Book Review #1, Leaving Gees Bend, by Irene Latham

There's an expression heard now and then across the eastern Kentucky coalfields, where here  and there are found urban islands whose best days are in all probability behind them.  Declining populations, declining school enrollments, declining job opportunities and other declinations make a brighter day look starkly unlikely in such places. Such towns, it is said, are "good places to be from," with the barely concealed connotation that they are good places to get out of. Not good in the here and now, but good to have hailed from.

Gees Bend, Alabama, circa 1932, as depicted in Irene Latham's novel, sounds rather like one such town. Physically isolated, its people psychologically isolated, its economy chronically stagnant, Gees Bend is the kind of town that almost any responsible parent would encourage his adult children to forsake at the first opportunity.

Standing amid the sad milieu that is Gees Bend is Ludelphia Bennett. Blind in one eye, this 10-year old sharecropper from a family of sharecroppers has known only hard work, hardship, and determination born of near-desperation. One day that determination is tested like never before when she sets out alone for Camden to find a doctor for her grievously sick mother. Though Camden is only 40 miles away, it might as well be on a different planet, so different is it from the world  Ludelphia has known.  This tale explores the interconnections among situationally compelled travel, cultural difference, and psychological growth, and does so in ways both well told and inspirational, and accessible to young adult readers.

Irene Latham is the award-winning author of two novels for children, the aforementioned Leaving Gee's Bend (Putnam/Pengui, 2010) and Don't Feed the Boy (Roaring Brook/Macmillan, 2012) and two volumes of poetry, The Color of Lost Rooms and What Came Before. She lives with her husband and three sons in Birmingham, Alabama. 

For more information about Irene Latham, go to:

http://www.irenelatham.com/

http://www.irenelatham.blogspot.com/

Nica Post #4: Music, Madness, Poetry, Incongruency

On the tarmac at Miami International, Canadian singer-songwriter Bruck Cockburn's (pronounced Coburn) Nicaragua, played in my mind:

In the flash of this moment,
You're the best of what we are.
Don't let them stop you now,
Nicaragua. 

And this selection from the song's opening lyrics:

The kid who guards Fonseca's tomb,
Cradles a beat up machine gun,
At age 15 he's a veteran of four years of war. 

Proud to pay his dues,
He knows who turns the screws.
Baby's face and an old man's eyes.

Carlos Fonseca founded the Sandinista National Liberation Front, which after a long struggle toppled the notoriously brutal and corrupt -- and U.S. backed -- Somoza regime. An excellent memoir on the Sandinista Revolution and subsequent Contra War is, The Country Under My Skin, by a woman named Gioconda Belli. That's me to the right standing next to Fonseca's tomb.  The inscription at the bottom says, "Carlos is with the dead, but he never died."  Fonseca was killed fighting U.S. backed Contra rebels in northern Nicaragua.

* * * * * * * * * * *

Another song that made its way repeatedly into my mind in Nicaragua is one I have been quietly working on for months.  (I am an amateur musician/songwriter.)  The reason I've been working on it for months is because of songwriter's block. I have a melody -- a very beautiful melody IMHO --  but can't decide what I want the song to be about:  romantic love or an ode to the beauty of our planet.  Either way, the song -- like most of my originals -- will include reflection on the human condition, as follows:

This world is but a hazy veil of tears,
someone said.
But now and then are visions sometimes fed.
Can  you remember?

This song has the potential to be one of my best.  I pray that my stupid male brain can get over itself and break the logjam....soon.

* * * * * * * * * * *

Sometimes a style of music turns up where you would never expect to hear it.  This happened on Big Corn Island while scuba diving.  Several times I came up from the Deep Blue and was greeted by a melody like Kitty Wells' Will Your Lawyer Talk to God?  Country music from the 50s and 60s was the music-of-choice for the two Caribbean black guys manning the boat, not Bob Marley and Whalers, not Harry Bellafonte, not calypso music.

* * * * * * * * * * *

Another song that visited my conscious mind on a number of occasions in Nicaragua was James Taylor's Enough to be on Your Way. It is the kind of song that either comforts you or rubs the salt in deeper. Here is a sampling of the lyrics.

Well, the sun shines on our funeral,
the same as on our birth,
the way it shines on everything that happens on this earth.
It rolls across the western sky, and back into the sea.
And spends the day's last rays upon this fucked up family. 

