A first novel: Research

A bit more than a month ago I wrote about dividing the novel into chapters in the hope of making the process of revising easier on me, giving me discrete parts to work on and improve rather than nebulous bits with no definite end that only serve to burn me out before I'm through the first third of the work. I still have faith that this approach will work. Unfortunately, I have no proof of this. I have only spent one day since then working on the novel. This is due, in part, to returning to the United States, spending time with family, traveling between three states and moving into a new apartment and new city.

It is also due to an extended period of writer's block. I have struggled to convince myself that this novel is any good, that it's worth another minute of my time and effort. Updike found references to any number of writers who won or deserved to win the Nobel Prize for Literature in Snow. What allusions does my novel contain? What references to the canon does it hold? Does it even point to anything beside itself?

To remedy this, I have decided to do some research to gain a better understanding of the foundations upon which this novel is set before I again begin to write. On the one hand, this means reading again Marshall McLuhan's The Gutenberg Galaxy and the collected essays of Johann Baptist Metz and reading for the first time André Bazin's "The Ontology of the Photographic Image." On the other hand, there are a number of films I need to watch to better enter the mind of the narrator, and they are not directed by the likes of Kurosawa and Godard. You don't find those films on the streets of Nairobi. You find DVD collections starring Jean-Claude van Damme, Steven Seagal and Dolph Lundgren. Those are my narrator's formative films, and those are what I need to watch. I'll let you guess to which half of this research I'm more looking forward.

Considering Thomas Mann's "Buddenbrooks"

No one writes like Thomas Mann anymore. The Pulitzer Prize this year went to a series of interconnected short stories. Modern mobile technology is waiting for the app that finally brings nano-fiction to the masses. Even those who are still writing elephantine tomes prefer the micro. Adam Levin's The Instructions spent one thousand pages on four days. I know no contemporary writer who still crafts decade-spanning literary epics.

On the one hand, I appreciate this. If this was the trend still, I would consider myself fortunate to finish a novel every month. On the other hand, I am glad that we have Mann. Buddenbrooks is thick and slow. Mann cannot help but to record everything that happens in the lives of the titular family. Nothing is too minor, too inconsequential in the family's descent from the heights of society to mention. Every character who appears for the briefest moment, the man who reads a poem at a family dinner, the teacher who says nothing while watching the high school students between classes, receives two pages worth of physical description and motivation.

The book is thick, the book is slow and the book is beautiful. Part of it is Buddenbrooks' sheer density. In short stories there is no time or space to lose yourself in the narrative. The techniques are clear. The mass of words in Buddenbrooks obscures the craft. The family's fate is foreshadowed in the first chapters, but it's lost amid all the rest. The final chapters include a page of reference to the trials of Job, and I almost lost the significance in the comparison to the Buddenbrooks' own fortunes. All the words make it seem natural and unforced.

The writing itself is great. Better still is Mann's treatment of his characters. The central triumvirate of Thomas, Christian and Antonie Buddenbrooks are no less ridiculous than any other character in the novel. They have their vanities and other flaws, same as Therese Weichbrodt or Alois Permaneder, but they have their pride, their honor, too. They have their sympathy. It's a remarkable treatment and portrait of these characters.

Just, wow, what a novel.

A first novel: Chapters

I have divided my novel into chapters. Its one-hundred and sixty-seven pages are now portioned between eighty-two chapters. They have no clever names, just numbers. The shortest are a few small paragraphs. The longest span three or four pages.

I do not know yet if I will keep them. It was not my intention at the beginning to divide it so. I wanted the novel to be a seamless whole and not in discrete, defined chunks.

I did it because I was struggling in my revisions. My thought before was to keep going through the whole again and again, adding scenes and developing the characters at first and later eliminating them down to only what is necessary. That did not work out so well. I would push through as many words as I could in a morning and write and revise until I burned myself out for the day. The trouble was that I was still a little burned out the next day, and it only accumulated. The chapters allow me to pace myself and focus my writing. Now I work every day only on a defined section of the novel, never more than a single scene, and focus just on making it the best it can be now. I’m feeling good about this.

With eighty-two chapters and assuming I hold to my goal of working on a single chapter every day, my goal of having a draft ready for the thoughts and reactions of friends by the beginning of November remains intact.

Considering Orhan Pamuk’s “Snow”

We read T.S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland” in my second literature class at Gonzaga. More than a few of my classmates admitted that they had only the barest understanding of what was happening in the poem, but they liked it nonetheless. Maybe it was the rhythm of “Please, hurry up, please,” or the imagery of waves crashing against the shore that caught their attention. I don’t know. I thought it was a garbage position to take. How can you claim to enjoy something but fail to understand it, especially something as rigorous as that poem? Since reading Orhan Pamuk’s Snow, though, I think I can understand them.

First, the Snow I read was not entirely what Pamuk intended. I read a translation from the original Turkish. No matter the skill of Maureen Freely, no doubt a great deal of the wordplay and allusions were lost in the process.

