a perfect ball that highlighted the almost uncanny resemblance his head had to the globe that her father kept perched on top of his chest of drawers.
When she first saw the picture she didn't believe the car was his. She thought he had found it parked on the side of the road and had seized the opportunity to show himself off, which was indeed almost exactly what he had done. Still, that didn't stop her from showing the picture to her mother, sisters, and girlfriends, or from writing on the back, in English: Yosef Car. She expected other pictures would eventually follow: pictures of him standing in front of a large house with a yard; pictures of him in a suit with a briefcase in hand; and then later, as the days, weeks, and months collided, and two years was quickly approaching three, she began to wait for pictures of him with his arm around another woman, with two young children at his side. She had secretly feared the latter would happen from the day he first left, because who had ever heard of a man waiting for his wife? The world didn't work that way. Men came into your life and stayed only as long as you could convince them to. She even named the children for him: the boy Adam and the girl Sarah, names that she would never have chosen for her own children because they were common and typical, and Mariam's children, when they came, were going to be extraordinary.
When no such pictures arrived, she wanted to write him and tell him to show her a picture of him in the middle of something, a square, a city park, a picture in which he played just one, minor role.
"Show me a picture of you doing something," she had wanted to write, but that wasn't it exactly. What she wanted was to see him somehow fully alive in a picture, breathing, walking, laughing, living his life without her.
On the morning they left for Nashville, my mother packed a small suitcase with two weeks' worth of underwear, three heavy wool sweaters she had bought at a garage sale for two dollars apiece, and pants and shirts suitable for summer, fall, and winter, even though it was the first week of September and so far the days had been nothing but mild, sunny, and occasionally even too warm for the thin cotton tank tops she had seen other women wearing as they walked casually through the aisles of the grocery store, through shopping malls, and down the deserted Main Street. Those women were neither slim nor graceful. They were plain, pale, and average, and to her eyes entirely indistinguishable one from another, which was precisely what she resented and envied the most. The trip was supposed to last from start to finish four nights and five days, but as she stuffed her suitcase to its limits, she decided it was best to always be prepared for the unexpected, for the broken-down car, for the potential wrong turn, for the long walk at night that for one reason or another never ended. She had packed up her entire life once before, and now six months later, if she had learned anything at all about herself, it was that she could do with far less. She could, if she wanted, get away with almost nothing.
Her husband, Yosef, was already waiting for her outside in the red Monte Carlo he had scraped and saved for more than a year to buy and now could hardly afford. It was not the same car as the one in the photo. She couldn't have said how or why, but it was less elegant, smaller perhaps, and even though the picture had been black and white, she thought of the Monte Carlo he was waiting in as being a shabbier shade of red than the one she imagined.
The car horn honked twice for her: two short high-pitched bleeps that could have gone unnoticed but did not because she half expected, half prayed for them. When they came she pictured a bird — a dove, or something dovelike — being set free, its rapidly fluttering wings disturbing the air. Had she known more words in English she would have said the sound of the horn pierced through the silence, pierced being the operative word here, with its suggestion that something violent had occurred.
If he honks one more time, my mother said to herself, I will refuse to go. It was a matter of principle and conviction, or at least something that so closely resembled the two that even if it was merely pride or rage in disguise, she was willing to fight and tear down the house to stand by it. She had, after all, waited for him for years — a virtual widow but without the corpse and sympathy. If she was owed anything now it was time. Time to pack her clothes, fix the straps of her dress, and take account of everything she might have missed and would perhaps potentially later need.
If he honks again, she told herself, I will unpack my suitcase, lock the bedroom door, and wait until he leaves without me.
This was the way most if not all of my parents' fights began. With a minor, almost invisible transgression that each seized upon, as if they were fighting not about being rushed or about too many lights having been left on, but for their very right to exist, to live and breathe God's clean air. As a child I learned quickly that a fight was never far off or long in the making, and imagined it sometimes as a real physical presence lurking in the shadows of whatever space my parents happened to occupy at that given moment — a grocery store, a car, a restaurant. I pictured the fight sitting down with us on the couch in front of the television, a solemn black figure in executioner's robes, a caricature of death and tragedy clearly stolen from books and movies but no less real as a result. Ghosts are common to the life of any child: mine just happened to come to dinner more often than most.
The last fight they had had before that morning left my mother with a deep black and purple bruise on her right arm, just below her shoulder. The bruise had a rotting plum color and that was how she thought of it, as a rotten plum, one pressed so fast and hard into her skin that it had broken through the surface and flattened itself out underneath. She found it almost beautiful. That the body could turn so many different shades amazed her, made her believe that there was more lurking under the surface of our skin than a mess of blood and tissue.
She waited with one hand on top of the suitcase for the car to honk again. She tried not to think it, but it came to her nonetheless, a selfish, almost impregnable desire to hear even the accidental bleating of a car horn crying out.
Just once more, she thought. Honk just once more.
She held her breath. She closed the lid of the suitcase in complete silence. With her hand pressing down on the top, she zipped it halfway shut. A tiny stitch of blue fabric from a pair of padded hospital socks picked up two weeks earlier peeked out over the edge. She pressed the sock back in with one finger, granted the zipper its closure, and with that, acknowledged that on this occasion her husband had won. He had held out long enough for her to complete the one minor task that stood between her and leaving, and despite her best efforts, that was how she saw it, as a victory won and a loss delivered. She was going. Even if he pressed on the horn now with all his might she would have to go, would have to walk down the stairs and apologize for having taken so long, because he had pressed her just far enough without going too far. Sometimes she suspected that he knew the invisible lines she was constantly drawing. There were dozens of such lines spread out all over their one-bedroom apartment like tripwire that, once crossed, signaled the start of yet another battle. There was the line around how many dishes could be left in the sink, another around shoes worn in the house, and others that had to do with looks and touches, with the way he entered a room, took off his clothes, or kissed her on the cheek. Once, after an especially rough night of sleep, she felt her husband's breath on the back of her neck. It was warm and came in the steady consistent bursts of a man soundly asleep. She didn't know which one she really hated — the breaths or the man breathing. In the end, she created a wall of pillows behind her, one she would deny having made the next morning.
