how so?
why do i do what i do? and how did I find myself here?
sometimes i wonder.
let's unpack it a little, shall we?
first, i guess, is my fascination with cultures, all cultures, and the fractures within them.
i love to pick inside and look around, picking up facts and ideas and understandings,
getting glimpses into the fractured state of peoples when only unilithic images facing outward were shown to me before.
fractured is a good word. not broken, not divided, but fractured. clinging on, capable of knitting together, but fundamentally yet faintly divided....
i love too adventure and glamour, but there's nothing adventurous about trudging down a dusty road with bodas whizzing by you on your way to 8 to 6 job. Glamorous neither as you travel to "darkest Africa" and arrive in Kuajok sweaty and sticky with several teeth loose from the series of dead policemen(t) buried higgledy piggledy throughout the km-long clay roads.
romance, not so much, although sex is on hand everywhere, and a kind of frenzied mating ritual of the humanitarian, ex-pat community entrances you and makes your eyes glaze over. Romance, maybe, if you mean it with a big old-fashioned R. Open skies, feeling like you are going where no one's every gone before, except for the preceding millions of people who lived, died, and still live there.
Tamam, it's tied more to the stories. It's Romance and Adventure like Hope's Zenda and Mason's Feathers. What you've read of, from the deserts of the Sudan to the shining cities of Uzbekistan. When I stood at the edge of the Caspian Sea, my heart caught. And last week, I caught a miniature glimpse of the Nile, and magic sang in my ears.
So, it's the stories, in the end. The why I do this, the how of it all. I am a glutton of tales, a lusty lover of legend. I am collecting them, to tell my friends and make them laugh at the silly things this kwayajja did, like vomiting in front of a police checkpoint, or the nasara did, who thought he was invincible in his flip flops in the middle of the night. Other stories, too, not just of the expansive smile of my Sarh friend, or the tomboyish headscarved Muslim girl of N'Djamena. The ones who surprise me because what I have learned outside these places is never enough, never enough to open my mind wide enough to be able to encompass embrace all the wide variety of wonderful things, and yes, horrible too, that this world imagines for me.
sometimes i wonder.
let's unpack it a little, shall we?
first, i guess, is my fascination with cultures, all cultures, and the fractures within them.
i love to pick inside and look around, picking up facts and ideas and understandings,
getting glimpses into the fractured state of peoples when only unilithic images facing outward were shown to me before.
fractured is a good word. not broken, not divided, but fractured. clinging on, capable of knitting together, but fundamentally yet faintly divided....
i love too adventure and glamour, but there's nothing adventurous about trudging down a dusty road with bodas whizzing by you on your way to 8 to 6 job. Glamorous neither as you travel to "darkest Africa" and arrive in Kuajok sweaty and sticky with several teeth loose from the series of dead policemen(t) buried higgledy piggledy throughout the km-long clay roads.
romance, not so much, although sex is on hand everywhere, and a kind of frenzied mating ritual of the humanitarian, ex-pat community entrances you and makes your eyes glaze over. Romance, maybe, if you mean it with a big old-fashioned R. Open skies, feeling like you are going where no one's every gone before, except for the preceding millions of people who lived, died, and still live there.
Tamam, it's tied more to the stories. It's Romance and Adventure like Hope's Zenda and Mason's Feathers. What you've read of, from the deserts of the Sudan to the shining cities of Uzbekistan. When I stood at the edge of the Caspian Sea, my heart caught. And last week, I caught a miniature glimpse of the Nile, and magic sang in my ears.
So, it's the stories, in the end. The why I do this, the how of it all. I am a glutton of tales, a lusty lover of legend. I am collecting them, to tell my friends and make them laugh at the silly things this kwayajja did, like vomiting in front of a police checkpoint, or the nasara did, who thought he was invincible in his flip flops in the middle of the night. Other stories, too, not just of the expansive smile of my Sarh friend, or the tomboyish headscarved Muslim girl of N'Djamena. The ones who surprise me because what I have learned outside these places is never enough, never enough to open my mind wide enough to be able to encompass embrace all the wide variety of wonderful things, and yes, horrible too, that this world imagines for me.