Second, a review in Harper’s called it a “political novel.” I have to agree with that as there are constant references to Turkey’s history of coups and a clear concern with the nation’s current struggle between secularism and popular Islam, but these are topics I am not well prepared to encounter as my knowledge of Turkey and its history begins with the might of the Ottoman Empire’s army and ends with the emergence of Atatürk.

Third, in his review, John Updike draws connections between Snow and the works of Kafka, Joyce, Calvino and six other seminal figures of the Western literary canon. Of those referenced, I had read only Mann and Dostoevsky and not even the referenced works. I wasn’t even well placed to understand its literary significance, but I enjoyed Snow nonetheless.

No, I loved it. It’s the best novel I’ve read so far this year. It was just so great in everything. The evocation of the city of Kars and its teahouses that no longer sold coffee because the unemployed customers couldn’t afford it. The sense of surreality as the city is isolated for days by a freak snowstorm and Ka meets the city’s powerful. The rich cast of characters concerned with politics and faith and their shadows. The plays and poems within the novel and the power of art and theater. The structure of the gradual reveal of the narrator and his own passions and hopes. It’s amazing. I would be happy if I once wrote something that came within a stone’s throw of Snow’s success at every level.

I find this incredibly hopeful that I can enjoy something without understanding it in its entirety. It invites later returns and promises new responses then and opens up so many other works.

A first novel: Autobiography in fiction

There is a basic rule of writing that goes “Write what you know.” It makes sense. You write best about the things you understand best, the characters and settings you have personally experienced. In that way you best set yourself up to place the telling details and reveal the truth. It may not have the same glamour as the lives and romances of landed English men and women two centuries past, but if you know hunting and plumbing and write about them, your stories will have the honesty of Austen. If you don’t know a thing about the Russian aristocracy in the nineteenth century, you don’t write like Tolstoy. Of course, if this is taken too strictly, there is no opportunity for fantasy, but a story can always be grounded by the conflicts the writer personally understands, be it sibling rivalry or racial prejudice or whatever.

I took this rule too far in my early writing. More than a few of the stories I wrote while attending Gonzaga were mildly fictionalized events and scenes taken from my own life. Some times I barely bothered to change the names. I have gotten away from that somewhat though it is still not hard to find the inspirations for the small Minnesotan town or the western Kenyan bush where so many of my stories are set.

I used to think it was vanity to think my own life was so interesting and rich and full of insight into the human condition that other people would want to read about it. I don’t think that anymore. I write for myself first. That way I can at least be assured of pleasing one reader. And when I write for myself I am trying to understand my life. I remember and create again those moments I thought were revealing and important and try to understand what they might have meant or why I did or did not do something. It’s an act of understanding, too, as I consider especially those whom did not appreciate or like and try to understand their own place and motives.

I don’t know. It’s the beginning of an artistic statement, I guess.

Rejected story

I received yesterday another rejection for “Perfection.” It was the eleventh I’ve received for that story, and I can pretty safely assume that another five journals rejected it but didn’t bother to send any notification whatsoever as it’s been so long.

What was different was that this was the first rejection I have received that was not a form letter. It was the first to be accompanied by the editor’s personal comments. His complaint was that there was too much exposition. He wanted to scratch “SUMMARY” in red pen across entire pages and leave only half of the whole behind, only the real meat of the story.

I can understand that. I might revise it, especially since a friend made the same point about one of the stories I submitted to Machine of Death and that story was definitely helped by the cuts. I probably won’t. I like it the way it is. “Perfection” is something like a confession or memoir. There is supposed to be meandering.

What interests me is that the editor said the writing was engaging. Isn’t that a good thing?

Let me make the point now that this isn’t an argument that the editor should have accepted “Perfection” and hailed it as the greatest thing he has ever read. He didn’t like it. That’s fine. My feelings aren’t hurt. I’ll try again with another journal. I appreciate that he took the effort to write personal comments in response to it. That’s really decent.

What interests me is the premise of liking the writing but wanting to cut it. He called it “exposition.” “Exposition” is clear and direct explanation. It’s the information that puts what follows into context and allows it to make sense. I learned early in my creative writing classes that exposition was bad and should be avoided, and the editor appears to agree with that. It may be necessary, but it requires finesse and should not call attention to itself. For the most part, I tend to agree. After reading friends’ stories, I’ve told them to cut paragraphs and pages worth of exposition. I’ve quit reading some novels because there were such slabs of exposition at the beginning that I just got too annoyed to continue.

But he said the writing was engaging. I’m not serving the rules of creative writing. I’m serving the reader. What does it matter if there are passages of exposition if the writing is strong and a pleasure to read? What I think is the problem is that he recognized the passages as exposition. Once he saw that, he couldn’t help but see them as an amateur technique and be impatient for the rest of the story to begin. What I wonder is that if the writing were stronger, maybe he would have been too caught up in it to realize it was exposition. Maybe exposition is not a problem until you recognize that what you’re reading is exposition. Maybe writing is just a magic act that is always trying to keep the reader’s attention on the words and characters and story and not on the processes and techniques that make them work lest they lose their sparkle and allure. It’s just a thought.

