The Beach, The Sea, Machetes and Poetry

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Hi.
I've been living on the beach for a month. For all of April I rented a room at this excellent little hotel-camping place, Big Milly's Backyard (www.bigmilly.com), in the village of Kokrobite just outside Accra, Ghana. I was there primarily to write, which I did, a play, but also to read, and to swim daily in the ocean, and to lie on the beach and listen to the primevally perfect sound of the surf, and to eat well, and to have a place to put my shirts on hangers and my books on a shelf. Sanity. I also went there to meet other travellers, which I did, and a colourful array. I would give a rundown of the handful of real and maybe lasting friends I made there, a "there was so-and-so and so-and-so", but that would be reducing good people to a quip, and that's no fun. So I'll say only that then there was companionship, where once there was none. Three cheers.

I want to write a bizarro update. Some ideas, one disturbing and therefore exciting anecdote, and a few poems, because that's what I was doing for the past month - writing - and an update, like a court appearance, would be incomplete without evidence. First, ideas. (If you make it through this wanky stuff there's a wild story involving machete violence! Keep going! On!) But yes, ideas: new ideas; let us say untrivial trivia. First the semi-trivial: showers. Long showers. This past month I was able to take long showers again. Granted, they were from a bucket, but I can't express how much I enjoyed having the time and leisure to do this. I so dislike being rushed in the shower. If bathing is sacred, which it is, then rushing someone who is becoming clean, like rushing someone eating or making love, must be a sin, small though maybe mortal.

Another idea, an idea that germinated in the shower (see?): change. Everybody's telling me that travelling changes you, that you leave and then return a different person, like Peter Parker with a passport. I think that on the bullshit scale this is low and harmless, perhaps, but registers. What I suspect people mistake for "change" when young people travel is the natural graduation from the condition of near-complete self-involvement that is adolescence and the inheritance of all the ancient, stubborn problems of the race. Which is to say greed, and deception for gain, and the desire for legacy, and the necessity of engaging in satisfying work. And the difficulty of acknowledging how radically, almost untenably different people really are in a culture, our culture, that insists that everyone is fundamentally, in their hearts of hearts, the same. But I'd like to think this graduation happens at some point anyway, for most, sooner or later, no matter where in the world you are or how you've gotten there.

Finally, my thinking about thinking has changed. For a while I wasn't a big fan of ideas for ideas' sake, considering how human knowledge has expanded and been specified considerably in 5000 years yet we still rape, kill, and maim each other for bread or god. I used to think ideas spurred men to action but were themselves idle. Now I think they are our most stable currency, our most liquid and our most important. My most satisfying moments here have been in encountering people, locals, with ideas, with opinions, with energy to effect change whether macro or micro. My darkest, most bitterly depressed moments have been those when I've felt I could walk around talking to strangers for a week and not hear an individual thought, only desperation and the horrible desperation that smiles at you and the desperate desire to escape. Anything to avoid thinking, reflection, all hopes idle, talk and talk and talk with not even the impulse towards action. It's not an issue exclusively indigenous to West Africa, of course, but it's certainly hit me pretty hard here.

So let me talk a tiny bit about life at Kokrobite, the coastal village where I was staying. For the most part it was peaceful, tranquil, a fishing population with a sizable Rastafarian (or pseudo-Rastafarian, the style and the smoke without the religion) community along the beach. There were a number of other long-termers staying both at the Big Milly's hotel site and also in private accomodation along the beach, economic refugees and spiritual refugees and people who like the Fugees. I could eat delicious banana crepes for breakfast for about a dollar at the hotel, then wander out to the little rasta cafe on the beach and sip coffee watching the sea for an hour, chatting in a weird amalgam of English and French with the francophone Rastafari who would gather at this unofficial salon, headed by Father Ben ("Fada Ben"), an older rasta fellow who is also an internationally accomplished musician. The story about machetes? The peace of Kokrobite was disturbed about midway through my stay there in a fashion that is positively "don't tell your mother". (Hi Mom.) Late one Saturday night, a few soldiers came into the village for one reason or another - accounts vary. These soldiers were confronted by, if you'll excuse me, some tough young local shitheads with small penises. I describe them thus because I can find no other explanation for why said shitheads would proceed to accuse the uniformed soldiers of being armed robbers, hack one to death with machetes, and chop off another's hand. All this on the main drag where I walked daily. Can you think of some other explanation aside from the small penis one? I would try but I already have enough shame at the thought of being human among humans, thanks. So they butchered these soldiers and then of course other soldiers came back and raided the village in the middle of the night and beat everyone to a collective pulp, women and children not exempted, before arresting half the male population. It became a ghost town and had still not entirely shed that state when I left more than two weeks later. It is a striking sight, flocks of young men running silently down a deserted beach to flee an unseen pursuer. As for me, I finished my omelette and walked back into the Big Milly's property. No trouble. Just an increased awareness of the rabid energy here, the rabid, forceful energy that leads to dancing in the streets but also to senseless slaughter. I think I may need to live somewhere where it gets cold, where snow and cold force people to sit by fires and talk and think. People kill each other in those places too but at least I understand the pace of life.

