The Seecret Life of Bees

The Secret Life of Bees

The Secret Life of Bees is a beautifully written novel. Despite the fact that it is Sue Monk’s first, it already demonstrates her extraordinary talent. She manages to get across the essential messages in the life of human beings in a clever way. She does that through describing the life of bees, which the central characters of the novel are interlinked with from the very opening scenes.

Set in the American South in the 1960s, the story of focus is Lily’s account of her life at the age of 14 and her childhood leading up to that age. Her childhood was a deeply unenviable one, involving “motherlessness”, because Lily accidentally shot her when she was 4 during a fight between her mother and father; and involving also “fatherlesness” because Lily was totally neglected by her unloving father. Thus, confused and in search of being loved, she is in constant longing for her mother.

Finally, at the age of 14, she decides to take action and escapes from her father to find out as much as she can about her dead mother. With her nanny Rosaleen, Lily finally finds tracks that lead her to signs and stories of her mother in the home of three black sisters, August, May and June. In the house of those three beekeepers Lily, through numerous twists and turns, not only finds discovers the truth about her mother, but also finds a home and more importantly, finds peace within her troubled self.

The novel offers the author’s profound knowledge of how important it is to find one’s “self” on the path to fulfillment, as is shown in the case of Lily. Monk also focuses on the representation of strength and the powerful “sisterhood” of women, helping each other through numerous hardships. The story is also filled with references to the life of bees and beekeeping, which are interlinked with the lives of human beings. Last but not least, the novel offers references to historical events of the 1960s America and the Civil Rights Movement, which makes the novel very interesting and extremely informative, and gives it a realistic touch.

The Secret Life of Bees is a very compelling and dazzling book, yet full of gentle wit. It is a must to read – a breathtaking achievement indeed.

Coming of Age: This World

I watched an interesting documentary titled (This World) "Coming of Age". Ok, I always moan and groan about globalisation and what drastic changes it has been causing to this world....but this documentary is the proof that cultures still differ greatly. Check it out.

Produced by Kiran Soni, a 90-minute documentary "Coming of Age: This World" provides an insight into lives of teenagers from different parts of the world, who take a journey that marks their coming of age.

The documentary begins by introducing eight teenagers from eight different cultures: a 15-year old Chan Lu from Beijing, Andre from Moscow, Yukina, a girl from Japan, a 15-year old Monica from the Dominican Republic, a 16-year old boy from Uganda, Kamoti, Appak, a boy from the Canadian Arctic, and others.

After introducing the teenagers, the film zeros in on their rites of passage from childhood to adulthood. We get a glimpse of life of a teenage Beijing girl, who fights the enormous competition in education and is facing a relentless pressure to succeed.

Parallelly, Kamoti in Uganda has to go through a ceremony, which tests his courage and makes him a man. He gets circumcised at the end of the ceremony, standing still in the middle of his village surrounded by his people, while a man circumcises him.
Andre in Russia joins the nationalist party and becomes a neo-nazi; In Jerusalem, we see Adam, age 13, who is nervous of leaving his boyhood. He is going through Bar Mitzvah, which signifies the cut from boyhood to adulthood. Meanwhile, in the Canadian Arctic, Appak is learning how to hunt, since this is the rite of passage for the Inuit boys. Last, but not least, there's the 11-year-old girl in Malasia, who's been studying Koran since she was four and finally graduates at the age of 11.

The filmmakers managed to make the subject fresh, atmospheric and eloquent, linking the stories of teenagers very well. Since the documentary is quite long (90 minutes), it would perhaps be a good idea to use different narrators instead of only one. That would liven up the narration a little. However, the music accompanying scenes is carefully chosen. It is always suitable according to the specific ethnicity - Chinese when in Beijing, Japanese when in geisha training school, violent when watching Andre's initiation, and sounding cold when watching ice and mountains in the Canadian Arctic. Photography work deserves special appraisal when showing the beautiful scenery of the Arctic and the close ups in the geisha training school.

Different ways of coming of age are contrasted on many levels, which are: contrasting traditional with popular when changing the scene from Yukina's training to become geisha to Monica's shopping in a mall to prepare for her dance; contrasting hot and cold, or bright and dark when first changing the scene from the beautiful sunset observed by Monica in Cuba to the foggy sunset in the Canadian Arctic and then from Appak's hunting in the dark, foggy Arctic to the Kamoti's ceremonial dance in the sunny Uganda. A horrible link is introduced when Kimoto refuses to have sex before circumcision, the following shot showing a dead bloody catch of Appak's father. This is probably trying to signify Kimoto's state of mind concerning sexual intercourse in Uganda. Have sex and you're dead.

Contrasting the rites of passage of those eight teenagers suggests cultural differences in the world, but all of them seem to have a common idea. Namely, growing up, unlike in most Western cultures, is one specific moment that marks the passage from childhood to adulthood. In addition, in some cultures, as in Inuit, Malasian, and Chinese, parents put a heavy load of taking care of the family on their children as soon as they become adults.

