Global

April 28, 2007

There is no television set in my home. No blues, whites, grays splash blemishes of reflection against the walls that surround me at night. Ghosts and sequences of flickering light are thrown about only in the waxed form of a lit candle as it dances, twirls and seeks life upon the wick of a tiny pointed toe. Instead, amidst the haunting brilliance of evening when the larger lights of day travel to the unseen regions of the globe, leaving behind a rounded orb of calm and a trail of salted stars, I sit complacently within a corner and listen to words. With me on the ground, and my roommate perched high upon the throne of a barrel full of well water, the words tumble and flow evenly from her mouth. The highs and lows of her expressions take flight around me and travel through the air, lifting me up into the thoughts and lives of others. I am a mad woman straining for reality, a man longing for the essence of youth, a brilliant gummy flower in its early stages of opening, a thin stick-like insect turning back on its leafy path, a green frog flopping over, and a sea monster spouting a fringe of blue pebbles, its scales shedding along the glistening shore in the moonlight.

There is no television set in my home. No Benfica games, greasy commercials, dramatic telenovellas or hour-long infomercials. These nights the only ink thrown onto the palate of my mind is in an array of thin, pencil-like swirls that travel through literature from one page to another – from the fruits of an artist’s labors to the table of my heart.

May 4, 2007

I walked down the dimly lit world of my home and fell into the school where I then wrote a summary in gritty chalk along a scratched and grainy blackboard. I wrote “Opinions and Dreams” and the small, unsure fingers of my students reenacted the effort and strained to forms curves, and lines to match the board. I asked my students to copy six statements in English and then decide whether or not these statements were true or false. The first statement was: Men are better than women. The class was split on the issue – but most said it was true.

Ten months in this country and I am only now beginning to understand the language, people and culture enough to awake to the reality that I am living in the Dark Ages in terms of human rights. Here women are a presence that exists for a purpose only when a man desires them. In that moment, she is only an object of what they call “love” and when that is over and done with, the door closes and the man continues his affairs with his other women. It is accepted, encouraged and expected for a man to have a number of these women. They are called pequenas.

I think back to the women’s studies classes I took in college and remember this topic being utterly cliché due to the attention the issue of gender equality often receives in the States. When I read about women belonging in the home I remember thinking it was a thing of the past, and what an out-of-date way to live. BUT WOMEN LIVE LIKE THAT HERE. They are in a state of slavery – I do not use that word lightly – and I watch daily as each of my good friends and neighbors sit waiting for their boyfriends and husbands to return from their side women. They are not allowed to leave the house. If they so much as have a drink at a party society’s gossip will shame them and put them back in their place. Just last month a woman with eight children was stabbed to death by her husband because she went to a party without his consent. When I asked one of my best friends here (whose boyfriend also blatantly cheats on her) why women stand for it, she said to me in Kriolu, “Oh, Brittania, fidelity is only something the old people believe in. It’s a thing of the past. People don’t believe in that now.”

And so I am stuck in a swiftly titling dot of history that spans across centuries and exists everywhere and yet nowhere at once. What is meant to be and what actually is pardons excuses that arise from guilty mouths and ignores the plight of desperate misgivings. Be it complacency, apathy, hopelessness or greed, the difficulties of these women continue and I watch, helpless with idle hands fumbling about, willing to work for change yet unable to grasp a way in which things can get from here to there. Wanting to see instant results in an age-old struggle, I speak until my mouth is blue, only to see the passion in women’s eyes fade into a state of disbelief and doubt. “It’s not right,” they say, firmly. But then, “It’s how it is here. It won’t change.” Many tell me that if they spent their lives looking for a faithful man here, they would die looking.

And yet despite my heart’s loss and the fear that I can do nothing here, I sense optimism in my young students. When I told them men and women are different but equal, it was as though I were introducing a new idea, planting a tiny seed that may one day grow into a stronger, more substantial ideal. As disappointed as I was when the hands of students who thought men were better shot into the air, I was equally content with the proudly raised hands that declared women as deserving of rights. Below these hands were faces of determination and I saw a forthcoming generation whose realities are still under careful construction, a glimmer of hope evident in their fresh, and still evolving eyes.

May 7, 2007

This

Is

Not

A

Poem

……………………………………

Is there any way to cut ties once they have become attached?

If so, I would use heavy black metal scissors.

Snip, the metal would creak, and away the ties would fall.

Effortlessly, really - But with profound weight.

The subtle strands would not land in a hush,

But crash hard upon the earth and shatter into fragments of porcelain lies.

Is there, in essence, a desire to unravel that which has become hopelessly intertwined?

If that is so, I would get to the tangle of life immediately, with patient, fixed fingers and a stool to sit upon.

And I would smile, pleased at the ticking away of my life,

For every moment would unravel loosely in the dexterity of my willful hands

As the moments in life whisper,

Teach me of how to savor time,

How to let it fall into place beneath the deep placid lake of my eyes.

In truth life, in its entirety, falls like confetti,

And I am caught in rapture

Deeply imbedded hues dance about

Formed by generations of madmen

Gaps of history and a superficially taut strand of logic

A fountain of feathery tufts glides around me in a maddening dazzle

The infinite line of a horizon stretches its arms wide

And I grasp at the enormous measure of it all.

Is this what I have come to assess?

This colossal perpetuity of shifting fragments and evasive realities?

It dances about flirtatiously

I lead myself astray and wait patiently as the thoughts and realities collect,

forming pools lifetimes deep at the weary soles of my feet.

Each has a papery edge and lays fixed in a trance upon my existence,

like a pillow resting softly against the features of a dream.

Down

They

Float

Innumerable untold perspectives,

Eras and eye colors,

Desires and fingerprints,

Heartaches and winds of untold passion fall

- like snow -

Onto the soft, fragile, befuddled palate of my limited mind.