bambina writes

Read the Signs

If the guy you're dating had on his bedside table a self-help book by the likes of Osho or Dr John Demartini, would you think he was profound or a total loser?

Personally the warning bells would start clanging loudly in my brain. And I tried reading both books, believe me, but there was no breakthrough experience for me and I gave up after 30 pages. I would rather see, say, a hefty Yves Saint Laurent tome by his bedside; at least I'd know he's gay and we could spend the rest of the night watching Sunset Boulevard and taking turns acting out Norma Desmond's lines.

Don't Tell Me the Truth About Love

I'm so over my missed call, but not this missed opportunity: the Scottish writer Dan Rhodes is in Manila and will be actually giving a reading at Fully Booked on Bonifacio High Street tomorrow:

9th February at 4pm: PHILIPPINES. Fully Booked, Bonifacio High Street, Metro Manila. Rhodes will be kicking off his 2008 tour with his first ever reading in The Philippines. Make sure you don’t miss this historic event. At the time of writing we are unable to confirm the rumour that if this reading goes well Rhodes will start thinking seriously about running for president.

How can you not love a writer with a sense of humor as quirky and ironic as this? I loved Dan Rhodes from the moment I heard about his debut novel, Timoleon Vieta Come Home, in 2004. And Timoleon Vieta, I learned, is the name of a dog, and the book is about two men and a dog. Of course the book never got to Hijack City - probably got snatched in a books-in-transit heist somewhere along the Durban to Johannesburg highway.

Eat Pray Felipe

"Omigod, he could be your Felipe!"

The fact that I've been hearing this from friends lately isn't as much a reflection of the state of my personal life as it is proof of the enduring universal resonance of Eat Pray Love.

Not too long ago we were the Sex and the City generation.  We defined ourselves as Carries, Samanthas, Charlottes or Mirandas.  If you were Carrie and someone asked you who was your Big, you knew exactly what that meant.

Today we've become the Eat Pray Love generation of thirty- to fortysomethings, all captivated with Elizabeth Gilbert's memoir of her year in Italy, India and Indonesia as a woman searching for everything.  Which really means searching for that elusive combination of earthiness and spirituality that will keep our lives in balance.

And when your girlfriends ask you:

Is he your Felipe?

You know exactly what they mean.

My friend Amanda had been telling me to read the book for months, and when it finally arrived in Hijack City in the middle of last year, I snapped up a copy.  I stayed up all night and even read by candlelight because there was a power cut, to finish it.  The next day I hyped the book to every woman I knew, from my yoga instructor to my therapist, and ended up giving my copy away to a friend.  It wasn't that the book was all that well-written, but it was heartfelt, humble and candid, the way the author was unafraid to bare her despair, share her hope and laugh at her own silliness. 

There were a few questions that nagged at me after I'd put the book down.  Why her marriage really ended (and Jezebel agrees), for one.  The other thing that creeped me out was that she admitted getting off on Bill Clinton from time to time.  I mean, hello?

"You're so Eat Pray Love!"

The thing is, finding my own Felipe was the last thing that came to my mind upon reading Eat Pray Love.  My own version anyway would have been pitched as Eat Pray Love meets Betty Mahmoudy, as in Eat Pray and Get Us Out of Here!  Seriously, what stuck in my head was that my own personal convictions were echoed by Elizabeth Gilbert's experience:  that no matter what happens, all will be fine, we are blessed and we are loved.  I swear.

"So is he your Felipe?"

Who?

Being Bi

A friend of mine once said that mixed breed children are the harbingers of world peace, or something like that. Especially children like ours, who are not merely bi-racial but multi-racial, really a little bit of this and a little bit of that. To them, being mixed isn't anything exotic; it's completely normal. They carry two, three passports, feel at home in different countries without necessarily pledging allegiance to any one flag. Heritage Day always presents a multiple choice option at school: Should I talk about being Filipino today, or Spanish or British or Greek or a toenail German and Scottish?

