Meteorological Poem

Down there -

in the engine room or up on the bridge

from such vantage regulate bilge

pump, soul, other essentials.

Measure other measurements. To involute

barometrics will get you only so far, no substitute for

getting out there sticking your head under it in order to know

inadequate instruments———-two clocks in time ticking

————-leading edges——–drenched now in rain

————————————–“I’m soaked to the skin – caught out in it. Hard luck, I’ll say! Hasn’t all day positively———-brittle sunlight, tendency to fracture and crack this winter sun, but still – what are the chances?”

Soaked, from the skin inwards, you might say.

Well, what luck with weather.  Great

healthy showers of this April rain,

——————-you just never know—–it’s the contrasts  that do it for me

———one minute sky looms, and now once again

———————-fragile patches——————-interpolated

with those great heavy bouts. England comes back to me

in ambivalent conditions, or call it a changeable week in mid-April.

So out into it.

Sketches Andaluz

Semana Santa (Monday) in Malaga. The weight of the Cofradia is evident

18.03.12. Perfect sunset coming down over Andalucía, descending in time with the plane.  Large lakes with jagged, jig-sawed edges, and a fading pink which stretches beyond the coast. Talked with Anas and Luisa, a Spanish/English couple. Romantic mountains gathering mist. A minute later the pink is orange and reduced, though broader bands of pink cirrus hang on (permanecen). Gibraltar looms, and Luisa points out a distant light – Tangier. Land in the new dark, wing tip blinking.

Found a cheap pensión in Malaga – go to stroke a small black cat in the lobby, but am stopped by a middle aged malagueño. ‘He doesn’t like to be touched. He’s crazy in the head (loco en la cabeza)’ [with international whirling single finger next to head]. The man, who might be as mad as the cat, goes on to explain his theory of human-animal relations. Sifting rapid and unfamiliar Spanish (I was later told by an Andalucían ‘we chew our words’, mangling the terminations), it is as follows:

La Coronacion in Campillos

‘His [the cat’s] territory and his world is the lobby, and he never leaves. Once he left, and came straight back in because he was afraid of the noise outside. But the problem is that he can’t tell the difference between me and himself, he thinks I’m a cat, and Carlos [gesturing] is a cat, and he has to compete with us to be the alpha, the most macho (lo más macho). So if you try to touch him he might attack you. Carlos hates him, but I understand – we’re not different to animals, they’re just as intelligent, or we’re just as stupid. Both have a psyche and a body. For these reasons it’s not a good idea for you to stroke him.’

21.03.12. Peaceful to wait at Campillos station, a mile or so out of town down a track, whose length is disguised by the effect its straightness produces, in the afternoon sun.  Hundreds of sparrows very busy in negotiations between bare trees lining the tracks. The view to the right is agricultural, oddly-peaked hills and fields in various stages of cultivation, variously parched different browns. To the left the Sierra begins, imposing lumps of what looks like grit stone.

Political graffiti in Campillos ('don't vote, fight')

Left with four hours to kill in Bobadilla, after missing a connecting train. I ask the man behind the desk what there is to do, and his companion replies, shaking his head: ‘there is very little’ (hay pocas cosas). The ticket man corrects him, as befits the authority of his station: No. No hay nada. (‘there is nothing’). He is not quite right – an abandoned soap and olive oil factory is pleasingly gothic-industrial in its ruination.

31. 03.12. Recuerdos de la semana pasada/Memories of the last week:

Un viejo cantaba Flamenco a una chica guapa en el bar ‘Embrujado’. Ella se puso turbada.

Parading up the hill away from the church into Campillos old town for a Semana Santa warm up, brass band at our backs. Even this small town contains five such bands, each with their own club house and favoured bar. Ours, by luck, is La Coronación – hasta la muerte!

Rose petals being dropped onto the Virgin as a Cofradia leaves a Casa de Hermandad (Campillos)

Lago Fuente de Piedra. Cuándo se palmeó las manos, tal vez cien Flamencos, alas rosadas y cuerpos blancos, brincaron hacía al cielo.

1. 04. 12. Domingo de Los Ramos (Palm Sunday), processions in Campillos and Cabra. In the latter, on tour with La Coronación, a Campillos band contracted to play for a Cabra Cofradía (devotional float used in Semana Santa processions). There are, it turns out, two main ways of carrying one (at least in Andalucía), the importance of method becoming evident only upon seeing one and realising quite how heavy they must be, built as they are of wood and metal, with ornamentation in silver and gold.