The documentary is most surely a very interesting outing for anthropologists and the teachers of international cultures, since it offers diverse examples of symbolic rites of passage, both religious and secular, that are built into every culture.

Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides

"Middlesex" by Jeffrey Eugenides catches the reader's immediate attention with the very first sentence, when it is stated that the protagonist Cal Staphanides was born twice, once as a girl and the second time as a boy. Cal's story, the story of a hermaphrodite and her family set in the historical and political background of Greece and America, is told in very metaphorical and figurative language, and with its long and detailed descriptions it almost makes the reader believe that he or she is reading an odyssey. Yet the language has an amusing quality to it on one hand (e.g. "A redheaded girl from Grosse Pointe fell in love with me, not knowing what I was. (Her brother liked me, too)."), and a rather scientific language on the other when the narrator gives details about genetics and chromosomes and other biological aspects concerning the causes of Cal's hermaphrodity.

The occasional use of the Greek language in the book also points to the problem of the protagonist's search for identity, which, centrally, has to do with gender (Cal isn't sure whether 'she' is a 'she', or 'he' is a 'he', or 'he' is a 'she', or 'he' is a 'she'). Cal is not only a hermaphrodite, but also a Greek, who lives in America. So, he is some kind of a 'double hermaphrodite' - that of sex and that of the language, speaking English, mixing it with Greek words.

The narrator of "Middlesex" is a first person narrator, Cal Stephanides himself. An extremely interesting narrator since the story is told from the perspective of the protagonist, but the reader gets the whole palette of stories and of all characters. The first person narrator becomes omniscient like a god who can see what his ancestors were feeling during wars and everything else concerning events and thoughts of all characters.

The book is very interesting, pleasant, entertaining and easy to read. Unfortunately, it is also very time consuming because of its excessive length. But once the readers reach the hardly expected end of the story, they realize that the first long chapters of the book, finally leading up to protagonist's story, are necessary to grasp the origins as well as the consequences of Cal's hermaphrodity.

A bit more on the characters of the story:

"Middlesex" is a title that certainly does not suggest a usual, everyday story with usual, everyday characters. The title "Middlesex" already suggests some kind of a sexual oddity, as is the case in the book. Every character in the story has at least one quite strange sexual characteristic, starting with the protagonist's grandparents, who basically are the start and the cause of Cal's hybridity.

Tracing back the cause or causes of the protagonist Cal Stephanides' hermaphrodity, the reader first becomes shocked by the grandparent's odd attraction to each other, namely that of incest. Cal's grandparents, Desdemona and Lefty, are closely related. In fact, they are a brother and a sister, who in the middle of family hardships (lacking a mother and a father), and in the middle of the Smyrna war with the Turks, develop a loving relationship more intimate than a normal relationship between siblings is allowed to get. They get married on the ship to America, and create a family of their own on an entirely new continent.

The fact that they are closely related is always stuck in the back of their minds until they sail across the ocean amongst the American crowds to which their family relation and their past are unknown. They create their own reality of who they are and how they had met for the society that does not accept or tolerate incest.

Unaware of the genetic mistake they were about to create - their granddaughter, who during puberty turns out to be a hermaphrodite, Desdemona and Lefty are joined by love and lust. Eventually, however, they become the victims of a crime they committed themselves. Bad guilt makes Desdemona withdraw from her husband, fearing that the outcome of their sexual intercourse might be a baby monster. Eventually, both of them withdraw from each other and lead an unhappy life until they die.

Through the fate of characters in "Middlesex", Eugenides shows serious consequences of incest - mental as well as physical.

One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest – the book and the film

One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest is perhaps the best-known anti-authority book in history (cf. http://www.sparknotes.com/film/cuckoo/context.html). So is the film directed by Milos Forman. Already in the beginning, it can be argued that the film is even more radical in its anti-authority views than the book, because in the book the story is narrated by a mentally sick narrator, Chief. We get the whole story through him. So, automatically, we get a sort of unreliable point of view. Nevertheless, Chief’s identity changes in the end and he becomes more than just an ‘unreliable’ narrator. He is seeing everything in the institution; he is pulling back and gets more perspective. Maybe he is seeing the existential truth of the situation. Yet, one could argue that the whole manipulation of the authority is only an ‘unreal’ result of Chief’s hallucinations. Milos Forman, unlike Kesey, approaches the story in a much more radical way. The story in the film is not narrated from Chief’s point of view. Keeping the spirit and the bottom-line message of the book but giving a more objective look on the manipulation of the Combine, it is more radical in its criticism to the totalitarian system of the society, because we do not have a hallucinating narrator, but a more reliable and objective observer – the camera. The story is not told from Chief’s perspective, but rather from a more objective camera. In addition, Chief doesn’t even seem to be hallucinating in the film. He seems to be a character who observes silently with wisdom, constructing a plan in his mind of how to get away from the manipulation of the Combine. He seems to be removed from the rest of the group until McMurphy fuels his passiveness into action. In other words, Chief is flying over the Cuckoo’s nest, and not into it.