The four large oak trees that lined the driveway were the last of their kind. The largest and oldest of the group stood just a few feet away from the two-story duplex that my mother and father shared with a frail, hunchbacked older woman with milky-blue eyes who hissed under her breath every time she passed my mother on her way in or out of the house. The oak trees cooled the living room in the summer, allowing the afternoon light to filter through seemingly oversized leaves that Mariam thought of as deliberately keeping the worst parts of the light out, leaving only the softer, quieter shades. Now that it was September and supposedly the harshest of the summer heat had passed, she noticed as she prepared to leave the apartment that the leaves nearest the tops of the trees had begun to turn; a small pile of dead ones had already grown around their bases. So this was fall. A woman at the Baptist church had told her just a few weeks earlier, "Oh, just wait until fall. You'll see. You'll love it." Her name was Agnes and she wore a curly black wig to hide the bald patches in the center of her head. A-G-N-E-S, Mariam wrote on the back of a church pamphlet that went on in great detail about the agony of Christ, which prompted her to write, after their first meeting, A-G-O-N-Y, on the back of the pamphlet, and next to that, Agnes is in agony, which was a simple sentence, with a subject and verb, which formed a declarative statement that Mariam decided was more likely than not absolutely true.
At the time my mother had thought to herself, I could never love anything called "fall." There was fall and Fall. To fall was to sink, to drop. When my mother was nine, her grandfather came out of his bedroom at the back of the house wearing only a robe with the strings untied. He was deaf and half blind and had been for as long as Mariam could remember. He walked into the middle of the living room, and having reached the center, where he was surrounded on all sides by his family, fell, not to his knees, but straight forward, like a tree that had been felled, the side of his head splitting open on the edge of the fireplace mantel, spraying the wall and couch with blood. That was one way to fall.
One could also fall down a flight of stairs, as in, your husband falls down the stairs while leaving for work one morning. She had this thought at least once, sometimes as many as three times a week. She pictured him tripping, stumbling, feet over head, just like the characters in the cartoons she had grown addicted to watching between the hours of one p.m. and four p.m. In those shows the characters all shook the fall off after a few seconds, bending an arm back into place here, twisting an ankle there. The cartoons made her laugh, and when she thought of her husband falling down the steps, his tall, narrow body perfectly suited to roll uninterrupted down the shag-carpeted stairwell, stopping perhaps briefly at the one minor bend that led to the final descent, it was only partly with those cartoon images in mind. When real bodies fell, as Mariam knew well enough, they did not get up. They did not bounce back or spring into shape. They crumpled and needed to be rescued.
Despite my mother's best efforts to resist fall, she found herself taken by the season more and more each day. The sun set earlier, and soon she learned, an entire hour would be shaved off the day, an act that she sometimes wished could be repeated over and over until the day was nothing more than a thumbnail sketch of its former self. The nights were growing marginally but noticeably cooler. Leaves were changing, and children who over the course of the summer had ruled the neighborhood like tyrants were once again neatly arranged in groups of twos and threes each morning, beaten (or so Mariam thought) into submission by the changing rules of the season. There was enough room in the shrinking day to believe that the world was somehow sensitive to grief and longing, and responded to it the same way she did when she felt convinced that time had been arranged incorrectly, making the loss of one extra minute nearly every day a welcome relief.
My mother could never have said she loved fall, but as she walked down the steps with her suitcase in hand toward the red Monte Carlo her husband had been waiting in for nearly an hour, she could have said that she respected its place as a mediator between two extremes. Fall came and went, while winter was endured and summer was revered. Fall was the repose that made both possible and bearable, and now here she was with her husband next to her, heading headlong into an early-fall afternoon with only the vaguest ideas of who they were becoming and what came next.
Excerpted from How to Read the Air by Dinaw Mengestu. Copyright 2010 by Dinaw Mengestu. Reprinted by arrangement with Riverhead Books a division of Penguin Group (USA).
Ed Ou/The New York Times
Dinaw Mengestu with copies of "How to Read the Air."
Early in Dinaw Mengestu’s new novel, “How to Read the Air,” the main character, a troubled young Ethiopian-American named Jonas Woldemariam, goes to a job interview, only to be asked, “Where’s that accent of yours from?” by a prospective boss baffled by his seemingly alien provenance. “Peoria,” Jonas replies, puzzling his interviewer even further.
Life has sometimes been like that for Mr. Mengestu, too. His name, “so clearly foreign and other,” he admits, and pedigree can make it difficult for some of the people he encounters to see past an ostensibly exotic exterior to the very American core underneath.
But as a novelist, Mr. Mengestu, 32, has made such doubts and confusion about identity and belonging his stock in trade. His work is populated by exiles, refugees, émigrés and children of the African diaspora, all struggling both to find a place in the American landscape and to make sense of their attenuated relationship to the world they left behind.
“It’s less about trying to figure out how you occupy these two cultural or racial boundaries and more about what it’s like when you are not particularly attached to either of these two communities,” he said recently in an interview in Manhattan at the offices of his publisher, Riverhead Books.
In nearly two hours, Mr. Mengestu never raised his voice, never demonstrated much emotion, never lost his composure, no matter how painful the subject. His characters tend to be like that as well. “As a writer, it’s a great narrative tool to have that character who is slightly detached but at the same time observant of his reality,” he explained, “because I think that’s pretty much what being a writer is — being there, watching and internalizing.”
Mr. Mengestu’s first novel, “The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears,” focuses on an Ethiopian shopkeeper, living in isolation in a gentrifying neighborhood in Washington, who develops a tentative bond with a professor of American history, a white woman, and her precocious biracial daughter. The New York Times Book Review named the novel, whose title derives from Dante’s “Inferno,” as one of the notable books of 2007, and Mr. Mengestu quickly became a literary name to watch.
“How to Read the Air,” published this week, addresses similar issues of self-image and estrangement from a different angle. With his marriage and job prospects crumbling, Jonas Woldemariam abandons New York and returns to his native Midwest, where, almost like a Kerouac character, he goes on the road to retrace a trip that his exile parents made before his birth and that poisoned their own marriage.
“Dinaw writes with a very lyrical grace, with a quality of freshness and observation in his sentences,” said Deborah Treisman, fiction editor at The New Yorker, which in June included Mr. Mengestu in its prestigious “20 under 40” list of outstanding young fiction writers.
“He obviously has a deep interest in studying the details of immigrant life and aspirations,” Ms. Treisman said, “but I would say he is 98 percent an American writer, who is getting more comfortable with his own voice.”
Ed Ou/The New York Times
Born in Addis Ababa in 1978, Mr. Mengestu came to the United States two years later and grew up in Illinois, first in Peoria and then in Forest Park, a Chicago suburb. During the interview he summoned nostalgic memories of those early years: a white Baptist church’s warm embrace of his immigrant family, his father’s job at the headquarters of the Caterpillar tractor company and the hope of rising to middle-class comfort that that newcomer’s luck inspired.
