Equivocality

It’s after midnight, Ethiopia time, and I’m almost finished reading the entries. I have to finish tonight because I’m headed to Paris tomorrow for a conference. I won’t have time to select a winner there.

At least there’s a hot shower here, at my American friend’s apartment in Addis-Ababa. That’s more than I had in Gambella, where the UN said I could visit the refugee camp, but the Ethiopian government refused. So much for that story.

My failed trip generated other stories, of course. I got writing out of it – or at least notes. There’s a piece taking shape on the dilapidated hotel where I stayed, my most personal symbol of the strange rotted feeling of the entire town, the slow collapse of civilization back into the jungle while no one does a damn thing about the failing water supply or the increasingly frequent blackouts. There are pages of furtively scribbled quotes from Nader, a big hairy Lebanese man overseeing the construction of the highway. Sure he was racist and materialistic, constantly bad-mouthing his servants for their “slave mentality” and asking me about nice beaches and hotels I’d seen in my travels, but he was also a painfully lonely man with a bizarre and sad history, losing everything at the hands of armed revolutions and constantly forced to change countries, and we developed a strange friendship based on mutual isolation and my need for his fax machine. Most interesting perhaps was the young British woman who is in Gambella mediating peace talks between the local tribes who have had a history of shooting each other. She’s been in the region for seven years and has come down with malaria 21 times. Every other white person in town thinks she’s insane. Maybe she is, but most people only talk about world peace, while she knows more about the day-to-day realities of it than anyone I’ve ever met. She was kind enough to give me a long interview.

It pleases me, as I sit at the kitchen table with my battered laptop late into my last night in Africa, that my life reads like so many of the stories that have been submitted to me. This seems only fitting, given that I have anointed myself a judge of the adventures of others, both real and imagined.

You people are fucking nuts, you know that? Creative, and insane. Insanely creative. Writers. Your stories are about everything. There is a story about following a stranger through the New York subway, there is a story about a stripper avenging the death of her friend, there is a bizarre fairly tale about a manic turtle catcher. There’s a man discovering Rock N’ Roll in 1952 whose head explodes, and a high-school in Heaven where Jesus teaches surfing (“Jesus is totally metal! Who knew?”) Then there is the non-fiction: a cleaning lady in Guyana who refuses to scrub stovetops, a man who travels through Guatemala as a clown, and, sadly, a young woman raped in Turkey to the indifference of the police.

The submitters also come from surprisingly many different backgrounds. There were journalists and professors and retired professionals. University students I expected, but there were also many entries from high-school students. One entry was penned by an 11-year old girl, who asked me to send her mother along with her if she won. We also have many foreign entries this year, even though the contest was promoted only in Canada and the United States. Sometimes the foreign authors suffer for having learned English as a second language, but their viewpoints are frequently fascinating. My favorite was the 18-year old Japanese girl who writes of the “Elegant Gothic Lolita” subculture in Tokyo. These girls wear Victorian dresses and throw tea parties with their stuffed animals. “Being a Lolita has changed my life,” she writes, “and I would like for everyone to see how beautiful this world truly can be, and look great doing it!

It’s good to write. That’s why I’m sitting on the kitchen floor at 1:00 AM with a cup of the tasty Ethiopian tea that I probably won’t be able to find in Europe.

What surprised me is how many people want to change the world somehow.

The ones with ideologies always give me a perverse sort of amusement. Maybe that’s cruel, but staying in all day reading submissions gets boring, and the ravings of the utterly convinced are good comic relief. This year no one wrote me an impassioned essay about how Allah had willed her to win the scholarship, thank God, but there was a 13 page treatise which begins by declaring that that how humans don’t really know anything about the universe – which I suppose can agree with – and ends with a plea to send her to the “the oldest spiritualism institute in the world that teaches mediums” so as to prepare her for her visits to Delphi and the Temple of Apollo. I also know that the author who tells me of his “anti-imperialist” struggles in various nations really does mean well, perhaps has even done well, but I find his lens a bit narrow for my reality. Then there was a woman who gave me a history of Auyerveda, “the science of life,” in her bio. All of life in one science? Fortunately, her actual story was quite good.

