On Poetry and Culture Shock

Let’s see. The news today said that my town suffers the greatest amount of acts of juvenile crime per inhabitant in all of Spain, and it is second, only after Barcelona, in plain absolute juvenile crime figures. We are taking here about teens who have all basic needs covered; they beat up random strangers, and rob from supermarkets, cars and individuals. Sometimes they smash car’s windows, too. What they try to get from what they steal is certain expensive clothes from very specific brands, ditto cellphones, and "recreational" drugs (this is not a crime problem caused by drug addiction). Essentially, these boys and girls are bored.

In France, groups of about the same age are setting cars on fire, the easiest to explain reason being that they are fed up with being discriminated against. Rage accumulates until it explodes, like a pressure cooker.

And as usual, but this is no news, another 13 year-old has been murdered in Palestine because he was carrying a toy gun and some soldiers it was a real gun. Just another victim of a war that involves children from the day before they are born, only this time it has made the news with a name and a photo.

Days like these I wonder what’s the use of poetry, or of being in training to become a teacher, or of any of the things I like.

I love birds,  especially urban ones.

This entry is dedicated to Luc , for cheering me up.

Birds for all seasons

Spring
Hush, it’s a concert:
The blackbird will sing
For those who don’t know his name!

Summer
Swallows flying high.
Summer trickles down my back.
No one cools me down.

Autumn
Hundreds of sparrows!
Dead ashes floating
in the evening’s burning sky.

Winter
Snow melts in the air.
Under her coat, she shivers.
Seagulls around us.

Pájaros para las cuatro estaciones.

Primavera
Sshh, es un concierto:
¡El mirlo va a cantar
para todos los que no saben su nombre!

Verano
Las golondrinas vuelan alto.
El verano me gotea espalda abajo.
Nadie me relaja.

Otoño
¡Cientos de golondrinas!
Cenizas muertas que flotan
En el cielo en llamas de la tarde.

Invierno
La nieve se funde en el aire.
Bajo su abrigo, ella tirita.
Gaviotas a nuestro alrededor.

My beloved Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett once co-wrote a novel, Good Omens, in which the Four Horsemen of Doomsday were:

A young, very attractive war reporter.

Your average skeleton in a cloak. 

A young boy who seemed to atract disaster (Pollution took over when Pestilence had given up after the discovery of antibiotics)

A nouvelle cuisine chef and inventor of fad diets.

Hunger in this modern world is a very strange thing.  Many, many people die of hunger. Some people are even born hungry because a human body and a foetus inside it can survive a hungry pregnancy. Can you believe it? I don't, even though I am told it is true. Other people are not exactly hungry: they have enough amount of food to eat but it doesn't have enough iron (no meat, not enough beans), or enough protein (no meat, eggs, fish, or dairy; not enough beans), or enough vitamins (not enough of anything except rice, bread or potatoes). Hunger makes people tired, sick, weak, less resistant to disease, unable to concentrate, and in the case of children, it prevents mental and physical growth.

Other people curiously go willingly hungry and pay money for others to find creative ways of making them stay hungry. The last I have heard of this is something you can buy in drugstores; in Spain it is sold in pharmacies. So I go to the local pharmacy with my prescriptions and I see that they are selling "fit strips" (the name is in English!). This is the idea : you pay 15 euros and you get 72 thin strips of orange fiber, wrapped in loads of shiny plastic. You are told to stick one or two on yout tongue, allow to dissolve, drink a glass of water so that the fiber swells up in your stomach, repeat about 8 times a day. Which means a 15 euro packet will last for a week or so.

 Isn't it shocking that I live in a culture that thinks it is perfectly fine to pay 15 euros for 36 small portions of fiber?  What does it take for someone to invent un-food? And what sort of person does it take to buy it? I can't imagine someone with 15 euros in their hands and abso-fucking-lutely noting better to do with it than buying themselves... hunger.

Wow, and I didn't even make a feminist rant (I will leave that to someone who has her knickers in a knot).

This is what T S Eliot has to say about rivers. The first two lines made me buy the whole book

I do not know much about rivers; but I think that the river
is a strong brown god –sullen, untamed and intractable,
Patient to some degree, at first recognised as a frontier;
Useful, untrustworthy, as a conveyor of commerce;
Then only a problem confronting the builder of bridges.

No sé mucho sobre ríos; pero creo que el río
es un dios fuerte, marrón -taciturno, indomable,
paciente hasta cierto punto, descubierto primero como frontera;
útil, traicionero, cuando facilita el comercio;
y después, sólo el problema al que se enfrenta el constructor de un puente.

 

En la pantalla,
tu piel de pixels,
inalcanzable.

On the screen,
Your skin, made of pixels,
out of my reach.

I'm feeling more and more comfortable about composing haiku in Spanish, even though up to a couple years ago I thought that it was impossible to twist my native language into haiku shape.  