So while my children are rather blasé about the multi-racial parts that make them whole, the novelist Hari Kunzru, author of The Impressionist - to my mind it could have been titled I'm Not There - as well as the more recent My Revolutions, says in an interview with Nerve, that people are still grappling with the implications of bi-racialism, even if there's a certain trendiness to being bi-racial these days in certain quarters:

People are authenticity freaks, and if you're mixed you're not 100% anything. And I agree with you, there's been a real shift where people now celebrate the mixed-upness — everyone's a different color and holding hands and everyone's sort of funky and cool and you'd like to sleep with them. That's very prominent in a certain urban metropolitan mindset, but if you go out of the cities there's a lot of fear and resentment toward this mixed-up globalized thing. People are nostalgic for a time that may not have actually existed, when a community was fixed and stable and everyone came from the same place.

But the real reason for people's discomfort doesn't stem so much from wondering whether Tiger Woods, for instance, considers himself more Thai or African-American, or whether Halle Berry considers herself more white or black. According to Kunzru, himself born of a white mother and an Indian father, it's a bit more prurient than that: it's the notion that interracial copulation once took place, and the bi-racial child is the curious fruit of those mixed loins.

And that's what it really comes down to. If someone sees a mixed race person, in their mind is: who had sex to make you? When people ask me, where are you from? They don't care where I grew up. What they really want to know is, cards on the table, what combination of fucking produced someone who looks like you?

It's all about sex at the end of the day.

Forget world peace. My kids are in for years of therapy.

Beached

For the next 10 days...

Lugging along to read:
- On Beauty by Zadie Smith
- Walking Into the Night by Olaf Olafsson
- Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin
- The Nautical Chart by Arturo Perez-Reverte

The place we're going to is quite remote, on the south coast of Durban. Lots of cooking, lots of eating, lots of sunning, lots of reading, but not much blogging!

A Thousand Days of Forgetting

Actually, it's been more than a thousand days, but I'm not the bean counter.

I tell him, "I knew a man who sat with his freshly estranged wife outdoors at the Saloon near Lincoln Center and, over fried zucchini, he asked her if she'd ever loved him, and she said, 'I can't remember. Perhaps I did, but I just can't remember.'"

- from A Thousand Days in Venice by Marlena de Blasi

I know exactly what she means. I can't remember either.

I guess it is true: the opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference. And with indifference comes not a willful forgetting, but a gradual erosion of relevance, until in the end, you just can't remember.

And neither can you even summon the desire to try.

How many more ways are there to say it's OVER?

Revenge of the Nerds

There are books that almost never make it to Hijack City. Something to do with UK editions vs US editions, I'm guessing, not that it matters because all the books that do arrive are immediately priced way beyond their US or UK recommended retail prices, which are cunningly covered by the new price sticker.

Some books you search and search for obsessively, never finding them in the shelves, until it's sale time and suddenly there is one copy of the book peeking out from stacks of other remainders. So you buy it, only to see dozens of the same book the next day marked down even lower... Happened to me with a couple of Don DeLillo's and Diana Abu-Jaber.

Some books I've NEVER found, in the last year at least, and we're not even talking backlists here: Laila Lalami's Hope and other Dangerous Pursuits, Jonathan Ferris' And Then We Came to the End, David Leavitt's The Indian Clerk, Gregoire Bouillier's The Mystery Guest,and Frank Portman's King Dork.

Until yesterday.

I saw King Dork, the lone copy, screaming at me from its multi-font cover, like a rock-n-roll rebel sandwiched between two giggling girls having facials for the first time.

So, here I am, panicking because I have 40,000 words to write in the next week or so, and I'm reading King Dork. I'd read it in two, three hours, if I didn't laugh so much. Frank Portman NAILS high school and has the Losers, Psychopathic Winners and the Seriously Weird Teachers down pat. High school is all the seas of the world + the Amazon river combined, and if you're a loser, stay clear of the sharks and the piranhas and stick close to the gentle dolphins.