Oh, it's enough to be on your way
It's enough just to cover ground.
It's enough to be moving on.
Oh, build it behind your eyes.
Hide it inside your heart. 
Safe among your own. 

I have probably listened to this song something like 1,000 times by now, and each and every time it stomps my heart. It is one of Taylor's all time best, a musical work of art. What does this have to do with Nicaragua?  Nothing really, though there is a personal tie in. Whenever I travel abroad I go through a period of pensive melancholy.

* * * * * * * * * * *

Nicaragua has a rich poetic tradition going back to at least Ruben Dario, but the tradition that so far has struck me the most is the poetry of the campensinos, the rural peasantry. Nicaraguan Peasant Poetry of Solentiname offers an excellent introduction to that genre through poetry that expresses the day-to-day lives of the peasants of the Solentiname Archepelago, a cluster of islands found in Lake Nicaragua, a huge freshwater lake whose southern reaches almost touch the Costa Rican border. In this volume are poems about love, the changing of the seasons, egrets, old age, and other topics.  And since Solentiname apparently was a hotbed of opposition to the Somaza dictatorship, one will also find poems about battles, violent death, oppression, exile, and similar subjects. 

Here are a few examples translated from Spanish:

Remember

Remember that life is not even
a thousandth of a second in the great sweep of time:
but one kiss from you is enough to make it all stand still.

An Egret

An egret goes slowly by
Lazily moving her wings
seeing her image
on the calm surface of the lake.

They Carried the Wounded Campesino

They carried the wounded campesino
down to his farm
Guardsmen had really worked him over.
Down from the thick mountains.
Dying, dying.
The wind ceaselessly moving the bushes.
There on the far horizon
The sun dropped out of sight.

And since the title of this post contains the word "madness."

It was a Night of Torment

It was a night of torment.
I went out to the patio in search of peace.
I thought I would die.
I sought air but found none.
I retired to a madero tree,
there i doubted my sanity.
I sat on a stone
until the sun's rays
announced the dawn.

May 2, 2013, Nica Post #3, Am I There Yet?

At about 10:45 on the morning of May 2, an American Airlines plane raced down the tarmac at Miami International Airport, became airborne, and made a bee-line for Managua.  Not having gotten sufficient sleep the night before, I spent most of the approximately 3 hour flight in a nether land between sleep and wakefulness.

The plane landed, everyone disembarked, I breezed through immigration and customs (paying my $10.00 airport tax in the process), stepped out of the air conditioning and into the hot, sultry, urban madness of Managua, Nicaragua.  Though this was my first time in Nicaragua, it wasn't my first time in Latin America, and in seconds I had stepped onto memory lane.  The heat and humidity -- not to mention the general ambience -- took me back to places like Santa Cruz, Bolivia; La Ceiba and San Pedro Sula, Honduras; and Trinidad, Cuba.  The taxi drivers hustled like carnival barkers. Then there were the 'hanger outers,' guys who try to 'help' you with your luggage or provide some other unrequested and at that moment unwanted service.  It is worth remembering that they do this out of economic desperation.  Compassion is called for, but so too is caution.

After wandering around awhile but getting nowhere, I began asking about the location of La Costena airlines, Nicaragua's puddle-jumper.  That was a mistake. I should have done what men have usually done since the dawn of history in similar situations, kept wandering around until random chance put me where I needed to be. In no time several 'hanger outers' were descending on me wanting to lead me there and provide assistance with my luggage.  That's just the way it is, or can easily turn, in most developing countries.

Having missed my 6:15 a.m. flight to Corn Island for reasons over which I had no control -- I was exactly where I was supposed to be when I was supposed to be there and the only times I wasn't was when Delta screwed up -- one would think I would have suffered no penalty for taking the afternoon flight to that island.  But one would be wrong. I got hit with an additional $40 charge, nothing that would break the bank, but irritating.

Though the offices of La Costena airlines are only a short walk from the desks of Big Dogs -- Big Birds? -- like Delta, American, and TACA, symbolically it was like traveling from the First World to the Third World.  La Costena's offices were gritty, unkept.  The floors looked like they hadn't been vacuumed in a long while. A good dusting would have been, well, a really really good idea. But that for me is part of the arresting, disconcerting charm of the developing world.  Its chaotic, seat-of-the-pants, hold-on-to-your-wallet (literally, and more on that later) shtick scrabbles my cognitive checkerboard in ways that, in the end, benefit me psychologically at multiple levels.  A major factor that keeps drawing me back to Latin America, in spite of its many problems, is that I just really like Latin Americans.