In Cabra, as in all Córdoba province, the Sevillian approach is taken: the biggest men carry the Cofradía on thick back parts of their necks, supported by sack cloths. They are obscured underneath the float by a black cloth, and have to work a good deal harder than those carrying the Cofradía on their shoulders, the style in Málaga and Granada provinces. Hidden from view apart from their feet, these men lug the Cofradía through increasingly narrow streets to the rhythm of the band. Their size is belied by the practiced dance-step their feet betray beneath the drapes, moving forwards for, say, five–ten minutes at a time before resting for as long again. Owing to the many pauses, the physical condition of the people carrying the Cofradía give the whole thing a stop-start rhythm, with peaks of motion and excitement alternating with the buying of snacks and searching for bathrooms in nearby bars.

Semana Santa in Cabra

Each time they heft the thing onto their backs the people immediately around them applaud the effort, and with good reason: the parade becomes something of an endurance test for everyone involved, lasting, all told, from 7pm until 1pm, a full six hours. I remember also the palpable release of tension as the Cofradía eased through the church’s portal, only just wide enough for it.

John Lanchester in conversation with Vicky Pryce, Dulwich Books Festival, Dulwich College 08.03.12

‘I’m very interested in obliviousness’, John Lanchester remarked early in yesterday evening’s conversation with Vicky Pryce about his latest novel, Capital. Obliviousness of various sorts, but primarily of the bankers and other wealthy Londoners who, circa 2005-6, seemed to evince a strangely a-historical blindness about what was to come. Lanchester claimed that he knew a collapse was inevitable, in some form or another – his prescience was such that he began his financial crisis novel fully three years before the events themselves began to unfold. And it is the oblivious that history will always judge most harshly, he says, a task commenced mid-crisis by his book Whoops!, something that had grown ‘like a benign tumour’ on his work as a novelist, occupying the space between finishing the first draft of Capital and editing it.

Lanchester is not, as he freely admits, an economist in any sense. But he is possessed of the ability to explain rather than obfuscate, to cut through economist-speak and ’tell the story’ of the crisis, which has a narrative shape. The talk drifted at this point towards analogy between the two worlds, finance and fiction, without labouring the connection. Too much detail will kill a novel as surely as too many numbers will bewilder the lay reader. ’You can do absolutely anything you want in fiction, but you can’t explain. Research can be a dangerous thing.’

Capital is a microcosm novel: one London street, Pepys road in Clapham, standing for the whole city. A mixture of diversity and unfriendliness highlights the paradox that London is an ‘open city’ (rather than a closed one – exactly what is meant by this distinction is unclear, but presumably an attitude towards immigration is part of it), and yet is atomised, having very little sense of community. We don’t know our neighbours, and this type of obliviousness constitutes a form of good manners.

The experience of coming to London from an elsewhere in pursuit of ‘the London dream’ makes a good subject for a novel – most of the residents of Pepys Road aren’t born Londoners – and it might also be a bit like writing, it is suggested. For Lanchester, born in Hamburg and growing up in Hong Kong, arriving in London as a young man made him in some sense an immigrant to the culture, despite his English citizenship. The link between this experience and his profession is not coincidental, he stressed: ‘Every writer I know has some displacement in their lives’.

At the heart of all this, though, is money, contained in Capital’s punning title along with the sense of the city with which it is so entwined. The interesting thing about wealth for Lanchester is that beyond a certain quantity it assumes an abstract, paradoxically immaterial character at odds with the materialism it permits. An index of value, but also a kind of passion which has a mystic, not-fully-understood allure, much like the global markets Whoops! attempts to clarify.

Finally, we are left with the cautiously optimistic notion that economically flat times might be in some ways more interesting than eras of affluent confidence. Periods of relative penury may be more significant in terms of the inner lives of ordinary people, Lanchester suggests, and valuable political and artistic creativity could be the result. Perhaps Capital marks a beginning of this intriguing new moment of British history.

Poetry and Geology: a Celebration (Geology Society, Piccadilly, 10.10.11)

flyer

Several Mondays ago I attended a conference at the Geological Society on Poetry and Geology: another example of the innovative cross-department work being done that bridges poetics and the earth/natural sciences. As someone with a pretty short attention span and a pathologically dilettantish interest in things I haven’t been remotely trained to do or write about, interdisciplinary study appeals.

Most emphasised was the importance of 19th Century contexts for thinking about the relationship between contemporary poetics and geology. From the middle of the century in England geology took off scientifically – Darwin, Lyell, Hutton – while also possessing great resonance as an idea that could be called in some sense ‘poetic’: the forceful rethinking deep, geological timescales impelled, especially though not exclusively in its obvious conflict with Biblical accounts of the earth’s age, appealed to writers due to its promise of an expansive relativism, a way of thinking not previously accessible.

In the 19th Century this insight may have been destabilising, but as the instrument of its revelation was scientific, and science controlled by man, it didn’t serve to fundamentally shift humanity’s perception of its own centrality: if anything the converse, confidence boosted by the perceived power of a new order of knowledge.

