Who was Cassandra?
In the Iliad, she is described as the loveliest of the daughters
of Priam (King of Troy), and gifted with prophecy. The god Apollo
loved her, but she spurned him. As a punishment, he decreed
that no one would ever believe her. So when she told her fellow
Trojans that the Greeks were hiding inside the wooden horse...well,
you know what happened.
the cassandra pages
words, pictures, and a life
Saturday, July 12, 2003
COUNTRY
At the very corner of this old map is a country I long for. It is the country of apples, hills, lazy rivers, sour wine, and love. Unfortunately a huge spider has spun its web over it, and with sticky saliva has closed the toll gates of dreams.
It is always like that: an angel with a fiery sword, a spider, and conscience.
Zbigniew Herbert from "Elegy for the Departure and Other Poems", 1999
Arabs in Conversation by the Canadian painter James Wilson Morrice (1865-1924). I rediscovered Morrice's paintings, which I really love, at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts last week.
This came from a young friend who has just completed a year on a Fulbright in Morocco before starting work on his doctorate in Islamic Studies. He wrote it for his hometown paper in Oregon; this is the first and most personal part of the article.
A Young American Among Arabs
“Don’t they hate us over there? Morocco, Tunisia, YEMEN for one whole year all alone: are you crazy!? Were you in a coma or something on September 11?” One of my favorites, “Do you work for the CIA?” or even better “Why should I believe you if you say no?” There were plenty of questions directed at me before I left to immerse myself in Arabic and complete a US Fulbright Scholarship in Morocco. As you might expect, I also had plenty of questions for myself.
I went there. I encountered my fear. I was not annihilated. To the contrary, even in the roughest of circumstances, I was welcomed warmly as an American and an individual. Indeed, my fears changed into a new understanding of the place I had studied in books and seen on television. After living in the Middle East and North Africa for a year, I distinguished between two Arab worlds. There is the Arab world of blood, uniformity, extremism and fear. This is the world we know through television, tapes by Usama Bin Laden, embedded journalists and commentary by “experts” who don’t speak a word of Arabic. This was the Arab world I was afraid of seeing. It was the Arab world that extremists both in the West and in the East want us to see.
There is another Arab world, the Arab world of life, diversity, welcome and humanity and even humor despite incredible challenges. This was the Arab world I saw. This was the Arab world we need to better understand. Certainly, I had encounters with extremism: on May 16 2003 the suicide bombing in Casablanca, just an hour away from me by train, brutally killed some 40 Moroccans, creating enormous popular movement and protest against Islamist terrorism. In a protest not widely reported in Western media, 2 million Moroccans marched for democracy after the blasts. In Yemen, the media and rumors have led people to believe September 11 was a Jewish plot organized by the Israeli intelligence service. At the same time, I met tribal sheikhs in Yemen who wanted to string up Usama bin Laden for trying to force a Usama bin Laden interpretation of Islam on his tribe.
Yet these rare encounters with fear and rage are not what shaped my experience most profoundly. As an American, I was targeted: not for hate and harassment, but for couscous and sweet cookies. I had to choose between three or four different invitations from families who wanted to invite me for a couscous meal. I saw Nike ball caps and American flag sweatshirts on the beach and streets of Rabat, “Addidas” spelled “addidos”, and the stylish concoction of “western” clothes that look much cooler than the shopping mall variety at home. I listened to an old, Moroccan Jewish woman, a woman my Muslim friends from the Jewish quarter call “jedati”, or “grandma”, who celebrated at the tomb of a Rabbi saint in the Rif mountains the day of the Casablanca blasts on Jewish sites. I sat in the long discussions on a 1000-year-old rampart in Yemen about “Booosh,” “Saddam” and “Amrika”: the opportunities I had to show that Americans too were not all the same.
I remember my best friend Nabil, the rastafarian, dreadlocks, reggae surfing dude who looks like somebody plucked from a San Francisco beach but who also goes to the mosque everyday and followed the Qur’an as strictly as possible, who constantly surprised me with his humanity, care and respect for others. Every Sunday afternoon in Rabat a group of Moroccan friends would come to my house for dancing to music of every style, from Hotel California to Gypsy King to Moroccan music, Samira and Khalid, and even the Can Can. We celebrated youth and life in my medieval home in the center of the Madina.
Yoruba masks illustrating "the uncontrollable passion of romantic relationships". From African Ceremonies by Carol Beckwith and Angela Fisher, via Conscientious.
Ecstasy and Irony
Two contradictory elements meet in poetry: ecstasy and irony. The ecstatic element is tied to an unconditional acceptance of the world, including even what is cruel and absurd. Irony, in contrast, is the artistic representation of thought, criticism, doubt. Ecstasy is ready to accept the entire world; irony, following in the steps of thought, questions everything, asks tendentious questions, doubts the meaning of poetry and even of itself. Irony knows that the world is tragic and sad.
That two such vastly different elements shape poetry is astounding and even compromising. No wonder almost no one reads poems.
