May 032013
 

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Donald  Quist just moved to Bangkok, oh, a few months ago after graduating with an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts, making a new home and giving NC a chance to add a fascinating new city/country our growing list of What It’s Like Living Here essays. These essays have been part of the NC package from the beginning, adding a wonderfully human and personal aspect to what the magazine offers (which is, well, human and personal anyway). Take time to look through the whole list and then think about where you live, how beautiful it can be just stepping out your door.

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Start at Wat Arun (Temple of the Dawn)

Climb the large stone steps to the center tower. Careful. The stairs from the second landing are steep. The rock is smooth and it’s easy to slip with sweating hands. There is a single metal rail, rusted red, wrapped in rope. It offers some grip. Pull yourself onto the next level. There are more steps but the incline is too dangerous for visitors. Large strips of pink tarp hug the base of the tower like a castle moat. It prevents you from trying to go any higher.

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Look up. The temple prang is a cone tapering to the sky, a tower covered in thousands of seashells and pieces of colored porcelain. There is a row of clay warriors, their shinning eyes and armor made from tiny tiles. The spire seems to rest on their backs and arms. Circle around the base, clockwise, stopping four times to trace the designs on ceramic flowers with your thumb. They feel like warm dinner plates. Imagine the hands that built these flowers turning into dust. 

Look over the monastery from 150 feet. Watch the monks stroll the temple grounds. Their orange robes are bright against the grey footpaths and green shrubs. Listen. Somewhere monks are chanting. Their voices pour from horn loudspeakers posted throughout the complex. It’s clearer at this height. Listen. It’s a steady tone and rhythm, a stream of soft vowels. It’s gapless. Their words are a river. You’re swimming without water. Had you noticed it before? 

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 Take the Ferry

The east side of Wat Arun runs along the Chao Phraya. There is a dock where you can catch a long-tail boat into the city. The boat rocks against the gentle current. The breeze off the water smells like salt and iron and dirt. Breathe it in. The river is dense and strong. It is a pillar. On the approaching shore, in the shadow of high-rises, are mossy forts and remnants of river trading posts. There is the Grand Palace spackled with flakes of gold, glittering. 

Imagine the Palace last night, covered in lights to commemorate Loi Krathong. All over the city there is singing and music, and fireworks bursting like cannon fire. Sky lanterns rise into the night like blooms of flying jellyfish. Thousands walk down to the river. Imagine you follow them, caught in the wave of a new kind of intimacy. Imagine. You feel their sweat on your naked arms. Together, under the Rama VIII Bridge, you light candles and make wishes and sail them down stream on flowery crowns of banana leaves and coconut husks. You notice a group of boys a few meters south, wading through the muddy water. They are fishing krathongs from the river, blowing-out the candles and selling them to others waiting on the shore. Pray to the river goddess that your real hopes will float. 

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 Head East

Follow the floodwater lines running along the bottom of buildings. Sidestep garbage bags and puddles from dripping A/C window units above the street. The air is heavy, like a dank basement. It carries an angry rot. Get lost in the buzzing of motorbikes and auto-rickshaws. 

Take a right, now, onto an unnamed soi. It is too narrow for a car. The small road is lined with morning street-food vendors tucked under rows of evergreen patio umbrellas. They sell porridge and pastries, soup and dim sum. 

Nod to people as you pass. Smile. They smile back. 

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Make a left on the next street. Follow the webs of telephone wire past a dozen convenience stores. The buildings share a similar architecture. Squat balconies with fat columns, decorative moldings and cornices like a Roman basilica. Patches of black mold stain the paint and facades. 

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Cross a short bridge arching over a canal. Hua Lamphong Railway Station is on the horizon.

Take the Subway at Hua Lamphong

Walk around the front entrance to find an escalator leading down to a long tunnel, trapping the humidity from the city above. The walls are sweating. The high ceiling echoes a hundred sandals slapping the floor. The tunnel ends at a ticket counter. Purchase a fare to Thanon Sukhumvit and then take two more sets of escalators, down, down, to the Metropolitan Rapid Transit platform. 

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The train is arriving. It rolls to a stop, lining-up with the yellow directional arrows painted on the lip of the platform. There is a loud hiss as the doors spring open. A blast of cold air slaps your forehead as you push your way on. It fills quickly. Pinned by a mass of people against the back wall of the passenger car, you can barely lift your arms. 

