Adios, albacore...

Walking along a sandy trail through dry tropical forest, toward the frothy blue Caribbean, Laura and I met coming down the path one of the staff of our rustic lodging in Tayrona National Park, the Finca Don Pedro. There we had pitched our tent between two coconut trees in an immaculately manicured jungle clearing. Our friend, one of the guys responsible for collecting dried coconut husks and weedwhacking the constant onslaught of tropical growth into a serviceable lawn, had just returned from the beach. Laden with fish, he had been at the shore at just the right time to purchase the pick of the morning's catch. He was carrying a string of bright-eyed snapper, some jack, and a long, silvery, eel-like tangle he declared was "mas sabroso que el dorado" (even better than mahi-mahi). The fish that caught my eye, however, was a diminutive tuna, fifteen inches of steely wet sheetmetal, sleek and stiff and glistening. He called it an albacora.

It was our last morning in the park. We said goodbye, heading along the coast to make the long trek up to Pueblito, the ruins of a pre-Columbian indigenous village hidden away in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta. This massive, isolated clump of the Andes tumbles down into the Caribbean here. The vast boulders scattered along the coast, the craggy, sandy terrain, and the last remnants of towering coastal forest are what make Tayrona such a spectacular place.

All day long I thought about that fish. Laura is amazed at my unfailing ability to manufacture stress and anxiety out of even the most blissful of situations, and later that afternoon, as we sat on the pearly-white sand and dabbled our toes in the azure water, things were no different. "I should have offered to buy that fish right then and there," I whined. "I should have put a deposit on it." Laura pointed out that nobody else was staying at Finca Don Pedro except for three Argentine hippies we suspected of being vegetarian. "I don't know," I said. "I'm worried. I'm going to be really bummed if he already unloaded it. What if we arrive back in camp and someone else is feasting on it?"

At dusk, we hurried along the trail through the forest, swatting mosquitoes. Once back at Don Pedro's I wasted no time, poking my head in the doorway of the outdoor kitchen, an array of propane burners and a makeshift sink set up in a thatched lean-to. "I want to inquire about a fish we saw this morning," I said. "Do you still have it?"

The owner of the fish was summoned, and I was led in the gloom to a battered styrofoam cooler, tucked between the stalks of two banana plants growing out behind the open-sided hut where the workers sleep in a row of hammocks. There was the tuna, illuminated in the glow of my headlamp, packed tightly in ice. After a quick and most reasonable negotiation, it was ours.

"Do you mind cleaning it for me?"




Cooking methods are not subtle in the jungle. After a few slash marks down the side of the fish, in it goes to the vat of bubbling oil. A few minutes later, voila!



Sabroso!
Conversation was limited, as we were too busy gorging.

Disposable Income Dept.

Driving the stretch of I-85 from Atlanta to Charlotte one could be forgiven, while looking out the window and tuning the radio, for thinking that South Carolina’s two major exports are broadcast interpretations of the word of God, and firecrackers.


On July 3rd, it is difficult to find a parking spot in the sloping lot in front of Shelton Fireworks in Fair Play, SC. A stream of gunpowder enthusiasts emerging from the triangular warehouse push shopping carts laden with rockets, bombs and other explosives toward their trucks and SUVs.


Inside, towering piles of cardboard artillery wrapped in cheap colorful paper form aisles of product, a destructive fantasy superimposed on a supermarket. The carefully piled stacks of identical packaging recall the dry goods at your local megacenter, but the brands and products are unfamiliar. Boxes of detergent, cans of coffee and jars of marmalade are here replaced with TNT wrapped in a lurid but predictable iconography. Superheroes and villains promise violence, flames, deafening booms, adrenaline, sparks and patriotism. Gangsters mingle with Martians, and Uncle Sam unleashes his wrath. The colorful labels and the cardboard bangers are manufactured thousands of miles away, in China, with July 4th in mind.


Fight the fight...

Nine shots of voodoo...

Hellfire barrage...

