In the Labyrinth

Donald Hall: One Road

(Photos by Peter Zelei/istockphoto and John Robert Shepard)

This happened across my internet-desk one morning and I stopped everything to read it. The poet Donald Hall wrote a beautiful and very poignant essay "One Road" about a journey he took post WWII with his very young bride driving from Oxford to Greece, by way of Yugoslavia. It is one of those effortless pieces of writing, that immediately draws you in and holds you captive to the end of the journey. It conveys the desire (and fearlessness) of the young to travel as a form of self discovery. It is also a detailed travelogue of a world now much changed, and a graceful reflection on a life that is only possible from a great distance (Hall wrote this essay when he was 84). Take a moment and enjoy.

"In December of 1952 my first wife, Kirby, and I left Vienna to drive through the Russian sector of Austria into Yugoslavia. At the border crossing, on a two-lane macadam road with no other car in sight, we stopped to present documents that permitted us to enter Marshal Tito’s country. Walking back to our car afterward, we met a man heading in the opposite direction, toward Austria. He had emerged from a big black car, and he looked important, like a diplomat or a capo. Seeing the initials of national origin on our small Morris convertible, he addressed us in English. I held in my hand our confusing travel directions. We asked the man if Zagreb was straight ahead.

He shrugged, and told us, “There is only one road in Yugoslavia.”

Putting Together My Father's Research With The Photos: West Africa 1963-64

Balafon performance in the streets of Conakry, Guinea. ©1963 Emile Snyder

 

Among the unique documents that have floated my way over the years was a manilla folder full of gorgeous black and white photographs my father took in the Ivory Coast, which was developed there, and some of them might have also been taken in Senegal, Mali, or Guinea. Among my mother's papers that I received after her death was a carefully cached collection of letters that my parents had written to each other from the fall of 1963 to the spring of 1964 when they were both abroad on Ford and Fulbright grants-- my father to numerous countries in West Africa and my mother to India, Bhutan, and Sikkim.

The letters are fascinating and cringe-worthy in places. One third love letters (with some surprising revelations about their sex life I could have survived never knowing about), one-third about money (there was never enough, and often arriving late, allowing for some desperate nail-biting), and one-third talking about the research and the separate lives they were having on their different continents.

As I read through the research parts of my Dad's letters, I learned a lot about these photographs--especially that he had done many field recordings of musicians, griots, and small village brass bands. He had made friends with prominent African writers at the very start of their careers as authors in 1963, such as Leopold Senghor, President of Senegal, and other writers and poets turned diplomats -- who also gave him music tapes and recordings (especially to the radio stations eager to get their music out to the West as well as Africa.). He sent around 25 videos back to the States with his friend Robert Garfias, an ethnomusicologist Robert Garfias, who then returned them to the Ethnomusicology Archives at the University of Washington, Seattle, WA.

I went looking for the tapes in the archives -- as this was the first I knew they had been adequately given to someone. I was so excited to find them listed here and here. So I will send scans of all the photos (plus more of the notes I discovered in his letters) to the archive there -- delighted that future students will have a chance to see these images and connect them to the music on the tapes. In many ways, the best part of finding all these papers is sharing the great features of their careers with others- to share those moments in history when they saw something, heard something, or wrote something that still matters.

All the photos can be found here -- or by clicking the "West African Musicians" link in the left-hand sidebar. And all images are ©1963 Emile Snyder -- please email me at the blog to request permission to use these photos.

Happy Birthday EP

 

This is one of my favorite photo's of Eva, bundling the garlic. One can almost smell it coming through the screen.

 

 

Happy birthday to the Garlic Queen-slash-birthday pig! Hope you guys are able to take time out from farming long enough to eat something decadent and delicious.

The Mystery of Family Photos

This post is for my cousin François, who has been visiting the blog to see what photos of our families are appearing -- and happily identifying those I don't know. I love these three photos for how the people are grouped, smiling, and staring back at the photographer. I am not sure who everyone is, but I know I am related to them all, making them seem even more mysterious. I can't help but search their faces for a sign of myself, a gesture, a smile. So here is what I know of the photos, and I am hoping, François, that you can identify the others in the pictures.

