mangos, crises and emo

Mangos de leche leak. A glaze sometimes, sometimes a congealed tear like sap, seeps from beneath their green and yellow skins. Today I slid a nail beneath one of those tears and pulled it from its resting place, depositing it instead on my tongue. It tasted like pine needles distilled in honey, and resisted being chewed.

The mangos de leche are pinier in general, less sweet and more fibrous. Eating them is more like coaxing juice from a mass of threads than it is like taking a bite of fruit. No one cuts mangos here; you peel them from the stem down, leaving a little bit of skin for a handle at the bottom-- by the time you get there you're so sticky you don't mind grabbing the gnawed-upon other end and peeling the bit that remains. The little mangos dulces are yellow orange and sweeter, with more self-contained flesh-- they're more like champagne mangos at home. The big red-green ones I haven't tried yet. I don't think they're really in season. And then you have jocotes, the mango's scarlet siblings, similarly composed but juicier, and sourer, and tiny, about the size of a small plum.

And for a minute last weekend I actually believed I had grown tired of mangos.

This was part of a wider-reaching crisis. A series of frustrations (with teaching, where I feared I was burning out; with the administration, whose workings I've had too much time to study; with the social structure of temporariness and mandatory civility; with with the feeling that folks around here lose faith so quickly despite months of work to gain confidence, etc) and triumphs (extracurricularly, while traveling, meeting glorious people, having fuuun and realizing it was the first time I'd felt free and light in months) and sickness (three times in the last three weeks, after going nearly six months without missing a day of school) and thoughtfulness pushed me to the point where, on Friday, home with a fever, I was about ready to cut ties with the program and travel for the next two months. It was real; I was ready. 

Over the course of the weekend I realized I needed to talk to Neil, to see if--well-- reform and not revolution was possible. There is a part of me that is wistful for the revolutionary outcome, but ultimately my sense of responsibility to my kids and to Elena's family and to Neil are more important than my disillusionment or my yearning for fully-fledged destinationless wandering. I shall sate my appetite for adventure on weekends, and over Semana Santa (when friend-and-fellow-intern Traci and I intend to summit Acatenango overnight) and on the as-yet-unspecified week I'll take off in May as a consolation prize, and when Catherine and Katie and Grace make my life all shiny by coming to visit toward the end of my stay. And regarding burn-out, Neil and I are looking at ways to ease the workload. At the moment we have nine classes, six of which meet twice a week, and eleven 1x1 or small group students a week. We desgined the schedule when we had 2 long-term volunteers and, more often than not, one short-termer. Now we're teaching them all among the two of us. So we're looking at combining two classes or letting the lowest-level class improve their Spanish literacy before coming into the English world, something they sorely need to do. More than any true prospect for hange, though, the realization that Neil wants me to stay and is willing to provide support to make it happen is the big factor here.

Meanwhile in the communities the daily melange of bizarre and tragic continues. Some things make you want to laugh until you realize what exactly you'd be laughing about. For instance. The emos are recruiting. Cars of kids from the capital city, with hair grown long to cover one eye, are making like missionaries and actually paying Itzapa kids to go emo. These smalltown kids (who've probably never heard Dashboard Confessional in their lives) are growing out their hair. They're cutting their wrists with safety razors and proudly displaying the wounds. They're advocating gay marriage, but not in a careful or culturally sensitive way, more because they know it will shock; they're managing to attach one more stigma to it by associating it with the rest of their borderline-religious dogma. And on Monday a local self-proclaimed emo 19-year-old boy kidnapped two girls, one 7 and one 9 years old, and tried to rape them. They were found in time, but he escaped, and hid in his aunt's backyard under a pile of sand. When people from town found him and were threatening to burn down the house to make an example of him, he pulled a dagger on his mother and said if he was dying she would die with him as punishment for having brought him into the world. And now all of this is muddled together in the minds of people who have no real base of comparison. I tried to talk to Elena about it today. She asked if there was anything like this in the States, and I talked about how emo is mostly an identity, somewhere between fashion/music taste and lifestyle choice. It tends to be exclusive in its way, I told her, with nothing of recruitment and really no established views on anything except general disillusionment with the world at large. I mentioned that cutting is a symptom of a psychological condition and an addiction; I didn't take on gay marriage with this very Catholic mother of six for obvious reasons. But I did stress that by recruiting for "emo" these kids were missing the point of having an individual identity, doing something totally counter-productive: by polarizing people into cultish followers of emo and those disgusted by the actions done in its name, they were causing the suppression of all departures from conventional roles. Now Elena is pressuring her heavy-metal-loving son Lester to cut his hair short. Anything abnormal is being linked to evil. And I can talk about it, encourage little bits of dialogue, but against a gasoline-wielding populace and centuries-old senses of self preservation that's about all I can do.