It is hard to detect the progenitors of modern planetary anxiety in such anthropocentricism, difficult to discern the radically displaced, unheimlich human subject as posited by J.H. Prynne (not discussed at this event). Prynne’s employment, in his early work, of the figure of ‘geological sublime’ seems to reach back further, to the Romantics, submerging their sense of nature’s hostile indifference within stratifications and bedrock, combining it with scientific discourses that are no longer a source of comfort. The seeming immovability and immutability of the mountain was for Wordsworth and Shelley the perfect metaphor for nature’s permanence and indifference to man; in Prynne the use of a geological time scale discomforts because it demonstrates even the mountain’s (relative) transience (see 1968’s The White Stones, and in particular ‘Concerning the Glacial Question, Reconsidered’).

There may have been a Victorian anticipation of such geomorphological fluidity in some lines from Tennyson’s In Memoriam, quoted by Bryan Lovell:

‘The hills are shadows, and they flow
From form to form, and nothing stands;
They melt like mist, the solid lands,
Like clouds they shape themselves and go.’ (IM, CXXIII)

The effect is something like a time lapse film: the liquidity of these lines is itself something processual, unfinished, and far from human.

'oldest of the old'

Of course, ‘geo’ leads us beyond the realm of the strictly geological, as Gordon Peters’ talk on Scotland’s Geopoetics Centre suggested. Starting from the highlands in Scotland’s North West – the oldest rocks in the world, or ‘oldest of the old’, in the words of Kenneth White – Peters unfolded his ‘theory-practice’; basically that intellectual and sensory apprehensions of the world should be brought together around the subject of the earth, as their focus. Behind the lecture, and indeed partially the conference, is poet/geologist Kenneth White, whose quote might serve as the day’s tagline: ‘where geology and poetry meet is not a line of scholarship but an immersion.’

Bryan Lovell, President of the Geological Society, gave an impassioned speech, the thrust of which was that ‘the scientists have lost the public argument’: the implication being that poets are needed to try and bring home the facts of climate change to people empathetically, or through form, or affect.

Finally, the best (only?) geology joke I’ve heard (though hopefully not the last):

‘So I was at an outdoor geology lecture in the North West of Scotland, and I moved a little away from the group, and the lecturer asked me, “what are you doing?”
“I’m sitting on the basalt”, I said.
“That’s gneiss”, he said.

‘Present Imperfect’ for Banner

Further flogging an ageing donkey: an article mined from several of the blogposts below appeared in the very new and very excellent Banner. The piece concerns Guatemalan history and politics, with a focus on the city of Xela and the language school Proyecto Linguistico Quetzalteco. PDF of the issue in print here; my article is pp. 27-29.

'Present Imperfect' I

'Present Imperfect' II

Loma Linda and the Cuchumatanes

Bosque nuboso, Loma Linda

It is hard to find specific, anecdotal things to write about Loma Linda, because life there has a pleasingly repetitive character and the days too easily slip together. So instead of anecdote, some statements. It is fortunate to be surrounded by large areas of very beautiful cloud forest, home to the elusive Quetzal, and there is a decent trail networking connecting a fairly sizeable portion of the jungle and leading to at least three waterfalls. I didn’t manage to see a Quetzal, and not for want of looking, but I was pleased to observe well and up close  for a good period of time several of a smallish, dark coloured specie of Toucan, recognisable as such by their outsize beaks. When it rains, as it does most afternoons, it rains hard and is finished quickly; afterwards a dense vapour rises off the many rivers, cloaking the trees and the village, and for this it has its evocative name (in Spanish it’s even better – bosque nuboso).

Loma Linda, one street village

Around 1200 people live there, although there are only about 100 families, which provides some idea of the size of each, and the families tend to be interconnected by a perplexing series of ties. The main crop is organically produced coffee, but more interesting is the community’s second cash crop, pacayina, a green plant grown and harvested for its very regular arrangement of leaves, which make it the ideal neutral element in flower arranging. There’s not much of a market for that in Guatemala, and the leaves are sold to the USA, as is the best of the region’s coffee.  It is a community with a central association that is effectively the professional and social core of the village, especially in relation to tourism and agriculture. It is for this association, ASODILL (Asociacion Desarrollo Integral de Loma Linda), that I worked on organic agricultural projects and taught English in the school.

Pacayina

One tangential point: it was in Loma Linda that I first saw for myself a phenomenon I had been told about several times, that of the rural family with relatives that make it to the USA, find work there, and are able to send money back to their village. That money sometimes goes into public works projects like community school or church repairs, but more usually it allows the family to modify their house, normally garishly, in such a way that it stands out in every conceivable way from the tin-walled and roofed structures in the rest of the village.