To the recent rumours news that the US are keeping secret prisons in Europe, where prisoners are held indefinitely and without charges, are are probably being tortured, in violation of international law and human decency, I can start by giving you something written by the Uruguayan poet Mario Benedetti.

Un torturador no se redime suicidándose. Pero algo es algo.

Tortures will not obtain redemption if they kill themselves. Something's better than nothing, though.

Sigh.

This happens every once in a while, although thankfully not as often as it used to. The other day I took my jewelry out and I showed it to a number of people who of course loved it and bought tons of it. Except one woman, who held an earring or two close to her ear and said "I like them, but I can’t wear dangling earrings. They make me look gypsy". Looks in horror at my portable mirror, makes a half-hearted tasteless joke about gypsy stereotypes (flamenco singers, this time), tries another earring that lightens up her sad sallow skin, gives up.

I have never understood these women. You don’t like dangling earrings, you think they don’t look good on you, fair enough. But this stupid, racist, "looking gypsy" nonsense, I don’t get it. What the hell is wrong in "looking gypsy"? And the funniest thing, real gypsy women don’t wear colourful, original, inexpensive dangling earrings. They wear very conservative designs, in gold.

There is a whole bunch of stuff that some Spanish women won’t wear or do for fear of gypsiness. I wonder if other cultures have similar arbitrary, racist fashion rules.

This haiku is dedicated to my friend Suzanne Guthrie. The Spanish version is the original, and the English one the translation.

Café fuerte.
Pies en alto.
Suplemento dominical.

Strong coffee.
Putting feet up.
Sunday papers.

Some words don’t translate well at all from English to Spanish: 

• Cute: Argh! “He’s not cute, he’s attractive”. “It’s a cute movie”. “You don’t want to look cute, you want to look pretty”. How do I translate “beautiful in the way that babies and Orlando Bloom are, soft, a girly kind of beauty” without saying “lindo”?
  
• Cheesy and tacky: In Spanish both words are translated as “hortera” and sometimes as “cursi” (rough equivalent of “cutesy”). I can translate the words, but I cannot translate in what way they mean different things.
  
• Afterglow is sunset light, once the sun is completely under the horizon: the glow after sunset. That’s what the dictionary says. But the first time I heard that word, it was used to mean the quiet but intense pleasure after something good has already finished. Something sensual. Find me a convincing translation and you’ll have my eternal gratitude (regusto no me sirve).
  
• Gender, especially Gender Studies. It isn’t considered completely correct to use the word “género” to mean “the social construction of sex”. I feel comfortable doing the shift Gender Studies/Estudios de Género, but the problem is that no one understands me when I say I’m working on Estudios de Género and what I do is definitely not a study of sexuality. So I know what I mean, but hardly anyone else does. Besides, most people who know the term identify it with Women’s Studies or with Feminist Theory, and that’s not the whole story.
  
• Queer or queerness: one of these days Spanish will have one short descriptive word, not an insult, to mean “not heterosexual, including those people who are not even sure of their orientation”.
  
• Soft. Surprised to find such a common word? Spanish has a word for “pliable, not hard” (blando) and another one for “smooth, not rough” (suave). Poetry in English sometimes benefits from the ambiguity of the double meaning and I can’t translate that.
  
• I don’t like to generalise, but it says a lot about the Spanish tendency to exaggerate that we don’t have a word, not even a phrase, to say “understatement”. 

Quick background information for foreign readers: Hundred of Africans try to come illegally to Spain everyday, sometimes en route to Northern Europe, sometimes to stay here. Sometimes on wee boats across the Gibraltar Strait, sometimes trying to cross on foot the Melilla border (Melilla is a Spanish town in Northern Africa, right next to Morocco). The ones that come on boats often die. No matter what route they use, they are very often caught and sent back. Nevertheless, I know that my vegetables have been picked by someone who wasn’t born here, and every traffic light in town has a black man trying to sell me tissues.

What amazes me is that the average Spaniard is passively sympathetic of Subsaharians (that is the fashionable, politically correct, term for black Africans), but hostile as can be of Moroccans, no matter if immigrants or not. Why is it? I have a few theories.

• The average black guy by a traffic light is gorgeous. Seriously. Someone please go and make movie stars of the whole lot of them. Moroccan men, on the other hand, don’t normally fit into Spanish conventions of male beauty.
  
• Everyone knows Moroccans are Muslim, and Spaniards don’t like that (and this was so even pre-Al Qaeda). As a culture, we have plenty of stereotypes about Muslims, but very few about subsaharians. Hardly anyone knows that many subsaharians are Muslim too. Ironically, much of it is related to our myths of Muslim treatment of women; who said life is a bed of roses for women in subsaharian cultures?
  
