Passing

My sisters and I grew up in the corner house on a cul-de-sac at the base of a mountain in a white flight suburb of Los Angeles.  Our house was a faded gold color and there was a brick patio and an olive tree in the front yard.  The numbers on the black mailbox were crooked and dichondra grew on a crescent-shaped lawn.  When I was about seven, my parents had a swimming pool built in our backyard; it was rectangular with blue tile; it kept us tanned every summer for years, and our pet duck was often found floating around above a pile of blurry poop down there at the bottom.

On the bottom floor of our house was a formal living room where my friends and I couldn't run, a den where we watched 'The Brady Bunch' and 'The Six Million Dollar Man,' the kitchen and dining area that I remember were somewhat green, a bathroom where my father listened to talk radio in the morning, a closet where he dropped a water bottle on his foot, and my parents' bedroom which at some time held a black and white patterned pull-out couch where my grandmother slept when she visited us from over the hill.  Upstairs were our rooms: my oldest sister had the biggest room overlooking the pool, my middle sister had the smallest room in the front of the house, and I had the unremarkable room that became remarkable in 1984, when my father consented to painting it purple. 

My father played the piano, but I don't remember this.  My mother was the musical one.  Downstairs in that living room where we couldn't run, there was a stereo that my mother used as often as the sewing machine, and even more as she tired of stitching dresses for three long-haired girls.  My mother played the Beatles, Seals & Crofts, Stevie Wonder, the 'Hair' soundtrack, Barry White, Earth Wind & Fire, War, Carol King, Simon & Garfunkel, Joni Mitchell, and several albums of classical music whose titles I cannot recall.  My mother sang along to everything, and we three girls sang along with her.  I can remember being a child and singing 'Here Comes the Sun' and 'As' from memory.  Music played out to the sidewalk, where my mother pushed me in a stroller and people slowed down to stare at the white-skinned woman and her brown-skinned baby.  I can remember coming home from school and hearing the music before I'd turned the corner.

Yesterday, driving from the Valley to the City, turning the corner toward the freeway, my sister played Michael Jackson's music.  'Man, I cannot believe he's gone!' she said.  Adding, as if she knew him, 'Michael is gone.'

Hearing his music, I thought immediately and viscerally about my childhood home, the gold house on the corner.  The staircase.  The double doors.  The dog.  The sliding glass door I ran into (while closed) the night my parents came home from Tahiti.  The push lawnmower and my father in a white v-neck t-shirt.  The radishes growing in the backyard planter.  And the strawberries, and the peas that grew like a vine up the back fence.  And the juniper bushes that gave me a rash.  And my sisters in bell-bottom pants, singing and dancing to that music, snapping and clapping and sliding around in their socks on the marble floor, and me, the youngest, sitting at their feet, looking up at them, happy.

A Child

In my junior year in undergrad, before I'd ever been to Mississippi, I took a Civil War and Reconstruction class.  We were assigned three texts; two were typical history books (over four hundred pages each) and the third was 'The Unvanquished' by William Faulkner.  It was the first Faulkner I'd ever read.  I'd had no understanding of him and I'd had no understanding of Mississippi.  

Four years later, during a summer spent in Spanish Harlem, up on 116th Street between First and Second, without a phone or email or air conditioning, I re-read 'The Unvanquished.'  Then I read as much Faulkner as I could.  'Intruder in the Dust.'  'Absalom, Absalom!'  'Light in August.'  'As I Lay Dying.'  And 'The Sound and the Fury,' which I read twice.  

By that point, I'd been to Mississippi, from Natchez to Oxford, including Yazoo City and Greenwood and Tupelo.  I understood.

Now I'm reading his Collected Stories.  There is a beautiful passage in 'Shall Not Perish,' which I read last night:

"...since nobody can tell us exactly where he was when he stopped being 'is,' instead of just becoming 'was' at some single spot on the earth where the people who loved him could weight him down with a stone, Pete still 'is' everywhere about the earth, one among all the fighters forever, 'was' or 'is' either."