However, as stated above, other than a few differences in the way the story is told, the film follows the spirit and the message of the book faithfully, although as I argue above, the anti-authority approach is conveyed more radically in the film. Seen from the Chief’s eyes in the book, we might doubt the evil manipulation of the Nurse Ratched and put forth questions whether she might be more sympathetic in reality. In the film there is no doubt about her suppressing manipulation.

Hallucinations or subjectivity in the book or the real picture in the film, when it comes to Nurse Ratched, we know that she represents the Combine and that she exerts her power in covert ways. She masks her manipulation so that the patients in the mental institution do not see it. With this masked manipulation, she retains power over them. There are many ways in which she can maintain power in the institution, but mostly with repression. She represses any kind of weakening of her power by the patients. Even if it is something totally innocent she perceives it as breaking of rules and she acts to regain that power even if she hurts the patient. That happens for example when Bibbit gets the opportunity to be with a girl and his damaged soul seems to vanish as if it was never there. The Nurse represses his improvement and his happiness the next morning by threatening him to tell all about it to his mother, which paralyzes Bibbit to such a large degree that Nurses threat resulted in Bibbit’s suicide.

She also blinds her victim’s eyes with strategies such as ‘divide and conquer’. First she rewards those who note any weaknesses or behaviors of their colleagues; then she points out the first weakness, and just sits back and watches as the patients start to attack each other. (cf. http://www.sparknotes.com/film/cuckoo/context.html) That’s what blinds them from seeing what she is really doing. When her manipulation is revealed, as when Mr. Martini insists on getting the cigarettes back and doesn’t let her get away with her manipulation, she wants to divert the attention to another patient and when even that does not work; her manipulation grows into violent force. Patients, who refuse the manipulation, are brain washed, smacked down by the authority and destroyed. In addition, she makes them believe that they are mad, and the power of madness prevents them from seeing how dependant they are.

Of course it is obvious by now that with her style of manipulation, she represents the totalitarian system of the society. Any kind of deviation from the rules results in repression, force and destruction of the opposing. Such is the case with McMurphy, who is opposing control and manipulation. He is not solely a rebel. He is much more than this - a man who loves life and wants to show it to those whose souls are already broken by the Combine. He encourages the patients in the hospital to take risks and to stop submitting themselves to subordination of the Combine; to think for themselves to be responsible for making choices and decisions about their own lives.

McMurphy encourages them to fight the control and totalitarianism of the Combine and he does that with a sense of humor, as when he says: “Which one of you nuts has got any guts?” In opposition with the sneaky rules-loving Combine, both the book and the film present the victims of the society with a bit of humor. So, we have realism mixed with humor. With this technique, the viewer already sympathizes with the victims and on the other hand establishes some sort of hateful feelings towards the Combine, questioning its masked-with-kindness and the ‘good old rules’ manipulation.

McMurphy is sort of a rebel savior in the institution; a character almost larger than life (which doesn’t mean there is no room for criticism for him, but he) does manage to open a window out of the house of manipulation, at least for Chief, who in the end refuses to submit himself to the Combine. On the other hand, Bibbit and McMurphy himself were sacrificed.

McMurphy’s end can be understood as an extremely negative wrap up of the story, or the message. He is destroyed by the Combine in the end, when he is sent to the electroshocks and comes back to the rest of the patients spiritless. A suppression of a protest which carries a very dark and pessimistic message for those who oppose manipulation, because it seems to suggest that opposition to control does not bear any fruit but rather brings to the destruction of the opposing. No matter how damaging for the individual’s soul the Combine, it will always triumph. That seems to be the message at least until Chief kills the now spiritless destroyed one out of mercy and leaves the Combine. He is free. Rebellion and opposition live on (which is a good thing), and yet, the message still cannot be considered positive. The difference between Chief and McMurphy is that Chief did not fight against the Combine. He escaped it. So, the Combine can continue to exert its power because it triumphs over the opposing again. It is interesting that both Kesey and Forman chose a Native American for Chief’s role. I believe their choice must have had a certain function - Chief breaks free, but like the Native Americans in the past could never be free from their ‘Combine’ that took away their freedom and damaged their souls, he can never be free of the Combine in the story, because it is too powerful to fight it and too powerful to escape it.

The identity of the Nurse (the Combine), McMurphy and Chief can be translated across cultures and across time. In this case, it can be culturally specific for the U.S.A., but it also can be transported to anywhere in the world, because the ‘Combine’ exists everywhere. Whether it is multi-national corporations with convincing us we need certain brands in our lives, or the manipulation of politics and church getting us to act in groups, we are manipulated in numerous ways. It comes well masked. Kesey and Forman seem to remind the readers that everyday we are voluntarily giving ourselves to manipulation of the ‘Combine’ and sometimes we don’t even realize it. Not even when a ‘McMurphy’ comes along and refuses to be a part of it. Then, people, blinded by the mask, will believe he is crazy.