American valor™

Land of the free, Home of the brave®

I'm in the newspaper underneath Sasha Grey

Suddeutsche Zeitung this weekend ran my photograph and article on Rwandan gacaca, drawn from the experience of working with Anne Aghion during the making of My Neighbor, My Killer. The article is print-only, and in German. Click the image below to read it.

Reading: Explosion in a Cathedral by Alejo Carpentier

When you've worked at making a revolution, it's difficult to go back to what you did before. --Explosion in a Cathedral


The people of Cartagena de Indias, perhaps the most spectacular ancient city in the Americas, proudly describe themselves as Caribbean. In contrast, those from the interior, from the chilly, moist highlands of Bogotá, are called cachacos, a term that carries a pale tinge of disparagement. The cachacos are forever outsiders on this coast, where one often has the sense that to be Caribbean is appreciated as more vital than any notion of national pride. Particularly with the Colombian football team in a long, profound slump. Outside of Colombia, few would place Cartagena on a list of the top ten or even twenty-five Caribbean destinations, but Cartageneros are steeped in their own history; the sixteenth century fortifications, the city wall, and the massive castillo dominate the landscape and the psychology of the town, whose people seem not to have forgotten an era when Havana, Port au Prince, New Orleans and Veracruz were connected to it via a constant web of commerce and shipping.

It is a fitting place to read Explosion in a Cathedral, Alejo Carpentier's epic novel, set in some of the farthest corners of the Caribbean basin, in once glorious and gloriously rich cities like Point-a-Pitre, Cayenne, and Paramaribo, places most people today will be hard-pressed to put a country to. Carpentier is one of Cuba's greatest novelists, but I fear I would have been unlikely to read this dense chronicle about the Caribbean aftermath of the French Revolution if it hadn't been for the recommendation of another, Leonardo Padura Fuentes. I've written about Padura Fuentes before; he is a writer whose work and opinions I respect immensely. Googling revealed a 2004 "ten best" list of Cuban novels he created for the Guardian. Explosion in a Cathedral came in at number one. "(T)he theme," Padura Fuentes wrote, "is the tragic destiny that awaits all revolutions: the failure of their grand aims and the perversion of their beautiful ideals." This is a loaded observation coming from a Havana writer whose work is characterized by a volatile blend of love for his city with disdain for the entrenchment of petty bureaucracy and the more ridiculous castigations of contemporary life there. Given that he also called the book "the perfect fiction and supreme expression of stylistic and conceptual ambition in narrative prose," I promptly ordered a battered ex-library copy.


The novel tells the story of Victor Hugues, a little-known Jacobin who maneuvered first to bring the French revolution to the Antillean colonies and then struggled to maintain his power in the face of shifting allegiances back in Paris. Born a baker, he traded in his rolling pin for a guillotine and became a butcher. When we meet him, however, he is a merchant, with interests in Port au Prince and Havana. He has just burst into the young and naive household of three bereaved relatives, a brother and sister, Carlos and Sophia, and their cousin Esteban. He easily insinuates himself into their lives, and ultimately his starry-eyed discourse and brash charisma will seduce two of them. Esteban succumbs philosophically, Sophia more traditionally.

Carpentier conjures up a compelling image of the stasis of life in Havana in the pre-information colonial age. It is a place where the veneer of civility is warped by slavery, ripe for the exportation of the equalizing fire of the French Revolution: "because people here seemed to be asleep, inert, living in a timeless marginal world, suspended between tobacco and sugar." His initial description of the city serves as the metaphorical template for Hugue's descent from infectious idealism into violent pragmatism: "Strangers praised the town's color and gaiety after spending three days visiting its dance halls, saloons, taverns and gambling dens, where innumerable orchestras incited sailors to spend their money, and set the women's hips swaying. But those who had to put up with the place the whole year round knew about the mud and the dust, and how the saltpetre turned the door-knockers green, ate away the iron-work, made silver sweat, brought mildew out on old engravings, and permanently blurred and misted the glass on drawings and etchings, already curling up with damp." Carpentier makes great use of this formal device throughout the novel, foreshadowing the action with ominous sentences ostensibly unrelated to the trajectories of the characters. On the imminent threat of a hurricane, to which Hugue's response will elevate him as a kind of savior of the household: "Those who lived on the island accepted the cyclone as a dreadful meteorological reality, which ultimately none of them would escape."