It made me think of our last night in Sao Paulo.  We'd gone to Bar Brahma to hear Samba.  Dona Duda Ribeiro was singing that night.  When we left the bar, five of us walked to the car, which was locked in a secure lot.  I noticed a lot of people sort of wandering through the downtown streets, some definitely looking high and others in the process of becoming that.  In the middle of the sidewalk there was a very small body with a filthy blanket draped over it.  The top of a very small head stuck out from the top of the blanket, and the face rested on the ground.  

'A child!' I said to one of the girls who traveled to Brasil with me.  She answered me, 'I was hoping I wouldn't see that.'

But we did.  And it was.   

Foreign

There is a retreat happening at Hoc Vien Quoc Te, the temple in the neighborhood my sister warned me against.  Today, dozens of monks and nuns chanted in memory of Thich Quang Duc, the Vietnamese Buddhist monk known for immolating himself during the American War and now often referred to as a bodhisattva.  

The image is very famous: a small man in an orange robe, sitting in full lotus on a city street, and the flames draping his body like a satin sheet and sweeping up into the air like curly red hair blowing in the wind.  His body remained still.  

I wore the grey suit and the grey robe that lay people wear.  The henna markings on my hands that I received on the beach at Itapua have mostly faded.  Almost all of my hair is gone.  I cannot detect in this desert empire the spinning presence of the orishas.  The daily expression, 'nao, obrigada,' which I'd nearly perfected, is now meaningless.  Brasil has left me.  

Some people at the temple looked at me from a strange and inquiring angle.  The corners of their eyes said many things: 'Who is she?'  'Why is she here?'  'Where is she from?'  'Is she a child of the War?'  I am accustomed to those looks.  I just smile and bow in return.

I am sometimes mistaken for an Amerasian because I know what to do in the temple, and it isn't every day that a non-Vietnamese like myself appears in grey and correctly chants the names of the buddhas and knows who is Thay and who is Su-Co.  

I have been asked, 'Your father is American?'  I answer, 'Yes, and my mother too.'  

At other times, I have been asked, 'You are Indian?'  Meaning India, the birthplace of our modern Buddha, not Cherokee or Choctaw (from whom I do in part spring.)  'No,' I tell them, 'I'm American.'

Once, one woman very brazenly told me, 'I think you are Mexican, right?'  'No,' I told her, 'I'm not.  I'm a Buddhist.'

There are no Vietnamese to speak of in Brasil.  There are Japanese and Chinese.  I saw them every day, walking through the streets and driving in the life-sucking traffic and speaking a Portuguese that sounded brand new to me.  I saw them eating feijoada and shopping in the Livraria Cultura.  I saw them waiting for the bus, at the end of a line thirty people long, and offering Jehovah's Witness literature at the public market in Liberdade.  I saw them walking in pairs, very old men holding onto very old women with canes and vests and feet smaller than mine.  I saw them carrying bags and briefcases.

They did not see me.

Looking

On our fourth day in Salvador da Bahia, the girls and I visited the Igreja do Bonfim, an old church that sits high on a hill on the upperside of the bay.  We all sat in the pews, scattered but close to each other.  This was a looking-place: to look, to be the object of looking, to be part of a long history of looking, to notice the act of looking.  One of us looked closely at the artistic details of the church, another read about the history of the church in her tourist guide, another watched the tourists enter and leave the church (crossing themselves, genuflecting before sitting down, taking photographs, whispering in the ear of a friend, kneeling to pray, fingering one's hair), and the fourth looked indifferent.

When we left the sanctuary and wandered into the outer rooms of the church, we stood in a space for those looking to be healed.  Plastered onto three walls are photographs of all kinds of people: people in wedding clothes, people lying in hospital beds, people in graduation gowns, and just faces in little squared photos like those taken for a passport.  From the ceiling hang plastic (or wax?) body parts.  Mostly legs and arms.  Some heads.  I looked at one of the girls for confirmation of something she was feeling that might reflect something I may have been feeling (and which I cannot yet describe).  I got it.