Similar situation with the propeller-drive plane.  While it looked all right from the outside -- I didn't see dangling engine parts or worn tires -- the interior was gritty, and most windows had, deep scratches, and does anyone know where's the vacuum cleaner? The almost-full plane carried a large number of foreigners, many of them English speakers, though there was at least one German speaking couple aboard.

I sat just a few feet from one of the propellers, and as the plane taxied down the runway I watched, mesmerized like a mildly autistic child, as the propeller went from being plainly visible to clearly invisible. I felt a wish to reach out to find out if the propeller was still there. (Good thing there was a window between us, haha.)  In minutes, I was eye-to-eye with beautiful, billowing  clouds, and a blue sky farther up.  In awhile we descended towards Bluefields, on the Caribbean coast, where some would disembark and a smaller number of others would board. As we descend, I see smoky fires here and there across the landscape.  Slash-and-burn agriculture? I didn't know, and still don't.

It is about this time that I began to notice that I was enjoying very much keeping a diary, one from which the material for this blog would be drawn. I recall mentally kicking myself for not taking up blogging sooner -- all those countries, so many stories.

There is something almost meditative, Zen-like, about writing as you travel.  I soon realized that the reason I could do this -- write as I travel -- was because I was traveling alone. Without a companion, my companion became my diary, and there was something about the experience -- this intimacy between me and blank pages in a strange land -- that was comforting and exhilarating.  I could choose between writing in my diary or reading my VIVE book about Nicaragua or my biography about Augusto Sandino. Writing usually won.

I used my diary to do a mental exercise.  For a while I jotted down each and every thought that crossed my mind.  The human mind is rather like a wild horse, galloping this direction and that in fits of consciousness.  Here are a few of the things that I thought about:  Once again, I had an internal conversation driven by my fear that I would end up like my mom: demented in a nursing home barely knowing who I am. Both she and her brother ended up in that awful place before their final exit. I reassured myself that, unlike my mother, I was doing everything possible to avert such an outcome. My attention to nutrition and exercise was way better than hers, my left brain told my right brain. However imperfectly, I remain engaged with life, unlike mom, whose open-wound cynicism following her divorce became a tool of self-destruction as she withdrew from the world.

Cynicism is genuinely ugly past a point. There are worse things than death.  These are two things mom taught me.

And then, like before, the $64 question came up: When and if the time came, would I be willing -- and just as important, able -- to commit suicide?  Of course, the Catch-22 of dementia and Alzheimer's is that by the time suicide becomes a truly viable option, your mind has truly turned to mush.  Interesting: suicide as a "solution" to chronic unhappiness, and suicide as a practical matter.

My other internal conversation will sound ridiculous, and probably is.  For a long time I have considered the United State's unique brand of provincialism to be a serious problem. While this is especially true relative to our knowledge of and perspectives about the other 195 countries in the world, there is a general polarization between American who embrace complex thinking, or even basic thoughtfulness, and those that don't. This statement is an over-simplification of a complex socio-historical phenomenon. Books like Anti-Intellecualism in American Life and, more recently, The Age of American Unreason explore the complexities of this schism.

Last year, I took a group of Southeast students to the Idea Festival, a 3-day celebration of creative rationality held each year in Louisville.  Getting it organized before the conference was a lot of work, and the sense of responsibility that came with sheperding youngins' during the conference was quite taxing.  But the reward was, in the end, worth it personally. For a few students it seemed to be a game changer, with potential to positively alter their life course.

I would love to take a group of Southeast students to a developing country.  For a variety of reasons, that will never happen, and probably shouldn't.  Yet from time-to-time I find myself pondering this impossible possibility.

There were other internal conversations that I jotted down. Most of them were too ephemeral, or too goofy, to mention. Others were too personal.

As we descended towards the Big Corn Island airport, the haze began to clear and I began to discern details in the water.  I quickly realized that I was looking down at a beautiful coral reef, and realized I would soon be scuba diving in a place like that.  This made me feel happy.

General Post #1 -- On Pain and Emancipation

I think this is an appropriate time to make a few comments about my blog.

