Bookshelf

Recently Read:

The Wretched of the Earth, by Frantz Fanon

I read this upon urging by an anthropologist friend. It was powerful and thought-provoking (duh)... I don't feel particularly qualified to discuss What It All Means, but I will cop out by quoting something in the translator's notes at the end:
"In his Preface to the first edition of Peau noire, masques blancs, Francis Jeanson tells how one day he wrote to Fanon asking for clarification of a particularly obscure passage in the book. An answer was duly furnished and Fanon added: "This passage is inexplicable. When I write such things I seek to touch my reader in his emotions, i.e., irrationally, almost sensually."
Further on in his letter Fanon goes on to confess how he is drawn to the magic of words and that for him language is the ultimate refuge, once it is freed from conventions, from its voice of reason and the terror of coming face-to-face with oneself. "Words for me have a powerful effect. I feel it impossible to escape from the sting of a word or the vertigo of a question mark." He went on to say that, like Cesaire, he wanted to sink beneath the stupefying lava of words that have the color of quivering flesh."
(Richard Philcox, translator)
I love this. Sometimes a thousand critics and academics with a thousand complicated analyses should just simmer down - it's inexplicable, it's for the joy of the language. Fanon was a brilliant theorist and a passionate writer, a true artist... I have a fairly shallow reservoir of patience for reading theories of race, culture, sociology - I'd rather read science - but I was glued to The Wretched of the Earth. Of course, living where I do at the moment, reading about decolonization was fascinating as well - Fanon was so right, and yet so wrong. I'm sure he would love to see how his predictions have been borne out or overturned, situation by situation. Highly recommended.

Vanity Fair, by William Makepeace Thackeray

After reading it, I'm a bit curious to see the film. I'm sure no glitzy period flick could recreate Thackeray's many-leveled satire... I think I would've hated it if I had only read the first half. Thackeray was almost too clever - too many sly references, his characters too glib and unlikeable, the parody unkind and extreme. But as he stuck with the characters and unravelled them, the arch removal of the earlier chapters seemed like our own deceptions and misunderstandings at first meeting someone in an artificial society, and in the tragi-comic pursual of their lives the satire became reality. It didn't end with a funny, pat, clever ending - neither ironic glory or harsh tragedy, but something real, and therefore sad. It's like the thrilling effervesence of a new relationship, when you kiss mask against mask and everything seems beautiful - and then eventually the glamour fades and reality intrudes, blemishes and faults and indiscretions. Is the sadness in discovering the reality, or in refusing to ever admit it? Thackeray mocks the illusions and leaves an ambiguous conclusion about the realities. Can we ever find them? Are we really happier with the mask, and can we maintain it? It's also quite a funny book, but in a wincing sort of way.

Less recently read:

The Blank Slate, by Steven Pinker
PINKER YOU BLEW MY MIND

Currently reading:

Love in the Time of Cholera, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
As with everything by Marquez, I never want it to end.

Okavango II

This is a bit of a cop-out, because I'm still not done... In fact, I've barely begun. But I'm about to leave on a trip and I'm not sure when I'll be able to write more, so I thought I'd post what I've got.

My trip began with the 6:00 a.m. bus to Maun. When you wait on the edge of the road in the dark, cold, early morning, you could be anywhere at all. Any train platform, any bus stop, on any road in all the world. Headlights illuminate the bush in an alien monochrome, but other than that it is just dark, an anonymous temperature that rules out only the most equatorial of locations, the only distinguishing features the dry subtle smell, the sounds of the birds. The bus pulled up – one of the small ones, rickety and wheezing with drafts through a thousand gaps, barely able to push 90km/hr, the front piled high with checker-print plastic bags and tattered duffels. I slept, having seen the pale sunrise over the Kalahari enough times already.