Considering Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s “A Grain of Wheat” and “Writers in Politics”

I do believe that it is congenitally impossible for Ngugi wa Thiong’o to not write Literature. The man cannot write something small and light. Wizard of the Crow was about the resistance to a president’s corruption. Petals of Blood handles a town’s transformation from pastoral to industrial. A Grain of Wheat, one of Ngugi’s earliest novels, is, if possible, even more ambitious than those.

It is the dawn of Kenya’s independence in A Grain of Wheat. It has already gained self-rule, and Jomo Kenyatta has returned from his imprisonment. In a few days the people will celebrate uhuru when the British formally withdraw from the nation. A Grain makes every attempt to capture the breadth of the zeitgeist. Everyone with a stake in uhuru is represented. There are veterans of the Mau Mau resistance and the detention camps, and there are collaborators and homeguards. There are white colonial bureaucrats and new black ministers of parliament.

It is, unfortunately, the weakest of Ngugi’s efforts that I have read thus far, too. There are some wonderful scenes that reveal the community’s spirit when the people gathered at the train station on Sundays or of the spontaneous celebrations on midnight of 12 December, but they are the exceptions rather than the rule. Much of it the writing is over explained and clunky. The symbolism of the “Narrow Escape” and “Lucky One” matatus at the end is a bit much.

What interests me, however, is the contrast between this work and the philosophy and impetus of literature Ngugi lays down in his second collection of essays, Writers in Politics. In the collection’s preface he makes the point that all writing is inherently political and reflective of a society’s power structures. It cannot be denied. The writer’s only choice is whether to support the ruling powers or to challenge them. He repeats this position that every writer must be actively and consciously political in every one of the ensuing thirteen essays. Two essays are dedicated to celebrating Mau Mau. He argues in “Return to the Roots” that writers in the post-colonial world should write in their national and tribal languages rather than English to find their true audience.

Ngugi’s latest, Wizard of the Crow, is a perfect example of this theory. It was first published in Gikuyu and actively celebrates those who resist government corruption and oppression. Not so with A Grain. Leading veterans of Mau Mau are murderers and rapists. One who confessed the oaths and collaborated with the colonists during the Emergency did enjoy the ensuing power but did it first out of love for a woman. The man who led a successful hunger strike in detention camp also betrayed a Mau Mau leader. Even the departing colonial officials are treated with some sympathy. It’s hardly what you would expect from a writer who is fighting the power and celebrating the resistance.

It’s very possible that Ngugi’s views simply changed over time. A Grain was published in 1966. Ngugi only wrote the first essay of Writers in Politics in 1973. A lot can happen over seven years, but I like to believe that superior literature is too subtle for this. It can only be so strident and definite with ideas and abstractions. When it comes to characters and their motives, the edges are blurred and things become less certain, like life, and people do their best to muddle through and do what’s right.

Two months in Malawi: Bicycle taxis

Bicycle taxis are called boda boda in Kenya. We never took them in Nakuru. They weren’t allowed within two blocks of the city center, where we spent most of our time, and when we could have used them to ride to a rugby or football match, we didn’t out of pride. They would push their bicycles in front of us and cut us off to convince us to ride with them, and that was just annoying.

We missed out. We took bicycle taxis on our first night in Mangochi. It was already night, we were carrying luggage and we had no idea where to find the hospital where we would be staying. Someone called two bicycle taxis for us, and it was, to take a cliché, magical. The bicycles were nearly silent. It was a new moon and there were no street lamps, so the darkness was complete. It felt like we were floating.

Bicycle taxis are everywhere in Mangochi, filling people’s transportation needs in the absence of intra-city mini-buses and tuk-tuks. Some replaced their carrying racks with padded leather seats and added foot pegs and handlebars for passengers. Others reinforced the racks to carry everything from bundles of sugar cane to cages full of chicken to fifty kilo sacks of maize flour to bound goats to cases of soda and beer bottles. These riders are tough. Carrying passengers, more than a few of them can still easily pass me when I ride alone for fun. As a passenger, my driver has fought up hills that would have given me pause riding alone. The riders take pride in their bikes and adorn them with decorations. They add hand-painted license plates and mud flaps and rows of extra reflectors.

If I were a rich man and if I settled in Mangochi and Malawi, I would build a bicycle racing complex. I already picked out a site, a few kilometers from the city center on the outskirts. I would build three tracks. There would be a two-kilometer track for sprints. There would be a second two-kilometer track, but it would have terrain. It would cross the dry irrigation canals and hit jumps. The last would be a ten-kilometer loop for endurance rides. There would be a variety of race formats. There would be singles races, of course, and doubles, too, where the passenger and driver would have to switch positions halfway through. There would also be singles races where they rode loaded down with freight. The winners could receive pennants that declared their speed and victories to potential customers.

There is a necessity for bicycles in Mangochi where there is not enough money to afford motor vehicles and fuel. It would be beautiful if it turned into a passion and entertainment.

