Two Capitals

Something similar about where I live in Harrisburg and where I stayed in Phoenix last month is that an interstate is only 1/4 mile away from either spot. They snake all around Harrisburg, making it necessary to get on the interstate just to go to the grocery store. I’m not used to highways being such a major feature of cities.

A big difference in these automobile-filled urban centers, though, is that Phoenix drivers pay attention to bicyclists. Moreover, if there’s not room on the road, the sidewalks are a reasonable option for biking. Not so in bankrupt Harrisburg, where broken glass bedazzles the cracked and crumbling sidewalks.

Interstate 10, Phoenix Arizona. January 2012

Friday 5: Beverly Cleary Tribute

When I had short hair as a child I liked to imagine it was a “pixie haircut” like Ramona Quimby. Did you love Ramona and her friends as a young reader? Do you remember that they lived in Portland, Oregon, which was also the home of her creator, Beverly Cleary?

I didn’t remember that until my sister moved to Portland a few years ago. The classic image of Ramona in rain boots makes sense given what I now know about Northwestern weather! I visited my sister last week and found several signs of Portland’s Beverly Cleary pride.

Documenting Re-Adjustment

Here’s another unfinished post that I began last year, just after returning from India…

(February 2011) A week ago I began a 24-hours journey that took me 8055.788 miles from my apartment in Abids, Hyderabad to my friend Emily’s apartment in Brooklyn, New York. After one domestic flight, a layover in Delhi, a 15-hour flight, and several choice Bollywood flicks, I scribbled the following words:

The plane is descending toward the thousands of New York City lights. And just like that a year abroad is over. Palestine is so distant.

Arriving at JFK to Emily’s greetings brought me full circle in a way, since she was the last person I saw before a plane took me from the same airport to Tel Aviv a year ago.

The fifteen hours in the air between India and the U.S. didn’t seem as long or treacherous as I expected. After all, I’ve spent that length of time on trains within India! And the grand cultural differences haven’t been as striking as they should be—but it’s probably just easier to not really absorb all that while I focus on minor things, like how I keep reaching for a non-existent fire starter when lighting Emily’s gas stove, or how it feels strange to pick up food with my left hand.

For readers who have spent long periods outside the U.S. and returned, the notes in this post will probably sound familiar. For readers who haven’t, this is what it’s like.

Where were you born?

I was born in the house that my parents still live in. For most of modern history, that was normal, but not in the U.S. in the 1980′s when I arrived. Today, home births make up only 1 percent of all births in the U.S., though the CDC reports that the number is increasing.

Do you know the story of your birth? Where was it? How long was it? Who else was there? How was it similar to or different from your siblings’ births?

The second installment of Birth Notes–the column that my friend  Miriam and I are writing for Canonball–came out this week. In this post, Miriam shares some tricks doulas use to bring the focus to women (as opposed to machines) during labor! Read it here.

January BAND: Don’t let your resolutions be fictions

Bloggers’ Alliance of Nonfiction Devotees is a monthly discussion among “advocates of nonfiction as a non-chore.” This month, Joy of Joy’s Book Blog asks, “What books have you used or are you using to support a goal, resolution, or project?”

I like this question because some people responded with books that help them fulfill their reading resolutions, while other folks shared books that help them accomplish non-reading goals, like healthy eating or learning web design.

I already noted that my New Year’s resolution is to read the Qu’ran so that I understand the religion off many of my friends around the world. I have a few other goals that reading nonfiction will support.

1. One of the many worlds I inhabit is a politicized one focused on organizing and movement-building. As an anthropologist and journalist, I’m pretty good at understanding and writing about conditions and power in situations of injustice, but I lack experience with the strategies for changing those situations. To help me better understand community organizing, this winter I plan to read Autobiography of La Causa by Cesar Chavez and The Long Haul by Myles Horton.

2. I’ve felt like I reached a plateau in my photography for a while now, so I’d like to start reading some digital photography books. It’s a broad topic, though, and I haven’t figured out what I want to focus on yet.

What about you? Got any book-related new year’s resolutions or goals that you’ll use books to help you achieve?

Friday 5: Desert Ecology

My inner biology nerd is visiting this week with fun facts about the plant and animal life  in Arizona.

1. The desert is alive. As April of Desert ArtLAB told me in a recent interview, “There’s this idea that the desert’s dead when really the Sonoran Desert is one of the most biodiverse regions of the world.” The Sonoran Desert covers a range of terrains and gets seven inches of rainfall per year. (By contrast, the Sahara only gets 2 inches per year.)

2. Palo Verde was the first tree I noticed in Phoenix. They  caught my eye with bark the color of the Wicked Witch’s flesh. Chlorophyll in the trees’ bark makes them able to drop their leaves during droughts and still undergo photosynthesis!

South Mountain Park, Phoenix. Jan. 2012

3. Prickly pear cactus is also called nopal, which is a food I’ve eaten in quesadillas in Mexico. The plant doesn’t start to bloom until it gets very hot, so the prickly pear fruit isn’t harvested till July in Arizona.

4. The javelina (also called skunk pig!) is a creature that lives in Southwestern U.S. down through Central America and into South America. According to a postcard I bought, “the javelina is an opportunistic feeder, eating flowers, fruits, nuts but mainly enjoys prickly pear cactus as a staple.” Its scientific name is peccary. Sadly, I haven’t seen any yet.

5. The saguaro cactus’ ribbed shape creates shade and channels water down its body to the shallow roots.

South Mountain Park, Phoenix. Jan. 2012

Out of Focus

The children’s section of the Phoenix Art Museum includes an exhibit and hands-on art activities. When I visited a few weeks ago I observed a mom pestering her son to turn around and smile for a picture while he worked on his drawing. “Mom, I’m doing something,” the 6-year-old kept saying to her. She was so busy “capturing” the moment that she disrupted it entirely.