 

 

The sepia photo above is of my grandfather Frederick Snyder, standing there rakishly among those women. I am unsure if any of them is my grandmother Madeleine -- their hats are pulled so low that it is hard to be sure. But if not her...then perhaps they are three of her six sisters? Maybe it is Madeleine who took the photo? And they look like they are having so much fun, leaning against Madeleine's big American boyfriend. I wonder if they knew that Madeleine was already pregnant by someone else when he married her. 

 

 

This is a later photograph -- Fredrick now poses like a doting father, with my father Emile and his sister Rosine perched on Frederick's knees. And the children behind? I love their postures --especially the oldest one, leaning against the wall with all the humor and panache of an adolescent.  I have some guesses...but I'll see if François can enlighten me.

 

Here is the last one, which is still later. Some of the adults here are the children from the photo above. For some reason, the image must have been taken before the war. People seem so relaxed and playful -- the younger one's mug in the back. (Even as I look at it now, the two young men holding up the girl are the identical two older boys from the photo above. And the women! How much like an older version of the two girls!) But judging from the clothes, it also seems late enough that the war is hovering not far away.

 

Basho's Reflection On Marriage: Akechi's Wife

 

 

Moon, come down and
come alone. I have to tell you all
about Akechi’s wife. -- Bashō

 

 

 

My husband and I will celebrate our 44th wedding anniversary this coming June. I think of all that passion at the beginning, rocking back and forth between joy and fear that it might suddenly prove ephemeral.  But for those of us now long married, that tempest has been transformed into something more reliable. Rituals that are ordinary, daily, and subtle. So how beautiful and exquisite is this reflection by Bashō, the itinerant poet-monk of 17th century Japan, on the love between two people whose relationship is wide and deep -- quietly full of intimate gestures.

"So worn out, not even sure I was on the right road, I forgot myself awhile, watching in weary amazement as his wife came and went, the two of them giving the impression of having long perfected some grave and complex dance known only to them, one of accord and the affection of two people moving hand-in-hand in the same direction, both possessed by desire while knowing themselves to be the source of that desire." Bashō, translated by Franz Wright.

Read the entire piece here at Poetry Foundation.

 

Art: Goyo Hashiguchi. 1920. "Woman in Blue"

Old Bones, New Tales

This is an odd moment. Three book ideas I have been working on lately have suddenly come into clarity as a single cloth -- not as a trilogy mind you, for each is different enough from the other -- but organically they seem to spring from the same desire to write about early, middle, and late life. I feel as though on any given day, I could write in all three manuscripts without missing a beat. Two at least are set in Italy (thank god the research here helps both novels). The third is contemporary fantasy, so familiar ground.

As I am now in my sixties, I think this sudden meta-thinking about the novels has a lot to do with my age. When studying African oral narratives, I learned that women storytellers in South Africa (and probably in every traditional society) told the same stories (with some changes in emphasis depending on the audience) to all different ages. When the audience was a mixture young to old, the tales were meant to be entertaining and to introduce the very young to the artistry of story-telling. Other times it was intended for a specific audience such as young women going through rites of initiation, and there the same stories acquired an instructional emphasis, the tales focusing on transformation to adulthood.

However, older women also performed those same stories privately to each other. All of them so well versed in a lifetime of living and of telling those tales. They knew these stories intimately, and in the variants of the tales they told each other, there was depth and nuance in the performances. It was an opportunity for them to reflect and to comment through mature and evocative performances of the tales on their past rites of passage; their lives as young women, as wives or co-wives, as mothers, and now as elders. One of the great Xhosa storytellers Nongenile Masithathu Zenani towards the end of her life performed three, one-hundred-hour epics. Each epic was performed over about 21 days --with Masithathu speaking for 5 to 6 hours each day. And like Scheherazade, each morning she picked up the tale where she left off the night before. She composed the epics from the threads of the oral narrative stories she had learned and told throughout her life, intertwined with a wealth of cultural details and a social history of the Xhosa.  (I am still waiting to read one day the final translation of these three epics which were recorded and transcribed by Professor Emeritus Harold Scheub.)

As authors, we continue to reach back into the deep well of inherited stories -- the universality of rites of passage means every generation will want to hear them, read them, and connect to them. But unlike traditional society where the oral narratives and epics could be learned at the knee and then repeated (though different variants even within a culture suggest personal embellishment and emphasis in the telling), modern authors are always required to reinvent old tales and make them "fresh" -- sometimes with wonderful results and sometimes with stunningly bad ones. (I can never get over the dreadful Beowulf movies...Beowulf in Space, Beowulf with a Golden Stiletto-Heeled Monster mother).