Tom Henderson, the King Dork of the title, is also known as Chi-Mo, sometimes mutated to Moe, and I've just discovered why. His friend, Sam, another geek par excellence - their friendship stems from the fact that they are partners in loserhood - sarcastically refers to the rest of the clueless kids (their erstwhile tormentors) as WAGBOGs - What a Great Bunch of Guys. Tom's life changes when he finds his dead father's copy of the Catcher in the Rye.

High school's a cruel place, but I think I'd rather have my kids in the very hysterically dysfunctional Hillmont High School of King Dork than Miss Jean Brodie's Marcia Blaine School.

Earlier this year, I read The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, and all the while, Dame Maggie Smith's perfectly precise and prissy voice kept ringing in my head: "I am truly in my prime." It actually is a chilling, disturbing book, all the more so because Miss Brodie's girls - her chosen set - were 10 years old when she first taught them and began to mold them. This was Scotland between the two world wars, and, unsettled as I was at the precocity of these 10 year-old girls, I was relieved that my own 10 year-old had shown little of that same worldliness.

As for me, I am certainly glad I read the book whilst in my prime. I wouldn't have appreciated the complexities and moral ambiguities of Muriel Spark's characters otherwise.

Self-Service

On the drive back from Swaziland, I belatedly realized that there were at least two books set in Swaziland - Richard E Grant's Wah-Wah Diaries (based on the movie), and, of course, King Solomon's Mines by H. Rider Haggard. We'd driven past a pub called Quatermain, which reminded me of Allan Quatermain, which reminded me of the movie King Solomon's Mines...

After we'd crossed the Swazi border post of Ngwenya, we went into the SA border post, Oshoek - greyer and grubbier than Ngwenya. Luckily, we got to the Immigration counter before the lunchtime travellers arrived. A big black woman (BBW) regarded me across the glass partition.

BBW: Where is your permit?

Me: It's in my other passport, which has expired. Here. (I hand over the passport. My visa's linked to a retired person's permit.)

BBW: Are you retired?

Me: (smiling) Do I look retired? No, it's from the spouse - the soon-to-be-ex spouse.

BBW: Why, you getting a divorce?

Me: Yup, for the last three years?

BBW: Why you want to get divorce? It's better to stay with him. Hard to find a man, just stay with him.

Me: (silently: Ok, you're an immigration officer, not a marriage counsellor. And there's a queue growing right behind me. Trust me, you don't want to hear my saga) Men aren't necessary.

BBW: (makes a gesture with her hand) Eesh, how can you say that? Where you going to get this?

Me: (thinking she means money) I work.

BBW: (making gesture again) No, what about this? Where you get this?

Me: (realizing she's made a fist with her thumb protruding between her index and middle fingers) Oh my god! (now mortified at having provided free entertainment to a growing audience) Well, life is like a gas station. Sometimes you have to go for self-service.

BBW: (clearly not impressed) Hmmmm! Is not enough.

Now my friend, stunning, dusky, dewy and exotic - very much the epitome of morena Filipina beauty - let's call her MFB - is waiting with increasing yet good-natured impatience behind me with her kids and maid.

MFB: No one has to stay in a bad marriage.

BBW: Aieeee, but you still need a man. For this (again the rather crude fist)

MFB: In our country men don't beat women!

Me: Yeah, in our country the women beat the men!

BBW laughs and lets us all go.

In the meantime, MFB's maid has fainted on the concrete floor.

By the way, I have no clue how self-service works at the gas station. And that's NOT a metaphor.

You Go Girl

Doris Lessing is absolutely right. To be a writer, one has to necessarily be a reader.

... I was brought up in what was virtually a mud hut, thatched. This kind of house has been built always, everywhere where there are reeds or grass, suitable mud, poles for walls - Saxon England, for example. The one I was brought up in had four rooms, one beside another, and it was full of books. Not only did my parents take books from England to Africa, but my mother ordered books by post from England for her children. Books arrived in great brown paper parcels, and they were the joy of my young life. A mud hut, but full of books.

Even today I get letters from people living in a village that might not have electricity or running water, just like our family in our elongated mud hut. "I shall be a writer too," they say, "because I've the same kind of house you were in."

But here is the difficulty. Writing, writers, do not come out of houses without books.