Thinking about The Apocalypse Now - Part 2

The main character, the seeker of the insane man Kurtz, Willard, sails up the Nung River with his crew - allegorically speaking, they are going back in time, to the beginning of human existence - the primordial times. As further up the river Willard goes, the wilder and more primitive everything gets. And far from ‘reality’, the soldiers were tempted to be animals and Gods. It is the soldiers of the war that are truly the “wild”, uncivilized people up on the river, not the natives, but the American soldiers in their stations along the river without any control, with their commanders gone, everything totally insane. Now, Willard, following Kurtz up the river, seeing the horror, knows why Kurtz departed the military and went his own way. Running into insane soldiers and officers like Kilgore (Duvall), a surfer-type Lt-Colonel and head of a U.S Army helicopter cavalry, who in the most shocking scene in the movie, the most insane, attacks the Vietnamese village with helicopters only so that the soldiers could surf there – an extremely absurd scene. They attack the village in helicopters, listening to Wagner, playing Gods, deciding who they’re going to kill, and exterminating the children, women and men. Seeing all the horror along the way, Willard begins to doubt the war: “No wander Kurtz put weed up the Command’s ass. The war was being run by a bunch of four-star clowns who were gonna end up giving the whole circus away…The bullshit piles up so fast in Vietnam you need wings to stay above it.” Going up the river, Willard can see “why Kurtz got off the boat, why he split from the whole fucking program “. Willard sees the horror of the Vietnam War and realizes that it is a big lie. We see that Kurtz refused to be a part of lies. He says it in the beginning of the film: “…What do you call it when the assassins accuse the assassin? They lie. They lie and we have to be merciful…” He proves Willard that ‘they’ lie when he reads him out the Times article describing the Vietnam War as being in order and that the Americans are making progress.

Kurtz is a very complicated and a controversial character. On the surface, he is insane, as the commanders already decide in the beginning of the film:

”He took matters into his own hands…Out there with these natives; it must be a temptation to become a God. Because there’s a conflict in every human heart between the rational and irrational…between good and evil and good does not always triumph…Every man has got a breaking point. Even you [Willard] and I and Colonel Kurtz as reached his. And he has obviously gone insane.”

The viewer also decides that Kurtz is crazy and insane. He deserted the military. He is almost an animal, removed from the “civilization” at the mouth of the river, having the role of some kind of a God figure to the natives of Cambodia. He lives in some kind of a cave, surrounded with natives and dead bodies, heads lying all around, himself acting with primordial instincts (as when he brings Chef’s head to Willard’s lap) and being out of touch with morality (when Willard looks through Kurtz’s script after he killed him and finds a note written in red ink: Exterminate them. Exterminate them all). Kurtz befriends the horror. Yes, Kurtz is “on the edge of a straight razor” in a way, but we have to keep in mind that he is a warrior. Warriors kill. They have to. And we also have to keep in mind that as a warrior, that man went back in time to reality because he could not stand the lies of the Vietnam War although he was a soldier decorated with high honors and great achievements in the military. He tells that in the letter to his wife and son:” I am beyond their timid, lying morality, and so I am beyond caring.” He couldn’t stand the insanity and the horror of the people involved in the war. And what he is trying to do now, as is Coppola with the whole movie “The Apocalypse Now”, is to make us look at the truth directly. From this perspective, he is definitely not insane. He went away from the war, back to the beginning.

As I mentioned, Kurtz is a complicated character and quite controversial. We, the viewers can see the absurdity of the war. We can see all the lies. And so does Kurtz. As further up the river we go, the more we see that Kurtz deserts the “civilized world” because he found it so “uncivil.” He removed himself from the corruptness and went to the primordial beginnings. The viewer comes to a point of dilemma concerning the insanity of Kurtz just as Willard himself, going up that river, starts doubting it. That dilemma obviously shows that there is something beyond Kurtz’s insanity and that what ever it is; it is powerful. There is something sane in his insanity. Willard himself feels that and begins to be like Kurtz, but in the end, after he kills Kurtz, he refuses to be like him. He drops the machete and leaves the native temple. The true apocalypse of the insanity takes place as the natives drop their weapons as well. The insanity has come to an end.

The film, demonstrating the insanity of war, suggests that savagery is not so far away. The savages in the movie are, interestingly, not the natives. They are the American soldiers. The darkness can easily refer back. We all have the capacity to do bad stuff, even to become Kurtz.

To me he just seemed to want to remove away from the savagery of America and the war in general into the primordial world where he can rule it without lies. But as I said, there is a lot of controversy in the character of Kurtz. Let’s just say that he is an insane man with sanity. His sanity, the truth he wants us to look at, can be cruel, but that’s the way things are. And he’s got a point about the absurdity of the whole war: “We train young men to drop fire on people, but their commanders…won’t allow them to write “fuck” on their airplanes…because…it is ‘obscene’!...The horror…The horror.”