When the Spanish colonial authorities set out to purge Cuba of revolutionary thought, the strange family foursome is broken apart. Carlos tends to business in Havana, and Esteban and Sophia accompany Hugues as he flees to the south coast and Santiago de Cuba with his fellow progressive, the mulatto vodou doctor Ogé. The Caribbean is in an uproar. Rumor has it that Haiti's slaves are rising up; the fearsome black revolt has begun. Sophia remains in Santiago for safety; Hugues, Ogé and Esteban sail across the channel to find Port-au-Prince in flames. There is no going back to Cuba, and no staying in Haiti; suddenly Esteban, who is really the tortured hero of this book, finds himself in Paris, swept up in events much larger than himself.

Soon, he is diminished. Just one of the innumerable minor satellites orbiting Hugues' rising star as the conquering revolutionary exports the new France back to Guadeloupe, he will bear witness to the all corrupting influence of power as it rots away at his former mentor's ideals. Before long, the guillotine blade is dropping onto the necks of Hugues' enemies with disturbing frequency. Esteban follows Hugues to the next killing fields, the malarial Guyane, not because he wants to, but because he has become a virtual prisoner. When finally he manages to escape and return to Havana Carpentier introduces his grandest and most daring metaphor. Sophia, recently made a young widower and still in thrall to Hugues, years after a fleeting seduction in Santiago, abandons the reunited family to go and join him. Most writers would end their novel with the happy family reunion, but for Carpentier history is bound to repeat itself, and now it is Sophia, as mistress to the iron-fisted ruler, who will suffer disillusionment and witness the latter stages of Hugue's downward spiral into tyranny. In this novel there is no escaping the virulent fever of power and influence.

Padura Fuentes is by no means suggesting that guillotines are falling in Cuba today, but merely by suggesting that we read this novel now he continues his measured, thoughtful, and literary critique of the Cuba he sees out the windows of his home in Havana, fifty years on from another revolution. Here, too, there seems to be some Caribbean common ground.

Adding to the collection... UPDATED

El Gran Fidel (2008) Dairo Barriosnuevo, detail

When embarked on obscure passions and pursuits it is always a joy to discover a fellow obsessive. One of the high points of a recent trip to Colombia to investigate the enormous mobile sound systems of the Caribbean coast was the discovery that this vibrant scene, in which deejays battle for the affections of the crowd from behind towering stacks of speakers, has a portraitist to immortalize their efforts on canvas. Dairo Barriosnuevo is a self-described music freak, but he is not a deejay; he is a visual artist who draws and paints his interpretations of the world and culture of the picó, as these sound systems are known. For some fifteen years the picó, their personalities, traditions, presentation, and history, have been his subject matter.

The picoteros are known and prized for their selection of music and for their brute auditory power, but they are also typically decorated with a vibrant popular iconography that evolves over time. When performing or competing, the picó display technicolor banners painted on thin scrims and hung before the speaker boxes. These are essentially self-promotional in character, images that hover somewhere between logo and mythology. Barriosnuevo does not (at least so far) decorate the picó himself. Instead, his paintings about them, while emerging from the same arte popular idiom, simultaneously celebrate and comment on the culture. Barriosnuevo sees the perennial competition between the picoteros as a kind of mock battle between titanic cartoon characters, comic-book superheroes, or manga warriors. He calls the picó "machines of war," whose weapons are sound and music.