Also interesting and sort of related is the way that poverty is indexed in a community such as this. Loma Linda is undoubtedly poor, but nonetheless a family that doesn’t have proper brick walls and instead uses a tarpaulin sheet will have a widescreen TV; a DVD player is a more important necessity than hot water. Judith Adler Hellman makes a similar point in an essay entitled ‘Give or Take Ten Million,’ collected in the book Latin America after Neoliberalism: Turning the Tide in the 21^st Century? She is writing about migration to the USA, but her point is a more general one, that ‘such products as televisions, computers, cordless phones, cell phones, DVD players, and a variety of consumer goods that, in very recent memory, would have been seen as luxuries…have come to be redefined as “meeting basic needs.”’

Iglesia traslada

After a month spent in a community where it’s obligatory to wish everyone you see good morning/afternoon/night each day – a surprisingly exhausting task, the shirking of which is interpreted as lack of communal spirit, and after which I could understand the economy of effort that leads most people to shorten the greetings, so that ‘buenas noches’ becomes either ‘buenas’ or ‘noches,’ but rarely both – I was craving some anonymity, and set off for some villages in the Cuchumatane mountains, first reaching Santa Eulalia. My book said there’s only one hotel, and that it’s directly below the church. Reasoning that that ought to be simple, I began to look around the central square, but a few circulations revealed only a building site containing lots of rubble and what might be pieces of church tower in it. I asked a fruit seller the obvious question, and am told that the whole thing was moved – traslada – and is now five minutes down the hill. This astonishing piece of information led me to ask everyone who stopped me to ask what part of the United States I was from (many people here refuse to accept that England is a separate country) or swap sombreros how such a technical feat is possible in a village like this, where all the streets are far narrower than the space left by the church. I received no satisfactory answers.

Todos Santos

Next, and the real object of this short trip, was Todos Santos, a Mam-speaking village known for being one of the few places in Guatemala where the men also adhere to traditional dress, wearing red and white-striped trousers, blue and white-striped shirts and small sombreros with a coloured band. It looks fantastic, as does the whole village, ringed by mountains. Climbing up the ridge side on an exhausting switch-back dirt track that leads out of Todos Santos, I could hear marimba notes very clearly because of the valley sides, drifting up from the Saturday market.

Spanish is the second language for most people here, and is rarely heard in the street. I am reminded that there are twenty four active languages in Guatemala (including Garifuna in Livingstone on the Caribbean coast), of which Spanish is only the official one. The impression is of a life relatively undisturbed by Hispanic culture, deeply traditional that is in some unthought way reassuring. As with Mexico there are really (at least) two Guatemalas; one found in the urban areas, striving to be more North American in dress, food, culture, and the other in the country, more or less able to continue as always, depending on the political situation in the nation more generally, which they have no means of effecting.

Traditional male dress, Todos Santos

Indeed, the Spanish never wholly succeeded in controlling this harsh part of the Western Highlands, bare, mountainous and frosty. Large dark grey boulders litter the valleys, interspersed with maguey cacti and cypress trees. Because it was difficult to access and didn’t contain mineral wealth, it was largely ignored by colonial authorities, and the tradition of dissident separatism and resistance to the capital’s central authority continued into the mid-Twentieth Century, as its remoteness also made it a location favoured by guerrilla groups during the internal armed conflict (1960 – 1996).

URNG poster

I heard a female ex-Guerrilla speak when I visited Santa Anita, a coffee fincha owned and run by ex-guerrillas, who gave up their arms and re-entered society after the signing of the Peace Accords in 1996. She spoke of the equality between genders in their mountain camps, that men and women would both spend the time when they weren’t fighting, or walking all day, reading political philosophy, and that all cooking and washing of clothes was shared equally. Guatemala was then and is now an extremely traditional society with regard to gender roles, and the position of female guerrillas was extremely radical, as of course it was intended to be. How easy can the process of re-integration have been after the conflict ended, I wondered. I suspect not very. And more generally, how disappointing must have been the years following the Peace Accords for the ex-guerrillas, as successive governments failed to implement the agreed changes, especially concerning land ownership and campesino rights. The transition from a free and equal community of people sharing a common aim to an at least partial regression to the problems and engrained prejudices of life before the conflict must have been extremely difficult. And the difficulty is exacerbated by the current powerlessness of the Guatemalan left. The four main guerrilla groups, after giving up their guns, elected to continue the struggle politically rather than militarily, forming the URNG (Unidad Revolucionaria National Guatemalteca), the current left party. But it has always been poor, and vote-winning in Guatemala is a matter of institutionalised bribery. Consequently there is no real hope of legitimate representation for the rural poor, and no way to alter the system by operating within its legal limits.