Two months in Malawi: Business names

Mangochi offers little for those who shop for amusement and distraction. Every shop and every stall carries the same products from the same suppliers. If you find one printed Tanzanian shawl you like at one stall, you are going to find it again at the next five shawl stalls. Everyone who sells plates and bowls carries the same Chinese ceramics. No matter how many bicycle shops you visit, your choice is still only between the Hunter and the Humber. There isn’t even much fun to be had in bargaining and haggling as the shopkeepers generally give you their best price first. Rather, the real fun to be had in shopping in Mangochi is in the shop and stall names.

Of the first order are the literal and straightforward. You can buy new clothing every Friday from the Fair Price Clothing Shop and be shaved at The Nice Cut Barbershop. There is the Snack Attack Restaurant and Resthouse and Sonny’s Stitch 4 Life Studio.

Then there are the Christian and Muslim faithful who operate Miracle Printers and Blessings Electronics. If these are too subtle declarations of faith, there are also Jesus Is My Boss Mini-Shop and God is Good Cosmetics and Salon.

I would have expected Black Boy Fashion Wear and Niggaz Music Centre to deny me entrance, but they accepted my patronage as well as any other shop.

Boyz 2 Barber Shop and Quiet Boyz Sound Company are just great names, but the greatest class of names overall are for those stores which admit in their names that their customers shouldn’t expect very much. Maybe Imagination Another wants you to imagine that they’re a different wholesaler. If you want to upgrade from the OK Restaurant and Resthouse, you can go to the OK Executive Lodge. That’s not including Time Tells Variety Shop, My Mistake Hyper, Slow But Sure Food Shop, Mixed Bag Shopping, Mzasi For Show Variety Shop and the Cheap-Cheap Shop.

All of this humility is only countered by the very overqualified Dr. Ishu Cellphone Repair.

Considering Leo Tolstoy’s “War and Peace”

I finished it. I have now read the unabridged War and Peace from beginning to end.

I never had any particular interest in reading it. Though I enjoyed “The Death of Ivan Ilych” and some others of Tolstoy’s short stories, I was not that impressed with Anna Karenina. Really, it was a matter of efficiency more than taste that drove me to read the Russian novel. This return to Africa includes a week in Kenya and another eight in Malawi and over fifty hours of sitting in airports and flying. I needed something that would last me, and hauling one elephantine tome made more sense than five books of a reasonable size.

The Signet Classic edition’s 1455 pages of small type and no line spacing took me roughly four weeks to complete. Assuming I read every day, which I totally didn’t, it’s an average of just over fifty pages a day. For the expressed purpose of taking a while to read, it succeeded. As a demonstration of my reading speed and actual interest in reading it, that’s not so great, but who can blame me? Something like a third of the novel is Tolstoy taking a break to explain his theory of history and its ultimate inscrutability. Napoleon was a twit because he thought he made the decisions and was important. Kutuzov was a genius because he realized he was merely an expression of the people’s will. We get it. We got it the first time you brought it up. Get on with it. That said, I would still rather read Tolstoy’s theory of history than another scene of Levin on his estates marveling at the peasant spirit and hunting. Shut up, Levin.

But, really, get on with it because the parts that aren’t that, the stories of the Rostov and Bolkonsky families and Pierre, are pretty great, a lot better than most everything else I’ve read this year. They’re good characters. They’re conflicted. They’re driven by their impulses and responsibilities. They’re making the effort to be good people. I liked reading about their lives. One hundred fifty years later they were still interesting and compelling. No doubt I missed a great deal of the nuance and subtleties in the interactions of the early 19th century Russian aristocracy, especially when the most shameful villain only sought to marry a girl without her father’s permission, but there were still some great moments. I felt more than a little sympathy and understanding with Pierre as he tried to liberate and improve the lives of his serfs but his every move is undermined by rampant corruption without his awareness.

For such a monument in the Western canon it seems like backhanded praise to just say of War and Peace, “I liked it,” but it’s true. It didn’t prompt any revelations, but I enjoyed most of the four weeks I spent in Tolstoy’s world with Prince Andrei and Princess Marya and Pierre. That’s something.

Two months in Malawi: Give me my money

I like Malawians. If a secondary school student starts a conversation on the street, it doesn’t end with him asking for assistance in paying for school fees or in obtaining a visa out of their country. They just want to ask some questions about the United States. The stall owners don’t quote me prices three times what their countrymen pay when I ask. They give me the straight price and save us both a few minutes worth of haggling. The third time the chain slipped off my Humber, a Malawian ran up to show me how to use a stick to work it out of where it gets stuck on some screws. The thirteenth time the chain slipped off my Humber, a passing Malawian spent ten minutes tightening bolts to make sure it would stop happening and didn’t ask for payment in return. It’s a nice change from Kenya where we constantly wondered what was in it for them whenever a local showed us some kindness.

There is one respect, however, in which the typical Malawian is more irritating than the typical Kenyan. It comes, unsurprisingly, from the children. Where the Kenyan children were content to scream “Mzungu” and maybe run up and touch us when we passed, the Malawian children take it a step further into the irritating. Rather than ask “How are you?” they put their hands out and shout, “Give me my money.” “Give me money” and “Give me bicycle” are also acceptable and common variations.