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Exit at Sukhumvit (Terminal 21 Mall)

The stairs lead up from the subway to the ground-level entrance of a shopping complex designed like an airport terminal. The women at the info desk are dressed like flight attendants. The escalators are decorated like departure gates. Each floor is themed with a global city: Paris, Tokyo, London, Istanbul, San Francisco and Hollywood. You are in Rome. There are pillars, arches, faux frescoes and marble angels looking down on shoppers. 

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English is everywhere, and whether it is a spa promotion or a sale on high-heels, for a moment you are literate again. You understand more than bits and pieces of passing conversations. Two young men walk by wearing tank tops and folded bandana headbands. One of the boys has camouflage cargo pants, while the other has neon pink short-shorts. They are having an argument over which street market is bigger, JJ or Chatuchak. Don’t point out that JJ Market and Chatuchak Market are the same. Do not interject that many places in the city have more than one name in English, and the J sound and the Ch often get confused. Keep it to yourself. Knowing makes you feel like less of a tourist.  

Head West 

At the bottom of the stairs exiting Terminal 21 there is a man with one arm and no legs lying on his belly. He shakes the change in his paper cup. The back of his t-shirt reads, “I LOVE THE KING.” Give him 20 baht, and then turn right. 

The hotels and office buildings block the sun. The tracks of the BTS Skytrain cast a shadow over the six lanes of traffic. It gives the impression of a stormy overcast. The Skytrain rumbles like thunder as it passes above. 

Ignore the thumping club music from the already open go-go bars.  Ignore the peddlers calling out to you. You may not know where you’re headed, or what you’re looking for, but you know it is something larger than a trinket or souvenir. It is something deeper than a watch, bong or bootleg DVD. 

Thanon Sukhumvit turns into Thanon Phloen Chit. There is construction everywhere. Crews of laborers in hardhats and flip-flops are raising new luxury condominiums from the rubble of old luxury condominiums. Above the chorus of jackhammers and drills are the staccato blasts of car horns. The traffic crawls forward as motorists honk in frustration. The exhaust fumes mix with the smell of street vendors grilling pork. Layers of black dust hug the street. It’s harder to breathe. You taste smoke in the air. Somewhere people are chanting. It’s coming from a gated square, ahead on the right.

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Erawan Shrine

Watch the believers light incense. They circle the shrine clockwise laying wreaths of yellow flowers, bowing to the four faces of the Hindu god, Brahma. Some are on their knees, their eyes squeezed tight in prayer. A few feet away, shielded from the sun by an open gazebo, a female dance troupe sways to a chorus of Thai folk songs. They wear towering headpieces and traditional dresses with shimmering layers that wrap around them and drape over their shoulders. Their faith makes them impervious to the heat. 

Scan the crowded square for another statue. Look for a depiction similar to the one at Wat Arun, protruding from the temple prang—Indra, the lord of heaven, riding Erawan, an elephant with three heads. 

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But there is no giant white elephant of the clouds, or his master. There is no Erawan at Erawan Shrine. Only Brahma. 

You may never know why. There may always be some facet of this city that eludes your understanding, even its name. Is it Bangkok or Thonburi Si Mahasamut or Rattanakosin or Krungthepmahanakhon Amonrattanakosin Mahintharayutthaya Mahadilokphop Noppharatratchathaniburirom Udomratchaniwetmahasathan Amonphimanawatansathit Sakkathattiyawitsanukamprasit or just Krung Thep Maha Nakhon for short? Was the city named for its flowers or for its treasures gracing the ocean? The City of angels, great city of immortals, magnificent city of the nine gems, seat of the king, city of royal palaces, home of gods incarnate erected by Visvakarman at Indra’s behest.

Move closer. Look. Listen. Follow the current circling the Shrine. Press your palms together and bow to something beyond your comprehension. Bow, in respect for what you don’t know. 

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—Donald Quist
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Donald Quist earned his MFA in Writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts. His creative work has appeared in several print and online journals, including Hunger Mountain and The Adroit Journal. He lives in Bangkok, Thailand.  
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Feb 152012
 

 

It comes as a shock to think that I have known Robin Hemley for over thirty years. I didn’t think, honestly, that I was that old. We met at the Iowa Writers Workshop in 1980, across a workshop table, I recall, with the then program director Jack Leggett chairing the proceedings. Robin looked too young to be in graduate school, and he still carries himself, even writes, with a kind of wide-eyed, cheery openness to EVERYTHING that is both charming and compulsively readable. Nowadays he’s achieved that remarkable state of being able to turn almost anything that happens in life into something worth writing about. He is an indefatigable world-traveler, prolific author, inspired teacher, and an amiable friend. Here he is taking a group of American undergraduates to Cuba for a winter course. Academia, life, politics and art merge.