Lurking in the background, though, was the trauma that had driven his parents from Ethiopia, namely the revolution that followed the overthrow of Emperor Haile Selassie and, he said, “split the family cleanly down the middle.”
Some relatives became high-ranking officials in the new Marxist military government, while others, because of their class background as landowners or their political activities, were arrested or jailed or who even perished, including an especially beloved older brother of his father’s.
“We had no memories in our house,” Mr. Mengestu said. “We were never allowed to, we never spent time talking about it, and yet you’re very aware that it haunts everything. It’s that absence that creates the concern for it. Nothing can be passed on.”
He added, speaking of his own reaction, “You know there is this history that precedes you, but you have no access to it whatsoever.”
At the elite Roman Catholic high school he attended in the Chicago area, his situation grew even more complicated. He was the target of racial epithets from white students, he recalls, but also had to confront “the question of my authenticity” in his dealings with other black students, since “it was always really clear that ‘you are the black kid who sounds white, the black kid who doesn’t seem like he’s black,’ and no one can figure out exactly why.”
Voracious reading provided some relief for the “anger and angst” that Mr. Mengestu said he felt then, and at Georgetown University, he gravitated to literature. Afterward he earned an M.F.A. in fiction at Columbia and held a variety of jobs while writing his first novel, which began when he spotted a solitary Ethiopian storeowner while on a walk one day through the Adams-Morgan neighborhood in Washington.
“Even then, he seemed very much above the fray,” said Norma Tilden, an English professor at Georgetown whom Mr. Mengestu named as a friend and mentor. “I was always very clear that Dinaw was holding back a lot, not in a reticent way, but just that there was a lot there, and he would get to it when he wanted.”
Much of “How to Read the Air” was written in Paris, providing yet another layer of distancing. Mr. Mengestu’s wife, Anne-Emanuelle, is French, and like American writers from Hemingway to James Baldwin, Mr. Mengestu felt, he said, a need to “get away and find a private space to work in,” one that would allow him to “see New York and Illinois more clearly.”
Mr. Mengestu also produces nonfiction, writing for magazines like Rolling Stone, Harper’s and Granta. He spent part of the summer in eastern Congo, reporting on the conflict there for Granta, and has also written from Uganda and Darfur, in Sudan.
In fact, when Mr. Mengestu went to Georgetown, it was originally with the idea of “possibly some day working with the State Department,” an ambition that was derailed when he took his first economics course and realized “this cannot possibly work.”
But even in Africa, issues of identity continued to pester him. In eastern Congo he ran into problems trying to interview Hutu rebels from Rwanda, who, like his high school classmates, didn’t know what to make of him.
“I could speak English as well as I wanted to them, but they could only see that my features are what they consider Tutsi, and that was definitely threatening to my life,” he said rather matter-of-factly. “They would look at me, and my translator would say, ‘No, he’s American.’ He was always very specific, telling me, ‘Don’t confuse them, don’t try to say you’re Ethiopian, just tell them you’re American, don’t complicate things with this extra layer, because nobody’s going to believe it.’ ”
Mr. Mengestu has begun work on a third novel, which, he said “seems to be the last component of this cycle” on the African diaspora and is likely to be followed by something that doesn’t have “that same sense of dislocation and displacement.” To those who know him well, that strategy makes perfect sense.
“The topics he writes about are very heartbreaking, really, but he is not somebody who is walking around the world with sad puppy-dog eyes,” said the critic Marcela Valdes, who has been a good friend since both were graduate students. “He’s a much more vibrant and charming personality than that. He has the ability to go deep and look at stuff that is hard, but he also has a joie de vivre.
”
Independent multimedia reporting from Haiti since 2009
Coffins block a downtown road in Cap Haitien.
All Elements of Society Are Participating” – Impressions of Cap Haitien’s Movement Against the UN
November 19, 2010
I spoke to Democracy Now and Flashpoints Radio yesterday. A Free Speech Radio News story featuring some of the voices in the piece below will air later today.
CAP-HAITIEN – The first barricade looked harmless enough. Foot-long rocks piled next to each other in a line.
But as the bus driver slowed down, flying rocks landed in the street – thrown by youths crouching in the bushes up the hill.
“We don’t really have a country! The police don’t do anything!” a nun sitting across from me complained after the bus driver negotiated, with a little cash, our way past.
The man next to her said the country will always be mired in problems until a leader like Hugo Chavez or Fidel Castro takes power.
We must have passed a dozen more barricades, most unmanned.
After Limbe, where cholera has killed at least 100 people, we came to the biggest “barikad” yet in the highway. Thick trees lay across the road and hundreds of people, a few holding machetes, blocked the way.
The bus driver once again descended to negotiate, but didn’t appear to be making any progress. Most passengers grabbed their belongings and got out.
I decided to go too. As I gathered my things, there was a debate among the remaining passengers:
“He’s a blan (foreigner), he’s going to get hurt.”
“No no no, he speaks Creole, he’ll be fine.”
“They’re going to think he’s MINUSTAH. They’re not logical.”MINUSTAH is the acronym for the UN peacekeeping mission. As I stepped off the bus, people standing at the road called me over and urged me not to go. It was the third day of so-called “cholera riots” against foreign troops blamed for introducing the disease into the country.
Someone said the protesters are violent “chimere,” a word for political gangs. I explained that it’s my job as a journalist to go talk to them.
Then two Haitian journalists who were on the bus pushed their way through the crowd and wrapped their arms around me. Everyone agreed, finally, that together with the two guys I could get through the barricades.
Elizer and Duval were coming back home to Cap Haitien. They were scared for me, saying under no circumstances should I talk with protesters or take photos. I reluctantly agreed to follow their instructions.
I wondered if perhaps the UN peacekeeping mission was right in saying these were protests were organized by a politician or gang. “Enemies of stability and democracy,” MINUSTAH mission head Edmond Mulet called them. So far, I’d only seen young men in the street.
But as we passed through each barricade, everyone – young girls and rotund market women mingling with demonstrators yelled out, “MINUSTAH ou ye?”
I yelled back, “Non, mwen se yon journalis Amerikan.” The suspicious stares softened into smiles and understanding looks. After passing the third barricade that way, we started laughing.
One teenager who threw a rock at us as we approached on motorcycle said, “pa gen pwoblem” – no problem – after I held out my press badge.
As we arrived on the outskirts of Cap Haitien proper, the streets were deserted except for people gathered around barricades. One was still flaming. At another, dozens of men milled around a burnt out car.