The Question of Sanity and Insanity in Coppola’s film “The Apocalypse Now”

The Apocalypse Now, directed by Francis Ford Coppola and based on Joseph Conrad’s novel The Heart of Darkness is a provoking and a powerful film, the power of which lies within all the questions – real brain twisters - which we, the viewers, ask ourselves. I guess that’s why it is difficult to say what the politics of the movie really are. One could say that the title itself calls for some sort of apocalypse, for the end of something, and as we see, it is the end of the insanity and the absurd of not only the Vietnam War, which is the theme of the film, but any war. However, the Apocalypse Now is not merely a simple statement of the Vietnam War; it invites the viewer to the path of insanity and when he comes close to it, it slaps him in the face, leaving him wandering about what ‘insane’ in fact means and if the meaning of it really accounts to the definition. The definition of the word ‘insanity’ in the Webster’s New World dictionary goes:” any form or degree of mental derangement or unsoundness of mind, permanent or temporary, that makes a person incapable of what is regarded legally as normal, rational conduct or judgment: it usually implies a need for hospitalization.« According to this definition the questions that come up in the film are not who is crazy or insane and who isn’t. The film already proves the madness, insanity and corruption of the Vietnam War, but it goes further in demonstrating the result of that insanity and corruption, which, as we see, leads to an apocalypse. The paradoxical question that is central is who the horror of the war made more insane and if we at all have the right to judge Kurtz an insane man and call him a murderer.

Focusing on the aspect of sanity and insanity in Apocalypse now, we see that there is no end to the discussion of the topic. One can come up with a conclusion but there is always a ‘but’ to it. And the reason there is always a ‘but’ to it is because all is relative when we consider the serious philosophical issues of the civilized and uncivilized, the rational and the irrational, the sane and the insane in the context of war. Who created the definitions of these words, who set the rules and who is breaking them? Even if we look at the issues of sanity and insanity from the ‘civilized’ perspective, the answer is relative. The definition says that an insane person is incapable of what is regarded legally as normal, rational conduct or judgment. What happens in a war already isn’t ‘normal’ or ‘rational’, especially not in the Vietnam War. Willard expresses this paradox when he is assigned to exterminate Kurtz, who is charged for killing four South Korean double agents, and because his “actions have become unsound”: “Shit. Charging a man with murder in this place was like handing out speeding tickets at the Indy 500.” As Coppola shows in the film the involvement of America in Vietnam was unnecessary and insane, because the Americans were “fighting for the biggest nothing in history.”

Coppola demonstrates the insanity of the characters through sailing into the darkest orbits of the human psyche (symbolized through Willard sailing up the Nung River to find the king of the hearts of darkness Kurtz), where all the characters in the film seem to be lost in their own mental world, not knowing whether they are animals or God (or both). The whole U.S. conduct throughout the film is seen as insane, excessive, destructive, futile... (cf. Phillips, 439). “Everywhere he goes, Capt. Willard sees signs of drugged stupor, loud, large, yet ineffective, as in the haunting image of the helicopter burning in the tree by the river […]. One meaning: an insane war breeds insane behavior.” (Phillips, 441). American soldiers, without even knowing why and who they are fighting, removed from the commands, ‘lost it’ and quickly began subordinate all around them. They quickly fell under the temptation to take things into their own hands and play Gods. The process of this ‘loss of reality’ and taking things into their own hands is described suitably in the novel Heart of Darkness:

“Going up the river was like traveling back to the earliest beginnings of the world, when vegetation rioted on the earth and the big trees were kings. An empty stream, a great silence, an impenetrable forest. […] You lost your way on that river as you would in a desert, and butted all day long against shoals, trying to find the channel, till you thought yourself bewitched and cut off forever from everything you had known once – somewhere – far away – in another existence perhaps […] The reality – the reality – I tell you – fades […]” (Conrad, 41-2)

The African train-ride

Painting by Nyanda

Never had I encountered life threatening dangers while on my expeditions, but traveling in Africa changed that fact. The following event did not only make me value life more, but it also made me wonder about the world’s mysterious ways and how everything in life eventually works out well.

The afternoon heat made everything fuzzy while we were waiting to get on the night train in Mombasa, Kenya. Our tickets were first class so we were waiting in front of the first two wagons. The conductor didn’t want to take our tickets for some reason – there seemed to be some sort of complications with reservations and since we didn’t really care what wagon we traveled in, we didn’t complicate things more and just let him take us to the compartment that was still free. Finally, we entered the fourth wagon at the very end of the train and traveled with the African natives. As the train finally took off at five o’clock, we stacked our luggage and our photography equipment underneath the beds and lay down. I stared out of the window, totally overwhelmed by the beautiful African landscape flashing by my eyes. Never had I seen a more beautiful sight. The setting sun made the sky look as if it was burning, the fire kissing the land beneath it as if they were lovers.

As it turned pitch black, I closed my eyes and drifted off into ‘never-never land’. Rain drops falling on the roof woke me up several hours later and made me want to pee. It wasn’t until I got up and looked out of the window that I saw it was pouring down rain. I went to the toilet and lay down again. The rest of my crew was fast asleep, so I made myself busy daydreaming about the future expeditions in beautiful Africa, reading stories my father had written when he was in Africa.

All of a sudden, the train stopped forcefully. All of us fell off our beds, holding to whatever we could, our hearts beating fast and furious. I could hear the water running outside. I figured it must have been a river raging somewhere nearby. A lot of people were screaming and the wheels underneath us were squeaking like thunder until, finally, the train stopped completely. Still, people were screaming and crying. We opened the door of our four-bed compartment to see what was going on, but the night was pitch dark and it was still raining pretty hard, so we couldn’t see anything. All we could hear was people screaming and water running furiously as if we were in the middle of a waterfall.