Robin Hemley is the author of ten books of nonfiction and fiction, and the recipients of many awards for both, including a Guggenheim Fellowship and two Pushcart Prizes.  His most recent books are A FIELD GUIDE FOR IMMERSION WRITING: MEMOIR, JOURNALISM, AND TRAVEL (University of Georgia Press, 2012) and REPLY ALL: STORIES (Break Away Books, Indiana University Press, 2012).  Indiana University Press is also reissuing his novel THE LAST STUDEBAKER in 2012.  He is also the author of the popular books, TURNING LIFE INTO FICTION (Graywolf Press) and DO-OVER (Little, Brown), and the BBC is currently at work on a feature adaptation of his book INVENTED EDEN: THE ELUSIVE DISPUTED HISTORY OF THE TASADAY (Bison Books, University of Nebraska Press).  He is the director of the Nonfiction Writing Program at the University of Iowa, founder of the NonfictioNOW Conference, a senior editor of The Iowa Review, editor of the online magazine DEFUNCT, and a colleague at Vermont College of Fine Arts .

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The eighty-three-year old Cuban poet grasped my arm, whispered, “I love your people.  I feel a spiritual connection to them.”  I didn’t know what to say.  I had just met him.  He had spent a dozen years in New York, much like the Cuban National Hero, Jose Marti, who, before dying in battle against the Spanish in 1895, spent fifteen years in New York.  I had spent a total of two weeks in Cuba, and what was I to say?  To lie?  “Right back atcha, Cuba! I feel a spiritual connection to you, too.”  I didn’t.  But neither did I feel a spiritual connection to my own country. I thought that he and nearly every other Cuban we met idealized the U.S. the way Americans idealize Cuba.  The Columbus Syndrome works both ways. Columbus spent a few days in Cuba and then sailed back and said it was the loveliest place on earth, and certainly my students had an enormous case of Columbus Syndrome.

I and a colleague had brought thirteen undergraduates with us to Havana for a Winter term course, as had, it seemed, nearly every other U.S. university.  A bellman at the Presidente Hotel, Gringo Central, told me there were more Americans now than ever, but “they will all go when Obama loses the election.” True, the restrictions have lessened over the last year, allowing more short-term visits by educators, researchers, and students.

Every day, it seemed a new group from George Mason or Randolph College or American University showed up at the Presidente and we compared notes on our respective itineraries: who was going to visit Che’s grave or the hot springs at Las Terrazas or the beaches of Varadero. Canadians, Brits, Russians, Germans, Chinese, Argentines, Colombians, and Japanese have been coming here for years, but for the throngs of young Americans now legally entering Cuba, the approach is not unlike the hordes of shoppers awaiting a midnight sale at Target on Thanksgiving. And what are they waiting so impatiently to purchase? Authenticity, of course.  It’s what the country trades in when all is blockaded.  Cuba es autentica, the commercial warbles.  Tom Miller, a travel writer and Cuban expert along with us, warned my students never to use the words, “quaint,” “nestle,” or “local” in a travel piece, but his warning was of no use.  Any traveler infatuated with a new country sees nothing but quaint nestling locals.

And that’s not the half of it with Cuba, where a powerful strain of Columbus Syndrome, resistant to any known ideological antigen, infects most American tourists who find their way here legally or not. It’s not just the antiquated American cars from the fifties and sixties, belching smoke and plying the uncongested streets of Havana.  Or the two and three hundred year old buildings, some being restored, some too ruined to save.  It’s also the view from the rooftop of the Presidente Hotel at night – the modest skyline with only one or two signs lit by neon.  My colleague and I had wondered if our students would miss the Internet and Facebook and Skype and their cell phones.  Instead, they worshipped the lack of it.  It’s not the U.S. blockade against Cuba that blocks the Internet, but the Castro government, though nearly everything else seems the result of the blockade, including the cars and the crumbling buildings.