“Press! Press!” I called out, and they beckoned me through the crowd, many hands pushing me forward until I was through.
I was glad when an elderly man walking in the street stopped me. I finally had a chance to do an interview, against the advice of my companions. I whipped out my audio recorder. He was Amos Ordena, the local section’s elected Kazek – an official dispute mediator.
“The population has information that MINUSTAH introduced cholera,” he told me. “So many people have died. They’re obligated to hold fast, to demonstrate, so that the authorities will take responsibility. They’re asking MINUSTAH to leave the country.”
Asked if the protests are by a single group or the general population, he said all elements of society are participating in “the movement.” He said MINUSTAH are not firing weapons in self-defense, in the air to disperse protesters, but firing at people. He heard that at least one person had died earlier in the day.
We finally turned off the main road and walked into an alleyway. Elizer’s modest home was at the end (his lost his wife, children, and house in the capital in the earthquake). One of his brothers, blind and handicapped, lay on the floor beneath a television showing a soccer match. He smiled and introduced himself when I walked in.
Elizer reminded me to use hand sanitizer. Then his frail mother, beaming at us, served us fresh mais moule (corn) and papaya juice.
A neighbor of Elizer called up TV reporter Johnny Joseph, who came to meet me and help me get to the house where I was planning to stay. Elizer refused to accept any money for all his trouble.
Before leaving with Johnny, I spoke to Aristil Frito, a 24-year-old student standing outside talking with his neighbors. “The objective of the movement is clear: they’re asking for the departure of MINUSTAH.”
He said irresponsibility by the leaders of the country had led to this situation. In a more developed country, without so many young unemployed people in the street, the protests might have been more peaceful, he said.
“But the real solution is for people to live in a climate of peace, in dialogue. Today all Haitians should work together finish with hunger and poverty,” he said. “The best solution is the promotion of social dialogue.”
Johnny and I hopped on a motorcycle taxi, taking backstreets to bypass the barricades. We passed a five-foot deep trench dug in a narrow dirt road. Johnny said a MINUSTAH vehicle fell into the trench Wednesday and people threw bottles at them. The troops opened fire, killing an innocent bystander whose body was taken downtown, he said.
MINUSTAH blamed the death on local gangs.
At one junction, a young man in a purple shirt and black cap blocked our path and stuck out a knife as his friends looked on. I realized my press badge was tucked into my shirt. I pulled it out as Johnny talked the man down.
“You need to have your badge out,” the young man told me, glaring. “It’s a principle.” That’s been the only instance of serious hostility directed at me since I arrived in Cap Haitien.
So it’s bewildering to read the reporting of CNN’s Ivan Watson, who claimed that armed rioters control the city. He told viewers while being filmed on the back of a fast-moving motorcycle that it’s only way to move about the city amidst “violent protests.”
He doesn’t use that adjective to describe the actions of UN troops, accused of killing at least three demonstrators since Monday.
“They shot many people. We took them to the hospital. We’re asking MINUSTAH to leave the country,” a middle-aged man who declined to give his name told me.
He stopped bicycling past an intersection barricaded with coffins to stop and share his anger. “We have bottles, we don’t have guns to shoot them, but they’re shooting us. We have to defend our rights, MINUSTAH is a thing that doesn’t work in this country.”
Another of Watson’s reports claimed that Christian missionaries were forced to speed on a bus away from out-of-control-mobs, like in a Hollywood-style chase scene.
High drama = high ratings.
As I walked towards the downtown’s central public square on Wednesday, finally nearing the house, I saw several dozen people facing Haitian police in full riot gear standing in their way.
They said they had no beef with foreigners generally – only MINUSTAH.
Theodore Joel said they respected the Haitian police, because they’re brothers and family – though two police stations were reportedly set on fire during the first day of protests.
“Those soldiers are tourists! The money that’s invested in MINUSTAH – they could invest that money in education. They could invest in constructing hospitals, in cleaning up the country. but they’re paying those soldiers instead. We don’t have guns like in 1803… but each time we put our heads together, we’re marked in history.”
Thursday marked 203 years since the Battle of Vertières, where Jean-Jacques Dessalines led the final major assault on French armies to drive them off Haitian soil. They renamed the city: from Cap Francois to Cap Haitien.
While many expected demonstrations to continue in commemoration of Haiti’s independence struggle, the streets were quiet. No further confrontations were reported. I walked around downtown Cap on my own, trying to find an Internet connection to send out a radio story.
I’m asking everyone I meet here – from local journalists, vendors, men at the barricades, to a local magistrate – if these protests were organized by a gang or political group.
The unanimous answer is no – people are fed up with UN peacekeepers and the cholera outbreak is the straw that broke the camel’s back. The magistrate said he understands and respects the people demonstrating, but he wishes the barricades weren’t impeding the transportation of medical supplies to fight cholera in his commune, where people are dying in the street.
As the head of MINUSTAH warned that “every second lost” because of protests means more suffering and death from cholera, the anti-UN demonstrations continued in Port-au-Prince on Thursday.
CNN’s Watson led his report this way: “Like cholera itself, Haiti’s protests against the United Nations spread Thursday to the capital, Port-au-Prince, as angry people took to the streets demanding the global body get out of their country.”
Seems that for Watson, these protests are like a disease. It continues: “a planned protest began peacefully in the center of the city but turned violent as it moved toward the presidential palace, with one woman overcome by tear gas, witnesses said.”
Again, the protesters are the ones implicated in the violence. But a timeline-report released by International Action Ties, an independent human rights monitoring group, said the demonstrations were largely peaceful after returning to Champs de Mars plaza.
UN troops and Haitian police fired at least thirty tear gas canisters into the Faculty of Ethnologie and surrounding tent camps, the report said, sending children and old women fleeing into the streets. Police ignored the group’s pleas to stop firing.
Are protests against the UN meant to destabilize the country? Are Haitians who’ve taken to the streets being used, like puppets, by powerful politicians for their own ends? Are the protests violent?
The foreigners I’ve talked to say yes. A few American liberals living in Haiti tell me they fear the protests are violent and meant to cause chaos, echoing the statements of MINUSTAH and reporters like Watson. Some Haitians in the professional middle class don’t want to participate.
But most Haitians I’ve spoken with say no. They say this is the inevitable outcome when troops who operate in Haiti with seeming impunity may have introduced a deadly, misery-multiplying disease into the country. It’s an angry, popular movement – protesting however they can, emotions running high – against a five-year-old foreign occupation.
What do you think? We’ll see how this plays out in the next nine days, ahead of the Nov. 28 election. Stay tuned.
