Travel in the Time of Coup

I publsihed a travel piece in October 2011 issue of Travels Thru History, with the above title (go here for that version: http://www.travelthruhistory.com/html/exotic45.html). I had to pare it down considerably to meet the length requirements of the ezine. Here's the full piece:

At the airport in Antananarivo the immigration kiosk was closed. A sign on the window told us that visas were €62. A handful of us waited, promised that someone would be coming to attend to us. It was hot and humid and most passengers had left for their varied destinations. Two men leaned against the kiosk and talked to each other of the business ventures they would be attending to in Madagascar. We smiled and sweated and nodded to each other with a strange air of camaraderie as we waited.   I finally got impatient and strolled over to a man in uniform.

            “Visas?” I asked, palms up, fingers splayed.

             He immediately moved into action, speaking French to a group of loitering officials, and we were herded to the customs desk. The visas would be paid for upon departure.

            On the drive to our hotel our guide told us that we shouldn’t leave our room because of the political unrest. He spoke a bit of English and periodically fed us tidbits about Antananarivo and the Malagasy people but his English wasn’t good enough for much of a meal. The driver, with inverted baseball cap, said little other than comments in Malagasy to the guide. The traffic was hectic, with the typical African phalanx of weaving cars and combis, pedestrians stitching their way through the speeding boxes of tin, a breath away from impact, rickety bicycles ambling along the roadside, men pulling carts of produce, and the occasional rickshaw. I remembered a trip to Mombasa, and like then, was awed at the absence of collisions from such tight trajectories. We passed through rice paddies with compounds out there on patches of solid ground looking much like hobbit houses. Great cones of dried rice husks sat among the houses. A Zebu (a breed of beef) or two plodded through the paddies or vegetated on the grass by the roadside. Bright mosaics of laundry were left to dry on the embankments, littering the grassy slopes with shirts and shorts and undergarments. The hills and houses of the city rose before us like a sloppy layered sandwich, rich with life.

            Our hotel was the Residence LaPasoa. We would be there for our first and last nights in Madagascar. The name had a funny resonance for me that would grow over the next nine days, and on our last night, a day after the coup, lush with Three Horses Lager, I went out onto our balcony that overlooked the narrow street below and called out to the standers and strollers and hawkers below, “Residence LA-PA-ZOaa!”

            They were mildly amused. I knew by then that the Malagasy people were a kind and gentle people, with smiles that came easily.

            We were the only guests at Residence LaPasoa, as we would be elsewhere. There’s nothing quite like the threat of cyclones and a coup d’etat to keep the tourists away. After the coup, the journalists poked their noses into the pub below, Ku De Ta, just for the name. It was all quite wonderful for us, but not so great for the gentle Malagasy people who made a living by the tourism industry. But in fact, there was nothing to be nervous about. That’s the way it is; people go about their business because that’s what they have to do, and the politicians scrabble for their piece of the pie.

            The plane to Ille St. Marie stopped at Toamasina before touching down on the island. Then it finished the cycle and went back to Antananarivo. Unlike there, the porters at the airport at Ille St. Marie knew what the word no meant. A driver was waiting for us to take us halfway up the island to La Crique.

            Marc, the owner, greeted us. “Welcome!”

            We were not alone, but almost. A French couple building a bungalow about 10 km up the island were having lunch. Rainy seasons and coups are terrors for the tourist business, make no mistake.

            “But you came.” said Marc, as if we were courageous. He’d had more cancellations than he cared to remember.

            I’m sure La Crique is lovely at any time of year or season of political unrest, but it’s especially nice when you have it to yourselves. A group of women came for a night, a couple for a day. Mornings beneath the palms, the sea swaying and drumming a steady beat, the fishermen and sea traffic passing in their lithe pirougues, as graceful and smooth as ice skaters, days crunching on broken coral washed onto the beach, or ambitious snorkel swims around the rocky islands that ringed the bay (one I didn’t think I’d make), fine dinners every night in the open to the music of the ocean, and nights filled with love and fun, both before and by candle light after the generator was turned off. Marc loaned me his nylon stringed guitar after we had a little jam session and I played beneath the herringbone of the thatched roof as the rain beat down. It rained almost every night, but the days were filled with sun and splendour.