Leaving the room, we sat in a window sill and looked out at the view.  The patch-work, mountain-ascending, height-defying, cliffside-clinging housing of the poor surrounds the hilltop church.  They're called 'favelas' by many people and in many sources, but I'm not sure if I should call them by such a name.  (I am an outsider.)  'Favela' means 'slum,' I think, and perhaps they're not slums.  They're neighborhoods constructed out of found materials, exclusion, desperation, creativity, necessity, hope, determination, marginalization, overpopulation, poverty, poetry, and resistance.  These 'self-constructed' homes and the long, winding, climbing staircases leading up, up, up scream out to anyone looking: live!

Having climbed up the hill to get to Bonfim, we four girls descended as it began to rain.  We had one umbrella and we rotated its use: two girls (one holding the umbrella and the other wrapping her arm around the waist of the holder) enjoyed the cover while the other two got wet (and the opposite the next rainy day).  Walking rather aimlessly, and defensively looking down at the sidewalk ahead of me (don't want to step in anything gross), I noticed feathers and feathers on the walk and in the gutter.  Large, black and white, and not a few.  

'Candomble,' one girl said.  Up ahead: a crossroads, and a ditch alongside the road, filled with feathers perhaps covering a carcass of some gift to the orishas.  They eat well.

While riding on the bus back to Pelorinho, I noticed the number of churches standing high and mighty in the hills.  Their spires are beyond reaching -- they reached as they were constructed, sometime in the candlelit 1500s.  Now they simply stand, obviously old, unkempt (a word my mother loves), with dark spots (mold? fallen paint? dirt?) all over the plaster surface.  They stand in the mountains, overlooking past and present, city and ocean, native and visitor, unencumbered and homeless, saying to those passing through: look!    

Green

Flying over the United States, there is a spotted horse or a porch swing on a small frame house. There are the Plains and the Rockies, flat land and yellow grass, white or brown hills. There are snake-rivers and snaking levees and the serpentine burial mounds of the Mississippians, and highways lying horizontal and grey. There are slow processions of soft-looking logs at twilight, along railways that look like braces running through what some frontier historian called the American desert.

From the sky, Brasil is green and multidimensional. 3D in emerald from about thirty-thousand feet. Alive and appearing to be original. Thick, bushy, motherly. An avalanche of curves and ribbons of green. The cities rise richly in the distance, and the creative homes of the poor are speckled orange and brown and cream, high and low and geometric. Jovial at such a height.

I was thinking of the term 'outro lado' as we were descending into Salvador and I could see the coastline around Baia de Todos os Santos. 'The other side.' I felt not like I was up above, but on the other side. I was on the sky side of the bay.

Years ago, when caravels arrived into the bay, they saw none of this maternal green. They saw blurred plantlife that dangled over the edge of the ground into the ocean. And the bluffs that dropped onto the beaches. And the grassy sand dunes all around the underside of the bay. From the low point of the water, bobbing up and down at the thankful end of several months' sailing (from Lisbon or the Gold Coast), they may have seen the forests rising in the distance like mountains and walls of green. Not matter; just color, color breathing in the wind and echoing the crying sounds of animals. It must have been a dark green -- like the crayon says, 'forest green' -- since the dramatic clearing of the trees hadn't really begun, and so with little light passing through, it must have been frightening, that dense and opaque green space out there.

On the sky side, I look down and see history, but it takes imagination and some effort. One has to see through the highrises and beyond the immutable calculations of hectare and parallel and dollar. I can see it. I can see the harvest of fortresses and cathedrals, and the departure to the interior. I can see the foggy arrivals of immigrants chained and unchained.

Their fear is still tangible. From the water, there is just water and the very edge of land and the absence of voices, silenced by the intimacy of the moment.

Water

 If you go to the third floor of the Museu Afrobrasil, there is a dim room that is devoted to the history of the slave trade.  The nearest wall to you, on your left side, features poetry and essays written by black Brasilians about the legacy of this history.  Hanging amongst these words projected in large print along the wall are some of the metallurgical arts of the Trade: chains, hand and ankle and neck cuffs, those absurd hooks that were attached to chains at the neck, and some indeterminate tools a creative and determined mind could put to work.  If you haven't yet left the room, keep walking and you'll see on the consecutive wall two very large portraits of former slaves, one with his country marks very clearly arising from his cheekbones, like three not very long fingers branded into his face and swelling out to meet the surface.  