You can also read Landon Yarrington’s account of how the protests began, which the magistrate disputes. Video posted by Pierre Durohito De Venchy of the first three days of protests:
__________________________________
About Mediahacker
My name is Ansel Herz. I’m a 22-year-old freelance journalist based in Port-Au-Prince, Haiti. Why Haiti, since September 2009? Read here.
I lived and reported through the 7.0 earthquake that struck Haiti on January 12, for Reuters Alertnet, Inter-Press Service, and Free Speech Radio News (FSRN). My work has been featured on MotherJones.com and Wired.com. In the days after the quake, I was interviewed by CNN, BBC, Al Jazeera English, the New York Times, Sky News, Democracy Now!, and other news outlets worldwide. Produced video for PBS Newshour.
I reported for FSRN on Texas prison and immigration issues and organized with Indymediaand Food Not Bombs in Austin. Hosted and produced local community radio show On the Fringe from Spring 2007 through the end of 2008. Started college at the University of Washington at age 15 and graduated from the University of Texas at Austin with a B.A. in multimedia journalism. Participated in the 2010 School of Authentic Journalism in February.
My goals are to advance media justice and “go to where the silence is” in my own reporting.
Resume (PDF). Skills: HTML, CSS, PHP, WordPress, Photoshop, Audacity (audio production), radio, writing, Soundslides, shooting video, iMovie, Final Cut Pro.
Send me an e-mail.
Watch Season Finale (Episode 10) Of “Celeste Bright” (Web Series)
Sonya Steele
A month since episode 9, here’s episode 10 (and the season finale) of Sonya Steele’s web series, Celeste Bright. If you haven’t been following, click HERE for episode 9, click HERE for episode 8, HERE for episode 7, HERE for episode 6, HERE for episode 5; HERE for episode 4; HERE for episode 3; HERE for episode 2; and HERE for episode 1.
7th Annual Geist Literal Literary Postcard Story Contest
Welcome to the Geist Literal Literary Postcard Story Contest, the writing contest whose name is almost as long as the entries!
The 7th annual contest is now underway — and the deadline is January 15, 2011!
The Early Bird Special: Enter by November 20, 2010 to receive the Geist 20th Anniversary Collector’s Issue!
First Prize: $250
Second Prize: $150
Third Prize: $100
(more than one prize per category may be awarded)
Honourable Mentions: Swell Geist giftsSend us a postcard along with a story that relates to the image. The relationship can be as tangential as you like, so long as there is some clear connection to the image or place.
Maximum length: 500 words, fiction or non-fiction.
Winning entries will be published in Geist and at geist.com.
Honourable mentions will be published at geist.com.Type your literal postcard story on standard paper, in at least 11-point type, and attach the postcard with a paper clip (no staples, please). Judging is blind, so do not write your name on the story or the card. Include a cover letter with these details:
- Your name
- Story title(s)
- Address
- Phone number
- Email address
- How you found out about the contest
(Your personal information is confidential and will be used by Geist only to contact you.)
Entry Fee: $20 for the first entry (includes a 1-year subscription or subscription extension), $5 for each additional entry.
Send your entry with by snail mail with a cheque for the entry fee to:
Geist Postcard Contest
#210 — 111 West Hastings Street
Vancouver, BC
V6B 1J5or submit your entry online, click here.
Entries must be postmarked no later than January 15, 2011.
Questions? Call 604 – 681-9161 or email geist@geist.com.
Click here for a list of the 6th Annual Literal Literary Postcard Story Contest winners. Read the winning entries in Geist 77 and at geist.com.
THE FINE PRINT:
Winning entries: Geist retains first serial rights for print and non-exclusive electronic rights to post the text at geist.com. All other rights remain with the author. Geist will attempt to secure reproduction rights for images.
Publication rights for non-winning entries are retained by the entrants.
Postcards will be returned if requested.
Geist contests are open to all entrants, except Geist staff and contract employees, executive members of the geist foundation and contest judges.
Crab Creek Review Fiction Contest:
Sept. 15th - Dec. 31, 2010
SUBMISSION GUIDELINES:
- Original, previously unpublished fiction up to 3,000 words, double spaced.
- Name and contact info must NOT appear on any pages of the fiction piece.
- Please include a cover letter with your name, address, telephone number, email address, and the title of your story with a brief bio.
- Please include a $10 entry fee (check made payable to Crab Creek Review) and a SASE.
- Postmark deadline is Dec. 31, 2010.
- Mail submissions to:
Crab Creek Review Fiction Contest
c/o 7315 34th Ave NW
Seattle, WA 98117- Winner will receive $150 and publication in Crab Creek Review.
- All contest submissions will be considered for publication.
- Simultaneous submissions are permitted as long as Crab Creek Review is notified immediately if your work is accepted elsewhere.
- Contest Judge: Kathryn Trueblood
If you are an associate and/or student of the judge, we ask that you not submit.Kathryn Trueblood is the author of The Baby Lottery, which was a Book Sense Pick in 2007, and The Sperm Donor's Daughter, which received a Special Mention for the Pushcart Prize in 2000. She has co-edited two anthologies of multicultural literature, The Before Columbus Foundation Fiction Anthology: Selections from the American Book Awards with Ishmael Reed and Shawn Wong, (W.W. Norton, 1992); also Homeground, which won the Jurors' Choice Award at the Seattle’s City Arts Festival. Her stories and articles have been published in Poets & Writers Magazine, Rain Taxi Review of Books, Publishers Weekly, The Seattle Weekly, Glimmer Train, and Zyzzyva, among others. She is an Associate Professor of English at Western Washington University.
A Call for Papers for Sequel to Go, Tell Michelle
By Peggy Brooks-Bertram and Barbara Ann Seals Nevergold
Given the foregoing and the recent mid-term election results, we think that this is the time to revisit, Go, Tell Michelle and for African American women once more to go on record. We are actively working on a sequel to volume one because the outcome of the Mid-Term Election is equally historic
November 12, 2010
“Go, Tell Michelle: African American Women’s Response to the 2010 Mid-Term Elections”
(working title)
Dear Sisters:
Much has happened in the last 24 months! Two years ago this month, we celebrated the historic vote for Barack Obama as this country’s First African American President. We were excited, enthusiastic and hopeful that this election represented a sea change in race relations in this country. Our high expectations were tempered, however, by the tenor and tone of the campaign during which both President and Mrs. Obama were attacked through the use of stereotypic and racist imagery. So on November 18, 2008, we wrote an open letter to African American women requesting their submission of letters and poems that expressed their esteem, regard, and support of Michelle Obama, as she embarked on an uncertain journey as this country’s first African American First Lady.