Here is her acceptance speech as reprinted in full by the Guardian.

Last Friday, I attended my first shabbas. Bar three, everyone around the table was, naturally, Jewish. Now the JAP stereotype exists in Hijack City, and the breed is known as the kugel - exemplified by materialistic women with shopping on their minds, preferably for shoes, clothes and jewellery. The male counterpart would, as the stereotype goes, be obsessed with making money and showing that he's making money.

However, at last Friday's shabbas, after the obligatory exchange of horror stories - who got shot/robbed/hijacked/raped/all of the above - in Hijack City this week - the discussion turned to books. I was impressed by the passion the younger guests evinced for reading. There was this 21-year old guy who was around 100 pages into Shantaram, and he simply couldn't bear to put the book down, even if he had some 800 pages to go. He was just so enamoured of the prose, and the story itself - it was really quite heartwarming to see in these kids what Lessing called a hunger for books.

As Lessing said, she was raised in a mud hut whose walls were lined with books. While the hut of my childhood in les tropiques was of the concrete variety, it was similarly lined with books - my mother, in particular, read widely, from cheesy romances and breezy bestsellers to political history and alternative spirituality. By the time I was in third grade I knew all about "psychic phenomena" and "ESP", courtesy of my mother's brief interest in the paranormal - and what a nauseating little show-off I was in school about my newly-acquired esoteric knowledge. When my mother began to dabble in photography, I, too, began to discover the the marvelously focused worlds of Henri Cartier-Bresson, Alfred Steiglitz, Ernst Haas, Richard Avedon and the like - all through the beautiful books she brought home.

My own children adore books, and like me, could spend several blissful hours in a bookstore. My little one knows who built the pyramids, thanks to a lovely book she chose a few years ago. That one book seems to have awakened an abiding interest in Egypt and antiquities. My older daughter scans the books bursting out of the shelves at home and already the more memorable titles stand out as invitations to be read. Last night she asked me if Gods Behaving Badly was appropriate reading for her age. If not for the scenes of by-now-banal carnality between Aphrodite and Apollo - they have been copulating for some millenia now, remember - I might have said yes. I said no to Music and Silence, too, which read like the (very exquisitely wrought) lamentations of poor King Christian IV of Denmark.

What about Sunrise with Sea Monster? she asked. I've had Neil Jordan's book for a while but hadn't gotten around to reading it. Maybe it's time I did.

Road Trip

All I know about Swaziland is that the country is ruled by a king who marries a new wife every year. Or something like that. There must be a dedicated automated phone service in Swaziland just for his divorces:

"Welcome to the Divorce Express Service.
Please select service.
Press 1 if you are seeking a divorce for the first time.
Press 2 if this is not your first divorce.
Press 3 if you are the king. Your divorce is granted. No explanation necessary.
However, please select service for your most recent ex-wife.
Press 1 to throw her in prison.
Press 2 to exile her to another country.
Press 3 to exchange her for her younger sister.

The King's you-must-marry-me-and-be-my-number-(insert number here)-bride face, via BBC.

Just kidding.

Anyway... Swaziland is tiny so a road trip around the country will probably take 30 minutes. Which leaves a lot of time to catch up on some reading.

Books I'm taking with me:

The Almost Moon by Alice Sebold
Skinner's Drift by Lisa Fugard
Amazing Disgrace by James Hamilton-Paterson

Not sure which one I'll start with, but so far I'm feeling the pull of the ghost of Manila, James Hamilton-Patterson. Amazing Disgrace sounds hilariously absurd. My friend Trish, a newspaper editor and book reviewer who recommended the book, was telling me about a scene where the main character is visiting this famous conductor whose memoirs he wants to ghostwrite. At one point, apparently, he excuses himself from the dinner table and mistakes a cupboard for the toilet... It reminded me of that scene in William Boyd's Stars and Bars, where the guy from the auction house makes faces at the daughter of a prospective client, thinking she's blind because she's always wearing dark glasses, but it turns out she's not.

I love absurd. I'm from flipland, as Ninfa calls it. It's the original Absurdistan.