I hope you can tell me what is on the other two walls; I can't remember.  Because in the middle of the room is the frame of a slaver.  It takes up the entire volume of the room.  It is hollow; your mind can fill the space.  

Perhaps, like me, you'll leave the room thereafter and very quickly forget what is on the other two walls.  

And perhaps, like me, you'll pause for a long time on the second floor, amongst the dark-metaled sculptures that might ease the effect of that horrible skeleton of a ship.  There is one that you won't miss.   I am no welder, so I cannot name what material it is made from, but it is the color of coal.  And I am no engineer, so I cannot measure space without a tool in my hand, but I think it is a little bit over five feet long and perhaps about two and a half feet wide.  

It is a woman becoming water.

She is lying on her stomach, as if she'd been killed and she'd fallen into a river.  Her feet and her lower legs are water, and her body rises out at mid-thigh.  You'll see her behind prominently standing out, and maybe you'll make the same assumption that I made: she is indigenous.  (There are feathers strung to a cord around her waist.)  Only her beautifully sculpted back and part of her wavy-haired head and the left side of her blurry face aren't water.  Her arms are water and her stomach is water, and the female markers of her body are water.  

When you see the sculpture, you will see how difficult it is to determine where her body ends and where water begins.  The borders of her body are swallowed by it.

When you leave the museum, it might be raining.  Be careful not to mistake the raindrops for your tears. 

Spinning

When I was an undergraduate, my friends Amy, Megan and I (and probably others I've now forgotten) went to see a film called "Baraka."  It was the strangest movie I'd seen at that time in my life, and perhaps the most beautiful.  

Fifteen years after I saw the movie, I wrote a poem based on what I thought was its most beautiful image: light-skinned men in tall, conical hats and long gown-like coats, spinning 'round and 'round with arms out, one hand in limp surrender to the earth and the other facing up, gently lifting air.

Whirling dervishes.

It isn't certain why this image struck me so.  Something about the double spin of their dance: their bodies are gracefully spinning 'round while they are orbiting around the center of the space.  An orbit, being and not being.

In the film, there is no Sufi music in the background, so the audience misses the full effect.  It is also shown in slow motion.  But the image is still striking.  The men spinning, and another man in a darker cloak walking calmly amongst them.

Tonight, I learned that Candomble has an orbit of its own.  

First on the south side, and then on the east side of Sao Paulo, I attended two celebrations for the great spirits of Candomble, the creative and hopeful faith of seemingly powerless African slaves who were forced to labor in the sugar fields of the Catholic Portuguese.  At both celebrations, men and women of all shades, mostly dressed in white, danced 'round an offering in the middle of the room while three men (at both places) beat on drums with their hands.  Apparently in some kind of trance brought on by the great spirits of West Africa, the celebrants spun 'round on their own skillful axis while also dancing around the center.  Some of them wore masks, one danced with a large basket of bread on his head, another wore a curtain of beads dangling in front of her face, looking like a traditional wedding veil of Yemen or some such place.   

They were absolutely as graceful as the whirling dervishes.  And their music was contagious.  I found myself dancing along with them, only on the outskirts of the tribe.  

Watching as men and women were overtaken by the feeling, trembling and jumping and then dancing and spinning 'round, I wondered: what is it about spinning on an axis that is so mesmerizing?  It's got to be more than dizziness.  Why do the spirits need this twirling, or why do people need this whirling, to feel their interbeing with the gods and their normally unimaginable energy?  What is it?

I think I know what it is.  After you've been spinning for so long, your body feels weak, you sweat, and yes, you are dizzy.  You must surrender to the feeling, or give up the twirling.  You must depend on others to take care of you: to wipe your head, to tighten your clothes, to protect you from banging into something or someone, to chant and sing and clap out the rhythm of the accompaniment, to encourage you to keep going.  

In that action, the spinner and the nonspinner become one, inseparable, interdependent.  

I wonder if the Buddha ever tried spinning.  If so, I hope someone had his back.