So. Mangos to drown my sorrows. Good thing I'm not sick of them.

levity is overrated.

and i'm breaking my promise. tough.

here's something like a poem. it doesn't have a title yet.

The lamp on the table

rests on the head

of a wild-eyed victor pushing a dominating

foot into the chest

of a flail-armed midget.

The pose (like Shiva

subduing the black dwarf

or any nameless

conqueror striding intentionally careless

across the ribcages he's laid bare)

is universal, the detail

excruciating:

nails in the arms of the fallen

so his agony can be adjusted,

made fresh against the slow accustomization

of the witness;

the lightbulb haloing

the upraised fist

sturdy boot

pressing apart

the sternum from its ribs.

I feel it.

The pressure around my 

own chest (building)

leaves no room

to doubt why that gesture

is one of domination.

Enough light

to distinguish supposedly sturdy white bones

seeps in around the boot's treads

west to east, against the tide of sunrise.

Whose boot is on my chest?

What desert seafloor 

spreads itself

beneath the light's probe, and

what does the bulb halo?

p.s.

i seem to be taking myself very seriously in these last postages. a gesture at amusement next time. promise.

the triumvirate

My mom is in Guatemala. I've been looking forward to her visit for months now, for the chance to show her the world I've joined, for the real conversations with someone who knows me and brings out the best in me (most of the time, and can usually tolerate or call out the worst in me). The richness of her stay here, though, is exceeding my expectations. With her usual way of inspiring trust in near-strangers, she has elicited the life stories of Doña Elena (headmistress, in a way, of the Itzapa school) and her daughter Greysi, the one a phoenix story (appropriately enough, since the Latin American branch of GVI is called Phoenix anyhow) of a heavy-drinking and heavy-handed husband woken up to the injustice of their dynamic by a token human rights course that was part of his police training, whose subsequent lenience freed her up to start a woman's group, meet Dom, and help found the first GVI project in this part of the world, the other a suspended story of an education put off by pregnancy, a cheating and hot-tempered father-of-child, booted from her life, and a beautiful little dictator being raised by the whole family so her mother can return to secretarial training. Among the uncovering of these stories my mom has reinvigorated my own teaching, which was growing a bit formulaic in my exhaustion, by demonstrating the drilling techniques she learned in the teacher corps and reminding me of the way those drills build confidence, soothe rowdy classes, energize tired ones, and are even kind of fun in their way. Talking with her has helped me iron out some incoherencies in my way of being here. And now, as I battle the worst stomach demons I've encountered since my arrival, she is covering classes for me so that I can take the time to recover. 