PLQ

The reason for spending so long in Xela – almost six weeks – was the excellent Proyecto Linguistico Quetzalteco, where I studied for five weeks. The school and its maestros are committed to educating its students not only in the Spanish language, but also in the political and social reality of Guatemala, whose recent history and current situation are characterised by coercive repression on the part of the government, the monopolisation of business interests by USA firms and by the eight very wealthy Guatemalan families who allegedly run the country, and the continual marginalisation of the countryside and the indigenous people that live there.

It is difficult to sum up PLQ, and instead of trying, part of the lyrics from two songs, sung at the weekly graduation dinner by the staff, will serve. The first is ‘Bella Chao,’ a song originally written (in Italian) by and for the Italian Communist party in the early Twentieth Century. It goes like this:

Una mañana de sol radiante

Voy a buscar al invasor

Soy Comunista toda la vida

Y Comunista he de morir

Y si yo muero, en el combate

Toma en tus manos mi fusil

(‘One morning of radiant sun, I am going to search for the invader. I am a Communist all my life, Communist until I die. And If I die in combat, take in your hands my gun.’)

And the second, ‘No Basta Rezar’ (‘It’s not enough to pray’):

No, no no basta rezar – hacen falta muchas cosas para conseguir la paz

En el mundo no habría paz mientras haya explotación

Del hombre por el hombre y exista desigualdad

Nada se puede lograr si no hay revolución

(‘No, no no it’s not enough to pray – many things are lacking before peace can follow. In the world there won’t be peace while there is exploitation, man for man inequality exists. Nothing can be achieved if there is no revolution.’)

Cantando

One pertinent thing about all this is the way that, as Annie pointed out, patriotism and radicalism are very much aligned in this context, and ‘la lucha por la tierra’ (‘the struggle for the land’) which is common parlance and a common concern in PLQ, is quite explicitly a patriotic struggle. My normal instinctive aversion to openly expressed patriotism doesn’t hold here. Being patriotic seems more imperative in Guatemala, a way of relating to one’s nation that stems directly from necessity and hope for social change.

Guatemala has had a troubled last sixty years, troubles that began with the 1954 CIA-backed military coup that led to the next thirty six years of internal conflict. The takeover occurred because then premier Arevelo’s moderate, socially liberal administration was pursuing a policy of expropriating land from United Fruit Company and returning it to the peasantry, who had farmed it for centuries before it was taken from them by  the American fruit-producing giant, known as ‘El Pulpo’- ‘the octopus’ – in Latin America. UFC were only paying tax on a fraction of the land that comprised their vast plantations, and the government reduced their holdings to the amount they were paying tax on. Using Cold War era Communist scare-mongering, and a deliberate unwillingness to distinguish between Socialism and Communism, a right wing militaristic government was effectively placed in power with covert US support, beginning thirty six years of bloody repression and abuse of the countryside and eventually, in the 80s, civil war, as guerrillas organized to fight the government. The situation was only diffused in 1996, with the Peace Accords, most of the concessionary terms of which have still not been met.

Mountainous Xela

There is still a lot of resentment, and the political atmosphere in Guatemala is currently very terse. In early January a camionetta was bombed by terrorists in the Capital, and most people seem to expect that the election will only increase the levels of violence as politicians use coercion in order to gain votes, and are themselves controlled by business interests. My maestro in PLQ told me of the need for an open higher education system, as most universities only teach neoliberal economics and political science, which favours the interests of the Capitalist elite and perpetuates the poverty of the majority of the population. And of course many children don’t go to school at all. The Catholic Church is a conservative presence at best, and the increased number of Evangelical congregations in recent years appears to be a fairly calculated move on the part of the US to retain purchase in Guatemala in the absence of UFC, which never returned.

Annie explained to me something of the history of ‘Vos,’ used informally in speech in various parts of Central and South America, including Guatemala, as either a very intimate or very offensive version of ‘you.’ A corruption of Vosotros (informal plural ‘you’ in Spain), it was introduced to Latin America by Colonialists who wanted a way to refer to and command their slave workers that would mark out the addressee as inferior. But the word began to be used by indigenous people amongst themselves, in their homes, and this appropriation of Conquistador linguistic territory is the historical antecedent of its function today as a colloquial and intimate substitution for ‘tu,’ though when used in certain ways it can retain its racially pejorative connotations. It began to be codified in written form between 1940 and 1960, and now in some places if a man uses ‘tu’ rather than ‘vos’ he might appear to be gay, and if a girl does likewise, she could be a ‘fresa,’ or yuppie. This is far from the only possible reading of the history of ‘Vos,’ as it is still relatively recent territory for linguistic historians and primarily an oral phenomenon, and there are presumably many other uses and meanings.