The clock turned one in the morning and we were still waiting in the train. Not knowing what was going on made me extremely nervous, especially because we knew something bad had happened. Some of the cries became more distant. On and on we waited for hours for the sky to get brighter and it wasn’t until four that it got bright enough for us to go out and see what was going on. There, in the middle of what seemed to be a never ending prairie, we walked to the tip of the long train, and saw the first two wagons had been swallowed by the river. Apparently, the bridge over the flooded river broke loose as the train tried to cross it. Some people were still alive in the wagons screaming for help, but none of us could save them because they were too deep down there for us to reach them. Besides, we had no equipment suitable to rescue them and the river was still raging. All we could do was stand there and watch the crying children and women dying. Dead bodies were piling up down there, hungry crocodiles waiting their turn to fill their stomachs. Standing there helplessly made me want to scream my guts out. There was absolutely nothing we could do to rescue the unfortunate souls who were drowning.

A man with a radio called for help, but the helicopters would not be coming for another four hours. We took our luggage and started walking towards Nairobi. None of us could speak. It wasn’t until we reached Nairobi and reported to the police what had happened that it struck me that we too should have been us among the two hundred people that died in the first two wagons that night.

What happened in the African prairie that night is something that seems like a distant nightmare – a nightmare which will always remind me of how valuable life is and that we should not take it for granted but be grateful to have it and cherish it day by day.

(This was written for my language-learning class; it is now my story, but it really did happen to some one else )

Here on Earth: a summary of the interview with David Monagan

Jean Ferraca’s “Here on Earth” interview with David Monagan discusses many facets of Irish culture, ranging from language, history, and politics to the present modernized Ireland. All of these issues are discussed through the views of the interviewer Jean Feraca herself, the author of ‘Jaywalking with the Irish’ and an American expat living in Ireland, and Tom McCarthy, an Irish poet and a native to Cork.

The interview begins with David Monagan’s descriptions of his life in the Irish-American part of Connecticut prior to becoming an expat in Ireland. In America, Monagan was surrounded by images of Irish culture, especially reading Joyce, Yates and his favorite Flann O’Brian, whose surrealistic, humorous and at the same time moving style represents Irish life for David. Love of Irish literature sparked his decision to study in Dublin in the early 1970s, after which he has been to Ireland on many occasions before moving there permanently with his family.

As a writer, Monagan finds it very stimulating to live in Ireland because he is constantly surrounded by poetic language. He enjoys the fact that even the most trivial conversations can flower with imagery. He believes that the Irish haven’t developed the gift of gab because of the oppression by the Brits in the past, as is believed by Jean Feraca, but that the poetic imagery of the Irish language has been around for millennia, possibly because of the romantic, misty, and rainy landscape.

Monagan can’t speak Gaelic, but he claims that the Irish language is very poetic. McCarthy agrees with him on that matter and further explains that there is great variation in the Irish language and that it varies from county to county. As an example, a song is played, called ‘Langer’, which is a typical Cork word. It is an insulting word but can be also used with affection. The Irish name the phenomenon where an insulting slang word is used with affection, "slagging".

The Irish culture has changed drastically in the past decade. The former secular country’s social life was highly dominated by the old tradition and the Catholic Church up to the 1970s, when Ireland was still fighting with poverty. Shortly afterwards Ireland started changing. Its population increased, it reached economic prosperity, and became modernized in the short time of only a decade. The Irish population has been coping with this rapid change with some difficulty, since the transformation from a rather poor condition to the economic boom and modernization had no ‘in between’ stage of industrialization.

Even though it’s become a modernized country, Ireland keeps many traditions such as several Catholic holidays and the country’s favorite sport, hurling. Two matches a year are of great importance to the Irish, almost equivalent to the American Super Bowl.

This interview gives listeners a good insight into the old and the new Ireland and its culture.

New words for today

That thing with learning 5 new words a day hasn't worked out yet. Oh, man! Sometimes it looks as if I am a chronic procrastinator, but believe me, I am not! There is just sooooo much to do this semester. I know it's my own problem to have 32 hours of classes a week...and a job...and I commute everyday from Slovenia to Graz...which takes about 4 hours of my time...No more moaning...I am learning words this very moment....so here we go....I need to refresh the old ones though. Activating new words in ones vocabulary is not as easy as I thought it would be....

The little kid didn't know what he was doing. He just couldn't discern right from wrong.
I used to live in the back of beyond, so when I finally came to a big city, I thought I was reborn in a world that was actually living.

Lucrative - Syn. fruitful, productive, gainful; profitable; juicy, remunerative; e.g.: Although it is very exciting it is not as easy and as lucrative as it may seem.

The deep south and the Afro-Americans

Needs revising
So, there I was with a bag full of interests in my closet waiting to be opened, to seek adventures and to see what the world out there is hiding. I felt like I was in a pimple on God's ass - totally removed from everything wild, crazy, and fun.