One of the greatest moments of amplification we've had since she's been here was when Yeimy, another of Elena's daughters, invited us along on a surprise visit to her aunt's. We started up the hill behind our little school, passing the small stores filled with Tortrix and sodas and the houses selling chocofrutas and the throngs of street dogs. First we saw Chay Balam, one of two or three government-certified schools in Itzapa. It's the only one that allows its kids to come in indigenous dress, rather than requiring the purchase of costly uniforms with too-short skirts and unrealistically white shirts, and the only one that teaches Kaq'chikel, the local Mayan language. It still requires far too much copying, absurd amounts of homework, and English taught by not just non-native speakers but essentially non-speakers-- I got my hands on one of my student's tests and it was riddled with errors before she'd written a word. Still, this is the school I hope my kids are attending. Yeimy herself went to high school (well, the equivalent, from age 16 to 20) there, between 6 and 10 pm every night. As we walked by, some familiar faces peeled away from the crowds of recently-released younglings and joined my mom and Yeimy and I as we left behind the bricked street for a narrower, water-runneled  dirt road/path hybrid and started to climb in earnest. The path got narrower and dustier, threading between tiny cinderblock houses and patches of ground punctuated by dried corn stalks in neat rows. It isn't the season for corn, so it didn't need to be a desolate sight, but this year's erratic rains and subsequent failure of the bean crop adds an extra dose of emptiness to the bare plots. As we came to the top of the ridge we saw all of Itzapa sprawling around us, the houses of clay bricks  and corrugated iron and plastic, the trash-choked stream they call a river, the horizon hazed by more trash burning and by open cooking fires that are eating up the forest. The volcanoes gave the whole view a majestic sweep, and there were pine trees standing magnificently on one hill, and the wealthier, more Spanish part of town (which is where our school stands, which surprised me with its basicness when I first arrived but which begins to seem like the bloody hallowed halls of academia in relative terms) were painted bright turquoises and reds and salmons, and to block up our speechlessness, I made some inane comparison between Itzapa and San Francisco, on account of both being cities built among the folds of hills, and my mom commented on the scene's beauty. It's there. There's a lot of it. What should we have said? Do we express some form of sympathy for these families with six or seven kids living piled between two sheets of plywood or corrugated steel? Surprise to see the face of Luis Giovanni, one of my brightest and best-dressed students, poking his head around the corner of one of the less substantial houses? The welling indignation that this is real, that I'm not among the pages of National Geographic of peering through the windows of a poverty tourism van, that I know these kids' names and pronunciation abilities and high five intensities and classroom personas, that they're brighter and more motivated than many of my middle school classmates were, and that they are, at least when they're at school, happier than many of my friends? Or do we seek similarities, the way cities on hills leave us breathless? Do we watch the clouds leaving shadows on the fields and marvel at the strength of men with bundles of wood larger than they are suspended from harnesses that run across their foreheads and let them support their burdens on their backs, at the balance of women with balled bright cloth or baskets or ugs of water on their heads? We did some of the latter, romanticization as politeness, but mostly fell silent to absorb it all, as Yeimy told us a few things: this is my aunt's house (a relatively ample two-room cinderblock house with an impeccably swept dirt yard punctuated by what looked like a sage bush and a few small fruit trees); she is working all day; my cousins Ana and Jairo (two of my students) eat lunch alone here; this other part of town has no running water and as such the women go to town to do their washing; Itzapa is growing as these lands are inherited and sons who can't find work elsewhere come back to wring what living they can (clay bricks drying in a backyard, avocadoes sold by Lorena, another of my students, outside her family's door) from the ground they have. 

The walk brought home to me the three-element balancing act I'm attempting as a way to understand the world. There is the lyrical, an old fallback of mine, finding loveliness wherever I can in a solitary attempt to remake the world in a softer light. There is the political, trying to see the forces that have created the current situation and to imagine how those forces might be altered to create change. There is the daily, the interpersonal, the insistence on maintaining personal dignity and respect regardless of circumstances, the conversational. The last is where my sense of influence lies. I endeavor to understand the political, and I can't help seeking the beautiful, but any kind of force I exert myself is going to need to be on the interpersonal level. That is the one thing that has held fairly solid for me since I first started really thinking about these things as they related to me, sophomore year of high school. 

In only moderately related news, I think I'm back to my kindergarten ambition of wanting to write and illustrate children's books when I grow up. Eh?

che

In my optimistic phase freshman year of college, I hauled my tentative derriere from the dorm to hear a speech by Inga Muscio, self-proclaimed feminist author and activist. I spent most of her speech allowing my mind to wander off to section dynamics and how to cultivate friendship, but I perked up when she started talking about the power of names. She focused on W. Bush, on how a trace of negative energy and power leaked to him with every mention of his name, no matter the context. She called him Arbusto (Spanish for 'shrub') to avoid the unintentional reinforcement of her own theory. I thought it was a bit extreme, but an intriguing idea: each time our name is mentioned it affects us and the world around us in some way.