In the meantime I have my play. I'm pretty happy with how it's going. It's not about Africa, but it is about the darkness in the human soul, the permanent moral eclipse, which means it's as much about Africa as anywhere else. I wanted to write something horribly bleak and awful but then the little gremlins of hope and levity snuck their way in, as they do, the twerps. Writing here is a good escape if an imperfect one: the frustration and loneliness of God (aside from His eternal introspection on the subject of Do I Exist?) must be the impossibility of entering the world, having suffered the burden of creating it. Not that I'm making comparisons or anything.

But all this "here" is pretence. I'm writing this from London. On Sunday I'm flying to Israel. Three months and a bit after that, with any luck, I'm rendezvousing with someone special and dreadlocked in Budapest. That's the scoop. And now, three poems from the coast, some with informative captions. Please try to ignore the way the photos break up the poems' formatting. I hate it but apparently there's nothing I can do about it. Alas.

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It is not holy if you tell it
to a stranger
on the beach.

It cannot be holy
if it is a story
whose telling
has become habitual,
I met her in the shade,
she wore green and inclined
her head a bit, we'd gone
to the same school
but never met.

It is coarse, it is crude,
it is profane, it is
debasing and it does no favours
to the millions who wait
knowing or unknowing
for what is holy,
for what is secret,
for what can be told only
in fragments, reluctantly,
to old drunks and grandmothers
on buses,
barely listening.





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This one's sillier. And also not about Africa, particularly. Just wait for that one. Just you wait.

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Lone Diners

Men dining by themselves
hold conversations silently
from opposite sides of restaurants
bubbling with family chatter
and pre-coital silence between bites.

Look.
All of them
know something
we don't.
All of them need not fear
the abyss
that opens when pasta
is unfinished
without clean-up crew, nor
the waiter's approach to clear all
in a moment of innocent
dinerly repose. They fear nothing.
But though we are solitary, we wear solitude
better than most; we wear solitude
like magnetic pants well fitted.
We eat and know our plates.
We sleep and know our beds.
We live as we were born, as man
was born, in the cradle
of civilization.

Men dining by themselves
are boldest
and most naked
checking their reflections in spoons
at the moment
they are most certain
everyone's looking.





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And this is my African epic. Semi-epic. I wrote it late one night at the beach bar with only a Guinness and the sound of the waves for company. Probably some mosquitos too.

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Tell me by what logic it is
we should find ourselves here,
tell me why the fishermen
with their scars and blue rags,
their wind-blown bandannas, laugh
on the beach in our sight, their wives
laughing though dropping no mango
from head-top, pulling children
from froth and undertow
in our sight, tell me why
we should bear witness,
such a lonely, distant
condition, such a limited looking.

O give me the roads clogged
with fumes and metal, give me
urgency, give me riots in the streets
(on the radio hours later please) or give me
brawls outside bus stops
where suspender-strapped businessmen
gather round in circles
as with boars and jungle justice
before heading to the office,
to the storefront stall; give me all
but not the lie that is inclusion,
not the lie that I belong here,
that understanding is possible and synonymous
with decency, do not tell me
I am welcome,
because Ishmael was made to serve
from birth
and I can offer neither
apology nor explanation.

Rather walk down this sand with me,
let me show you where I waited
for tropical rain
to bring lightning
that would cut the water
into dimensions so forceful,
so raggedly insistent
they might be human: below this palm
the storm touched not a hair rising
as with grave respect
from my skin, the storm
was a vision, incorporeal
from shelter; and these rocks
strewn where the surf dies
know more about history and grace
through assault
than the wisest among us,
we who wander through the dark
with a match
but no striking surface.

Walk with me to the rocks,
if you call me your brother
I will call you by your name,
we will leave footprints
that will vanish in an hour,
as smoke billows in the hills,
as the great hope of the race
throbs and breathes
in sandcastles we build
wordlessly, this elegant inpermanence
that is our stuff and is our worth,
in sight of ragged men
chewing off each other's hands
to gain some practical advantage
for the pulling-in of the day's catch.