The response was over-whelming. In the short span of three weeks we received hundreds of letters. The messages expressed a wide-range of issues that African American women wanted to share with the First Lady as well as their well-wishes and support. For example, many of you used your personal histories and experiences as the backdrop to underscore the important impact you believed that Mrs. Obama would have on the image of Black women—as mothers, career women, accomplished leaders. You told her that you thought she would help to dispel the myths and misconceptions about Black women. You juxtaposed this election against the history of Black people in this country to emphasize its ground-breaking significance. You implored the First Lady to adopt your causes, e.g. health care, education, military families, as her causes. You paid homage to our ancestors, who would have rejoiced “to see this day!”
From the many letters we received, one hundred were accepted for the volume we entitled: Go, Tell Michelle: African American Women Write to the New First Lady. Since its publication, Go, Tell Michelle has received rave reviews and a major book award. It has been used as a classroom text, a model for college women’s self-awareness discussion groups and adapted into a play. It is the only book that provided a platform for the voices of a diverse group of African and African American women to have their say about this historic event in American political/social history. In short, the messages sent to Mrs. Obama spoke not only for the writer but for our sisters around the world.
In the wake of the mid-term elections, we look back over the previous two years of the Obama presidency. During this period, the President and Mrs. Obama have faced unprecedented attacks that have included the “birther” debate, questioning President Obama’s citizenship and thus his legitimacy as the 44th US President. The question of his religion has become another “straw argument” in the on-going campaign to discredit the President’s authenticity and recent polls show that a sizable segment of the American population believe that he is a Muslim not a Christian. While still a topic that the President personally eschews, the issue of racism is increasingly identified as being the crux of the personal animosity toward him and his family.
While the First Lady appears to enjoy a higher approval rating than the President, she has not escaped criticism, which has been biased, mean-spirited and not befitting the office of First Lady. Many of the projects she’s advanced to combat child hood obesity, aid to military families, promote education, for example, have been met with derision and ridicule. Even her personal appearance has been fodder for political opponents and right wing pundits. Most recently, reminiscent of the questions about who paid for Mrs. Robinson’s move to the White House, disparaging comments were leveled at the First Lady for a trip to Spain that combined official business with a mini-vacation for her and her daughter. Mrs. Obama and her children have also been the subjects of stereotypic and racist comments. When the perpetrators were called on these, they tried to cloak their offensive remarks in the thin vale of humor.
Given the foregoing and the recent mid-term election results, we think that this is the time to revisit, Go, Tell Michelle and for African American women once more to go on record. We are actively working on a sequel to volume one because the outcome of the Mid-Term Election is equally historic, not just because of the resurgence of the Republican Party and the rise of the Tea Party and the so-called “Grizzly Mommas” but for the implications it has for the 2011 Election. While the first two years of Mrs. Obama’s tenure as First Lady have presented successes, the challenges also remain, some of which we anticipated and some we did not. We are returning to you and others asking that you submit another letter to Michelle expressing your sentiments around these issues and your concerns for this young family.
We also have a Survey that we are asking you to respond to. We will send this questionnaire under separate cover. Whether you decide to write a letter or not, please take some time to respond to the Survey and return it to us. Once again, we are asking African and African American women around the world to raise their voices and send their messages to Mrs. Obama. We cannot afford to be silent in these tumultuous times. We are asking for your response by December 20th.
Please feel free to share this “Call” with others.
Best,
Barbara/Peggy
Peggy Brooks-Bertram, Dr.P.H., Ph.D.
Co-Editor, "Go, Tell Michelle: African American Women Write to the New First Lady"716-829-6047, 716-697-8386
Fax: 716-829-3912Co-editor, "Go, Tell Michelle: African American Women Write to the New First Lady"
716-829-6047 (o)
716-913-1228 (c)
Monk’s Moods
Illustration by Joe Ciardiello
Thelonious Monk, the great American jazz artist, during the first half of his junior year at Stuyvesant High School in New York, showed up in class only 16 out of 92 days and received zeros in every one of his subjects. His mother, Barbara Monk, would not have been pleased. She had brought her three children to New York from North Carolina, effectively leaving behind her husband, who suffered bad health, and raising the family on her own, in order that they might receive a proper education. But Mrs. Monk, like a succession of canny, tough-minded, loving and very indulgent women in Thelonious Monk’s life, understood that her middle child had a large gift and was put on this earth to play piano. Presently, her son was off on a two-year musical tour of the United States, playing a kind of sanctified R & B piano in the employ, with the rest of his small band, of a traveling woman evangelist.
THELONIOUS MONK
The Life and Times of an American Original
By Robin D. G. Kelley
Illustrated. 588 pp. Free Press. $30
Associated PressThelonious Monk at the Newport Jazz Festival in 1963.
The brilliant pianist Mary Lou Williams, seven years Monk’s senior and working at the time for Andy Kirk’s Clouds of Joy orchestra, heard Monk play at a late-night jam session in Kansas City in 1935. Monk, born in 1917, would have been 18 or so at the time. When not playing to the faithful, he sought out the musical action in centers like Kansas City. Williams would later claim that even as a teenager, Monk “really used to blow on piano. . . . He was one of the original modernists all right, playing pretty much the same harmonies then that he’s playing now.”
It was those harmonies — with their radical, often dissonant chord voicings, along with the complex rhythms, “misplaced” accents, startling shifts in dynamics, hesitations and silences — that, even in embryonic form, Williams was hearing for the first time. It’s an angular, splintered sound, percussive in attack and asymmetrical, music that always manages to swing hard and respect the melody. Monk was big on melody. Thelonious Monk’s body of work, as composer and player (the jazz critic Whitney Balliett called Monk’s compositions “frozen . . . improvisations” and his improvisations “molten . . . compositions”), sits as comfortably beside Bartok’s Hungarian folk-influenced compositions for solo piano as it does beside the music of jazz giants like James P. Johnson, Teddy Wilson and Duke Ellington, some of the more obvious influences on Monk. It’s unclear how much of Bartok he listened to. Monk did know well and play Rachmaninoff, Liszt and Chopin (especially Chopin). Stravinsky was also a favorite.
Robin D. G. Kelley, in his extraordinary and heroically detailed new biography, “Thelonious Monk,” makes a large point time and time again that Monk was no primitive, as so many have characterized him. At the age of 11, he was taught by Simon Wolf, an Austrian émigré who had studied under the concertmaster for the New York Philharmonic. Wolf told the parent of another student, after not too many sessions with young Thelonious: “I don’t think there will be anything I can teach him. He will go beyond me very soon.” But the direction the boy would go in, after two years of classical lessons, was jazz.