What the elevator operator in the Presidente Hotel said about the U.S. elections is true most likely.  If Obama loses the election, the Blockade will undoubtedly continue at least four years more.  No one, American or Cuban alike, could give me a good reason why the Blockade, in place since 1960, continues, except for the most obvious political reason, that the Blockade serves the interests of a minority of Cuban Americans in Florida.  And there’s too much money being made in the maintenance of the Blockade, (including spending 500 million taxpayer dollars annually on Radio and TV Marti, the latter which is blocked by the Cuban government in any event).  The word I heard most frequently was “inertia.”  The Blockade has been in place so long, no one has the energy or will to end it.

Romney must be a little embarrassed by a 2007 speech on Cuba, which he mistakenly ended with the phrase, “Patria o Muetre!  Venceremos!”  It means “Fatherland or Death, We shall overcome,” a phrase that Castro used for decades to end his speeches, and which my students and I glimpsed occasionally on banners strung across Havana’s streets (Gingrich has had a lot of fun with that Romney gaff).  Our tour guide admitted unabashedly as we passed under one such banner, “It works, growing up with those slogans, seeing them everyday.”  Of course, it works, but blockades and embargoes don’t work, unless we hope to push the blockaded country into war.  When was the last embargo that worked?  In the forties, we wanted Japan to leave China and stop massacring its population.  A noble desire on our part, but not an easy solution.  After we imposed an oil embargo against Japan (at the time, America supplied 80% of Japan’s oil), Japan asked FDR for a summit to discuss the matter, but the U.S. said Japan had to withdraw first from China and instead Japan attacked Pearl Harbor.  Go figure.  Why didn’t they just do the right thing and obey us?

Throughout World War Two, comics routinely portrayed Japanese as monkeys, inhuman, not worth a moment’s thought, but now of course, we’re the best of idealizing buddies again.  It could be so again with Cuba.  In his youth, Fidel Castro wrote to FDR addressing him as his good friend and asking him for a ten- dollar bill.  I’m sure he doesn’t give this youthful faux pas a moment’s thought now, and it means nothing because he was a child.  But grown men like Romney and Gingrich should at least be a little realistic when they ask the Castros for something.  They don’t want ten dollars from Raul or Fidel Castro.  They want, in Gingrich’s words to “promote democracy” in Cuba.  They want “free elections.”  Sure, we all do.  We want them in China.  Let’s blockade it.  We want them in Iran.  Let’s embargo it . . . oh, we are?

This just in: Cubans don’t want to drive junker cars.  They’d rather drive new cars, which they now get from China, along with scores of new Chinese busses.  They long to eat Pringles.  But I don’t want them to eat Pringles!  Or Big Macs.  I certainly never want to hear any quaint Cuban locals ordering skinny lattes.  Then all hope for humanity will be lost.  For this reason, I find myself curiously conflicted about the Blockade, on the one hand wondering what good it serves (beyond reasons to do with a small minority of Cuban Americans in Florida).  On the other hand, I was delighted to see so many old American cars so well preserved.  The country seems so real!

During our visit, a rumor spread in the Miami Cuban community that Fidel had died, relayed to me by Tom Miller, who added that such rumors crop up every eighteen months or so.  “Assassination by Twitter.”  I mentioned the rumor later to our Cuban tour guide who assured me it couldn’t be true because if it were, her mother, a well-known journalist, would have been in tears that morning.  Cubans mourning Castro?  Actually mourning him and not in the official North Korean way, in which a family of bears reportedly sobbed by the side of the road upon learning of Kim Jong-Il’s passing? Undoubtedly, few woodland creatures will mourn Castro’s passing, and not many more Americans, but now I wonder if even his passing will signal a change in our policy toward Cuba?

Honestly, ask yourself, don’t you want to visit Cuba before Fidel dies and/or the Blockade ends?  Of course you do.  You want to see Cuba as it exists now, poor and blockaded, but resilient and proud, one of the lone anti-U.S. bastions that’s any fun. If North Koreans had conga lines and made Pyongyang Club Rum, maybe they’d have more visitors, too.  But North Koreans don’t salsa.  At least, the Cubans know how to resist the U.S. with panache.  When the American Interests section, a tall building along Havana’s famous seafront, the Malecon, streamed electronic anti-Castro messages around the building’s rooftop during the Bush administration, Fidel retaliated by erecting over a hundred flagpoles flying enormous flags to block the messages.  The messages are gone now, but the Cuban flags remain, as well as an adjacent plaza, “Jose Marti Anti-Imperialist Plaza.” It was here, on January 1st, the anniversary of the “Triumph of the Revolution,” that my students and I listened to a Cuban singer belting out tunes with a string of young women straight out of a USO Show, as one of the savvier of my students remarked, line dancing on a stage before which thousands were gathered, most of them dancing too.  And between sets the enormous anti-imperialist video screens played the latest American music videos.