In Maun, a stop at the internet cafe to send off some last-minute emails for work, and then off to the airport to meet my relatives. Their plane was late, and I sat around waiting and chatting with R, our guide. In true closely-linked-small-town fashion, R is both a friend of the Princeton alumnus that set up my position here, and the brother-in-law of C, a prominent Ghanzi landowner that has been helping out with Huiku. R is also friends with many of my other Maun acquaintances... What can I say, it's a small community. He's originally from Kenya, which I would say is the archetypal country for Rugged Safari Guides, and he fills the position to a tee: sun-baked, cigarette-smoking, swearing constantly with the words “bloody” and “damn,” white-streaked wavy grey hair, a compact energetic form, and – incongruously – a pair of Crocs on his feet. I could have suggested someone a bit younger, a bit more modern, but what's a safari without a colourful guide? He's full of casual stories about near-death-in-the-bush; he is disdainful of tourists, researchers, and the modern world; he spouts out politically incorrect opinions about everything under the sun, most definitely including Africa; and he is a bit of a nutter. He also has an encyclopedic knowledge of the bush, gained through experience and conversation rather than hours bent over a book. I myself have learned almost everything I know from books, and it was interesting to me how he knew everything there was to know about the animals we encountered, yet nothing about phenomena which are textbook standards for Bio 101. Different sets of knowledge, gained in different ways, but with significant overlap... I think he was also a bit surprised by what I knew, since I obviously haven't spent years as a guide in the bush.

Sitting in the airport, however, we talked mostly about my work at Kuru, until the plane landed and interrupted all conversation. My relatives (aunt, uncle, 2 cousins) arrived laden with bags to donate to a local street kids' center,* and ready for their African experience. Faster than I could have imagined possible, we piled into R's Land Cruiser and started barrelling down the highway – canvas flapping, raised safari seats bouncing, no seatbelts, dodging donkeys. Straight from the tarmac to the bush. I imagine they felt a bit shell-shocked.

Soon we left the paved road for the slightly calmer gravel road into Moremi, and within an hour or two we were seeing giraffes and elephants on the side of the road. It's always exciting to see the first one; the crossover point where you leave the drive and enter the adventure. My relatives, needless to say, were very excited.

We drove for 4-5 hours through Moremi, the bush gradually changing from the low, dry bush of Maun to the taller trees along the gravel road – the sunlight low and golden, dust filtering slowly through the branches and autumn-tinted leaves. It's not quite the raging fire of “The Foliage” in Vermont, but there's a definite sunset tinge to the leaves at this time of year. Further into Moremi, the trees get larger and more twisted, the acacias all but disappear, patches of reeds interrupt the grass. As we drove through a large open field dotted with weirdly misshapen dead trees, boughs scattered across the ground like bones, R (the guide) explained that once, decades ago, there was a very high flood and this field was actually a lagoon for several years. The trees drowned and now their bleached shapes stand alone on the plain, used as elephant scratching-posts or roosts for tawny eagles. The area can still flood seasonally, but it was dry when we went through.

*Bana Ba Letsatsi (Children of the Sun)

last night...

... I ate part of a leopard that had been shot by an old man who once ran for governor of Texas. We later sang songs from The Sound of Music.

cat

Yes, mom, I really am a crazy cat lady.

extraterrestrial

Last night the moon was full. I was at a birthday party. I stood outside inventing constellations, tracing turtles and sting rays and acrobats across the sky in the chilly July night. Full moons are so bright you can play with shadow puppets on the sand, black shapes against silver. I looked down, wineglass in hand, and saw the ethereal gleam of moonlight through glass: a spear of light piercing the inkblot shadow at the end of my arm, crystalline and bizarre.

They told me, at Victoria Falls, that on a full moon night there is a lunar rainbow - moonlight refracted in the never-ending spray of the falls. Is it monochrome? I suppose it must appear so to human eyes, the cones disabled and the rods calmly transmitting black-and-white. One hundred trillion prisms violently thrown up by the smoke that thunders, splitting the moonlight into its lunar spectrum.

