(for Julie)
At sixteen weeks the baby’s head measures twelve centimeters They can’t tell us what is normal blade of grass ceramic plate ¿Qué es más probable? I know this carpet is pink that we should notice her rings and wallpaper samples that they are all torn up omertà And that for her there is no such thing as fictionSummer Circles Green
Summer circles green and my hair is growing another color, silver/white like tinsel or Christmas tree ornaments or snow on the slanted roof of the artist’s yellow house, who paints her daughter blonde, reclining as in a lawn chair, her oiled canvas stretching now in a museum down the road, where we, on Sunday mornings, relax like swans, drinking flavored coffee from blackened mugs so the darkened rims don’t show. I despise the dirty rigs on my own blue mugs, like arctic circles, tea rings, skim milk spilling on the wooden floor beneath the picnic table benches.
Summer circles green and my hair is growing another color, preparing cob-webbed gowns we wear like gauze bandages, covering the cigarette burns on our wrists and upper arms, slices of roast beef for the noonday meal, when we should be eating turkey along with last year’s yellowed photographs, boxed memories of three years’ madness, the hospital gowns, green and open in the back, displaying what we’d prefer to hide behind some sturdier covering.
Summer circles green and my hair is growing another color, asking impossible questions about misplaced rooms and lilacs beside the brick house that stained my childhood brown, brown hair like dirty ponds in winter, though I pretended it was red, imagined I was burning, wondering—will I ever be consumed like bread crumbs scattered to the pigeons that roost on slate roofs, cooing, calling—
I wrote the following poem when I was struggling to differentiate between what was real to me and what others told me was real–the inherent confusion of the psychotic, thinking, believing, even knowing I knew better, knew more, could intuit things the experts couldn’t.
Long Ago
I went to the lilac bush because it was is/is a safe place being nothing other than a branch a scent no light to make seeing happen They told me I was sick but I knew that it was better we only know the real by the not real Having lost all sense of up and down direction the dignity of admitting I was wandering eyes closed following a faint glow of incense burning on a shelf Smell, like touch, always precedes seeingAs Sara and I prepare to move back to the US next week, leaving behind in Haiti a year’s worth of work, challenge, periodic victory and sometimes defeat, it’s a time for me to reflect, reminisce, think about where I’ve been over the past year, in an effort to figure out where I am going in the one to come.
In the reflective spirit of Lent* (which begins tomorrow), I thought that over the next week I’d revisit some of my earliest posts to the blog, remembering the lessons learned, even the questions left unanswered.
So–since I’m busy packing up one life and moving into another, and since, at the blog’s beginning, most of you weren’t reading yet, I’ll resurrect the first post below and give you a glimpse of how it all got started 4 months ago:
So–the old blog is reincarnated here under a new name! It is, indeed, the Vietnam version “reinvented” from yet another edgy location–this time Haiti, where a cholera epidemic has spread to Port-au-Prince–my home for the next couple of years.
But before I address the big issues faced here on the western half of Hispaniola, I should clarify why I’ve chosen this new title. For my less geeky readers, an “event horizon” is the edge of a black hole, a boundary in the space/time continuum beyond which no light can escape—in many ways, a point of no return. You’ve taken physics; you know this; you’ve just forgotten.
Bottom line–it seems to me, that the far-away places Sara and I have been over the last couple of years have formed a kind of “event horizon” in my mind–taking me to the outer limits of my own comfort zone, shaping new perspectives in me about both the world around me and about this time in my life–a bending of my personal space/time continuum, if you will—–mind-bending for me, at the very least.
However, Haiti itself offers a kind of event horizon–a comparison I first found when reading Paul Farmer’s book “The Uses of Haiti.” Farmer begins his chapter of the same name with the following epigraph by T. D. Allman:
Haiti is not simply one more of those tropical dictatorships where to rule is to steal, and headless bodies are found by the road. Haiti contorts time: It convolutes reason if you are lucky–and obliterates it if you are not. Haiti is to this hemisphere what black holes are to outer space. Venture there and you cross an event horizon. (After Baby Doc, 1989)
Wrap you brain around that statement and you may begin to see why I’ve renamed the blog–because this place, this location has forced me to rethink my beliefs, not only about myself, but also about big issues such as poverty and hunger–and disease, for god sake! We’re in the midst of a cholera epidemic!
But even without cholera sickening folks by the thousands, we had an earthquake here last January, a hurricane last week, and a million and a half people homeless in Port-au-Prince today.