Xela's Cemetery; Volcan Santa Maria in the background

Also regarding linguistics, Spanish school has revealed some interesting ways in which Catholicism and Spanish are connection in a very integral way. The first and most intriguing is that when describing the death of a person, the correct verb ‘to be’ is ‘estar’, rather than ‘ser.’ ‘Estar’ is normally used to describe states, conditions or locations that are temporal and impermanent, implying that death too is only a temporary condition, which of course within the semantics of a Catholic worldview, it is. Similarly, though somewhat more tenuously, there may be similar reasons for the fact that ‘creo que’ (‘I think that’) doesn’t take the subjunctive form, despite being potentially open to doubt (i.e. the phrase could mean ‘I think that I am correct that,’ but could also be ‘I think but I am unsure that’). ‘Creo que’ having its semantic roots in belief – ‘creer’ is ‘to believe’ – might explain why the former interpretation, indicating fideistic certainty, is the one the language uses.

 

 

Xela

Earthquake damage, Antigua

Antigua, although beautiful, is full of gringos, and it is nearly impossible to even formulate phrases in Spanish in the privacy of one’s own mind there, let alone speak any. The locals often address you in English in the street, which is far from the norm in Guatemala. Indeed Antigua, with its refined cafes, clean streets and ruined churches feels like a town from a completely separate country. I passed a pleasant few days and left for Quetzaltenango, or Xela, as it is known locally by its Mayan name, deriving from Xelaju (pronounced ‘sheyla-who’), the settlement’s pre-Hispanic name.

Xela's cathedral: note the gap between ancient façade and modern church behind

Xela is a contrast in pretty much every way. Resolutely normal, and relatively unmarked by foreign influence considering the large number of language schools, the second largest city in Guatemala feels as though no one other than its inhabitants is paying much attention to the town, unlike many tourist locations that, for better or worse,  have been attended to by people that don’t live there. Xela’s bizarre architectural style is the product of historical accident, in the form of a devastating earthquake that in 1902 levelled most of the colonial churches and buildings, ending the town’s rivalry to Guatemala City. The re-build was in neo-classical style, at least some of which was the result of dictator Ubico’s wish to symbolise his power in Doric columns, many of which serve no purpose and terminate in mid air. Likewise the extremely odd Templo Minerva, out of town near the bus terminal that bears its name, is incongruous and now pretty much ignored. The highest concentration of this Grecian style occurs, naturally enough, around Parque Central, where the facade of the old baroque cathedral remains standing, with the bulbous new version squatting behind it. There’s a window high up on the old facade that now opens onto empty space. Xela being a mountain town, and the Parque being situation in the valley’s declivity, the new cathedral’s fairy-tale domes are visible from most places in the city. It’s all highly unusual and in its own way characterful.

Neoclassical Xela

In a way Xela’s development is the opposite of Antigua’s, as the destruction caused by an earthquake stimulated a strange re-build rather than the preservation of ruins, which is one of the reasons Antigua is so popular with tourists.  Inhabitants of Xela are proud of their town’s historic importance, which can still be seen in their football team, the Xelaju, whose fans carry banners reading ‘Sexto Estado,’ the sixth state. This is in reference to the independent Western state of Los Altos, which took Xela as its capital and resisted central control from the Capital from the break with Mexico in 1820 until 1840, when President Carrera relegated Xela permanently to the status of provincial capital.

From Santa Maria, looking down

I climbed two volcanoes close to Xela – the crater lake of Laguna Chicabal, and the perfect cone of Santa Maria, 3700m above sea level. In both cases the culmination of the walk, either the lake or the summit, was used as a social and religious gathering point and by Guatemalan Mayans. The water of the lake, especially, is sacred, and it is prohibited to touch it. Clouds were moving very quickly over the lake surface. At least fifty Guatemalans families were barbequing meat and drinking pop on the lake shore, and it was a similar story at the summit of Santa Maria, where a Catholic ceremony of some kind was also taking place. Thirty or so Guatemalans, formed in loose circle, were singing and clapping rhythmically with rising and falling vocal tonalities, led by one or two singers at the beginning of each phrase. It’s the first time I’ve really seen clearly at first hand how Mayan and Christian spirituality are fused: although the songs are about Christ, there is a sense of something older here, only with different words.

Laguna Chicabal

Also regarding Mayan spirituality, I attended a lecture at my language school on the Maya Cosmovisión, given by a Maya Sacerdote or shaman. The talk was fascinating in many ways, but the most pertinent part to record here is a quote from a Ki’che shaman who was arrested for practising Mayan beliefs. While in jail, in 1917, he was interviewed, and said of his religion that it provided ‘un sistema de valores que relaciona y explica al ser humano, la naturaleza, el tiempo…yo veo a dios en los arboles, en las piedras, en las nubes…’ (‘a system of values that relates and explains what it is to be human, nature, time…I see god in the trees, in the stones, in the clouds…’).