• Get the two previous together: it is very easy to romanticise a gorgeous, exotic-looking person if you don’t know anything at all about their culture.
• In the Spanish imagination, Morocco is not desperately poor, and Southern Africa is that distant place in the news where wars and famine happen.
  
  In short: It is so easy to feel bad about people who are very, very far away, and so hard to do something constructive for people next to you!

This blog started the day after Thanksgiving, 2004. Thanksgiving is the last Thursday in November, so I'd rather measure the year according to that date, not to a calendar date. Easier to remember.

 I wonder if other cultures, apart from the United States, have a day that consists on thanking the forces of the Universe for the good things of the last year. I know there is nothing of the sort in Europe, which is a shame. I enjoyed my one American thanksgiving very much, and any excuse is good for having a huge family meal. But then again, I'm conveniently skipping the fact that Thanksgiving is a holiday that sits on the Native American genocide. Native Americans don't have a lot to be thankful for.

Anyway. Thanks very much for coming here. Now let's go back to the poetry.

No, I don’t mean I dislike the way he writes. On the contrary, I like it very much. I hate William Gibson with corrosive envy. Something positive out of it is that corrosive envy is a motivation to write more poems.

The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.

El cielo sobre el puerto era del color de la televisión, encendida en un canal sin sintonizar.

This sentence is the beginning of his novel Neuromancer. The expressivity! The mood-setting! The conciseness! The imagination! I hope I like the rest of the novel half as much.

Trainspotting , the movie, is an excellent example of the theory that “tragedy is a slap on the face; comedy is a slap on someone else’s face”. It is a lot easier to make comedy about whatever is different from you, which means, in the case of Trainspotting, that if you have seen the effects of drugs from too up close, if you cannot see them with detachment, you might like Trainspotting, but you will not see it as a comedy. The first time I saw it, about nine years ago, the most salient thing to me was the black, weird humour. Now I still love it, but the things I really appreciate have nothing to do with the plot; they are formal aspects,  such as the cinematography and the editing. I also enjoy precisely what makes the movie closer to me, what I can relate to (and that goes well beyond comedy): the accents, and the places that I know.

By the way, the film was shot on location in several different Scottish towns, which means that in the now classic “Lust for Life”, Renton-chased-by-the-police scene, he runs away in Edinburgh, crosses the street in front of the Glasgow Museum of Modern Art, and is caught by the police back in Edinburgh. That’s quite a long distance to run.

Trainspotting the book has a lot less comedy elements than the movie, and it is very hard to read because most of it is not in English, but in Edinburgh Scots. If you have never heard Scots or at least the Edinburgh accent, I don’t think you can understand the book at all. The Spanish translation is absolutely brilliant: it is written in a version of slang that is contemporary enough to sound very true, but it doesn’t try to reproduce the sounds of the vernacular: the spelling is always the standard. That is the best way of avoiding to turn Edinburgh into any specific Spanish town.

I got the book in Spanish one Christmas. When I got to the final page I started all over again. When I finished it a second time, I reread a handful of the best sections. Then I lent it, and my friend did more or less the same. Then I lent it a second time and I lost it (that’s what happens when you lend books). That was about seven years ago. Ever since then, once in a while I went to a bookshop with materials in English and I opened Trainspotting at random, to see if I understood anything. Nae, ah couldnae. But after a few years, I did, and I didn’t even remember where the difficulties had been before: that’s simply because now, after having travelled four times to Scotland (two holidays, one study, one work), the version of English I hear in my head is Scottish English. Not slang, as in the book, but it is definitely Scottish.

So that you can see what I am talking about, here you have the beginning of the novel. The translation’s mine; the published one is really good, but as I’ve said, I don’t have it with me any more.

The sweat wis lashing oafay Sick Boy; he wis trembling. Ah wis jist sitting thair, focusing oan the telly, tryin no tae notice the cunt. He wis bringing me doon. Ah tried tae keep ma attention oan the Jean-Claude Van Damme video.

Le chorreaba el sudor a Sick Boy, y estaba temblando. Yo estaba sentado sin hacer nada, viendo la tele, intentando pasar del hijoputa. Me ponía malo. Procuré concentrarme en el vídeo de Jean-Claude Van Damme.

After five years or so of travelling like my life depended on it, and reading like the future of humankind depended on it,I am convinced that a society is more advanced and more civilised the better it treats its women. Give me maternity leaves, free kindergarten (that’s day care if you’re reading this in the States), legal contraception, full civil rights, maybe even a woman president, and I will start to trust that your country has left the Dark Ages.

The recent news say that the UK is a less advanced country that I though it was. Courtesy of I Blame the Patriarchy , heartbreaking news. A third of Britons believe a flirty woman is at least partly responsible for being raped.

The article does not mention these other opinions:

• 34% of Britons do not think that a man who behaves in a flirtatious way deserves being battered by a woman who feels offended or threatened.
  