            I don’t think a few more people would have spoiled all that.

            There are not that many glam tourist activities on Ille St. Marie, thank god. Apparently renting a motor bike and taking a tour is one, and of course the pirate’s cemetery, or the zoological and botanical gardens. We chose to walk. And walk we did. It’s a small island but getting across its 10 km width is a mission. A new road has been built since cyclone Ivan but it’s difficult to imagine anything other than assault vehicles making the trip. Some of the hills are so steep you almost need a ladder to get up them.

            Of course, we had the dogs of La Crique with us. There were three of them, led by a little mutt who was a terror for chickens. With the emergence of a lanky Malagasy chicken from the rice or bush his ears were perked and in about two seconds the chase was on. The other dogs followed. That’s the way it is.

            They killed a chicken on that walk. I felt like I’d stolen from somebody. They weren’t even our dogs.

            We passed a small village, and people working in the fields, their backsides to the sky. They smiled and waved at us, or asked, “You need boatman?” high above the sea. There were patches of indigenous vegetation but the land has been well worked over. This was disappointing but it didn’t ruin too much.

            We were walking across the island in 40 degree C heat to have lunch at La Paradiso. We were greeted by Florance, who eagerly took us to the restaurant his mother ran. All through lunch he regaled us with the many things he could do for us, for very little Ariary. Times were tough, we knew that, but we had no wealth to spare, we weren’t that kind of tourists. But what a lunch it was! Chicken in coconut sauce, shredded crab in the shell, unprocessed rice, Three Horses, a finger bowl with purple petals, and peace. Every bit of it was harvested locally and cooked fresh, and every bite was a delight. As we ate the little mutt chased a village boy and bit him on his ankles.

            We took another walk as well. Somehow we imagined that we were walking to have lunch at another restaurant toward the tip of the island.

            I don’t even eat lunch normally.

           We walked a long way, and nearly made the top of the island. But there was no restaurant, the resort was further still. Just another 20 kilometer walk, why not? We walked through villages with houses built on platforms above the sandy soil that would course with the water that flows to the sea in the storms.

            There was a nagging feeling of invasion of privacy, especially since the dogs of La Crique were along again, but I was glad for those walks and the life we’d seen.

            When our beautiful time at La Crique was over and it was finally time to make it down to the crossing to Ille aux Nattes for two nights on that tiny island, everyone piled into the bakkie: Joseph, Serafine, Venise, and a mysterious old man who had appeared two days before, with a typewriter perched at his back window. On the one-lane road we came face to face with a large red lorry and as the various manoeuvrings and jockeying for positions were executed we finally saw a giant chameleon. Its blue and white body was poised on a fallen palm frond and C leaned over me to take the picture, her left boob lightly touching my thigh.

            You get to Ille aux Nattes by pirougue. The boatmen line up and beseech you to vote for their boat. You could walk across the channel if you wanted. We stayed at Baboo Village, but right next door is a place owned by a South African, Ockie, and unlike Baboo Village, he had guests. Two of them. They were Dutch and had some business on Madagascar but for now they were chilling with Ockie, until they felt like doing something else. In the evenings they watched DVDs on the widescreen and in the mornings they sat on the deck with coffee and whiskey and watched the pirogues cross the channel, carrying bicycles and people. There’s a sandy trail that circles the island and you can walk it in a couple of hours, depending on your stops. Stop by the Maningory Bar and Restaurant and you might see one of the few lemurs left, semi-domesticated. You can take a pirogue around the island, stop for a bottle or three, for you and the boatman, swim in the clear water where the Madagascar Strait meets the Indian Ocean, and make it back to the lodge before sundowners and yet another French meal. 

            On the plane back to Joburg about a half dozen journalists were on board. The coup was over and they were headed on to the next story. We waited on the tarmac for twenty minutes for the last of them, carrying his satchel and talking on his cell phone as he mounted the stairway. One of them, a light haired middle-aged woman sitting across the aisle from me, lifted her flaccid arms and clapped, slowly but loudly, as he entered the cabin. No one else joined in, but there were calls and jests. I got the distinct feeling that they all thought that they were the only ones on the plane, the other passengers more like faceless manikins than real live people in the flesh. I was in front of them in the queue at customs as well, but they were soon whisked off like royalty, and not because they had a story to cover.