Was the earthquake an event horizon for Port-au-Prince? Will cholera bend time and space so there’s no escaping the dis-ease that’s plagued this place for centuries?
Is there light for Haiti?
Now, fast-forward 4 months.
Do you think the blog is fulfilling its mission so far?
And, even more importantly, if you have one, what task does your blog accomplish? What is its purpose? Tell us about it in the comments and leave a link. You might attract some new readers!
And don’t forget that tomorrow we’ll have our “Mid-Week Mindy,” tomorrow a reflection on Lent*. Mindy will be covering for me, answering questions, responding to comments.
* On the Christian calendar, tomrrow, Ash Wednesday, begins the season of Lent, 40 days of reflecting and fasting, leading up to Easter Sunday. For a beautiful mediation on the meaning of Lent, check out this post by my friend Jane over at PlaneJaner’s Journey.
Guest post today from my friend and fellow writer Mindy Shannon Phelps.
A journalist by training, Mindy is a project management and communications specialist.
How remarkably we humans are made, that once a child reaches a certain age, she is able to say goodbye to all that is known and familiar to her – parents, mother, father, sister, cousin, close friends – and her bedroom, her house, the only home she has ever known –and, just, move on.
Remarkable that the human child willingly and even longingly leaves the familiar – the scents, the sounds, the comforts – 19 years of cuddling and coddling – pancakes for breakfast and tea in bed – I will admit the first 12 years were more fun for both of us than the next seven – but she is just so ready to be an adult daughter and I can’t see beyond her beautiful little hands and sweet, expressive, perfect face. She will always be my little Liz. My baby.
I had just said goodbye to Lizzie. I’d hoped it would be a warmer parting, even though she was eager to get to her dormitory and the small space we created together for her yesterday and just settle in. But, at the end, she seemed tired and ill at ease from the days we had spent together. Uncomfortable, and in need of privacy. I noticed that she had not read her Bible or written in her journal – had only captured her thoughts and emotions in the emails she had written and sent each evening to people she did not identify for me.
It’s hard to read Liz – often difficult clearing the fog off the hard glass she surrounds herself with. Her glass is not brittle but it is breakable and I try not to shatter the shield when she has it up and in place. It is her safe enclosure and there is no need to breach it.
We had been traveling together for three days, from Kentucky to Colorado in her tiny Volkswagen Beetle. Our travels were glorious—the billboard-sized copy of Van Gogh’s “Sunflowers” in the middle of a Kansas wheat field, the vivid blue September skies and the rain we could see a hundred miles away that never touched us. So peaceful and fun and adventurous, even blessed.
And now, the end.
Liz would keep her car at the school where she would begin training as a missionary with an international NGO. I would fly home after helping her settle in.
A quick ride to the airport and, suddenly, Lizzie seems as if she doesn’t want me to go. She wants to park and come in with me. I think this is what she wants to do, but, again, her glass is up and I can only peer in, bringing my nose and eyes and face up to the enclosure, trying not to cloud the view with a sudden exhalation.
I decide a quick goodbye is for the best because my prayer this morning had been for a bit of grace and a letting go with joy. This is what I’m supposed to do, I think.
So I quickly hug her and say too loudly, “I’ll call you when I get home.” “Yes, do that,” she replies.
And I turn and go, denying Liz the tears and sorrow of saying goodbye – an emotional farewell we might have shared but did not. It’s for the best, I think.
I turn and walk a few steps and begin weeping as I enter the terminal.
I still weep when I think about the time I let Lizzie go.
(Note: When Lizzie was born, Mindy was an evening news anchor for the NBC affiliate in Lexington, Ky. Viewers (about 250,000 at the time) avidly followed Mindy’s pregnancy and loved Lizzie from the moment they saw her.)
I’ve been thinking a lot about memory this week. How we remember. What we remember. Why we remember some things but not others.
And in process, I remembered a poem I wrote some time back about my own expereince of memory, especially my experiencing the past as text.
In it, I allude to Anna Ahkmatova, the celebrated Russian poet who was so highly censored under Stalin , she resorted to writing her poems on cigarette paper, memorizing them with a friend (friend’s memory as carbon copy), and smoking the evidence of her crime against the Soviet State.
Here, I also allude to the texture of memory and the texture of texts themselves. It’s interesting to me that in English the word “text” is inherent in our word for “texture”–a sematic given.
