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.

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.

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.

I’m letting the music guide me back to South Africa. The silly songs still ring in my head from the time I wake in the morning to the hour I lay my head back down to sleep. I’m sure they’re continuing on through my dreams, making the journey connected, cyclical.

A dear friend told me the other day, “You have a disease.” And I said, “Yes, I think you’re right.” Perhaps it’s a happy form of obsessive compulsive disorder. I can’t stop it, I just follow the threads of tinkling tunes from place to place and hour to hour.

She’ll be coming around the mountain when she… high hopes, he’s got high hopes, he’s got… Tarantara! tarantara! Tarantaraaaa!… I am the very model of a modern major general… Jimmy crack corn and I don’t… Ugh! Make it stop.

So, now you want to know what possible silly song road I could travel to get back to South Africa? So here it is. I had to stop listening to Tom Lehrer’s That Was the Year that Was to help me curb the plague of silly songs driving through my brain, but it doesn’t matter. The songs are still there.

Anyway, in one of the songs he sings about nuclear proliferation and how it seemed in the 60s that everyone was getting the bomb. France got it, but that’s OK because they’re our allies. The Soviets got it, but that’s OK because it helps balance the powers. The Chinese and Indonesians were working on getting one. Lehrer then sings about South Africa getting two bombs - one for the black and one for the white. It’s only right.

So there, now we’re back in South Africa.

My last stop on the magical realism tour of the world is South Africa. Andre Brink’s Imaginings of Sand is an epic tale of several generations of white women living in rural South Africa. As in most of the Latin American tales, the political climate plays like a soundtrack to the magic that happens throughout the characters’ lives.

In Latin America, we see the disparity between the haves and the have nots, and like South Africa, the distinctions are often drawn on racial lines. But in Latin America those lines have blurred as blood lines commingle. In Africa things seem a little more black and white.

When I think of South Africa, I think of racism. It’s just something the media has drilled into me. And in my own prejudice, if I meet a big white man with a South African accent, I assume instantly that he doesn’t care for people of color. Of course, my own southern US accent could afford me the same assumptions in someone else’s ears.

But regardless of politics and racial intolerance, there is real life happening in Imaginings of Sand. The “real” lives. The individuals hidden behind the stereotype. The details. That’s where the magic happens.

We arrive in China by way of San Francisco following Olivia and her half-sister Kwan in Amy Tan’s The Hundred Secret Senses. Living on a sphere, it is sometimes easier to travel West to arrive in the East; and halfway around the world is a further destination than all-the-way around the world.

East and West are worlds apart, yet there are always consistencies in the human condition. Kwan’s father had to leave her behind in China to start a new life for himself. He longed for her and wanted to give her the connection of family as he lay dying.

Many years ago, my own cousin had to give up her child when she was struggling just to take care of herself. The baby girl traveled west from Florida to Texas to California to the Middle East with relatives who would claim her as their own and love her forever.

Kwan has “yin eyes” — she sees ghosts and hears their stories. She sees more than the blood connection with her young American sister. She sees love and both the strength and the sadness of humanity.

One of my dearest friends shared her copy of Alice Walker’s The Temple of My Familiar with me a few years ago, knowing how I was consumed with thoughts of trees and memories of past lives.

Walker’s character Lissie takes us on a journey through history and pre-history. Her memory is long, for “Lissie means ‘the one who remembers everything.’” And she does.

Lissie remembers Africa, and many African countries have a history of tree cults, where trees are thought to bear some life-giving spirit or divinity. Lissie talks of “the chopping down of our hair,” as if our hair were mighty trees. She calls to me.

More recently, my friend shared another connecting link through the music of Jill Scott. The song, “Do You Remember,” on Who is Jill Scott? Words and Sounds, Vol. 1, also ties in this concept of remembering past lives. J-I-L-L remembers Africa, too, building “sand castles in the Serengeti.”

I don’t remember past lives, but I feel connected to all who have come before me and those who will come after, like the roots of trees are connected to the earth, their branches to the sky.