            I thought of the two little girls who walked with us to the west, trudging barefoot to school the ten kilometres across Ille St. Marie, a journey they made every day, with empty hands and stoic hearts, and the smiling villagers on top of the hills asking; “You need boatman?” I thought of the woman who sold us pastries at a spaza shop; “You want three, four…” I asked C. “…or five...” said the smiling woman as she walked up the path to open the shop. I thought of Paki the pirougue man of Ille aux Nattes, and Joseph at La Crique, and musty cemeteries with midget crypts, and the lithe climber who pulled down the coconuts to fall on the sandy trail, and the shopkeeper who couldn’t understand our requests for the title of the almost rumba music we heard as we passed, and the sage guitar of Manhi at the Zebu Bar and Lounge on our last night in Antananarivo - and so many others we’d encountered, and I thought that the journos had missed the story, and I was glad to see them go, like cockroaches underneath the moulding.

            Coups come and coups go, but the people soldier on, barely blown by the breeze.

            What a place!

            Don’t hesitate to go.

Novelinquinties

Ah, the literary world continues to cause smirks of amazement at the silliness that it spits out. The architecture of formalisms often seems to be more enticing, even addictive, to many than lucid expressions of heartfelt honesty. After all, in a world where one’s life will soon cease, as sure as shit, it becomes a matter of some importance whether one’s writing conforms to the guidelines of the righteous scholars, or to the imperatives of impending doom.

            There really isn’t all that much time to fuck around with bullshit.

            I’ve written 4 novels; but of course they aren’t really novels are they?

            Why?

            Because they are all between 40,000 and 50,000 words. Therefore, they are ‘novelettes’, or ‘novellas’, and not novels at all.

           

            Excuse the break; I had to go to the loo to puke.

           

            Things get more and more ridiculous and now we have ever finer gradations of category, classifying each piece of writing so that we can chuck it into yet another pigeonhole.

            There’s a contest (good god, not another!) in my area for best piece of ‘flash fiction’. Submit your story, not more than 150 words, by January 15. Winners will be announced. Payment is not specified.

            Well, ‘flash fiction’ is just another bit of crappy marketing strategy promoting as something ‘new’ that which has existed for a long time. I’ve been doing it since I was a kid.

            So here we are, for prose writing:

            Flash fiction – 150 words or less.

            Short short story – 150-1000 words

            Short story – 1000-10,000 words

            Long short story – 10,000-20,000 words

            Novelette – 20,000-40,000 words

            Novella – 40,000-60,000 words

            Novel – 60,000- 150,000 words

            Piece of Crap – 150,000-300,000 words

            Very Large Piece of Crap – 300,000- infinite number of words

            Ah! It’s all clear to me now! The beauty of literature…       

Funny, ha ha

It’s funny how the methods of thieves and robbers and criminals in general get incorporated into the very fabric of how an economy functions. The assimilation is nowhere more perfected than in the USA.

            It’s funny if you think getting reamed up the ass with a corrugated pipe is funny.

            It’s very funny how these shady behaviours get accepted by the general populace, growl as they might. To curse and express anger at being robbed is deemed to be naïve, un-American, anti-social, or even seditious.

            How has this happened?

            Gradually, over very many years; and it dates back to long before the founding of the US, doesn’t it?

            A very small example, and one revealing of my own naiveté is my current Comcast (that bastion of corporate excrescence) bill. Little did I know I was being charged for HBO every month, after the first month’s free trial. I never asked for it, I never signed on, I never said yes.

            But apparently I never said NO (perhaps I had other things to do).

            Let’s nail him! they gloated, and I was 20 bucks poorer every month for something I did not want.

            Apparently I let my guard down, forgetting how ‘things work’.

            Are corporations evil? my daughter asked me one day, as we walked along the tree-lined streets of midtown Sacramento.

            It’s more complicated than that, I answered.

            But I’m not so sure.

            The businessmen, the politicians, the lawmen; they all learn from the crooks. Somewhere in their hearts they admire the crooks and their quick successes, and seek only to find ways to do the very same things, but within the gambit of some law or other. Protection rackets, shell games, snake-oil, thinly veiled stick-ups and high-jackings – they are all accepted under the cover of the proper amount of, or layers of, authority and official and showy decoration.