In 2003, I decided to go to Arkansas. It wasn't me who came up with the choice of that state. Arkansas sounded like Kansas at the time and I was prepared for the worst, but I didn't really care. To be honest, I didn't know anything about the state but that it was in the deep south and that is where I wanted to go.

You see, when I was kid, it wasn't only the 'Indians' I was obsessed with. It was also Afro-Americans and blues and jazz. This admiration also has roots in the stories my mother told me. I can't remember the title of the story, but it was about an African boy who one day sat on a whale and traveled the world on its back. Then, my dad told me about Uncle Tom's Cabin. Then there was Jim who escaped from the plantation and sailed on the raft with Huckleberry Finn.

Then, my father introduced Miles and Coltrane and old blues men records that he brought from his sea adventures.

There was something about these stories....I felt it when I was little although I couldn't name it...it was more a subconscious thing. But there was something powerful that I felt. It was this strength in the characters, in the blues men sang, in the jazz musicians playing so deeply immersed in their feelings and thoughts...there was something that is not SAD, hopeless or miserable, but strong, wise, and mysterious.

The romantic naivety of the story atmosphere soon broke apart when I dived into the history books about the Afro-Americans and found what the white race did to Africans, who even after building "America" in horrible conditions as slaves and degraded people never became Americans but a hyphenated minority, just like all other minorities there. So much for your melting pot! As far as I see it, nothing in America melts. Maybe on the surface, but the inside is still a salad of particles oiled by the white race, and will never melt.
Those books really made me want to puke on the human existence....

Anyway, I was not allowed to watch much TV as a kid- especially not in the evening, when it was bed time. But I remember once, years and years ago, we had this channel in Slovenia. Just for a few months and then it got canceled. It was Sky One - an American or a British channel, I can't remember which. But I remember as freshly as if it was yesterday...One Sunday evening, a series of films began, and it was called Roots. The films were inspired by a novel of the same name, Roots, written by Alex Haley. It started out with a black man running into the dark jungle somewhere in Africa, trying to escape from people who were after him with ropes and chains. He could not escape and was transported to America on a slave ship. That man's name was Kunta Kinte. I will never forget it. Memories come back vividly now. I had goose bumps then and I have goose bumps now. Anyway, he was enslaved on a cotton plantation in Virginia. Soon, he tried to escape, but was caught. His punishment disabled him from ever escaping again - his master cut off his foot.
The series of films were about Kunta Kinte's descendants trying to survive in the cruel world ruled by white Americans. They tried to abolish slavery, they fought for their rights after the abolition, fought the Jim Crow laws and the ugly claws of segregation...all this while trying to keep their dignity and pride. Haley, through a history of one family, captured the history of an entire race of people whose names and identities were stolen from them.

I watched the movies as a kid, and tried to read the book when I got a little older. I quit,though. Over 600 pages takes some of your motivation away...It takes a hell of an exciting story for me to finish if it has over 600 pages....

But to come back to my story...I needed to see the old south. And these stories from my childhood strongly enhanced my travels.

Coming to the deep south, I was first shocked by the humidity and the heat. I thought I would die at first. Just imagine slaves and workers working through the day on the fields for hours on end...day by day...IN THIS UNBEARABLE HEAT!!!! .... Nowadays, people stay in more than they are outdoors. I learned to like the heat of the South. Somehow, my body liked the heat and the humidity, so I wandered around constantly, having the streets all to myself, cars honking at me, people yelling out of their windows how crazy I was to walk...There were no sidewalks...but that didn't stop me from exploring....Soon, I found those supposedly extinct juke joints where Afro-Americans play their music and just sing sing sing...no pompous lights or tables....no stage or lights...no mike...no speakers...no toilets...no nothing. Just pure music and soul. And fun, of course.

The Mississippi Delta was just as I expected it would be. Mississippi and Alabama are the poorest states in America...but certainly my favorite - next to Louisiana and California. ....

But more about that in the next post.

See ya there.

A prelude to my adventures

NOT FINISHED

I used to be a nasty kid (you would never guess, would you??!!) We lived right next to a river and my sister, our neighbors' daughter, and I were the only girls in the neighborhood. My sister liked New Kids on the Block, Jason Donovan, and pink dresses, so she was seldom my 'hang-out-and-play buddy'. Our neighbor Spela was her best friend, so, my only option for wild adventures was turning to the remaining kid population of our neighborhood - boys. Preferring playing with insects and animals to dull dolls, I already had a good predisposition to becoming something that is not what the society names 'a girl', I became a tom-boy of the neighborhood. I always had a boyish hairstyle, cut very short; I was wearing torn and dirty jeans, and I rode that cool BMX bike, and the good old Kekec, of course.