Her idea came back to me today as I continued to push through Empire's Workshop. It's in the shimmer of certain names, their oily sheen or their beatific glow. Every time I read the words Oliver North I feel like I shrink inside my own skin. Bush's name produces a narrowing of the eyes and an occasional cynical burst of laughter as each mention confirms my feelings. The strongest impression I've gotten of late, though, came from Grandin's treatment of Ernesto "Che" Guevara. I should almost say 'lack thereof.' In the whole history of Latin American resistance to U.S. involvement, the Argentine-doctor-turned-guerilla-revolutionary-turned-pin-up-boy-for-rebels-who-don't-do-their-research merited only one paragraph. And my reaction to that one paragraph only proved the wisdom of that choice. Guevara has become sheer magic realism. His name means something entirely different from what he actually did with his life. Have you seen The Motorcycle Diaries? I watched it for the second time last weekend. It paints a stunning picture of an honorable, gruff young man struggling as his idealism overtakes his ties to the bourgeois world in which he's grown up. The soundtrack is masterfully concocted and composed by Gustavo Santaolalla, the fellow behind Brokeback Mountain, which tells you a bit about its tendency toward sweeping. Have you walked into a bookstore in Central America? Every shelf is heavy with Che, Che, Che. He's grander than Fidel because he never calcified, and more immortal than Allende because he fought with guns instead of politics and therefore remained untinged by diplomacy. You read his name and sigh with the envy of any socially-conscious member of the upper middle class for one who followed his idealism through to its lowest common denominator, you see his face emblazoned on the red t-shirt or incongruously pasted across the rasta-colored flag and long for the courage to achieve the same glory, regardless of whether his life actually confirms the values he's come to represent. It Doesn't Matter. He is fiction. That is why, I think, Grandin spent so little time on him. A book devoted to exposing the uncomfortable scope of ugliness in Latin America has no room for such dewy hero-worship, but were he to try to ground Guevara's story in quotidian unmagic realism he would alienate a large portion of his readership. So Che gets his paragraph and then fades behind the Allendes and the Castros and the Pinochets and the Kirkpatricks and the Montts and the Somozas and the Sandinistas and the Norths and the Robertsons and the Carters and the whole mess of mixed figures that villainize and manipulate one another for months upon months. And I'm left running his name through my fingers, trying to decide if it's one that belongs on the world's lips.

There are things on my mind tonight. They're perching, some digging claws into tender bits of my medulla oblongata, others swizzling their feathers across the cerebral cortex. (And only Catherine will really ever be able to tell me if those are relevant brain parts or not. I just like the way they sound.) I feel like my mental capacities went into some deep, self-centered hibernation over the holidays, and have emerged only this week, hyperactive to compensate for their long slow introspection. Now they flit and flaunt on mangoes, on the "Good Neighbor" policy, on ceramics techniques, on recipes for mole, on Guatemalan celebrities and political parties, on pageantry and the top 2% of the population, on Pablo Neruda and how thoroughly I love him, on dreams ripe with meaning and those that linger more in realms of spectacle and shock, on tamalitos, on seasons, on value judgments and my judgment of their value, on the U.S. public education I received up to eighth grade... Will I sleep tonight? Only if I grant these thoughts some ballast, which is what I'm attempting here. This list is every bit as flitty as the thoughts that inspired it, though. Let me see.