            Peel the layers off the onion and you find nothing. Something has been lost - likely stolen - and it is irretrievable.

            Maybe you can live with this.

Note from the Downtrodden Man, written at 2:43 PM, on a Monday

We are truly at war all the time. Not with the terrorists. The terrorists are on our side. They hate the machine as much as we do. We should all be terrorists. At least, to those who decide to become one with the machine. Then again, most of them are really only going along with it, because they believe they can’t fight it.

            Cut off the head of the snake, indeed. That would be good. Walls of insulation protect the ones who really profit, from retribution by the masses, if they ever venture forth to complain or cause a little fuss. The walls have been built year upon year, generation upon generation, the workers themselves under direction and diligently mending all the flaws and possible points of ingress and egress. Reinforcements have always come to seal the breaches that have threatened to penetrate the walls.

            We’re not at war with another country, another culture, another race, another religion, another geopolitical region. Our enemies are right here amongst us, with their slimy fingers working their way into our minds and our hours. We need a patriotism of the self.

            Slavery is a word with multi-faceted meanings.

            Find your meaning.

            The strongest weapon is the weapon of time-suck. We watch in near helplessness as our hours get vacuumed from the dwindling balloon of our lives, only to be piled into a dumpster in a piss-stained back alley, reeking of stale shit and dead messengers, never to be retrieved.

            It gets worse, of course.

            Sometimes we’re blasted right to our faces, told we’re not good enough, not with the program perhaps, somehow diseased and dysfunctional. It’s an easy line to walk, just walk it, we’re told.

            It can get even worse if we actually pipe up and say something, or god forbid, do something.

            In spite of all our sense of self-preservation and wish for well-being we continue to say; ‘Fuck you, asshole.’ (though it may often be just under our breaths). That’s the life in us speaking.

            It all sits like a toxic stew fermenting in our guts and we just want to shit it all out, and be done with it.

            But we can’t do that. It keeps welling up inside from the continual injections from outside.

            We are truly at war all the time.

            This war is not about guns, or slogans, or placards, or protests, or marches, or bombs. It’s an everyday war, and it’s not going to end any time soon.

             

Livin' in the USA

‘$100,000’

I was merely stating what the documents I’d given her stated, our worth.

She was unimpressed and searched for the monthly income line.

‘Hmm.’ she went, which was barely perceptive to a normal person. I noticed it though.

‘I’ll call you.’

She never did.

I walked off, seeing that even though we could afford not to work for awhile, but could rather enjoy a bit of leisure, the landlords would not allow us this pleasure. We needed to work for them.

A homeless person waddled by with a grocery cart full of possessions. There was probably more stuff in that basket than I had in the tiny studio apartment I was camped out in for the time being. I noticed he had a shiny silver watch on his wrist. Both of mine were bare.

I’m only a very small step away from that, I thought.

Who knew it would come to this? In a past life being locked out was expected, but it wasn’t anymore, after I’d acquired some serious credentials.

Well, that’s my pretensions rearing their ugly heads. How foolish to believe the hype.

It would be summer soon, the real summer, not these measly days of 80’s and such. The overarching trees provided their welcome cover, and I had to wonder where I’d be when those days rolled around.

I went back to the place to watch baseball and drink beer.

Who would have thought it would come to this?

            In America you can’t rent a place no matter how much money you have (not considering millionaires and such here, only regular people with a nest-egg to live off), without a monthly income of 3x the rent.. As in many other things, Americans wear blinders and are oblivious to the realities of the world, and to a life outside the grind. Things must conform to the script. God help you if your history has been in another part of the world. That doesn’t count to an American. It doesn’t really exist.

            For example, your credit history of paying off houses and cars and having credit cards and bills count as nothing if they were incurred in a foreign country. Recite this history and an American’s eyes will glaze over and they will disappear into the place where all things are as in America. It’s in one ear and out the other. Not even a single ching registers on the cashbox of that mentality. America is simply not geared up to deal with things and people that happen elsewhere. Try counting the forms, in whatever format, that don’t allow the option of somewhere other than the 50 states, or maybe Puerto Rico, to be chosen.

            Americans don’t really believe that there is a world outside the lower 48, and a few other add-ons - except as occasional tourist destinations.