I want to know who told them how to say that. I want to know who told them it’s even remotely right to say it. The adults, even the teenagers, don’t say anything like that. Is it a common line in their English language education? Have they all seen Jerry Maguire and understood Cuba Gooding. Jr., as its hero? It’s not a begging culture that I’ve found here. Where did they learn to ask that? And why do they stop saying it around the time they turn eight? I just want to know.

A first novel: Beginning revisions

It came a week later than I had planned, but I have returned to my novel and begun revisions. With a draft complete from beginning to end and five weeks of distance and perspective, I have a better understanding of it. A title still eludes me, but I know the characters better and what they want and why and what they will do for it. I know what the novel is about. I know where I want to take it and where not.

I would not call these major changes. They are more refinements of ideas that were already in place from the onset and toyed with throughout the draft than a wholesale rejection of my first thoughts. I do not think that they will require massive rewrites, but it troubles me that the changes I have made so far are so minor. Except for bringing back the original paragraph which sets the narrator’s voice as one telling the story some decades later rather than in the moment, I have done little more than shift around a few words and delete some sentences.

I know this first draft is not good. I wrote more than a few sections in a rush to finish or to fill space or late at night when I only wanted to sleep. I know it needs work, but the work it needs is more significant than I am currently doing. The trouble is gaining the right perspective. Right now I am revising on too fine of a level, making things work where they are now instead of putting them where they would work better. To make an analogy with carpentry, I have gathered all of the lumber I need and have drawn up the plans but am sanding the wood when I should be joining the pieces together and reinforcing them.

I do not know yet how I can do that. For now I think that I will just push through, try to knock things into place better, expand a few sections that need it and delete the parts where the characters do not act true to themselves and the voice is inconsistent. When this draft is done, my plan is to print it and make handwritten notes and changes. When I can flip between pages and sections more easily, maybe I will have a better perspective on where to join and reinforce the sections. We’ll see.

A first novel: A persistent universe

For some time I have entertained the idea that this first novel of mine will also be the first in a very loose trilogy. I’m not thinking the continuing adventures of Kukat Lochilangor or anything so unified as Lord of the Rings but a trilogy of theme and place, an exploration of Kenya and the United States. This first is about a Kenyan in Kenya. The second will be about an American in Kenya, and the third about a Kenyan in America. A handful of supporting characters will recur between stories. Main characters may reappear only well after their own stories are told and in much more limited roles, but their presence will be felt. The new characters will know of those that preceded them and be inspired by them. The action of the following novels will only be possible through the efforts of the characters before them.

I like this idea as it allows me to use a first-person or third-person limited perspective but still see complex, conflicted characters and places through a multitude of eyes, but lately I have been considering expanding this idea even further. What if all of my stories took place within the same universe? The origin was in writing my second submission to the second volume of Machine of Death. I was trying to think of a name for one of the characters, another Kenyan, and I thought why not make him the son of two minor characters in my novel now? That’s all. There’s no more allusion to my novel because I cannot be too confident in any more of the details, but I like the idea that my characters had some existence outside of my writing, that their lives continued and mattered after I stopped writing about them.

If I follow through with this idea, even that may be an exceptionally strong relationship between two of my stories. Most of them will have nothing whatsoever to do with any other story, but I like the possibilities this opens up. Events after another story’s end can be mentioned. Hints of characters’ fates can be referred to. A character in one story can comment on the work of an artist in another and may hate it.

I can see how this can be a limiting idea. If I held tight to it in absolutely everything, it can hold me back from attempting stories too large as their impact on the world would spin its course too far from that of the real world, something I would very much want to avoid, but I don’t have to always hold so tight. I can be loose in it. We’ll see where it goes. It’ll be fun.

Two months in Malawi: Bicycle

We live with cheat codes in the United States. Maybe not invulnerability and auto win but unlimited ammunition and double-speed build times for sure. In the United States I have a Gary Fischer. It has twenty-one speeds. It has front shocks. It has a solid frame. I can adjust the seat height to better fit me and allow full extension on the down pedal. It has knobby rubber tires, and a seat that is comfortable to sit on.

In Malawi I have a Humber. It has a single gear. It has no shocks. The brakes only barely work. The frame is held together by a few nuts in critical positions and is much too small for me. Even with the seat at its full height, my legs are never fully extended. My knee never makes an angle larger than one-hundred and ten degrees. The tires are smooth plastic, and I can’t sustain too hard of a turn to either side because the tire is so large and my feet so big that I would kick it on every revolution. The seat is made from the same plastic they make action figures from and offers no padding. Since the springs beneath the seat bent horizontally, it’s become more comfortable because my bottom rests on more than three narrow points. The Huffy I rode in the first grade was a better bike than the Humber.

The first time I rode it, pulling away from the shop, it shook so bad that I thought it was going to collapse into a puddle of screw, nuts and pipes. It probably would have if I had gone all the way back to our hostel because it needed immediate maintenance. I watched for an hour while the man tightened every nut, attached the brakes and bent the gears into shape so that the chain wouldn’t slip with every revolution.