 —Robin Hemley

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See also Stanley Fogel’s ¿Que Coño Pasa? Snapshots of my Wonderful Cuban Life, a book length essay on living in Cuba published earlier on NC.

Sep 162011
 

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Five years ago today Sion Dayson moved to Paris, the last move, so far, in a peripatetic existence. This essay is Sion’s contribution to Numéro Cinq‘s What It’s Like Living Here series, a vivid, intelligent meditation not so much on place but on the deeper implications of belonging, of identity and strangeness.

Sion Dayson is an American writer living in Paris, France. Her work has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, Smokelong Quarterly, Six Sentences (Volume 3) and the anthologies Sounds of this House and Strangers in Paris: New Writing Inspired by the City of Light. In 2007 she won a Barbara Deming Award for Fiction. She holds an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts and is currently putting the finishing touches on her first novel. It recently placed as a Semifinalist in the William Faulkner – William Wisdom Creative Writing Competition (novel-in-progress category). You can read more of her experiences in Paris at her blog, paris (im)perfect, and find out about all of her work at siondayson.com.

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An Alien Feeling

By Sion Dayson

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When I was a baby, I had a nanny named Josephine who came from the Dominican Republic. My family lived in New York then – the mythic New York of the ‘70s that I would love to have known.

Josephine spoke to me in Spanish, long before I could understand or form words. There’s no doubt, however, that this early exposure stayed with me. When I started studying Spanish formally in junior high school, the language came easily, my accent hardly noticeable. Vocabulary stuck like scotch tape.
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Cara K., my best friend, took French classes and I teased her endlessly for it.

“What good will French ever do you?” I ridiculed.

In fact, I charged anyone who chose not to learn Spanish as elitist. By that point we lived in North Carolina where the Latino population was exploding. Spanish was not only useful, but to me, completely beautiful.

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May 182011
 

Stanley Fogel’s ¿Que Coño Pasa? Snapshots of my Wonderful Cuban Life is the first book-length text ever published on Numéro Cinq, another first, another huge milestone in our adventure in digital publishing. I am calling it a “What it’s like living here” because, in fact, it tells us what it’s like living in Cuba today. But, of course, it doesn’t fit the pattern: it’s a book. The first chapter, the introduction, takes the lesson of Edward Said’s Orientalism and applies it to the West’s construction of the so-called Cuban historical fact. The next three chapters are very much a memoir of the years Stanley Fogel has spent living and teaching in Cuba, the personal facts behind the wall of words. Snapshots is thus a blend of the critical and the personal (with a dash of Fidel Castro’s own rhetoric added for flavour). Stanley Fogel is in a good position to see what he sees. A Canadian scholar with a yen to be “displaced,” he has spent about four months a year since the early 1990s in Cuba. He is a quirky, perceptive, thoughtful (critical in the best sense) guide to that other world. He tells a story different from the received wisdom, he fills his story with people and anecdote—our Virgil.

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Me: I spent 36 years at the University of Waterloo/St. Jerome’s University where I was overcome by deconstruction and taught critical theory. A travel book, Gringo Star, ECW Press, only partly captures my desire to be displaced in the world. In 1999 I was awarded an honorary degree from Instituto Superior de Arte in Havana. Re. the opus at hand: I have spent c. 4 months per year since 1991 living in Havana, discovering the richness and distinctiveness of Cuban life–culture and politics transformed by the Cuban Revolution. I am retiring there shortly. (Do come visit if you’d like an ‘insider’s’ sense of Havana.) —Stanley Fogel

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¿QUE COÑO PASA?

SNAPSHOTS OF MY WONDERFUL CUBAN LIFE

By Stanley Fogel

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A mi hermano, Mario Masvidal, y la revolución cubana

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Thanks to Elizabeth Effinger and Trieneke Gastmeier
for typing and grooming the manuscript.
Thanks, also, to St. Jerome’s University for grants
towards the preparation of the manuscript.
The photos, man with libreta and man with eggs,
were taken by Giorgio Viera.