Some of what I say might be surprising to those who don't know me very well.  Those who do know me know that I came from a terribly screwed up, dysfunctional family.  For years I felt a sense of personal guilt about it, as if I somehow were responsible for my father's mood swings or my mother's chronic melancholy, and for the near constant conflict between them and among my siblings and me. The institution that is generally regarded as the ultimate life-affirming institution -- the family -- was for me little more than misery's ambassador. Yes, I had suicidal ideations as I was growing up. Yes, I turned deeply introspective as a strategy for coping with impossible circumstances over which I had no control. Consequently, one of my goals in this blog is catharsis. This blog is almost as much about psychological space as it is about geographic space.  In the coming months, if I fulfill my personal goals, this blog will be at least partly therapeutic.

I wish to address the blog's content as per my #2 Nica post.  I am not, for starters, making light of suicide, though it may seem that I am.  I know it is a terrible thing to do.  I make light of it because now I can make light of it.  Similarly, I am not making light of mental illness. I understand -- more than most -- the misery it renders. The burden of living in a family scarred by mental illness is not a burden I carry any more, but yet it has influenced in one way or another almost every aspect of my life, from the relatively trivial to the exceedingly important. I don't like that; I am not proud of that, but at least its hold on me has eased to the point that I can make light of it.

I know I lean towards black, or gallows, humor.  From an early age I have used humor as a coping mechanism, and what came out was often sardonic, if not out-and-out darkish. I don't think it's hard to understand how I got that way.

My fascination with travel, likewise, began at an early age, and I realized, even when I was young, that it had something to do with getting to a better place.  But I am fully aware that the grass is not always greener on the other side. 

I have come to detest provincialism, people who go through life with blinders on (though, in a broader sense, we all do.)  It was provincialism -- and the sense of shame it engenders -- that eclipsed any possibility of my parents ever realistically dealing with the nightmare that was the family dynamics they had created.  It was provincialism -- and the boxed-in world view it engenders -- that led them to keep doing the same thing over and over based on the same dysfunctional template, and expecting different results.

May 1, 2013 -- Nica post #2 -- Notable Moments

My flight to Atlanta out of Lexington was delayed by 55 minutes, which gave me about 20 minutes to make my connecting flight to Managua.  I reminded myself that I had a 6:15 a.m. flight the next morning to Big Corn Island.  Not good, not good at all. Shortly later, it was announced that my flight to Atlanta was delayed by another 20 minutes.  The dominos are lined up for a perfect fall, I said to myself.  And fall they did.

In Atlanta I sought out a Delta help desk after missing my flight to Managua. They routed me to Miami via American Airlines, which was at least in the right general direction.  Later that evening I land at Miami International Airport, and soon find myself walking in many of the same spaces I walked in just a few months earlier enroute to Havana. Concourse J, for example, and the same downstairs area where I waited (and waited and waited) for that hotel van that never came.  During my second interaction with a Delta help desk -- the first in Atlanta, the second in Miami -- I was given vouchers that covered dinner, breakfast, and lunch, and which had a collective value of $18.00.  At least my hotel room that night was paid entirely by someone else.

Earlier that evening I'd had my first notable moment, one that lasted 2.5 hours. It was a refresher course on the value of serendipity. Sitting next to me on the flight was a woman named Paula (not her real name).  We struck up a conversation.  She was a delight to chat with. I soon learned that the parallels between her life and mine were, to me at least, striking.  I call them the three S's:

Shit. Until that evening I had never met anyone who, like me, had had human shit thrown at them.  Paula had shit thrown on her by a disgruntled hospital patient at her first nursing job.  I had shit thrown on me as a weapon of total discombobulation by would-be thieves in Barcelona, Spain. There is a special bond that only members of the Sisterhood and Brotherhood of Those Shat Upon can truly understand.  While I wouldn't wish this awful experience on anybody, even the most miserable, humiliating experience can be a lesson in strength and endurance.  The would-be thieves failed, and I learned some valuable lessons on protecting myself in and around big city subways.

Suicide. When Paula was 14 she attempted suicide.  She did not succeed, she reassured me, but did acknowledge subsequently spending two months in a psyche ward.  When I was 14 -- having by then already endured years of psychological (and more than a little physical) abuse from my mentally unstable father, compounded by my enabling mother -- I gave the final exit option serious consideration, serious enough to think through the means and, on the appointed day, attend to the public relations aspect of the project. The "means" was my father's sleeping pills, and the PR part was the suicide note. (Even then I enjoyed writing.) It could have worked if only I'd put the pen down and started swallowing.