As you can imagine, in a neighborhood packed with boys, dolls, tea parties, playing teachers, and wearing mother's high heels were out of question. Especially for a tom-boy. Even if I had the desire to play with toys of the kind, I didn't because I needed to keep my reputation. So, most of the times we played 'Indians' in a ruined bunker from the WWII. We built tee-pees, slept in them if our parents allowed us (which happened close to a zero), we colored bird feathers and wore them in our caps or tied them to our heads; animals were our main attraction. My mother would find snakes and lizards in my pockets when doing laundry. Sometimes I came home having a strange and mysterious smell, walking through mud and this strange type of grass that has a terrible odor and she would take me out of the apartment and wash me with the garden hose. I escaped home several times, starting when I was 5. All of this not because my family would be unloving or uncaring (on the contrary!), but simply because in my imagination, I was Huckleberry Finn. Vinetou. I was Geronimo. I was Crazy Horse and Pocahontas.

I didn't care for anything but maps and stories when I was a child. My father sailed the world twice before I was born. He would read maps to me when he put me to sleep. My mother would tell stories. Lots and lots and lots of stories. She is an amazing story teller and I wouldn't let her away without at least one. Huckleberry Fin and Winetou were my favourites. They also offered a lot of wild ideas that I did not think crazy at the time. This is why my friends and I built our own raft and wanted to escape down the river. We got caught before we did it and there was some serious spanking going on. The neighborhood was not far from the power station where my father worked at the time, and he constantly warned us about the dangers of that part of the river.

Playing 'indians' was a lot of fun. ...Those men with bows and arrows, speaking with low and calm voices made such an impression on me that I decided, as a little girl that I wanted to be an 'Indian'....Little did I know about the real situation. Growing older, I was more and more interested in the spiritual brave 'Indians', and searched for information and ways to get to them somehow. Of course, what was in my imagination did not turn out to be the truth. Karl May never even saw an Indian when he wrote the book Vinetou. And even worse, 'Indians' practically didn't exist anymore....

Is bush a comedian or an idiot???Do we have to think twice???

http://24ur.com/naslovnica/ekskluziv/ekspres/20070508_3096983_60013565.php

This is something you would like to see if you are amused by Bush's stupidity and his SPEECH DISABILITIES....He seems to be amused by it himself..maybe you will be, too...It seems that Bushisms (there is even a name for it!!!) have become the target entertainment....

He certainly has become the court jester of the world. Doesn't that make us wonder about the politicians we choose to govern our countries...

Learning new words and giving them home in my active vocabulary :-)

The only way I can think of learning new words is by trying to use them in as many sentences as I can. I will do that every day (I hope I can manage). Over a period of time, I will try to repeat all of them by using them in even more sentences. I always try to learn a new word by collocating it to others. I think there's no point in learning a word on its own, because there is a danger of collocating it with wrong words. That is why I only use dictionaries that have lots of examples.

So, here we go...the 5 words for today are:

• We went to Egypt for the summer holidays and were shocked by the abysmal living conditions.
• After his mother died, he was in abysmal misery.
• Ignored by authorities and communities, the gypsies in Romania lived in abysmal poverty.
• I did not enjoy it. It was an abysmal performance.
• The weather was abysmal.

I like the way the word atrocity sounds. But I have no idea what it means. Let's check it out.

• The invading army committed many atrocities.
• Hitler not only committed and act of atrocious cruelty, but committed crimes against all humanity.
• Americans were behaving atrociously in the Vietnam war. Just watch The Apocalypse Now by Coppola. It is a very vivid example of how atrocious the behavior of people can get when they think they are God.

I don't like the way the word sound anymore. It's meaning ruins it!

• What we wanted this summer was going away from crowded cities and beaches. What we wanted was a quiet little place in the back of beyond.
• We fell for the commercial of the gorgeous little cottage on the edge of the town, but in the end we found that it was in the back of beyond. It took us 2 hours to get to the nearest shop.

• I get very annoyed if I am on a train, trying to read a kick ass novel, and some hectic woman starts to cackle.
• He seemed like an interesting fellow, but every now and then he cackled like a madman, which shocked me every time.
• I prefer giggling to cackling, because the latter makes me fall into a shock.

So far, I've go abysmal, atrocity and cackle. I will try to make a sentence out of all three.
The army devastated the land, behaving atrociously towards the hostages left behind. One of the soldiers cackled like a madman every time a hostage tried to escape but couldn't.

Oh, dear. All of these words are so depressing. I don't think it is even possible to use them in a more positive meaning, because of their negative connotation, except maybe the word cackle. Although, I can't imagine anyone not being annoyed by it....Let's move on to some more positive words this time.

• We discerned a sail on the horizon.
• She is incapable of discerning right from wrong.
• Walking for miles on end without a living soul, we finally discerned twinkly lights and a few houses in the distance.
• Tina finally discerned a figure approaching through the fog and we were rescued.
• Walking through the kitchen we discerned a strange odor. (we can discern with other senses than the eyes as well!)
• We had no clue why he did it. We were unable to discern his motives.

I can already tell that this is going to be a tough one to remember - or to use in my active vocab. I need to come back to that one...I hope I will discern the word through the huge chunk of other words:-)

• That was a nifty joke! You have a clever mind.
• He's always full of nifty ideas.
• I bought a nifty dress for my prom.
• Luckily, I sold my car for a nifty price.