Perhaps best known for what I might describe as his portraits of various beloved sound systems, a kind of fetishizing and even anthropomorphizing of the equipment itself, Barriosnuevo recently completed a new series he calls Heráldicas Picoteras. In these "heraldic" paintings, the sound system itself is no longer the subject matter. Instead the works interpret the icons of the various picó. They are therefore versions of the same sorts of paintings which the proprietors commission from a handful of specialist popular artists and have painted on their speaker grilles. "El Coreano," for example, has long been identified with a tank, charging into battle; the sound system was named in the 1960s in honor of the owner's nephew, wounded in action in the Korean war as part of the Colombian battalion that fought there, the only South American representatives of that particular US-led coalition. In Barriosnuevo's version the tank threatens to crush a frog, representing the hapless multitude of other, croaking picó, beneath its treads. His image of "El Conde," the count, depicts a seated, top-hatted patriarch, with all the imagined trappings of the refined, land-owning elite; in a tuxedo, he is seated on a gold-brocade armchair, with monocle, cane, and cravat, on a ballustraded patio, with the ancient city walls of Cartagena visible across the bay in the background.

"The Korean," "The Count," "The Guajiro" (which in Colombia has a completely different meaning than it would in Cuba, referring to the remote north-eastern province of Guajira, with its heavy indigenous population of Wayú Indians), and "The Supersonic," are just a few of the legendary sound systems Barriosnuevo has interpreted. Other sound systems are named for cultural or political heros: "El Gran Che," the great Che, is one now-defunct picó. Still in action today on the patios and terraces of Barranquilla is "El Gran Fidel." When I saw Barriosnuevo's painting of the same name I entered immediately into negotiations with the artist, and a few days later, arriving at customs at JFK Airport in Queens, I was able to have the following nerve-wracking exchange as I handed in my customs declaration form:

Dept. of Homeland Security: "Colombia, huh? What's inside that tube?"
Me: "Hmmmn. Uh.... It's, it's a painting."
DOHS: "Really? Of what?"
Me: "Well, to be perfectly honest, occifer, it's a picture of Fidel Castro, deejaying!"

El Gran Fidel, restretchered courtesy of Atlas Industries, in situ back at the Red Hook ranch.


UPDATE:
Fabian Altahona, of the excellent Africolombia blog, read this post and was kind enough to send along a snap of El Gran Fidel ready for action, to illustrate what it is, exactly, that Dairo Barriosnuevo is illustrating. It is in no small part thanks to Fabian's blog that I owe my renewed interest in the subject of the picoteros and the phenomenon of African popular music as played throughout the Colombian Caribbean litoral.

Photo courtesy Fabian Altahona Romero

There's a reason they call it cloud forest...

Just back from the Cuchillo de San Lorenzo ("the knife of St. Lawrence") in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, a place I have wanted to visit for a very long time. This particular Sierra Nevada contains Colombia's tallest mountains, despite all the competition from the twin spines of the Andes that carve across most of this country further to the south. But this comparatively small cluster of mountains emerged in isolation, like an island, away from the principal Andean chains, and the therefore has an extraordinarily high rate of endemism in its flora and fauna. To see these unique birds and plants, however, one must climb high up into the mountains, something that has until recently been rather unsafe.



For much of the 1970s, before American growers perfected the cultivation of their crop on their home turf, the Sierra was largely given over to marijuana production; it was the source of the famous Colombian Gold, packed down the mountainsides and loaded into clandestine ships in the jungly coves Magdalena's north coast. In the 80s and 90s the guerilla and then the paramilitaries controlled the zone, then just one of many badlands totally out of governmental control. When I last visited the region, in 1993, I was strongly advised not to go up into the mountains. I took that advice, and so the ornithological riches dwelling in the high altitude cloud forests remained, for me, imaginary. But this time, when we asked around in the placid port city of Santa Marta, the situation was said to be completely calm. And it was, blissfully so. After the thick heat of the coast the mountain air was crisp, oxygenated by steep hillsides of dense forest festooned with epiphytes. Nothing disturbed the tranquility but strange birds darting amongst the gnarled trunks. There were toucans and toucanets, the passive and deliberate Golden breasted fruiteater, and the Santa Marta brush finch, which Laura quickly nicknamed "cheeks," for the dusky patches it has on the sides of its black head. The most dangerous things we could find were the columns of leaf-cutter ants carting their shards of greenery back to their vast nests.