Monk was well enough known and appreciated in his lifetime to have appeared on the cover of the Feb. 28, 1964, issue of Time magazine. He was 46 at the time, and after many years of neglect and scuffling had become one of the principal faces and sounds of contemporary jazz. The Time article, by Barry Farrell, is, given the vintage and target audience, well done, both positive and fair, and accurate in the main. But it does make much of its subject’s eccentricities, and refers to Monk’s considerable and erratic drug and alcohol use. This last would have raised eyebrows in the white middle-class America of that era.
Throughout the book, Kelley plays down Monk’s “weirdness,” or at least contextualizes it. But Monk did little to discourage the popular view of him as odd. Always a sharp dresser and stickler for just the right look, he also favored a wide array of unconventional headgear: astrakhan, Japanese skullcap, Stetson, tam-o’-shanter. He had a trickster sense of humor, in life and in music, and he loved keeping people off-balance in both realms. Off-balance was the plane on which Monk existed. He also liked to dance during group performances, but this served very real functions: first, as a method of conducting, communicating musical instructions to the band members; and second, to let them know that he dug their playing when they were in a groove and swinging.
Even early in his career, Monk often insisted on showing up late to gigs, driving bandleaders, club owners and audiences to distraction. And on occasion he would simply fall asleep at the piano. He would also disappear to his room in the family apartment for two weeks at a time. When he was young, these behaviors or idiosyncrasies were tolerated and, more or less, manageable. But the manic, erratic behavior turned out to be the precursor of a more serious bipolar illness that would over time become immobilizing. From his father, Thelonious Sr., who was gone from the scene by the time Monk was 11, Thelonious Jr. seems to have gotten his musical gene (there always seems to be one in there). But he also inherited his father’s illness. Monk Sr. was committed to the State Hospital for the Colored Insane in Goldsboro, N.C., at the age of 52, in 1941. He never left.
Kelley, the author of “Race Rebels” and other books, makes use of the “carpet bombing” method in this biography. It is not pretty, or terribly selective, but it is thorough and hugely effective. He knows music, especially Monk’s music, and his descriptions of assorted studio and live dates, along with what Monk is up to musically throughout, are handled expertly. The familiar episodes of Monk’s career are all well covered: the years as house pianist at Minton’s after-hours club in Harlem, which served as an incubator for the new “modern music,” later to be called bebop; the brilliant “Genius of Modern Music” sessions for Blue Note, Monk’s first recordings with him as the bandleader; the drug bust, where Monk took the rap for Bud Powell and lost his New York cabaret license for six years; his triumphant return in 1957 with his quartet, featuring John Coltrane, at the Five Spot; the terrible beating Monk took for resisting arrest in New Castle, Del.; the final dissolution and breakdown. Likewise, the characters in Monk’s life and career are well served: his fellow musicians; his family; his friend and benefactor, the fascinating Pannonica (Nica) de Koenigswarter, the “jazz baroness,” at whose home in Weehawken, N.J., Monk spent his final years. He would die, after a long silence, in 1982, in the arms of his wife, Nellie.
Musicians — particularly jazz musicians of Monk’s period, and most especially Monk, taciturn and gnomic in utterance by nature — tend not, as writers do, to write hundreds of letters sharing with intimates what is going on in their hearts or heads. A biography of Monk, perforce, has to rely on the not always reliable, often conflicting, memories of others. Instinct is involved, surely as much as perspicacity, in sifting through the mass of observation and anecdote. The Monk family appears to have shared private material with Kelley that had hitherto been unavailable. This trust was not misplaced. There will be shapelier and more elegantly written biographies to come — Monk, the man and the music, is an endlessly fascinating subject — but I doubt there will be a biography anytime soon that is as textured, thorough and knowing as Kelley’s. The “genius of modern music” has gotten the passionate, and compassionate, advocate he deserves. h
August Kleinzahler’s most recent book is “Music: I-LXXIV,” a collection of essays.
2010 National Book Award Winner,
Poetry
Terrance Hayes
Lighthead
Penguin Books
Photo credit: Yona Harvey
ABOUT THE BOOKIn his fourth collection, Terrance Hayes investigates how we construct experience. With one foot firmly grounded in the everyday and the other hovering in the air, his poems braid dream and reality into a poetry that is both dark and buoyant. Cultural icons as diverse as Fela Kuti, Harriet Tubman, and Wallace Stevens appear with meditations on desire and history. We see Hayes testing the line between story and song in a series of stunning poems inspired by the Pecha Kucha, a Japanese presenta tion format. This innovative collection presents the light- headedness of a mind trying to pull against gravity and time. Fueled by an imagination that enlightens, delights, and ignites,Lighthead leaves us illuminated and scorched.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Terrance Hayes’ previous poetry collection, Wind in a Box, was named one of the Best 100 Books of 2006 by Publishers Weekly. His other books of poetry are Hip Logic, which won the National Poetry Series Open Competition and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award, andMuscular Music, which won the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. His other honors include a Pushcart Prize, three Best American Poetry selections, a Whiting Writers Award, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He is a professor of creative writing at Carnegie Mellon University and lives with his family in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
SUGGESTED LINKS
Hayes' profile on Poets.org
www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/437Hayes' page on Penguin's website
us.penguingroup.com/nf/Book/BookDisplay/0,,9780143116967,00.html
EXCERPTLIGHTHEAD’S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY
Ladies and gentlemen, ghosts and children of the state,
I am here because I could never get the hang of Time.
This hour, for example, would be like all the others
were it not for the rain falling through the roof.
I’d better not be too explicit. My night is careless
with itself, troublesome as a woman wearing no bra
in winter. I believe everything is a metaphor for sex.
Lovemaking mimics the act of departure, moonlight
drips from the leaves. You can spend your whole life
doing no more than preparing for life and thinking,
“Is this all there is?” Thus, I am here where poets come
to drink a dark strong poison with tiny shards of ice,
something to loosen my primate tongue and its syllables
of debris. I know all words come from preexisting words
and divide until our pronouncements develop selves.
The small dog barking at the darkness has something to say
about the way we live. I’d rather have what my daddy calls
“skrimp.” He says “discrete” and means the street
just out of sight. Not what you see, but what you perceive:
that’s poetry. Not the noise, but its rhythm; an arrangement
of derangements; I’ll eat you to live: that’s poetry.