One thread here's the political one. When I was in Mexico two years ago there was an enormously important election in the Senate and the House. The whole day it took place I haunted the library, refreshing my news pages at every opportunity, breathlessly awaiting the judgment I felt would come through. This time, this trip, it was the presidential election. I stayed home and planned a lesson. This was an election I'd followed with urgency at home, an election for which I'd wriggled through hoops in order to be able to vote, and yet when the day rolled around I couldn't be bothered to walk the fifteen minutes into town. I didn't even find out the results until the next morning, when my German friend and fellow volunteer, Barbara, informed me of what she'd found out the night before. The same was true for the day of the inauguration. My mom called from her post by the television, reporting her feeling of overflowing hope and tearful joy, and I had actually forgotten the significance of the day. I'm not sure exactly what this means. One possibility is that I've actually become stuck in here in a way that I never did in Mexico. I'm doing something that fills much of my time and my mind, gesturing at an actual concrete (if miniscule) change, and therefore less caught up in the pageantry (told you that word was on my mind) of politics. It's also a trace of cynicism, I blush to confess in this moment when the world is supposed to be flushed with a restoration of the right to hope. I've just picked up this book, Empire's Workshop, by Greg Grandin. Its thesis is that U.S. foreign policy was conceptualized and tested in relation to Latin America, that the foundation for our diplomatic interactions with Europe and Japan and our violent imposition of "order" in the Middle East was laid in our use of soft and hard power in our own hemisphere. It is not exactly inflating me with optimism. It has led me into two sweeping political conversations in the last two days, one in Spanish (which makes me absurdly proud) and one in English, one after coffee and one after kusha, the local firewater that gets served periodically in Itzapa. In each I found myself forced, if not into defense of the U.S., at least into tempering the disgust people feel at the mention of our country's name with some sense that it isn't all that way. Two points keep returning. One is that we are so enormous. The day a governor of any sort cannot know all his constituents is the day that power begins to corrupt, I think. As soon as the people in power cannot directly witness the outcome of their decisions, they start to disbelieve in the reality of the effects of their decisions, like kids slaughtering aliens in video games-- like Ender, convinced he's being trained in battle techniques only to learn at the end of his supposedly imaginary campaign that each triangle he blew up was a real ship and each circle a real planet. With a lack of accountability comes a lack of understanding that is born, not out of spite or inhumanity, but out of a genuine inability to comprehend the figures in terms of real lives, real poverty, real illiteracy, real hunger, real deaths. This is a crap excuse; it's no excuse, but it does make it a bit easier to imagine a politician as a real human being beneath the trappings and uglinesses of power. The other point is related to size as well. It's the homogeneity problem. Many of my fellow volunteers are from scattered regions. My first political engagement was with Dario, a curly-haired volunteer from Italy who's been traveling around Latin America for the last several months, and Irene, my housemate and fellow intern, who's from Spain-- Catalan, to be precise. They were both deeply surprised that I'd learned to question and even criticize my government in public school. Though I don't pretend to know every mistake the U.S. has made since it existed (oh god, the size problem in yet another manifestation-- I doubt the most gifted historian has the capacity for that information) I've been marveling at our misguidedness at least since first really learning about slavery in fifth grade. In those days I read history in a constant state of us vs. them, trying to ascertain which side held the virtue and which was to be condemned, dreading the possibility that California might have tottered between North and South in the Civil War, dodging any association with our 'dark past.' I have an even older memory of being in the front seat as my mom drove across the Golden Gate Bridge and saying "I'm so glad we live in a time when there aren't any more wars." I must have been six or seven. That would make it '92 or '93. Civil war was going strong in Guatemala, for damn sure, 30+ years after it had started. El Salvador would have just signed the pact to nominally end their civil war, though fighting would continue for another ten years or so. Bosnia and Herzegovina had declared independence, initiating (well, as much as one act ever initiates anything-- catalyzing?) absurd bloodshed in that part of the world. Israel and Palestine were doing their thing. The Rodney King riots went down in L.A. That was a tangent. Back to fifth grade, and onward to eighth grade. Mr. Butler had us engaging in debates for and against the Indian Removal Act of 1830, and I was supposed to argue in favor of it, and I came up with some brilliant point and felt myself split utterly in two: the victorious part that felt enormous satisfaction in my abilities and the horrified part that could see what would happen, what had already happened. Even knowing the outcome I could sit there in front of the class and make my point. It was the beginning of my enjoyment of playing devil's advocate, not just as an intellectual exercise but as an urgent desire to show that there are infinite sides to any story, to knock each and every speechmaker off of the pedestal or soapbox he or she had chosen. This battle to force some kind of dialogue came to mean a lot more to me than any specific political cause or issue. That's still what I'm doing, I guess. But I'm doing my research now too. It's haunting, and distracting from the present, and discouraging to watch one admired or at least respected politician after another (JFK? bye. Eisenhower? so long) lose my faith, but the fact that I had any faith to lose means something. Does that make some sense? It means I do defend the U.S., if very very hesitantly and carefully. It means I do want to come back. Just not until I have a slightly better sense of what it is that invites my return.

I had a good eight other streams of consciousness to dump at your feet tonight, but it's getting to be time to sleep, ballast or no. I'll re-read all this later and see if it makes any sense. In the meantime, I'll dream things I can't explain at all, which might be refreshing.

a poem scribbled in a cemetery in panama

Flood Tide

The flash

of light and dark fishes 

won't reach my feet.

They will flop

from the water flinging

droplets toward my lightfurred mammal

skin, spattering

eloquent reminders

of when I lived in salt water.

Up through

damaged banana leaves, across

the slatted floors of stilted houses,

the water

rises

tugging at my toenails.

It wants what I want: union.

Or so I say

until my legs can stretch

no further, and it

retracts its proffered hand.