The Reader Travels

Once upon a time, I thought I might want to be a librarian when I grew up. I enrolled in graduate school and started night classes, pleased to be learning something new. I didn’t really like my first teacher because he told me most of the people in his class would figure out they didn’t really want to be librarians after all. It was like that speech they give people as freshmen going into college, “Look to your left, then look to your right. Only one of you will still be here in four years.” In this case, I wasn’t the one.

In my second semester, I had a teacher who stood in front of the class dreaming she was someplace else, namely Africa. She wore African dresses and braids in her hair, and she spoke to us of her recent stay in Nigeria. I liked her.

The class was an introduction to reference, dabbling in the vast and varied reference materials you can use in a library. She used the example of tree cults in one of her lectures, trying to teach us how you might use the library to find out what a tree cult is.

Sadly, I was more interested in the topic of tree cults than I was in the topic of reference materials used to find out about them. If I recall correctly, tree cults are cultures that assign some spiritual quality to trees, some of which credit trees with the beginnings of human life. Trees are often personified, providing wisdom to those who would hear them. She cited West Africa as an area of tree worshipers, and I wanted to know more about Africa, more vast and varied than the reference materials she was trying to tell me about.

In the years that have passed since then, the Internet has exploded as a reference resource, but as I search on Yahoo! for “tree cults” I’m still finding the materials are limited. If I really want to learn more, I’m sure I’ll want to just ask a reference librarian.

Another of Alice Walker’s books that ventures into African causes is her novel Possessing the Secret of Joy. Tashi, whom we met briefly in The Color Purple, is a main character, and her plight is insufferable.

Tashi’s story is engaging, and the prose carries me along. But I cringe when I remember, and clench my thighs together in imagined pain.

I suppose that’s the idea, to make readers feel her pain, to make them want to take up her cause as if it were their own. Awareness in hope of change, right? I might like to take back my oblivion.

My second review for The Armchair Traveler Reading Challenge took me on a canoe trip down a wild river in northern Georgia. Although the Cahulawassee River referenced in James Dickey’s Deliverance is fictional, the rapids and the cliffs, the forests and the kudzu are a very real and beautiful part of that country. Both the Coosawattee and Chattooga Rivers claim influence on Dickey’s Cahulawassee, sparkling blue water and white rapids flowing through deep green, hilly country.

The novel starts in the city of Atlanta with Ed Gentry wishing for something fresh and new to take him out of the meaningless rut and routine of his life. He goes to work every day and goes through the motions of making love with his wife, fantasizing about another woman, her “gold eye” looking back at him, “the promise of it that promised other things, another life, deliverance.”

Dickey’s language is poetic, his descriptions vibrant, his pace intense, and this book truly is a great American novel. At the beginning of it, I found myself comparing it to Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, the camaraderie of men traveling together on a new adventure, the narrator idolizing the strong, fearless, adventurous one. Ed’s son is even named Dean, perhaps as some kind of tribute to Dean Moriarty, perhaps a mere coincidence.

But unlike Kerouac’s somewhat pretentious and irresponsible characters, I actually liked Ed Gentry and Lewis Medlock and their buddies, perhaps because they were so real to me, like I knew them and the meaningless routines they were trying to break through.

The river does deliver them from their routine, safe existence into a world of uncertainty and danger, their lives changed forever. One thing that is masterful about Dickey’s language is his sparse use of dialogue, making every conversation count. Their language in the city is structured and citified, sometimes whiny. But once they have made it through the hardest part of their journey, the language changes to something more decisive but informal, like what you would hear in the country. It was as if they had become part of the river and the folk who live there.

And as Ed said in the end, the river would always be with him, no matter what the rest of his life would hold for him.

In Alice Walker’s The Temple of My Familiar, Lissie is an old woman who tells stories of her past lives. Although she has lived in the southeastern United States all her life, many of her memories are from Africa.

She remembers living in the African trees in one of her earliest incarnations. She remembers living on the ground in a later life, and she remembers, “the chopping down of our hair,” as if their hair were a mighty tree. She remembers fellow Africans dealing in slaves. She remembers the priests, “Of course they were feared, if not respected, and of course the fear looked like respect, I guess.”

I played flute in my parents’ Catholic church after I graduated from college. Like many others I was disillusioned with the Church after early feelings of oppression and some bit of higher education. Anyway, I needed a musical outlet, and the Church provided that for me, so I was prepared to set my disillusionment aside.