I am worn out of belief, you see. Leaving Africa, the most complex and exhausting place I have ever been, I am wary of zealotry. This is a continent wracked by ideologies past and present. The people have suffered colonialism, communism, racism, and inspired dictators of every kind, religious and not. I’m not sure the situation is any better now, even if we assume the best intentions of those who are trying to help. Quick: tell me what the problem is in Africa. Why are these people poor, at war, sick, ignorant, oppressed? I have seen enough now to be deeply suspicious of the short answers.

My submitters see so many different ways to save the world. Some are aware of the limitations of tunnel vision, as in the woman who writes “my students have told me repeatedly how belly dance has changed their lives … sounds cheesy, but it’s true.” Others are just off pursuing their little bit of the problem, describing themselves as an “activist.” Or “single mother,” “recovered from a long illness,” or “slowly losing my sight.” So many people have their own personal battles. “Debt.” “Family.” “No time for travel.” “Money isn’t exactly abundant for fresh college grads.” Well – perhaps organizing a scholarship is my tiny piece of the solution.

“I feel that if I do not get out of town soon, my artistic strengths will shrivel away and I will no longer be able to write anything substantial.”

That last one is bullshit, of course. There’s always something to write about. Christ, my “to write” list is completely overflowing these days. I despair. That’s why I’m up at 2:00 AM in a borrowed apartment in a foreign city, eating from a jar of Nutella with a spoon and trying to get some words down, just trying to feel that rhythm for a little while tonight.

The preferred destinations of the entrants were also intriguing. Revealing in their consistency, you might say. The top choices, in order of popularity, were something like:

1. Ireland
2. France
3. Kenya
4. Peru
5. Thailand

I’m not judging. I did say anywhere. The Writer’s Travel Scholarship, despite the name, is also not a research grant: thinking you might have a great time is, for writing purposes, a perfectly good reason to visit somewhere. (Just make sure it’s a really great time, okay, or it will never stand up to Hemmingway’s Spain.) But I’d like to point out that certain countries are rather better known than others. Most of the 200+ countries of the world just don’t get that many press mentions.

Which is another phenomenon that has come into sharper focus for me in Africa: if no one tells the story, it doesn’t exist. This is obvious, really, since the vast majority of information learned in a lifetime must necessarily be second-hand. But some stories are much harder than others to tell. Millions of people starving. Personally, both “million” and “starving” are words completely outside of my daily existence. No wonder I have difficulty comprehending it. I can’t write it either. I can’t find a way in yet – but of course, it’s my job to find that way, and I’m working on it.

Because there’s something glorious about writing, especially when it works. Hell, this isn’t even about making a difference. This is about art, the dirty word that supposedly separates literature from journalism. This is about beauty and ideals and all of the crap we all believe in but are too scared to write about. With good reason: that stuff cuts to the core somehow, and it’s difficult to reduce to words. I did have one rainbows-and-sunshine entry which explained very cheerfully that the secret to happiness was nothing more than how one sees the world. Well, yes. “Nothing’s good or bad but thinking makes it so,” as Hamlet pointed out. But frankly, hers was lousy writing. It was telling, not showing. What I live for are the pieces that make me grin or weep without ever telling me what to feel. I mean, fuck – what’s the point of all this, anyway? Why bother addressing the problems of the world if we’re still all going to be empty and miserable?

Which is why I value fiction, strange, useless, and irreverent fiction, just as much as necessary words about the painfully real. To mangle a brilliant quote from a brilliant man who was originally talking about physics: writing is like sex. Sure it has some practical uses, but that’s not why we do it.

That’s why I’m awake at 3:30 AM, sitting on a cracked linoleum floor surrounded by dirty teacups and an empty jar of Nutella, scribbling notes about other people’s writing and trying not to wake the sensible people sleeping in the next room. They’re not writers.

Thank you for your submissions. Thank you for amusing and educating me. Thank you for teaching me so many things about writing. So often I shake my head and say, “damn, this person is good. I couldn’t write like that.” More often I shake my head and wonder, “do I really have to finish reading this?” But that’s valuable too, because it teaches me what doesn’t work. (Hint: if you write twenty pages about your family, make sure it’s really about my family too.)

What I mean to say is: thank you for writing. I do not know of a higher calling than communication. Ironically, I don’t think I can do a good job of explaining why I believe that. Perhaps there is a poet among us who can help with this problem.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 12th, 2007 at 11:27 pm and is filed under Blog-like. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.