Censorship
The past comes
back in bits
colorless as glass
ground almost to dust
so that any sense of shape
seems irretrievable
The taste of it lingers
in my mouth like
something burnt
marshmallow
toast
skin
Dream of Ahkmatova
stanzas scratched out
on cigarette paper
during Leningrad winters
memorized by a friend
burnt in ashtrays
saying what we don’t
(hear)
only know
like skin
(Something to be touched)
Text (ure)
is everything
(The formatting of the poem is not correct, but I could not get WordPress to recreate my Word document without changes in spacing. I finally decided to pass the poem along regardlesss, hoping its message would speak to you despite the irregularities.)
It’s the forgetting I remember most. The fact of forgetting. The past is fuzzy for me, something that will make memoir difficult.
So, for me, re-membering will partly be a process of re-constructing and re-assembling the story, piecing and pasting. Largely, this is due to trauma. Trauma around growing up in a dysfunctional family whose front door was broken down by the FBI on way too many occasions. Trauma around having a mental illness that at times disconnected me from reality and the people I love.
However, I have a strategy for doing this detective work, because I, clearly, need to research and document the parts of my life I can’t recall.
So today I’ll outline the most obvious steps to take in reconstructing both the story about my father’s connection to organized crime and the one about my mental illness—what amounts to a 20 year struggle to win (and sometimes seemingly lose) the battle against bipolar disorder.
Though I don’t know that my family is entirely comfortable with my writing about my father, who, in fact, died in 1981 (when I was still a teenager), I plan to do the following to document my dad’s story:
And in order to reconstruct the bipolar narrative, I plan to:
As I lay out this agenda, I want you to be assured, also, that I am well these days. No one would ever know I had ever been sick or still carry this diagnosis. In fact, when I’ve shared this information with folks in recent years, they’ve been shocked.
My partner can certainly see how moody I remain. I’m not always easy to live with. As Sara says, when I feel something, my emotions fill the entire house. I still hallucinate at times, but you would never know. I’ve learned to manage the symptoms that remain, the ones that still break through despite the medication.
I hope some of you will help by holding me accountable with regard to the strategy outlined above. Renee over at “Life in the Boomer Lane” recently posted a two-part series on memoir writing (something you should check out by clicking here and here). But in the second of those posts Renee suggests assembling a supportive group of friends to keep oneself on track during the process of writing a memoir. (So, I hope some of you will be willing to “support” me with periodic kicks in my memoir-writing ass.)
Thanks to all of you who read my blog. Please know how much I appreciate your on-going support. You all have given me the courage, the faith in myself as a writer, to finally take on this task I’ve been avoiding for years.
Peace to each of you and, as always, hugs from here in Haiti,
Kathy
As many of you know, tomorrow is the one year anniversary of the Haiti earthquake and accordingly huge numbers of media and NGO big wigs are here in Port-au-Prince to commemorate the event. The streets, still strewn with 95% of the original earthquake rubble, are more crowded and crazy than ever, which is saying a lot for a city whose roads boast potholes the size of swimming pools and mounds of debris that dwarf the SUVs that try to travel them.
So, I’m back in this city I love, hoping to participate in some small way—hoping to commemorate along with many others, both here and around the world, a catastrophe that shook this nation to its historic core, killing nearly a quarter million and leaving, still today, more than a million homeless in Port-au-Prince, entire families living in tents and under tarps that remap the landscape, blanketing the city in a patchwork of sadness and resignation–the hillsides and former parks of Port-au-Prince quilted in the aftermath of tragedy.
Tomorrow the American Refugee Committee is organizing an event called “Bells for Haiti”—asking churches, schools, and city halls across America to ring their bells for 35 seconds, beginning at 4:53 pm EST—the time it took the earthquake to topple Port-au-Prince one year ago.
Likewise, I’m asking those of us at WordPress to somehow remember the Haitian people in our blogs tomorrow.
Please post for Haiti on January 12th.
I don’t know how. I can’t tell you what to say, since I myself fell muted by the enormity of what we face here. I’ll post my part, but it won’t be enough. My voice isn’t loud enough.
But I know the blogosphere can raise a collect cry against the pain and suffering that still cripples Port-au-Prince, still haunts all of Haiti.
So, please press your words for Haiti tomorrow.
Post! Pray! Remember!
(And if you’re willing, please re-post this request to your own blog to help spread the word.)
Kathryn M. McCullough 