I spent New Year in Xela, and went to New Year Mass. It was an extremely lively affair, the music being primarily driven by enthusiastically sawed-at violins, and the congregation singing along with gusto and more or less in time. The padre cracked jokes – New Year’s Eve being a Friday – ‘and of course I’ll be seeing you all at Mass again on Sunday.’

 

 

Guatemala again

Melchor, on the Guatemala – Belize border, for the second time. It’s the only place it’s possible to cross between the two countries by land, which means most people end up several times, as is often the way with border towns. I am sitting in a pleasant comedor overlooking the Mopan river with four hours to kill and a river-fish to eat before an overnight bus to the capital. The first time I was here, two weeks ago, going the other way, I didn’t take much notice; now I am shabbily charmed. Families combine bathing and play in the Mopan; melancholy Spanish tunes on the comedor stereo: ‘te vas, desde me vida…adios, adios mi amor…Marisa, adios amor…’As often seems to be the case in Guatemala, everything appears peaceful, but I am told by a lady at the next table that there are many ‘malvivientes’ in this town, and that I should take a bus that leaves before night fall.

Chicken bus

One interesting aspect of life in Guatemala is the ubiquity and sheer number of camionetas, allegedly called Chicken Buses by tourists because of the likelihood of Guatemalans taking their chicken along for the ride (to market). As in Belize (see photograph in the post below), the majority of the bus service is made up of old American School buses, garishly painted and adorned with racing stripes, licking-flames and religious slogans. Each bus has a conductor as well as a driver, and he is a very specialised employee. His first duty is to convince people to take his bus, which he does by hanging or leaping out of the perpetually open door while the bus is rolling at low speed, shouting ‘Xela Xela Xelaaaa,’ or wherever the bus is going. Once all the rows of seats, designed for school children, are packed full (three people to each two-person row), people stand in the aisle, and eventually on the steps, around the driver, frustrating his attempts to change gear, while trying not to fall out of the open door as the bus lurches around hairpins. The conductor is immensely acrobatic: he shimmies up to the roof with luggage resting on his shoulders against the back of the neck, where it is stored, without apparent difficulty. He will jump on and off the bus while it’s in motion, hanging off the back. It is a skilled job, and they never seem to tire. There is apparently no limit to the number of people it’s possible to fit on board – when it seems there isn’t room for even one more, he will still jump off and call to anyone on the pavement who looks as though they might be persuaded into taking his bus. And on top of all this he still has to keep track of who has and hasn’t paid.

Covert campaigning

From the windows of various chicken buses I noticed various coloured designs painted on rocks or the sides of the cliff from which the road has been cut out; the most common are a blank red, and a pattern like the German flag except the yellow is proportionally larger. There will be an election in Guatemala in November 2011, and until the New Year campaigning was apparently illegal: the explanation I received for the colours was that it was the parties trying to get a covert and subliminal head start. I also later heard that the reason for the German colours is that the candidate they advertise is of German descent and is using that as a premise for electability, on the grounds that he will run the nation with German-like efficiency. I don’t know how true this is, but I feel it is worth writing nonetheless. Much of the information I have been presenting as fact here is like this: really just things I heard from people or read in sources I have forgotten and then remembered later. I have made a point of not using the internet to research stories or histories that I’ve picked up, preferring to take what information I’m given as it is, and trusting that it will contain more that is factual than not.

Centre-back: a boa constrictor digesting an elephant?

Something interesting I either heard or read about the ‘impossible landscape’ (Aldous Huxley) of Lago Atitlan when we went there is that there is some suggestion that an unusual mound on the shore might be the model for the famous elephant-being-digested-by-boa-constrictor drawing at the beginning of The Little Prince, which I am reading in Spanish (El Principito). Antionne Saint-Exupery lived in Antigua while he was recovering from an accident, had a relationship with a Guatemalan woman, and visited Atitlan. The three volcanoes on the Little Prince’s planet may also correspond with those that loom over the lake.

Saint Simon

In the Mayan village of Zumil, in the Western highlands, resides Saint Simon. He was given his Spanish name following the conquest in order to avoid trouble, but in fact he is far older than that, and in some obscure way I don’t understand part of the ancient Mayan belief system. In his current incarnation he is a life-sized figure that appears to be made from plastic or wax, wears western clothes, shades and always smokes a cigarette – it is someone’s job to tap and collect the ash, as it has healing powers. He is moved, once a year, between different houses in the village, and people come from far away to light candles in front of his chair, which act as supplications: yellow for health, red for love, and black to wish ill on an enemy.