Insanity.  Both her father and my father had serious mental health issues. Well, I know mine did, and Paula was convincing that her's did. Both her father and my father were psychologically damaged souls -- mine, as far as my mother and siblings could determine, by a positively awful childhood.  Her's by Vietnam-era Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).
 

My conversation with Paula erased any irritation I might have felt over missing my flight.  It was pure serendipity, a  lesson in spontaneity.

More serendipities and synchronicities awaited in the coming days: The young man from Argentina with relatives in Lexington, the college professor who was with our Cuba tour group just a few months previously in February who, it turned out, was in Nicaragua the same time as I, and the man I met on Little Corn Island who grew up in the same Louisville neighborhood as I.  But none of them would affect me as deeply as the conversation with Paula. It was the matter-of-fact way she told her story, not just about the suicide attempt but about other chapters in her family history that I've chosen not to mention here. It was as if she had completely freed herself of shame.  I, with my Catholic upbringing next to my wildly dysfunctional parenting, have spent much of my life trying to unravel the vestiges of shame, as well as of abuse.  I all but envied her lack of shame, which made me feel, well, ashamed. (Just kidding.)

Then there are the "notable moments" in which you are merely an observer. This one, involving a Delta help desk attendant and a passerby with a question, was from the Déjà vu all-over-again bin. A rather elderly Haitian woman walked up as the Delta rep was doing the voucher paperwork and, with confused demeanor asked where to go to meet disdembarking flights from Port-au-Prince. The rep told her that she needed to go to the international flights section on the upstairs floor. The Haitian woman walked off only to return a few minutes later, seeming more discombobulated and asking the same question. The rep again explained where she needed to go, this time adding in a few hand gestures and a few more details. 

The exchange made me think of my mother, who died from the cumulative effects of dementia. Part of me wanted to "do" something to "help" her, for her behavior was suffiiently similar to my mom's that I had little doubt schronic cognitive impairment was at work.  I could just picture myself with a clipboard and white coat interviewing her next to the Delta help desk. Do you smoke?  Have you been diagnosed with diabetes, or as pre-diabetic?  Do you exercise regularly?  On a scale of 1 to 5, how would you rate your intake of saturated fat? Have you ever had a C-Reactive Protein test? How's your SED rate?

I did nothing of the sort, of course, for I have learned -- as most of us do -- that people are gonna do what they're gonna do. Mom continued smoking even after several heart attacks. Indeed, her right to smoke was one of the few things she would get really assertive about. She never exercised a minute in her life.  Bacon and eggs continued to be her breakfast-of-choice even after being diagnosed with cardiovascular disease. She continued eating sugar laden deserts even after being diagnosed with insulin dependent diabetes. Even as her body started crashing in on itself and her mental confusion became life-in-hell, she never seemed to draw any connection between her choices and her consequences.

Why am I being so sanctimonious and judgmental about my mother?  After all, I was working hard to get into a country where I could easily contract Giardia or some other intestinal parasite, and where an encounter with potentially deadly malaria, or a bone-grinding renderzvous with Dengue fever, were not out of the question.  

Believe it or not, I am in the process of making a point.  Tenga paciencia.  It will come, but just not today.

Before closing, I would like to describe another kind of notable moment.  It is the least noticed by those around you, though sometimes it is, to your inner world, akin to an earthquake.  It is -- at least in my experience -- the most likely to be a truly transcendent, or transformative, moment. And for that reason there is a touch of madness about it. 

Sarooning at the Managua bus station.

Sitting in the plane that was soon to be Miami bound, I watched as passengers walked single-file down the aisle.  Having flown by now more times that I could recall, I watched an utterly routine scene that suddenly felt surreal and inspiritational. A white, somewhat elderly looking man walked down the aisle, stopped, and proceeded to place his carry on luggage into an overhead compartment. As I watched this mundane scene I suddenly understood with cinematic clarity that I was living on a planet inhabited by billions of people but that, at that moment, the gentleman and I, and everyone in the immediate physical vicinity, were sharing a unique moment in time/space. I understood the almost unspeakable sacredness of that moment. I thought about this man and wondered what his "story" was, this one unique life, this living, breathing, mortal, moment in time. And I understood that when he died, this person would never be repeated. I understood this not as a "factoid," but from a far grander vantage point.

I read years ago that such thoughts and emotions hold similarities to the mental universe of a schizophrenic. I don't know if that is true, though it seems plausible.