So I guess this is the big challenge now for me. Trying to be faithful the tales, to take the time to reflect on how they have shaped and articulated different moments in my life, and yet, satisfy the craving to create something new, something "fresh" out of very old but venerable bones.

For more reading:

* Life Histories of African Women, edited by Patricia W. Romero which contains the autobiography of Nongenile Masithathu Zenani recorded, transcribed, and translated by Harold Schueb.

**The Word and the World: Tales and Observations from the Xhosa Oral Tradtion. "A master storyteller of the Xhosa people of South Africa, Nongenile Masithathu Zenani gives us an unprecedented view of an oral society from within. Twenty-four of her complex and beautiful tales about birth, puberty, marriage, and work, as told to the renowned collector of African oral tradition, Harold Scheub, are gathered here. Accompanying the stories are Zenani’s detailed commentaries and analyses and Scheub’s striking photographs of her in performance.  The combination of these historical and cultural observations with a richly symbolic collection of tales from a single traditional storyteller make The World and the Word a remarkable document."

 

Art: Edward Hopper: In the Barber Shop, 11:00AM, Summer in the City

The Hungry Mother: Kate Atkinson and Baba Yaga

I had one of those remarkable encounters while reading Kate Atkinson's Case Histories, who was describing in almost identical words an idea I had explored years ago in a poem. It is an ambiguous moment in motherhood, knitting power and love in a fierce and consuming way. It's awful really, selfish as it expresses a desire to reclaim the flesh once freely given, as though it had it been a loan and was needed back again ostensibly to keep the child as safe as she once was in the womb, but really, as a desire to recapture youth and vigor. Jung describes the trauma of birth as the "unhealed wound" in the child's life -- but I think there is an echo of the trauma in birth for the mother too. Nine months of intimacy, of quiet internal reflection, communication, a quickening joined in blood and flesh, a fullness that is suddenly followed by an emptying. There remains a longing, because everything that comes after is a leaving, a leaning out and away from all that primal connection. 

I stumbled and then stopped and re-read this passage in Kate Atkinson's brilliant and brooding collection of intertwined murder mysteries, Case Histories.

"...she loved her youngest child with a ferocity that didn't always seem natural. Sometimes she wanted to eat Olivia, to bite into a tender forearm or a soft calf muscle, even to devour her whole like a snake and take her back inside her where she would be safe. She was a terrible mother, there was no doubt about it, but she didn't even have the strength to feel guilty." 

 

Atkinson's passage lit up in my brain like lightning, recalling my own poem "Baba Yaga" -- which I wrote for my daughter more than a decade ago. It was eerie and familiar to read the two passages side by side.

"My daughter when you were small
How I wanted to eat you.
Cast off flesh of my flesh
I wanted to keep you in me,
Digest my fear of losing you as I swallowed
You whole, plumped and roasted.
Can you forgive the way I fretted over the oven
And took the measure of your
Wrists with my worried fingers?"  

When I was pregnant with my daughter I developed anemia, which was discovered late in the pregnancy because I confessed to the ob that the sight of sand made me salivate, and I wanted to eat it. (I didn't tell him that I actually did eat a small finger full as the children were playing in it. ) That's when I learned about pica, a condition where anemic women, especially pregnant women crave dirt and sand. I also discovered that women in the South used to keep a little container of iron-rich red clay to eat during their pregnancy. The body's search for iron looks to the soil to enrich the shared blood grown thin. How like Baba Yaga, licking her iron tusks in pleasure, sucking marrow from the bones of bad children. Are all mothers always so hungry?

This is part of my daughter Taiko's reply to my Baba Yaga poem which we published as a duet. It is an answer from a young woman who had learned a thing or two about leaving and returning, about cooking and slaking a mother's hunger without turning first into the meal herself. 

"Won't you be stunned to see,
in your weakened state, Old Woman,
that I have brought more than fish!
I will teach you, now that you have
burned your old recipes,
the new ones I remedied.
And I will uncover the hidden plants
I've stashed in my hair,
the worlds I have in my mouth,
the tattoos woven in my skin
and the sky I discovered in my breast."

"Old Woman, this will surely be your
finest meal."

 

Art: "Mother and Child" by Kathe Kollwitz, "Vasilisa and Baba Yaga" by Vania Zouravliov, "Baba Yaga" by Kinuko Craft.