Adam Zagajewski, Two Cities, 2002, Univ. of Georgia Press
Last night's reading was...what can I say? Interesting and curious. I had no idea what to expect for a turn-out, since it was a combined recital with a pianist, and our mailing lists don't necessarily overlap, but about 50 people came to hear us at a local Methodist church. David played two sonatinas by a local composer: excellent works but rarely performed. Inbetween those works, I read three essays. When he first called to invite me to join him, I asked David what he had in mind. "I was thinking maybe you would read something about New England," he said. "Prose or poetry?" I asked. "Hmm," he said. "Prose, I think." So that's what I did. I've never read prose formally before, except for being a lector at church, which was actually good preparation for this. It seems harder to me to pull off a convincing prose reading - it just seems awkward, somehow. I decided the only way was to just go for it with conviction and sincerity, so I tried to do that. David's playing was electric, and I think we felt inspired by each other; it was a good fit. Afterwards a lot of people came up and told me their own tree stories - I often get that kind of reaction to my writing, and I like it: that some word of mine may have served as a catalyst and permission for someone to trust and tell their own story. It's better than feeling liked you've forced them to struggle to find something to say about art - I think it's so difficult for most people. They come to support you, but they really have no idea what to say, and are afraid of sounding foolish. So I'm always happy when someone says something specific or concrete from their own perspective. Of the comments I got, I especially liked what Shirin said:
I really enjoyed listening to you reading the pieces last night. I have read other pieces but when you read them it's different. You paint the picture so vivid that it wants to jump out of listeners' head. I especially liked the willow tree's story. It was sad. You gave it a life as a creature with feelings; pain, sorrow, and even happiness and satisfaction. Good for you and barakellah.
The piano was good too. I liked it a lot. It brought out a feeling of revolt and strength. You couldn't sit and listen to it and be passive. It was not romantic though like most Iranian music.
I was also so grateful for this blogging community and realized how much more satisfying it is to have both an audience for one's creative efforts, and some ongoing feedback. It's difficult to be an artist of any sort, and last night I was really struck by the changes in my own attitude, confidence, growth, since my last reading a couple of years ago. I find that putting myself into similar situations (performances, readings, gallery shows, public speaking, presentations) separated by time is the best way to see how I've changed in my inner life as an artist...or person, for that matter...
I changed my calendar today -- I know, it's really late! -- but the reason was that I hated to say goodbye to this image.
Thanks so much to Heather at Soul Food Cafe for including one of my pieces in her "Golden Seed Grove". I'm impressed with what she's doing on her beautiful site to encourage younger writers and to make full use of the internet as a medium for writing - take a look. The essay she chose, "Requiem for a Tree", is one of the ones I'll be reading tonight. It talks about the impossibility, sometimes, of trying to capture the essence of nature in words (although obviously I'm trying, right to the bitter end!) There's an interesting discussion going on about this aspect of "place" writing at the biweekly topic discussion on the Ecotone Wiki..
3:42 PM
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Tuesday, July 08, 2003
Good morning, and thanks to everyone who wrote to welcome me back and respond to the previous post! I'm so glad I got comments working before I left. It makes me very happy to hear from every one of you.
To those who were worried about the lettuces, they're back - I had just removed some pictures to see if the downloads were what were slowing up the site. But the problem simply seems to be that Blogger's servers (some, not all, and at different times) are very slow. It's been working better since the switch to the new Blogger Pro, but I still look forward to changing over to our own domain.
Seems like a good time for some biographical details. I don't take any of the personal photographs on this blog - they're all the work of my husband, who is a professional photographer. We've been partners in our own design/communications business since 1981, and have been together since 1979. We've always worked to maintain some sort of balance between our professional work and our own art/creative work, and as any of you who have similar lives will know, it isn't always easy. When I met J., he was still working primarily as an artist, selling prints and showing in galleries, and just getting into commercial work. I had a graphic design business and was writing and illustrating, mainly in the fields of nature/biology, doing a good deal of calligraphy, getting into the book arts. I was also painting seriously (oil and watercolor). We combined our professional work into a firm in 1981 and have been doing that ever since, always trying to keep on the edge of graphic arts technology - right now we're doing more multimedia work.
Our decision about how to deal with this mix of interests was to work hard in these related design/communications fields, live frugally, save as much as we could, and "buy time" for our own creative work. At the same time, we've tried to integrate the two, so that the line has become increasingly blurred between the work we do for pay and for love, and as our careers have progressed we've been fortunate to be given more and more creative freedom which makes that possible. There has been a lot of dues-paying along the line, though...and many months and years of frustration at not having time to pursue our own work, which continued to be photography for him and moved more and more toward writing for me.
J.'s particular interest is in street photography; in the edges between things: city/country, for example; and in the endless complexity of people in their own private worlds. I keep telling him to start a photoblog or a photo site but until that happens, you'll be seeing his work here occasionally...he's incredibly generous about letting me use work, or taking special pictures for me.
More on Montreal soon. (If the scales are correct, it's a damn good thing we only stayed six days...) I'm giving an informal reading tomorrow night (it's a joint event with a friend who is a pianist) and I haven't made a final decision on the work, so that's my task for today.
10:14 AM
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Monday, July 07, 2003
Hi. We got back home tonight and I sat down to read e-mail and write a post -- and my site won't open at all. I'd appreciate hearing if people have been having trouble getting the site to load over the past few days, or if it's been particularly slow. Hopefully it's just blogger being blogger, and everything will be running fine in the morning...I promise to move this site before the end of the summer!
9:30 PM
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