I wish I glowed like a brown-skinned pregnant woman.
I wish I could weep the way my teacher did as he read us
Molly Bloom’s soliloquy of yes. When I kiss my wife,
sometimes I taste her caution. But let’s not talk about that.
Maybe Art’s only purpose is to preserve the Self.
Sometimes I play a game in which my primitive craft fires
upon an alien ship whose intention is the destruction
of the earth. Other times I fall in love with a word
like somberness. Or moonlight juicing naked branches.
All species have a notion of emptiness, and yet
the flowers don’t quit opening. I am carrying the whimper
you can hear when the mouth is collapsed, the wisdom
of monkeys. Ask a glass of water why it pities
the rain. Ask the lunatic yard dog why it tolerates the leash.
Brothers and sisters, when you spend your nights
out on a limb, there’s a chance you’ll fall in your sleep.________________________________________________________
via us.penguingroup.com
By far, the most accurate article on the demostrations yet. Great work Mr. Herz.
Hey Ansel,
Just throwing it out there because I know folks in Cap who feel like many of the people at the blockades are just thugs. What would have happened if you didn’t have that press pass? I know plenty of people going hungry in Cap right now because the blockades have shut down regular commerce ad they’ve run out of food and money in their homes. There are more people infected with cholera because prevention options aren’t getting out.
I respect the need to protest against MINUSTAH, and an organized protest would have done a lot more to motivate change. MINUSTAH needs to own up to the grave error of transporting an infected troop. But a few hundred or even a few thousand people using machetes, rocks, bottles and burning tires to shut down a few hundred thousand person city and endanger people’s lives at the start of a fast spreading infectious disease epidemic is not a movement that in my opinion deserves much respect.
You burn down food warehouses, throw glass bottles at public health workers just because they are white, threaten to burn down gas stations, shut down the banks, close the roads, attack the day to day fabric of people’s lives leaving people hungry shuttered in their homes to air your political grievances and you have crossed the line from political discourse to thuggery.
Prior to these events MINUSTAH in cap was largely an innocuous bureaucracy driving around maybe not doing a hell of a lot in the eyes of the people but honestly other than a few incidents at the level of a corrupt police force and driving around too fast in armored vehicles showing guns they did not act as occupiers.
Do the people protesting think it will get better without MINUSTAH? Really? Please, I would like to know from a group of protesters how MINUSTAH is keeping them down as an occupier? Illegal searches? Rapes? Levied taxation through corruption? From what I know the MINUSTAH police were the only people really trying to do something about violence against women or corruption, such as catching the people who hacked that girl to death who spoke out against her rapists a few weeks ago.
Do people think suddenly there is going to be a safer city without MINUSTAH? That the level of investment needed to solve Haiti’s infrastructure problems and create jobs from the domestic investor community? Do they think the international community is going to start to put the billions in that are needed if they drive MINUSTAH away with riots? The only people who I can see who benefit significantly from MINUSTAH leaving are criminals or drug dealers.
I don’t see a political voice here talking about reasonable options in these protests. I see an angry mob lashing out maybe not manipulated by political forces but definitely not lashing out to a positive end, and in the meantime more people are getting infected with Cholera without treatment.
Sincerely,
Peter
Thanks for your comment Peter. You’re entitled to your opinion, of course. I’m reporting what I’m hearing and seeing.
Also, to answer your question – I think I would have been fine without the press pass. I was with local journalists. When you’re with people who are part of the communities you’re traveling in, it’s a lot less likely that people are going to give you problems.
Peter:
Your ignorance is quite overwhelming. And the fact that you’ve typed a whole essay, justifying your lack of awareness is quite shameful if you ask me. You, like so many others, are so quick to attempt to formulate an opinion on the situation in Haiti without knowing the facts, and that, my friend, is what I call intellectual sloth.
I have family in Au Cap – a lot, actually – and the notion that folks in the region view those freedom fighters that are defending their country and their dignity and wellbeing, as thugs is a bold-faced lie and you know it. I spoke to my great aunt and several other friends and relatives in that area, and I know for sure they all want MINUSTAH to get the hell out of their city and country. Furthermore, the initial protest consisted of several thousand people, according to my people over there, so I guess the men, women, and children who participated in the protest are all thugs, too?
Also, do you care to explain why Haitians would not be better off without the brutal UN proxy occupiers that has done nothing but engaged in rape, pillage, and repression? Perhaps you believe Haitians are just savages who simply can’t fend for themselves, but the truth is, Haiti was doing much better before the US / France / Canada orchestrated coup against Dr. Aristide. And while Dr. Aristide was not perfect (considering that he bowed down to neoliberal pressure), he was not given the chance to exercise his true potential for the betterment of Haiti, and because he eventually resisted the call to sell his soul to the imperialists devils, he was eventually thrown out of country.
For over two centuries, Haiti has been in a proverbial economic chokehold, starting with Thomas Jefferson, who imposed a long-standing embargo on the country because recognizing the newly independent republic would have been a threat to his highly lucrative slave business. This cycle of injustice continued even today, and this, my friend, is the reason for Haiti’s lack of infrastructure.
And last I checked, tyranny never responds to peaceful means. Six years of peaceful protests against MINUSTAH occupiers have solved absolutely nothing. In fact, they’ve recruited troops from all over the country to intimidate Haitians and keep them from rising up. They’ve even invested millions in the
Nazi-esque Haitian National Police to further oppress and repress the people.
So, now…By any means necessary. That is the only solution. They won’t accept the peaceful way, so now it’s time for the Dessalines way. And more people need to stand up and kick the satanic UN, NGO poverty pimps, and fake white-savior charity do-gooders and Jesus freaks out of the country. Now, I’m not saying all of the charities are bad, but many of them are front groups for the US, and they must be exposed. Every damn camp needs to rise up. From
By the way, who cares if the warehouse was allegedly burned down? The food was probably bad anyway, since they were not being delivered to Haitians. The food was left to rotten. So whatever.
Neither you nor I are in the predicament of Haitians in Haiti. And even though I’m Haitian and I have a lot of relatives in Haiti, this feeling of utter despair that get when I see Haitians being slaughtered and disrespected in their own country is quite minimal compared to those who are actually enduring it, and the other effects of this occupation. In other words, it’s easy for you to sit there, curl you fingers, and type a lot of nonsense, and get away with it.
Learn to formulate opinions / analysis on facts, not what the mendacious media spews out.
Media = lies
so
Opinions based on media lies = lies.
Regardless of how you look at it, it’s all lies.