• 26% of Britons do not think that a child is partially or totally responsible for being molested if he or she is wearing especially cute clothes that trigger the fantasies of pederasts.
• 22% of Britons do not think that promiscuous straight men would be partially or totally responsible of being raped by a gay man.
  
• 8% of Britons do not think that men are totally responsible in the case above.
• 30% of Britons do not think that a drunk straight man is partially responsible if he is raped (I’m assuming a male rapist again)
• 37% of Britons do not think that a man is partially responsible of being assaulted if he fails to clearly say "no" to his assaulter.
  

Edited to add: I wonder how the people who do not express these opinions would feel if they were told that there were gangs telling white middle-class British boys that they could find excellent jobs in an exotic country, to which they were taken and forced to be sexual slaves.

No poetry today. Here you have a fairy tale. Warning: it is from the Bluebeard, child-eating giants, bloody variety of fairy tales.

Once upon a time there was a king who had three daughters, two bad, one (the youngest) good. One day, the King said to his daughters, “I’m old and tired. I have divided the kingdom in three parts and each one of you will have her portion. I will keep a thousand men as my court and I will spend four months a year with each one of you. But first, tell me: How much do you love me?”

The oldest said, “More than my life”.

The middle one said, “More than words can express”

And the youngest one said, “As much as it is right and proper”.

The king went into a rage at tis lack of exaggeration, and he banished his youngest daughter from his castle, which made her very sad, but she was so good and beautiful that the prince in the land at her father’s borders married her, even without any dowry. The King then divided his kingdom in half, between his two remaining daughters, and said he and his thousand men would spend half the year with each one.

The king had a counsellor who was fired after defending the good daughter; this man had two sons, one good from his wife, one bad from is lover. He decided that now that he had more spare time, he would dedicate it to his older, illegitimate son, and find a way of giving him part of his inheritance. But on seeing his castle and his luxuries, the Bad Son decided to take everything and take it soon. So, he faked a letter from the Good Son and the Counsellor was made to believe that his Good Son planned to kill him. And that was how the Good Son had to run away from his house, and pretend he was Poor Tom, a mad beggar.

As soon as the king went to live with his eldest daughter, she banned the thousand men from her castle. The King was furious, but nothing he said affected her. Finally, he said he would go and live with the middle daughter. But when he arrived, she told him to go back to the eldest until his appointed time, six months later. “My sister was right. You don’t need a thousand knights, not a hundred, not one, if you have my sister’s servants to take care of you. Go back to her and apologise”

“Apologise to my own daughter? I’d sooner die of cold in that storm”

“Suit yourself”, said the middle daughter.

The King went out in the rain and was found by Poor Tom, who gave him shelter in a hut. Meanwhile, the two bad sisters realised that the thousand knights might be a danger to them and decided the needed his father back to keep him controlled. They went to the counsellor’s castle, to see if he knew anything, and were received by the Bad Son. The two women immediately desired him. They told him their plans and he said that the counsellor was too loyal to the King, so they would probably need to torture him. The Bad Son went into another room while the daughters tied the old man to a chair. When he said he didn’t know where the King was, each one of the women pulled out one of his eyes. They kicked him out of his house and they told the Bad Son that he was the man of the castle now, although they would like to have him in their army in case there was a war. The Bad Son was delighted.

Poor Tom found his father the counsellor, now blind, who didn’t recognise his son’s voice and asked him to lead him to a cliff so that he could kill himself. The Good Son led his not towards a cliff, but towards the borders of the country. The Good Daughter had found out how her sisters were treating her father, and since her husband the foreign prince loved her so much, she easily convinced him to invade her country to avenge the old King. The first battle of the war was won by the daughters, who had both become lovers of the Bad Son. He made prisoners of both the King and his daughter. The King realised what a stupid fool he had been, and considered himself lucky to be alive and with the one person that had remained true to him, his youngest daughter. But the Bad Son ordered a spy to kill them both when they were in prison.

When the eldest daughter knew that her sister was her rival, she poisoned her. Poor Tom had stayed away from the battle, taking care of his father, but when he saw his half brother, he revealed his identity and challenged the Bad Son in a duel. The Good Son won, and killed his brother. On seeing that, the eldest sister killed himself by smashing her head against a rock. Grief and exhaustion were too much for the old counsellor, who died while his sons fought. The Spy tried to fake the Daughter’s suicide; the King just saw him escape the room, and did not have time to save her. He tried desperately to bring her back to life, not believing for one moment she was truly dead. Death by sorrow found him too, surprised, denying it, unprepared.

And only Poor Tom was left alive, sad castaway in the ruins of a destroyed nation.

************************************* 

This cheery story is the plot of King Lear (I have changed a few details), maybe my favourite Shakespearian tragedy.