Cameras have some wonderful metaphoric qualities that are part of why I love teaching photography to kids; they can help us learn about perspective, power, and framing (the ability to include or exclude information). But when we focus just on the product, or photos as the “proof” that something happened, we lose sight of the process and miss out on the experiences—of photographing and living.

Communities Rising child playing with a volunteer's sunglasses and camera, Vikravandy, India. January 2011

Photo of the Day: Empty fountains

January 2012

This is Hance Park next to the Phoenix public library. What you can’t see in this photo is the homeless population—youth and adults—who spend their days here. They are hidden by the trees or around the corners. That’s how we prefer to keep it, isn’t? Instead of problems to be addressed, homelessness and poverty are realities to keep outside our field of vision.

I’ve been told that the concrete structures at Hance Park used to be working fountains, but city officials shut them off because of sanitation issues with people bathing in the water.

Had Your Lunch? A Post about Food

This is one of those unfinished posts from a former journey. It contains bits and pieces of what I observed and thought about food culture while living in Hyderabad. I had planned to write further notes, but I never got around to it, so take it as is!

Fruit vendors, Secunderabad 2010

An emic perspective: What I eat

Besides the usual figuring out what everything on the menu is, one of the first food-related habits I took notice of here was the common question, “Had your lunch?” In Palestine someone asking you about whether you’d eaten yet meant that you were about to be served delicious but excessive amounts of food, no matter what your answers. In those first days here, not being fully adjusted to Andhra food yet, I was reluctant to ingest unfamiliar substances just before teaching a class, so I tended to say “yes, had my lunch,” regardless of whether it was true. Now I’ve learned that the question is as hum-drum as “How was your weekend?” My first clue to that fact was when 6-year-olds started asking me whether I’d had my lunch. Obviously they weren’t about to serve me food.

The other question I’m asked with alarming regularity is whether I eat Indian food. I truly don’t understand what the people asking (i.e. everyone I meet) think that I’m eating, since Hyderabad does not have options OTHER than Indian food, but regardless, I was looking forward to eating the food before I arrived. I was warned that Andhra cuisine is particularly spicy, but it hasn’t been quite as troublesome as I expected, perhaps thanks to the existence of yogurt (a.k.a. dahi, curd, raitha).

Idly, which is usually a breakfast food. Hyderabad 2010

An etic perspective: What they eat

So, really, being someone who doesn’t isolate herself in an expatriate bubble, the emic perspective is a bit difficult to separate from the etic perspective: what “they” eat IS what I eat…

Biryani is by far the most beloved dish of Hyderabad. It’s like soft pretzels to Philadelphia or kunafeh to Nablus. Residents take pride in Hyderabadi biryani, and non-residents crave it. I like it on occasion, but usually I’d rather a curry with pulka or roti. Sometimes it’s difficult to find any of those options, though, as restaurants are very regimented in the hours they will serve meals: no lunch before noon or after 2pm, no dinner before 7pm. In the intervening hours, a diner is relegated to chaat or light tiffins. Since most of the foods in those categories are fried I find the word “light” and “snack” to be misleading.

Street food is everywhere in India. This is a wheelbarrow full of nuts, but my favorite were the carts where vendors sold fresh pineapple slices. Secunderabad 2010

Review: Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami

There are some novels that I wish I had read as part of a class. Kafka on the Shore is one of them. I put Haruki Murakami as an author on my fall reading list to uphold a promise to my friend Chandrakala (CK) in Hyderabad. While I lived in India, I tried to read only novels by Indian authors, but having grown up there, CK wasn’t as interested in Arundhati Roy or Anita Desai as I was. She encouraged me to try Murakami, who is a Japanese writer. So finally, in November/December I did.

The relationship between this Japanese book and my memories of India doesn’t stop with CK, though. Several of the feelings this book evoked for me are similar to how I responded to Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie–one of the books I read while in Hyderabad. Both are characterized as magical realism.

Kafka on the Shore has two interrelated plots. The odd chapters focus on Kafka, a 15-year-old boy who runs away from home and winds up working at a small private library. Even chapters revolve around Nakata, an old man who experienced childhood trauma that limited his mental capacity. “Nakata’s not too bright,” he often tells people; yet he also strange/supernatural abilities, like talking to cats and opening “the entrance stone.”

The first similarity between Kafka on the Shore and Midnight’s Children is its sheer density and thus the time it took to read. It’s not that the plot was difficult to follow, but that at the end, I felt that I would need to read it again to catch more of the themes and subtleties. I don’t think I’m alone, since Murakami has said the following:

The key to understanding the novel lies in reading it multiple times. Kafka on the Shore contains several riddles, but there aren’t any solutions provided. Instead several of these riddles combine, and through their interaction the possibility of a solution takes shape. And the form this solution takes will be different for each reader.

The novel’s other significant similarity to Midnight’s Children is that in both novels the author plays with the idea of time and inevitably. Although the relationship between the plot’s events isn’t always totally clear, the fact that the pieces must connect moves the story along. This modality is encapsulated on page 435 of Kafka on the Shore:

Time weighs down on you like an old, ambiguous dream. You keep on moving, trying to slip through it. But even if you go to the ends of the earth, you won’t be able to escape it. Still, you have to go there–to the edge of the world. There’s something you can’t do unless you get there.

In sum, Kafka on the Shore, like Midnight’s Children, is a labyrinth for literature lovers: you can enjoy the basic story and skillful narrative, or you can dive deeper and lose yourself in twists and turns of the author’s mind.