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That's all for now. Next bulletin from the holy land, where I will be backpacking for about a month and then doing a study program in Jerusalem until the end of July. Love from here. Be well.

Daniel

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Photos

A Rasta Friend on an Average Afternoon
Tell me if this is too stereotypical. Do remember though that stereotypical is just six letters away from typical.

Noon
This photo was taken in colour. The contrast is all natural.

A Hair Experiment (But Oh, What a Fine Two Days They Were)
There are three characters in this photo: me, Ley, and a lot of plastic hair. In the case I am prosecuting against the world, Ley is the most compelling argument for the defense.

Me, Justin, Ngoni
Justin is an American fellow living in Montreal who was probably my best bud in Kokrobite. He was renting a room in a private compound along the beach for about three months. He is holding a ngoni, a very good thing. I bought one and am travelling with it now.

Where I Am Now
Strange, considering.

Comments

[dan]

3 cheers and such
hey daniel, been reading your emails (blogs... you kids with your techmology and bruce springsteen music) for a while now. you get much more personal than i would dare, and i respect and enjoy that. sounds like youre living a good and worthwhile life over there. looking forward to chatting when you get back. im back from thailand and japan in the last week of may. ill be keeping thornhills electric suburbs warm for you. cheers, dan

[Judy]

the machetes
Hello. It's funny how we always try to find an excuse to separate us from machetes massacres in Africa and the numerous genocides. You’re right, we kill too, but is it really the pace of life here that comforts us into to believing that perhaps life is way better here, or even that we are better? I often feel that we fool ourselves into thinking this way and that we make up for it, for example, by murders that are more discreet and completely unexpected. Of course, we don’t need three guards watching our house, as a friend from Zimbabwe recalled to me... The fear is definitely minimized. But the fact is that we still have fear. I just keep wondering if we all are making an excuse to justify our society as being a less violent, structured and more 'grounded' one than the other. In some ways, I guess they are just Different.

[Judy]

Oh, and fabulous hair ;)

[Daniel]

Writing with Guiness
Halibut, I thought your last entry was just a wonderful piece of writing. I feel like a voyeur (what's the equivalent for someone who takes pleasure in watching someone write beautifully? an ecriveur?) What a privilege to read the thoughts and observations of a very interesting, sensitive, somewhat intelligent (kidding) young man from Toronot. If I drank Guniess when I wrote, would it help? I think the answer is yes because even if what I wrote was no good, methinks I might not care so much feeling that froth hit my lips :) Be safe, be well, be happy, be careful, be dreadlocked and above all continue to just be.

[Daniel Karasik]

Machete Violence
Hi guys; thanks for writing stuff. It's Daniel (K; the other Daniel was a different Daniel; perhaps this is obvious). This note is in response to Judy's. Judy: my possibly controversial opinion? Life IS way better here (i.e. Canada, for example), and we ARE "better". Better: generally more educated, more tolerant, more organized, in a classical sense more moral. However. We are not responsible for being "better", we can take no credit for it, and I don't feel it would be a stretch to say we are obligated to justify it, by not worshiping it and by living morally - maybe. We are better because our upbringing was better, we are better because we come from a humanist tradition that values human life and the rights of the individual above all else, we are better because we are not hungry, we are lucky, though we are not entitled: we are not better inherently but by opportunity and by chance. I'm not saying that the human spirit is necessarily different in Canada or wherever, but the conditions are, and so our society IS without a doubt less violent, more structured, and more grounded. Sure, we have domestic violence and gang violence and whatever, but that exists where I was too; in fact certain types of domestic violence, including but not limited to beating your wife, are enthusiastically encouraged. A friend who's travelled before in Ghana told me early on that I "couldn't have" certain emotional reactions to casual violence I saw when I was volunteering, that I was "in a different place, that's okay here", but I can't function that way. I just can't do it. It's unnatural. No, you don't want to write off a country or its people, but you do make value judgements. You get angry. I certainly do. And I'm not so liberal-minded at this point as to be able to write off casual and public brutality, machetes or canes or fists, as only "different".

[Gerry]

Heart of Darkness
wow! your trip makes me want to go to Africa, but the west of ireland will have to do. Hey, it's pretty wild there. Man! And it's got a dark heart too. Hopefully you'll visit the jungle of westmount when you return . I wish I'd noticed before that one could respond to your blog. Good luck . Gerry