In the game of life, the Humber is playing on the highest difficulty and employing the harmful cheat codes like one-hit kills against you. It makes even the lowest levels more exciting. I took my Gary Fischer across Spokane’s trails and down Beacon Hill and felt pretty good about that. With the Humber, driving on asphalt and over speed bumps is an adventure. It’s so off balance that it veers off course if I take a hand from the handlebars to scratch my nose. I have to fight up even minor hills in my single gear.

I will be glad to sell the Humber a few days before we leave Malawi and to be back on my Gary Fischer, but until then, I will enjoy my little daily rides down Malawi’s roads and be reminded of what biking was like a few decades ago and how far we’ve come.

Two months in Malawi: Zomba Plateau

I have bought Coca-Cola in Malawi. I like it more here than in the States. It is less sweet and has more flavor. I have seen my first knock-off jersey for the U.S. national soccer team in Mangochi. It was a red sash on a black background. I have seen here, too, authentic jerseys for the Chicago Blackhawks, Minnesota Wild and Toronto Maple Leafs because I can’t believe that there’s enough of a market to make knock-offs of them. I have watched the New York Yankees and Chicago Cubs play on ESPN on satellite television. And yet none of these things have reminded me of the States so much as our hike up and along the Zomba Plateau this past weekend.

The hiking trail to the top is wide and well used. Pine trees line it. They are not indigenous and their needles are long and soft, but they are the first pine trees I have seen in Africa. There are small waterfalls. There are raspberries and strawberries in the underbrush. There are duikers that can be mistaken for a small deer at a glance. There is a cool breeze, and the air smells heavily of mint. Halfway up we felt we could have been on any trail in the Rockies.

Not that we would have forgotten that we were in Malawi. Locals passed us carrying pine logs balanced on their heads. We passed a group of vervet monkeys scampering up the trees. Those were unusual in that they were the first we had seen so far outside human habitat. At the pinnacle we saw that we were not within a mountain range, just “an isolated syenite protrusion,” as the guidebook put it, rising up from the Upper Shire River Valley, and we could see few other lonely hills on the plains.

Much of the pleasure in travel for me comes in escaping the familiar and discovering the new. I enjoy seeing new landscapes and tasting new foods, but I was glad to take a familiar hike on the plateau.

Two months in Malawi: Matola

Every terrible thing I have ever written or said about matatus I take back. I want them again because, somehow, Malawi discovered an even worse form of public transportation.

Malawi and its people are poorer than Kenya. The capital is not available here to buy a fleet of minibuses for the minor cities, and even if one made the investment, there would not be enough people who could pay for a ride to make it a profitable venture.

For the most part, this is not such a problem in Mangochi. The city is small, no more than four kilometers across at its widest. You can walk across it in a half hour. If you are in a rush or need to transport packages within the city, a bicycle taxi will suffice. If you need to travel to Lilongwe or Blantyre or another major city, you can take a bus.

It is, however, a problem when you want to make only a short trip outside the city to one of the villages, too far for a bicycle and too short for a bus. For these instances, Malawi provides the matola. A matola is a Chinese pick-up truck. The bed is shallow and long. Men stand just behind the cab and grab onto it or sit on the sides. Women sit in the center with their knees to their chests. Because the matolas that leave Mangochi go to villages over fifty kilometers distant, many of its riders pack a month’s worth of groceries and fish that they don’t have to make the trip too often.

The matola departs when it’s full. This is a floating number, higher now because of a national fuel shortage that has forced operating costs up, depending on just how large the passengers are, how many of them can be forced to stand and how many supplies are being transported. I rode a matola with Demetra that fit thirty people in the bed, not including children, infants and supplies. The police at the checkpoint didn’t care. They wrote the driver a ticket for having an expired sticker in the window and waved him on.

Of course the matola will stop to pick up every person who waves it down from the side of the road because that is another paying passenger. Unless it is a light load, there are a few seconds of hesitation when the matola stops as the current passengers try to figure out how to arrange themselves to make room for one or two more.

Riding a matola is pure terror. It is open air, and there is nothing to hold you in. You can never keep more than one hand on the cab because of how many other men are pushing to take their own hold on it. The sides are less than an inch wide on top and provide no balance at all. Fortunately the drivers are aware of their passengers’ precarious position and are less insane than those in Kenya, but you are constantly aware that it would not take a very small bounce or very sharp turn to make you lose your balance and tumble out or into someone else and knock them out. When I ride a matola I am constantly making plans on how I would jump out and curl to save myself if it takes the bend too fast or stops too suddenly for another passenger.

And that is why I bought a bicycle.

Two months in Malawi: HIV theater

We are in Malawi for Demetra. She applied to and was accepted by the University of Washington’s Global Health Opportunities Program, so rather than spending the summer in Helena or on a reservation, she earns her credit by performing a community health assessment of Mangochi and developing and implementing a program that meets one of its particular health challenges. For obvious reasons, I am not doing that. I’m not even allowed in the hospital with Demetra because in the patriarchal culture, they’ll ignore her and treat me as the doctor even when she’s the one with the white coat and stethoscope.