Not all the specialties made an appearance, so we'll just have to take that as an excuse to go back...

Don't you go touching my coconuts...

Apologies for the recent scarcity of bloggage. We've been in the Caribbean coastal jungles of Tayrona. We've been high up in the mountains, in the former guerilla stronghold and 1970s world capital of weed production, the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta. We've been lurking with the hummingbirds in the dark corners of the forest. Internet remains scarce in these places of extreme natural beauty and ornithological opportunity, but our stay in Colombia has been rich in blog-worthy topics, and many posts are soon to come.

I like to think this sort of thing runs in the family

My sister, the mother of my three delightful nieces, who is too busy kicking much ass, writing books, and cashing fat checks to allow her the time for her own blog, today gets much deserved recognition in these pages as the 2008 Runciman Award winner. That is an award for best book of the year, by the way. Here she is, collecting another of those checks.

Martin Hammond, chairman of the awards panel, called the book "a beautifully written and cumulatively moving account." Congratulations, hermana mia!

The rubber trees shall inherit the earth

One of the things I like best about the tropics is the sense that nature has a chance in the face of mankind's constant assault. The brute power of photosynthesis near the equator gives one the suspicion that our species' eventual and inevitable passing into extinction will be noted here only by a massive spurt of vines, trees, rot and recycling, until in a few short centuries not a cinder block or slab of asphalt will remain to await the discovery of interplanetary archaeologists.


The hotel where I am staying in Cartagena is a riot of buildings and overlapping roofs with multiple patios, all under constant threat from two gigantic rubber trees in the central courtyard. They are the largest I have ever seen, and manage to cast a deep shade across much of the sprawl of hastily conceived additions. They shed prodigious amounts of leaf litter and beefy twigs.


Yesterday, one of the workers here climbed delicately up onto the tile roof to clear it of debris. The leaves of these trees are thick and rubbery like the sap that is tapped from their trunks. They have substance and heft that prevents them from falling far from the tree. Overwhelmed by the piles of litter, my friend on the roof was using a common kitchen broom. It was a Sisyphean task in reverse, pushing the leaves, twigs and sticks off the roof into the patio, only to await the next breath of sea breeze to replace them with another shower of organic material.


The hefty beams placed to prevent the mighty branches from sagging down and crushing the roofs are as matchsticks, engulfed in a spaghetti of the dangling tendrils from what is rather like a gigantic mangrove tree. These strand-like branches become, upon reaching down to the ground, the roots the tree uses to spread itself. The eagerness and ability of these shady giants to envelop the hotel in their embrace is endearing and unstoppable.

A couple of minor offshoots...

By the way, while our species is still thriving, I highly recommend the Bellavista hotel to those travelers tolerant of cracked, upthrust patio tile and a genuinely welcoming atmosphere.

42,000 watts of amplification in the Plaza de Toros, Cartagena de Indias

El Rey de Rocha, Cartagena's largest and most fanatically followed sound system, awaits the arrival of its thirsty crowd in the bullring last Sunday afternoon. Humberto Castillo Rivera, the organization's administrative director, calls El Rey "la religion de un pueblo."

I just wanted to make a simple phone call...

Some things really should be a state monopoly. Here in Cartagena, Colombia, there are three major cellular telephone operators, Comcel, Tigo, and Movistar. Not unlike Sprint, AT and T, T-mobile and the rest of the New York carriers vying to be the one to drop your call today, except that part of the corporate strategy here for grabbing market share is to penalize anyone who isn't your subscriber every time they call someone who is. In other words, since I'm on Comcel, I can call anyone else with a Comcel SIM card at a quite reasonable rates. If I call someone on Tigo, or Movistar, however, I get whacked. The first digits of the telephone number indicate the carrier; numbers beginning 310 and 311 belong to Comcel, for instance.