Were we ever constructed to understand these things? Light years, quantum uncertainty, and the universe beyond our bubble of life? Best to stick to shepherds' wisdom, Scorpio and the Southern Cross, the moon as a gem in the shadow of a wineglass.

Okavango I

It is difficult to write about the Okavango Delta.

Why?

There's nothing else like it in the world. It is truly one-of-a-kind; a unique natural phenomenon on a huge scale, something for which there is really no comparison. It is also an extremely seasonal event – I've seen it now, at the start of the flood and beginning of the dry season, but it's a completely different landscape at other times of the year, just as much as a forest in North America that goes from barren, snow-covered skeletons to lush greenery as the seasons progress. It seems, in a sense, misleading to write about my little slice of the delta – an inadequate sliver of time, an inadequate sliver of the land itself.

Let me start with a brief summary of the flood. The Okavango River begins in the highlands of Angola, where rainfalls swell the waters of the Okavango and send it rushing south into Botswana. The flood pours across the border and hits the Delta – the flat, dry, sandy northern end of the Kalahari Desert. Confronted by this, the river slows and spreads in a clean sheet of water across the sand, filling shallow channels, submerging termite mounds, and kick-starting an orgy of growth. The animals follow – the birds, winging in from other parts of the continent. Elephants, migrating towards the water they know will be there. Every thirsty creature relaxes and sates themselves in the flood, from zebra to lion to the fish that tumble downstream with the river and wind up swimming in the sinuous loops of hippo trails.

Typical image of the Delta – the green areas in the foreground are completely flooded, just overgrown with reeds. The lines in the water are all animal trails, mostly hippo and elephant as they make their way through the swamp.

The amount of water that is poured out on the Delta is also something to wonder at – 15,000 square kilometres of desert are affected, with 11 cubic kilometres of water pouring over it. For the Americans, that's 264,172,052,360 gallons, or over two hundred and sixty-four BILLION gallons of water. For those of us wisely using the metric system, it's one TRILLION litres. A more visual example – it's enough water to cover the entire island of Manhattan to a depth of 615 feet, or 187m. All of this water is poured out across the desert. At different times of year, islands will disappear and reappear; endless lagoons will dry out and sift with dust; trees will crackle with dryness and then swim in three feet of water. Papyrus rafts grow, float, anchor, and float again. Elephants churn the sand into a slow cloud as they make their way to the river, then joyously bathe themselves in mud and spout streams of water from their trunks.


It's not a rainforest, by any means; there are few tall trees, no curtains of moss nor verdant orchid-filled canopies. After all, even with the water flowing around their roots, these plants are still beaten by the blinding Botswana sunlight, and the water doesn't stay all year.

The wonder is in the waterways, the swamps and lagoons, the endless frayed fields of green that seem solid until you see a hippo wade out from the reeds and realize that it's all the same continuous expanse of water. Gain a little elevation and you start to see the darker twists and trails of hippo paths on the bottoms of the channels – the lines carved as they walk along the bottom, munching weeds and then emerging to trundle through the papyrus towards solid ground and better grazing. From an airplane the endless network and pattern of animal trails is stunningly clear, branching like spiderwebs away from the nodes of solid islands. The shapes of elephants are obvious, like giant boulders clustered around trees, and the light darting herds of impala gleam red against the grasses. You can see everything.

Get even a few hundred meters away from the water, though, and it will be this again:


Dry, low acacia bushes, sand and rocks and thorns. It's a fragile miracle, a precious sheet of moisture in the parched Kalahari. But for many kilometres around the water you'll find the animals – as long as they can get back to the river to drink.

Maun is at the southern end of the Delta, and the river there is beautiful – hippos and crocodiles sun themselves on the bank next to one of my favourite restaurants, the occasional elephant will trod through the fields, and every once in awhile you can hear a leopard coughing. But it isn't the Delta, the real Delta, the wild infinity of lagoon and twisted lily-choked channels. I entered the real Delta for the first time on the eleventh of June, 2009.

--- Brevity is a virtue! To be continued. ---