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Chapter 1: ¿COÑO, QUE PASA? An Introduction

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A loose translation of “¿Coño, Que Pasa?” is “Jeez, whazzup?” “¿Que Coño Pasa?” is a grammatically skewed version of the first phrase. Its speaker is betraying more bewilderment and/or astonishment at what s/he has witnessed or heard than in that initial formulation. Both, though, transmit the effusive, gestural nature of Cubans’ speech and flamboyant responses to what is happening locally or beyond. Indeed, to absorb the import of the remark most fully, it is best to hear it uttered by someone, steeped in Cubans’ idiomatic lexicon and delivery, who shortens the noun to “’ño,” confident its meaning will survive. If you’re planning on spending time in Cuba and want to sound authentic, work on your “’ño”; remember, the shorter the syllable the better: taking the first, small bite out of the word “gnocchi” will suffice. Despite the possibly sexist dimensions (coño=cunt) of the formulations, no offense, feminist or otherwise, should necessarily be taken by the addressee of either remark, given that both men and women have been heard to repeat them, most often in gender-free contexts.

Too often, however, the voices of individual Cubans have been muffled or overwhelmed, most noxiously, of course, by pervasive U.S. media disseminating their political leaders’ rabid and hawkish views regarding the island. “A Caribbean gulag” is the mantra incessantly uttered, one which erases any sense of the lively, polyphonic voices existing there. Much more persuasive and compelling than dogmatic right-wing comments, to my ear at any rate, are Fidel Castro’s speeches which offer the vision of utopian and egalitarian possibilities for Cuba’s inhabitants and, indeed, for the world. That impressive voice, however, has come to represent, metonymically and univocally, the diverse people who live in Cuba. In addition, it often offers idealized visions that can by no means always or easily be translated into quotidian life. Nonetheless, not least because Fidel’s speeches have been so influential in shaping Cuban government policy and because they have not had the widespread reach of American anti-Cuban material, excerpts from some of those speeches are presented here, interspersed with my own commentary. They are meant to act more as a parallel discourse than as a countervailing commentary. While it is true, that they can draw attention to a discrepancy between the ideal and the real, they also point to genuine achievements as well as noble aspirations.

These pages, it is hoped, give some hint of the richness of Cuban life, a fecundity jammed, again, to a significant extent by American efforts to isolate the country and to caricature its unique political, cultural and social dimensions. While the U.S. bombards Cuba with messages, threatening, hectoring and proselytizing, Cuban versions of itself and its interpretations of world events and tendencies don’t get a hearing of any kind in North America, unless one subscribes to Granma International or accesses granma.cu on the web. With globalization of an American-capitalist kind that has produced homogenization in much of the rest of the world, the idiosyncratic qualities of Cuba since the Revolution are even more worthy of examination, respect and transmission. In Orientalism, his groundbreaking work that in many ways launched postcolonial studies and strove to articulate a postcolonial sensibility, Edward Said pronounced on the dangers and distortions inherent in a Western imposition of meaning on the East. Surely, U.S. constructions of Cuba are no less pernicious; they may, in fact, be more deleterious given Cuba’s size, its proximity to the belligerent presence immediately to the north and its pre-revolutionary interconnectedness with the U.S.A. To that list, one could add the current constellation of political forces in Florida which dictates, in large measure, the direction of Washington’s policies towards Cuba.

I have lived in Havana for approximately three months a year since 1992, the epicentre of the “periodo especial” [special period], when, after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union, then Cuba’s sponsor and ally, food, gasoline and electricity all but disappeared for a time from the lives of ordinary Cubans. I witnessed the seismic shift firsthand when, early in my time spent in Havana, I happened to be passing by the University of Havana Library. Just outside the doors was a large, unsightly pile of Russian language books dumped there unceremoniously by the staff. The special period’s duress may have begun; at least, though, there was the satisfaction of jettisoning a Soviet presence that many felt was joyless, arrogant, oppressive and, possibly even, racist. Traces of that occupation do remain, principally in the numerous Ivans, Liubas and Vladimirs registered in Cuba’s census. Freed from naming their children from such imperialist sources, many parents opt for such freewheeling monikers as Misleidys (my lady) or Roelvis (you’re Elvis) that augment the sense, readily apparent, of Cuban expressiveness and buoyancy. Not that politically-based nomenclatures are passé; there is always the chance of encountering a Usnavi (U.S. Navy) or, more in line with official Cuban sympathies, a Hanoi. Famously, a kid with that latter name in the early 1970s was a “one hit wonder,” singing a song demanding the release of American dissident, Angela Davis, then in a U.S. jail. When she was freed, one of her first stops was Havana where she appeared at a huge rally in her honour.