But I remember the last mass I went to. A missionary priest had traveled to Texas to perform the sermon for us that day. He was there to ask for donations to support the Church’s missionary work in places like Cuba, the Dominican Republic and West Africa. He spoke of West Africa saying, “The Muslims aren’t there yet, and they’ll use force if necessary.” I was so disgusted with the hypocrisy that I never went back.

Alice Walker has taken me to Africa on a number of occasions, most recently to South Africa, in her memoir The Same River Twice about making the movie based on her Pulitzer Prize winning novel The Color Purple.

Her chapter called, “Crossing Perseverance,” includes a journal entry and letters surrounding her need to respect the cultural boycott and keep the movie from being released in South Africa under Apartheid. After the release of Nelson Mandela, the end of Apartheid and the lifting of the cultural boycott, the letters take a different turn, exuberantly preparing for the release of this movie to the kindred spirits of South Africa.

Although I am generally apolitical myself, I respect Alice Walker’s “perseverance.” I sometimes get exasperated with her novels because of her long-winded preaching, but because of the beauty of her words and ideas, along with her human imperfections, I love her.

It’s something that people say about movie stars and authors all the time — Oh, I just love her. But it’s more than that. No, I don’t really know her. But I love her anyway. Somewhere deep in my heart. Bless you, Alice.

I used to wonder why they made musicals out of dark stories like Les Miserables and even Fiddler on the Roof. Operas are one thing, but musicals are supposed to be happy-go-lucky, right?

But my favorite story of South Africa is the musical Sarafina! It reminds me that even when people are going through horrors and oppression that there is still childhood, music, laughter and joy. There is still progress and hope. It seems to me sometimes that musicals are more realistic than real-life dramas, in a metaphorical sense. Instead of being purely horrified, we see both sides, the good and the bad, the yin and the yang.

I don’t even understand the words to the musical soundtrack, but when I listen, I hear truth.

My first review for The Armchair Traveler Reading Challenge takes us to the three Indian states of Punjab, West Bengal and Maharashtra, with a brief trip to the beach in Goa.

Monica Pradhan’s The Hindi Bindi Club shares some history, customs and flavors from the various parts of India, flashes of color floating in the melting pot of America. The recipes made my mouth water, and the cultural references were educational. But overall, the characters and their stories lacked substance and seemed only to stand as a vehicle for the research performed by the author.

It’s the story of three young American women who don’t like each other very much, but their mothers are best friends, sharing a homeland in common. Even though the mothers are all from India, they come from different states, each with its own customs and language.

The mothers were halfway interesting, and the best parts of the book involved the one named Saroj Chawla, a spunky business woman born in the town of Lahore which became part of Pakistan when the borders were drawn in the 1940s. Her family was uprooted, and her struggle with animosity toward Muslims and the memory of her childhood Muslim friend makes for a real and sympathetic story.

I would have liked to see Saroj’s story in more detail, for all the others were dull, cliché tales of modern Americans shooting e-mails and calling each other on their cell phones, embracing pharmaceuticals and online dating. I suppose you might consider that Monica Pradhan was trying to make it a point that regardless of their Indian origins, these people lead ordinary American lives, but I think she might have taken that concept a little too far.

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» For an Indian American book I actually liked see Present Tension from the November ‘06 archives.

Now that we’re back in South Africa, I’m suddenly feeling bi-polar, like I’ve been manically singing silly songs for weeks, and now I’ve hit the deepest depression. It’s almost as if I’ve been racing around, trying to keep my energy up, so maybe the centrifugal force can keep me from falling, falling into the darkness. But I’ve stopped now, and there’s no more avoiding it.

Andre Brink’s A Dry White Season gives us a dark and dangerous look at government control and forced silence during Apartheid (which may be defined as, “separate but not so much equal”).

It was an excellent book, and they made a pretty good movie out of it too. These things are hard to read or watch, though, stories about human injustice, torture and all that. At least it wasn’t about genocide, though, I have a real hard time with that type of fear mongering and abuse of power, and we keep seeing stories like this from all over the dark continent, wet with blood.

I’m feeling pretty strong, though, that it only took me two weeks of goofing around before I could go back to Andre Brink. After all, I’ve had Looking on Darkness sitting on my to-be-read shelf for nearly eight years. I’ll let you know if I ever make it there.