 

 

 

Belize

Buses come colourful in Belize

Belize is something of a mongrel nation, as the names on the map announce: Hopkins; San Ignacio; Dangriga; Calal Pech. This toponymy corresponds to languages: though the official language is English, Belize has at least five languages, corresponding to different ethnic groups: English, Creole, Garifuna, Mayan and Spanish, spoken by the many Spanish-speaking immigrants, most of whom are from neighbouring Guatemala. As a consequence many Belizeans are excellent linguists through daily contact with so many tongues, speaking Creole, English, Spanish, sometimes Maya, and in the south Garifuna, often combining several in a single sentence.

Belize City

On the streets of Belize City, down by the docks and the Caribbean, I met the self-titled ‘Prince Charles Perez,’ of mixed Mayan and African heritage, who gave me his ‘synoptic’ (I had a boat to catch for the Cayes) lecture on Belize’s history, and in particular the etymology of the word ‘Belize.’ Interjections of ‘watch me now’ folded around a chaotic but informative account of the Mayan goddess Belkini, meaning ‘beautiful woman,’ which was – he said – adapted by the European colonialists owing to the happy chance that the preface ‘Bel’ signifies ‘beauty’ in both languages. At least I think that is what he was telling me. So when, following Belize’s Independence from Great Britain in 1981, and the new country needed a name that wasn’t British Honduras, Belize, or Belice, was chosen, for both capital and nation. Incidentally, this is also where the popular and tasty Belkin beer derives its name from. The capital was moved to the new town Belmopan in the 1970s in an unsuccessful attempt to relocate Belize’s primary urban centre inland, out of reach of flooding caused by hurricanes. Belize City lies below sea level. Belmopan is still tiny and all the important politicians and businesses stayed in Belize City. Perez concluded his lecture by dubbing me Junior Historical Ambassador for Belize, both our hands solemnly on our hearts in the middle of a crowded street. It’s street theatre, but very informative, assuming his facts are good. When he asks for his ‘piece of cheese’ I offer him an orange, but he don’t want no orange, so I give him some change instead. He tells me that if ever I was back in town to look him up or shout him down, and we part.

Caye Caulker

My hostel on Caye Caulker, one of Belize’s Caribbean reef islands, had a canoe out back for guests. It is approaching the end of the day and I take it out for a paddle as the sun sets over the lagoon. A ray swims underneath my canoe; there is a couple out in another canoe, further away. Cormorants perch on poles sticking up out of the water, wings outstretched in poses of comic menace, drying them after a dive.

Swing Bridge, Belize City

Also in Belize City, at the swing bridge, which is the nominal centre of town (and the only mechanical swing bridge still operative in the Americas), two groups of kids, Creole and Honduran, are fishing and pointedly ignoring each other. It’s about 11 at night, and they are tearing apart a fish they’ve caught with their hooks to provide bait. Pedestrians walk by without a second glance at the entrails that cover the pavement.

I stayed at the wildlife sanctuary and field research centre Monkey Bay over Christmas. It is beautiful and replete with good wildlife. I saw an armadillo rummaging in the undergrowth close to the two mile path that leads down to the River Sibun, in which it is possible to swim despite the strong current. There are Boat-Billed Flycatchers flitting around the grounds and huge Iguanas in the trees.

By chance, on Christmas Eve, I came across a song called ‘Christmas in Prison’ by John Prine (which I now realise was covered, not written, by Emmy the Great). Like me, Prine’s not at home for Christmas. It goes,

It was Christmas in prison, the food was real good

We had turkey and pistols, carved out of wood…

…She reminds me of a chess game with someone I admire

Or a picnic in the rain after a prairie fire…

…It was Christmas in prison, there’ll be music tonight

I’ll prob’ly get homesick, I love you, good night.

Monkey Bay bus

Helping out with some manual work around Monkey Bay, I found a smallish kind of Iguana, apparently called a Wish-Willy, inside some breeze blocks I was moving. At first I thought its tail sticking vertically out of the block was some foliage. I am advised to wear gloves, my attention is drawn to a venomous toad sitting next to another block, and I’m warned that there could also be scorpions, a sting from which means a hospital visit. The next day I am moving some logs and am warned that some of the pieces come from Poison Wood; they have ugly black blotches on their bark. ‘When they’re cut, the poison seeps out.’ Once again, direct contact results in nasty blisters and hospital.

Hard labour

This day also there were two quite large scorpions living in the woodpile. Well, mild peril. Breaks up the day. Moving logs is surprisingly satisfying: due to the way they criss-cross and trap one another, each time you need to move one there’s usually only a single piece that can be moved, making the task into a kind of puzzle.

I enjoyed working outside, and doing something simple, physical and finite: after two days, I had built a wall of breeze blocks and made a large wood pile to be sawed up into firewood. The work felt good, like an excursion into a world that’s normally closed to me. I was reminded me of something Frank O’ Hara said: ‘If I ever get to be a construction worker I’d like a silver hat please.’