            When I was interviewed for a position in South Africa nine years ago I was laughed at when I told them I didn’t have a passport. Believe me, now I know what they meant.

            Now I’m back, without much welcome.

            It’s all quite frustrating and I hope you will forgive me if my respect for the intelligence and soul of a people as a whole, and any number of individually seemingly kind and reasonable people, appears to have eroded a bit. It’s unavoidable. 

            I see the country as a case of mass constipation, and hope for the moment when it lets it all out.

            I know this little bit won't help anything get more sane, and I know the world is mad from pole to pole, but it makes me feel better, and I count that as a good thing.

Exploitation

Growing up I had no feel for science. In fact, I was anti-science. We all were, me and the other little hippies, who knew so very little about almost anything. Some of those people still feel that way – they’ve carried an adolescent perspective into their senior years.

            Hey, that could be a good thing - the youth that refuses to die.

            Yeah!

            I’m with that rebellion. I will protect my innocent amazement of nature, intact in the face of the mercenary drive for mammon and prestige.

            Which is what science is all about - innocent amazement of nature - and the blowhards who rail against it in favour of airy-fairy lollipops that they find succour in sucking on can go get fucked, hopefully by a horse with a cock that will rip them from asshole to jawbone.

            As for myself, I finally got into the swing of science, saw it as the play that it really is, and became enthralled by the discovery of little bits of knowledge and insight that can be gained through persistent questioning and testing.

            Make no mistake; the pursuit of science is almost exactly the same as the pursuit of art, and its outputs are often equally abstract and at the same time equally necessary, though sometimes much more practical.

            In time, I gained some respect in my field – internationally - in spite of my dissolute younger years, and often got requests to review, or edit, or participate in gatherings, or in many other ways be invited to become an accepted member of the club.

            Yes, there is a club; as there is in all human endeavour. Don’t fucking kid yourself.  

            But there’s a telling piece of the picture that doesn’t fit; though it fits perfectly with a larger view of life that I’ve held since my days of walking to school with my buddies and expressing words too cynical for such a youngster.

            I’m good enough for this and this and this, but I’m not good enough for that…the very thing that I actually need…namely a job in my case...You can insert your own need or dream here if you wish...

            A cruel and unkind exploitation is found everywhere that humans exist.

            This is what we have to live with.

The Professionals

The burden of professionalism lies like a rock on the soul of creativity. There is more to treasure in the careless tinkerings of some artists than in the carefully honed and rehearsed constructions of others.

            I said that one night as we sat around in the kitchen; she with a white wine and me with the inevitable beer.

            “You’re copping out.” she said.

            “I’m serious! People miss out on a lot because they want perfect little turds wrapped up in neat little packages, bows tied.”

            She winced. She was frustrated with me. I could see that, but I wasn’t sure why. Because surely it was true. I’d heard too many people praise too many so-and-so’s who seemed to be without soul, for their clever little ditties. There were recipes to follow.

            The clock on the wall made an abnormally loud click as the top of the hour rolled into place. It had never done that before.

            “You’re just lazy.”

            “I used to think that too, but I’m not so sure anymore. Working too hard at it seems to squelch what it is I really want to do.”

            “What is it that you really want to do?”

            “Find something new, all the time. And find honest expression.”

            “What are the chances of that?”

            “If you can do it once, you can do it again. If not, then no matter how professional you are it doesn’t really matter - might as well sell used cars.” I took a hit of beer. “It won’t always work. Sometimes it will be the same old shit, it’s true. It’s a matter of probabilities. One has to take the chance. Chances are, if you don’t try too hard, it’ll happen. As far as honest expression goes, the chances are slimmer. We have a lot of skilled people but precious little of that.”

            “The probabilistic guy.” she said. She was sceptical about this view of life, though she knew it was as organic as wheatgrass to me. Play it by the probabilities.

            “Ya, that’s me.” I took a pull off the beer, afterward squelching an incredible interior burp, a heroic implosion.

            She smiled in hopeless abandon and we both laughed, wrinkles coming together along the sides of our eyes. Silliness really was the unabashed master.

            I saw that there was a good probability that we would be making some sweet moves along the sheets quite soon, and that made me look on the bright side of things.       

            We had a chance in life, after all.