An entire business has sprung up to cope with this absurdity; on almost every block is a small-time entrepreneur who has gathered enough capital together to buy at least one phone and SIM on each network. The simplest of these businesses consists of a woman sitting somewhere in the shade in a plastic armchair, with a little disco waist pouch on her lap overflowing with the cheapest Nokias. The more splendid have a cart of some kind, or a card table protected from the brutal Caribbean sun by a small awning. Customers, even those who may own their own phone, cluster around these impromptu booths when they need to call someone outside of their own network, or simply because they have depleted their pay-as-you go funds and don't wish to make the lump-sum investment to recharge their accounts.

"Wait, let me get this straight: it costs much more to call some numbers than others?"
"Claro," of course, she said, as if I was a small child who understood nothing.
"How strange," I said, but instead it was me that she thought strange. It had never occurred to her, I think, that it would ever be any other way.

To avoid any funny business, like an unannounced call to Australia, the proprietor dials for you. As soon as someone picks up at the other end, you are handed the phone, and you begin to explain why you are not calling from your own telephone number. The less spry proprietors attach their telephones to their chair with lengths of string. The most deluxe operations have chains, an unintended metaphor for your relationship with your "service provider."

Quitate la Mascara...

With apologies to Adalberto Santiago and Ray Barretto...



Tucuman International Airport in Panama is a sleepy little strip of duty-free shops, not much more than a hub for Copa Airlines and a chance to buy Lacoste shirts, overpriced chocolate, and digital cameras. Today, however, the place has a gloomy, post-nuclear feel, for in the wake of the H1N1 pandemic the port authorities have apparently obliged their employees and contractors to wear protection; shopgirls hired for their pretty smiles have been reduced to batting their dark latin eyelashes over light-duty dust masks. It is rather surreal and even unsettling to wander through an airport, now filled like all others with luxury shopping, and find that every last janitor and mascara saleswoman has their nose and mouth concealed behind a white shield.




The paranoia is, of course, vastly more infectious than the flu seems to be, with the result that here in this little tropical airport there are more masked passengers wandering about dressed like interns around an operating table than I saw in all of Heathrow two weeks ago, when the flu looked much more like an imminent danger.

Rorschach Situation

It has rained every single day since I returned from Africa. In Kenya, everyone was waiting for it to rain. Here is the back of the Brooklyn Museum, as seen this morning, viewed en route to buying plants at the Brooklyn Botanical Garden plant sale and warbler-watching in Prospect Park.

Mightiest in the forest

One of my favorite parts of my own book, if you’ll forgive this self-involved and almost solipsistic observation, is a chapter introduced by various musings on the Ceiba tree, that towering, massive denizen of American tropical forests. In Cuba the Ceiba has been incorporated into both home-grown biblical fable and local folklore, including a Camagüey version of the great flood. It is the only species in which the rare and endemic Giant Kingbird will deign to make its nest, and it is of immense metaphorical and curative value to santeros, those practitioners of African forms of healing and magic imported to the Caribbean by the slaves. The tree is even recognized as its own santería orísha, the deity Iroko. But, as I point out (citing the anthropologist Lydia Cabrera in Walking to Guantánamo), the elder generation of Africans transplanted to Cuba recognized that the Ceiba “is not the legitimate Iroko.” They called the mighty Ceiba Iroko because it reminded them of home, of Africa’s most majestic tree, which grows across the length and breadth of sub-Saharan Africa.



The true Iroko is of course the Baobab. Under the right conditions it can grow to dizzying heights, but the tree is perhaps most impressive for its ability to convert sunlight into raw bulk and girth. The leaves and branches are disproportionately small and spindly in comparison to its trunk, a mammoth woody reservoir from which the tree draws in the extensive months of African drought. On Manda Island, just across the channel from Lamu, where I have been enjoying a few days of pure rest and relaxation courtesy of my old friend Fazal, the Baobabs are not overly tall, but some of them have the diameter of a Midwestern grain silo or the watertowers whose function they essentially share. In the same way that a whale or an elephant can only be seen as an awesome and impressive creature, the Baobab has a dignity, gravity and majesty that befits it as the leader among trees.