So, while Demetra will tell me at lunch and in the evening about her time in the wards and meetings with the district health officer, my personal interactions with the health system of Malawi have been limited until this Sunday when I arranged for us to attend a university troupe’s performance in a local village that taught the people about HIV.

The stage was the shade cast by an ancient tree. It was theater in the round because the audience crowded around on all sides and had to be parted when characters entered and exited. The smallest children sat in the front while their older brothers and sisters and parents stood behind them to guarantee everyone a view.

I do not know if there was an official title, but it could have been called “An HIV Carol.” On the eve of his wedding to Shakira, Kenny is visited by three spirits. The first, the Ghost of HIV Past, reveals that Kenny’s mother passed HIV on to her son in the womb. The second, the Ghost of HIV Present, did something I did not quite catch because it was all in Chichewa. The third, the Ghost of HIV Future, reveals the future where Kenny does not deviate from his current path, and Shakira dies young. So inspired, Kenny amends his ways to seek treatment and protect his new wife from the infection.

In the second play two men, one with a stutter and the other with a bum leg, suspect each other of having HIV until they learn that such disabilities do not imply HIV and, furthermore, that even if it did, it cannot be transferred by sharing a meal.

It was a success, in some respects. The people seemed to enjoy it well enough. They laughed when Shakira’s body was brought out and when the one with a bum leg stole the other man’s bread when his eyes were closed during the prayer. They didn’t drift away after the plays began. Sixty men and women were tested for HIV and received counseling on their results. Perhaps, too, it aided in making the discussion about HIV public.

In other respects, it was less successful. Between plays there was a quiz on HIV with soap and condoms as prizes for correct answers. Maybe one in five got their answer right. When the plays were done and we returned to the truck, kids no older than ten had their hands stretched out and asked for condoms, leading one to wonder if they really knew what they were for. Follow-up visits to offer further testing and assure that those who tested positive had visited the hospital are rare because the funding is not there.

It’s a young program, only three years old. I hope that it gets the continuing support it needs from the community and donors to maintain it and continue helping people.

A first novel: Thoughts on an artistic statement

I completed the first draft of my novel on May 9. I wrote a post to celebrate the occasion and make plans for the break from it before returning for revisions. I was going to prepare a couple of submissions to the second volume of Machine of Death. I was going to finish two short stories that were very nearly there. I was going to gain a fuller conception and understandings of the novel’s characters and what it was about.

I was less than successful in attaining these. I wasn’t lazy. I was busy, which is okay. Preparations had to be made for the summer. Things needed to be stored and things needed to be packed for our return to Africa. There were three days of driving. There was a week back in Minnesota visiting family and friends and canoeing and shooting and fishing and all that. There were two days on airplanes and in airports. There was a week in Kenya to visit the kids.

Now that we have mostly settled into life in Malawi and are prepared for the next two months here, I have finally found the time to work on these earlier goals. I haven’t returned to my earlier stories yet, but the Machine of Death stories are going well. The trouble is with my goals relating to my novel. I am starting to wonder if they aren’t too ambitious, if I might not need to start at something more fundamental, specifically an artist’s statement.

I never considered one before. They sounded pretentious. They sounded limiting, setting down what you think is worthwhile and what is not, but then I read some essays by Flannery O’Connor and Ngugi wa Thiong’o. I began to understand artistic statements better. They exist whether we elucidate them or not, even if they are as simple as entertaining through stories of men and women who are irresistibly drawn to one another despite conflicting personalities or of strong men who fight other strong men. They may be limiting, but they also give focus within that range. They do not have to be static either. They can change.

I have no idea what my artistic statement will be. I have snatches of what it might be, but I do not see the whole. I will give it some thought. I will experiment with some and see what I write from it.

A week in Kenya: Kibera

Walks the streets of Nairobi around the Hilton or past the City Market and men will come up alongside you and ask if you are interested in a safari to Maasai Mara. These shills for tour operators will stop short of cutting you off, but they will push brochures in front of you and not stop talking. If you make the mistake of stopping to talk to them, they will go on to suggest Lake Nakuru and Tsavo, all in the hopes of attracting you to their offices to make payment on a booking. They never mention the slum tours, but those are options, too. For the right price you can walk through Kibera or Mathare or any of Nairobi’s many other slums with a guide and see where the inhabitants eat and drink, work and play, wash and sleep.

I admit to a longstanding curiosity to see Nairobi’s slums. I want to know how they compare to the rural poverty of Pokot. I want to see how they differ from those in Jakarta built on and around the city landfills. I never would have paid for a tour. Neither would I have gone by myself, but an opportunity presented itself last week when our Tanzanian friend wanted to visit a woman who had helped her once when she was in need. Demetra and I quickly asked to accompany her.

The friend’s name was Mary. She was Maasai. She did not wear a shuka ¬or the elaborately beaded fan necklace. She wore a blue and black dress and had her hair done at a salon. She left her tribal lands and its cow dung cooking fires to gain a college degree. She worked for a while at a pharmacy but wanted her own. She moved to Kibera and opened it. Her husband was Caleb. He had just returned that day from Kisumu where he was visiting family. He sold groceries in Kibera.