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Mar 112011
 

Here’s a second Las Vegas essay from NC’s intrepid observer of all things Nevadan (from the unique perspective of a 24-year-old Canadian Russian and Slavic Studies grad student). In her first essay, Brianna shot a Glock and an AK47. In this one, she visits the Atomic Testing Museum. In two short essays, she somehow manages to go straight to the heart of American strangeness, at least from an outsider’s point of view. Brianna Berbenuik publishes the blog Desire Machines and writes occasional film critiques here.

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Let’s See Them Top That

By Brianna Berbenuik

 

I’m pretty disappointed that I don’t get to see the nuclear test sites out in the Nevada desert. Being a Canadian citizen, I am required to go through extensive paperwork that takes up to 6 weeks to clear in order for me to be able to see radiated holes in the ground. This is a letdown, because I hear that parts of the desert have turned to glass in the wake of the testing. I imagine this and think that there is, somehow, a morbid, unshakable beauty in this. The aftermath of great destruction: quiet and delicate. However, just up Paradise Boulevard off the Strip, there is the Museum of Atomic Testing. My consolation prize.

We walk there, which is a fucking mistake because it takes forever and by the time we actually get there my legs and feet are sore and I kind of feel like strangling something. The museum is a boring cube of grey concrete passing as a building. It resembles a bunker in some aspects, and maybe that’s the point. I buy our tickets, sign a guest book, and walk through the museum, which is essentially full of dismantled bits of the nuclear test stations that once were out in the Nevada desert. Everything is educational, scientific and at times hilarious. So much of the American zeitgeist of the 1950’s and until the end of the Cold War was illustrated by videos and documents “preparing” people for a nuclear attack. Incidentally, I read somewhere that less than 1% of the American population, during the Cold War, had fallout shelters.

But, because it is America, within all this educational material and nostalgia there is a lot of propaganda:  videos of veterans of nuclear testing extolling the virtues of having nuclear bombs and how it truly does protect the country and the greater good in the end. No regrets. But the war is over.

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Mar 072011
 

Here’s an outrageously subversive essay from Las Vegas by Brianna Berbenuik, a  grad student  in Russian/Slavic culture and English & Russian literature at the University of Victoria on Vancouver Island. DG discovered her by stumbling on her Tumblr blog Desire Machines where she goes by the name Superfoo. Beyond this, dg knows nothing about her except that she writes with audacity and says what she thinks and has an instinct for cultural truth, troublesome as that might be.

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Shooting Guns

By Brianna Berbenuik

 

One of the things on the top of my list of things to do in Las Vegas was shoot guns. I had heard legends of places you could go and for $100 shoot whatever weapon of destruction you chose. As I am an avid student of war, apocalypse and humanity’s unending and impressive ability to continually invent new and exciting ways to demolish itself, shooting guns had not only its historical appeal, but also a pop-culture appeal, and personal appeal. To be, at least for a little while, part of this culture that loves to bear arms and imagine blowing away wrongdoers was exciting. I guess it’s kind of like a kitschy power-trip. When in Rome. Americans love their guns.

The Gun Store is about a 10 minute cab ride from the main strip, and it costs around $20 to get there. We enter the store and I sign a sheet of paper already almost full of other signatures, that declares with far too much ease that I am mentally sound enough to wield a gun, and that I understand I could be grievously injured or killed due to stray bullets, ricochets, malfunctioning of the weaponry, and everything else that goes along with toting a killing machine. I read this and of course my standard reaction is to smirk and laugh a little at the absurdity and redundancy of what I am signing, but my gut ties itself in a little knot and I think about how pissed I’d be if I died shooting an AK47 in some shit hole in Vegas because the dude next to me decided he didn’t like my face. Or worse yet, just a stray bullet. I mean, how pointless. Not that life isn’t pointless in the first place, but putting yourself in a situation where the pointlessness is magnified if you happen to be killed due to your own compliant stupidity is a little frightening. I guess you’d also call that the American Dream. Continue reading »