Their home was the size of a dorm room. Half of it was occupied by their bed. The other half held a new blue couch, one table with a Chinese TV and DVD player atop it, and a second table with their dishes. The walls and ceiling were pieces of corrugated steel and decorated with a variety of bank calendars. There was a single bare light bulb, but they turned it off early because it only added to the room’s stifling heat. There were maybe four other rooms like this in their row, all sharing walls, so that you could hear the telenovella played in the room next door and the baby crying at the very end of the row. There was no door, only a hanging sheet. Neighborhood children poked their heads in and another friend passed through and joined us for lunch. It was like eating with my German relatives. It was impossible to leave an empty plate without being offered another scoop of rice and beans or a banana.

I do not know for what the people who pay for these urban safaris are looking. It may be some sort of karmic balancing to acknowledge Kenya’s squalor after spending thousands on flights and days spent in luxury watching exotic fauna. It may be a personal reminder that their lives could be that much worse and that their complaints about delayed flights and lines at the DMV are ultimately very shallow. It may just be an opportunity to see something different and to have atypical stories and pictures to share with family and friends back home. It probably is some blend of the three and cagey tour guides no doubt emphasize one aspect or another depending on what their customers expect and want.

I found a vibrant community. It was with some pride that Mary told us Kibera was the second-largest slum in Africa after Soweto in South Africa. She and Caleb liked living there. I do not doubt that Mary and Caleb would prefer to have indoor plumbing and consistent electricity and more than a single room, especially once they have children, but they still chose it over their homelands. The slum offered them opportunities to economically advance their lives. There were restaurants and bars. There were pharmacies and markets. There were clothes and toys. There was a coffin maker. There were schools.

Humanity can adapt to an awful lot. That not every person in prison commits suicide and that communities continue to exist in Pokot is proof enough of that, but the slums are far from the worst there can be. I know there is no privacy and I am sure the crime rate is incredible and that there are other psychic troubles that I have not imagined, but materially, someone camping in a tent is probably more deprived than a slum resident.

I do wish that one day there are no slums because every person and family has the same opportunity for the material things and utilities that we take for granted in the developed world and that they do not have to content themselves with what Mary and Caleb enjoy now, but until that day comes, Kibera will do.

A week in Kenya: Nairobi Safari Walk

The man who collected the entry fees made an effort to convince us that the Nairobi Safari Walk was a superior option to Nairobi National Park. His argument hinged on the fact that animal sightings were guaranteed on the Safari Walk; they were not in the park proper. This was not entirely true. Though a glorified zoo, the animals, except for the Colobus monkeys in their cage, could still escape to their pens or into the ditches running along the fences and be out of sight of those on the platforms and walking paths.

Not that we needed convincing. We were going on the Safari Walk. Its entry fee was twenty dollars American. Entry to Nairobi National was forty dollars American and required a vehicle, doubling the total cost at minimum. The Safari Walk only became a better deal when the man took Demetra’s alien card and did not notice that it had expired near a year ago or that it did not, in fact, permit her the greatly reduced resident rates.

That would make the Nairobi Safari Walk the second zoo we visited in Kenya after Haller Park and Bamburi Forest Trails outside of Mombasa. We walked the path twice. We saw the ostrich and its whip neck. We saw the leopard bat at its tail in surprise. We saw the crocodiles be still. We read the educational signs and learned facts about the hyenas. We waited for the lion and elephant but never saw them. It was cool. It would have been cooler if my camera had not run out battery just before we saw the cheetah playing with the old thatching thrown down by workers replacing a roof or the Colobus monkeys chasing each other through their cage or the duiker slinking through the underbrush, but I’ll take it.

It seems like a cheat. Kenya is the nation of long safaris through Maasai Mara and tours around Lake Nakuru. To visit and be content with the zoos, attractions not unknown in the United States, seems like less than a full embrace of all the nation has to offer.

It is, but allow me to raise some points. Kenya’s parks are not American parks. There are no hiking and biking trails. There are only roads. Outside of Hell’s Gate, entry to all of Kenya’s national parks is only possible through a motorized vehicle. It makes sense. There are a great number of animals that can kill you pretty easily, and a car provides protection, but it means you go at your own pace. Even if you do want to dawdle over a patch of flora or wait from a particular vantage point, someone will always be waiting for you, even if you are paying him to drive.

The zoos you take on foot and at your own pace. You can stop and backtrack and go around again. They are quiet, and the air is cool. You can sit. That is a glorious break from the madness of the cities and their dearth of public spaces and people who are not trying to sell you something.

Neither do the zoos feel terribly much more exploitive than the parks. Around Lake Nakuru our driver cut off a rhinoceros already walking away from another car. Yes, it allowed better pictures, but the man ran the car right up next to it. The animals are safe from that in the zoos, and the zoos aren’t even entirely artificial environments. They’re merely penned sections of their natural habitat.

Yes, someday I would very much like to go through Aberdares and spend a few days in Tsavo and Maasai Mara, but until my finances allow that, I will be happy with Kenya’s zoos.