Obama: How do we make sure that we don’t change, even as we protect our people?”
— quoted in The Economist, 26 November 2016
To the Last
January 21, 2017 at 9:55 am (The Economist)
Tags: elections, inspiration, Obama, politics, Saturday
What Self Learned in 2016
December 16, 2016 at 11:48 pm (Conversations, Eavesdropping, Lists, Surprises)
Tags: elections, Fridays, Hillary, Obama
Since self has been laid up with a bug for the last three days, she has plenty of time to ruminate on the year soon ending. And these are her darkest thoughts:
A lot of women (mostly older women) disliked Hillary.
A woman can run for President, she can be the smartest woman in America, and the other candidate can still slam her on her looks. (Thinly veiled: “She just doesn’t look Presidential.” Self recalls that a long time ago, when Desperate Housewives was a hit, The President-Elect pronounced Eva Longoria just “a 7 out of 10.” Thank God he did not go that low this time)
Women are hard on a woman who wears pantsuits all the time.
Self heard this during the latest election season: Melania knows how to dress and Hillary is “ugly.” Post-election: Michelle Obama is an ape in heels.
American animosities that had been frayed open by eight years under an African American man came to tortuous conclusion when a woman ran to succeed him. It was just too much. For most of America. A return to sanity was sorely needed. And that is why we are here now.
Stay tuned.
The Fascination of the Story
November 9, 2012 at 1:35 pm (Books, Memoirs, Recommended)
Tags: Bacolod, Chinese writers, discoveries, Literary Magazines, memoirs, Obama, reading lists, translation
It’s amazing but, in between bouts of family melodrama, self has actually found the time to crack open a few of the literary journals she toted along to Bacolod.
One of these is a very old issue of Manoa: “The Mystified Boat: Postmodern Stories From China.”
Self doesn’t know why, but in addition to the fictional Greg Mortenson memoir Three Cups of Tea, about whether Mortenson really did or did not build xx number of schools for young women in the farthest reaches of Afghanistan and/ or Pakistan, she also had the good luck to bring along fantastic books like the Obama memoir, Dreams From My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (Five Stars!), a book which made her feel truly involved in the Obama win, and the Valerie Trueblood collection Marry or Burn. She also brought along volume 28 of New Writing From Scotland, and this issue of Manoa, which appeared in the positively anti-deluvian period of 2003.
She took along the Manoa issue when she went to the bank to change dollars to pesos. It’s a good thing she did, because she got passed along from one bank officer to another, and the whole process of changing $200 took almost an hour. Self didn’t mind a bit, though, because she was able to finish the first story in Manoa, Ge Fei’s “A Date in Purple Bamboo Park.” She finished the whole story while seated in front of the desk for New Accounts, and she never looked up until she’d read the very last sentence. And that story was simply stunning.
Today, she began the second story, Ma Yuan’s engrossing and deeply moving “The Master.” She hasn’t finished reading the story yet, but here’s a paragraph towards the end:
I’ve saved the solution of the murder of the old man for the end. I recall there was a yellow notebook, and a self-styled writer who tried to lead readers down the wrong road, who was even crazy enough to delve into his friend’s secret for the sake of writing a half-baked detective story. Let’s get rid of that egotist. He won’t appear in what follows. Let’s just go back to where they discover the old man’s body.
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
More On the Subject of Diaspora/ Journey
November 1, 2012 at 6:35 am (Books, Memoirs, Recommended)
Tags: advice, inspirations, memoir, Obama, reading lists
Like a galloping horse sensing the imminence of the finish line, self is racing through the last 50 or so pages of Dreams From My Father. She may even be able to finish reading by tomorrow! And then she will be back to reading fiction. The next book on her reading list is Typhoon, a novel by the Scottish writer Charles Cumming.
p. 388:
“He says that many young men have been lost to . . . the white man’s country. He says his own son is in America and has not come home for many years. Such men are like ghosts, he says. When they die, no one will be there to mourn them. No ancestors will be there to welcome them. So . . . he says it is good that you have returned.”
The old man raised his hand and I shook it gently. As we got up to leave, the old man said something else, and Roy nodded his head before closing the door behind us.
“He says that if you hear of his son,” Roy explained, “you should tell him that he should come home.”
Self is particularly struck by the description of men who do not come home as “ghosts.”
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
Barack’s Journey, Cont.
November 1, 2012 at 3:43 am (Books, Calls, Conversations, Family, Memoirs, Recommended, Surprises)
Tags: Bacolod, Halloween, memoir, memories, Obama
Self called home about an hour ago. She wondered why The Man wasn’t picking up. Suddenly, he got on the line, sounding very harassed: “I can’t skype now,” he said, hurriedly. “I have to hand out candy.”
OMG! Self completely forgot! It is Halloween in the States! Self’s favorite holiday (next to Christmas)! She usually buys pumpkins and sets them on the front steps, and puts lighted witches in the bushes, and strings ghoulish faces across the picture window in the living room.
Last Halloween, a Yeti sprang up from the bushes, and self actually screamed, she was so surprised. Naturally, the kid laughed his head off. But it is all in good fun (For the life of her, she can’t figure out how someone that tall — the kid looked to be about six feet — could crouch behind the bushes without her noticing)
“How many kids have come already?” self asked.
“32,” The Man said.
“You’re going to run out of candy,” self said.
The Man said he thought that would happen.
“You’ve got to turn off the lights when that happens,” self said. A darkened house signals any other trick-or-treaters that it is no use coming to the door; there is no more candy. She was about to say “Hope you don’t get TP’ed,” but decided that it might produce in The Man even more nervousness than he already seemed to be exhibiting.
Self is quite satisfied that The Man has risen to the occasion and done a yeoman’s job of keeping up the Halloween spirit.
Not only that, The Ancient One is still alive.
YAY!
Self decides not to ask about the state of the garden.
The last third of Dreams From My Father, by President Obama (she hopes she can keep referring to him this way, for the next four years) is about a trip Obama took to Kenya, his father’s native land. His observations so closely parallel self’s own, it’s almost eerie. Here’s an excerpt:
It wasn’t simply joy that I felt in each of these moments. Rather, it was a sense that everything I was doing, every touch and breath and word, carried the full weight of my life; that a circle was beginning to close, so that I might finally recognize myself as I was, here, now, in one place. Only once that afternoon would I feel that mood broken, when, on our way back from the market, Auma ran ahead to get her camera, leaving Granny and me alone in the middle of the road. After a long pause, Granny looked at me and smiled. “Halo!” she said. “Muuwa!” I said. Our mutual vocabulary exhausted, we stared ruefully down at the dirt until Auma finally returned. And Granny then turned to Auma and said, in a tone I could understand, that it pained her not to be able to speak to the son of her son.
“Tell her I’d like to learn Luo, but it’s hard to find time in the States,” I said. “Tell her how busy I am.”
“She understands that,” Auma said. “But she also says that a man can never be too busy to know his own people.”
If dear blog readers care to, they can search the archives of this blog for self’s December 2010 and January 2011 postings from Bacolod. You will note that self was reading Jose Saramago’s The Cave, and then Antonio Muñoz Molina’s Sepharad. You will find in those posts almost exactly the same tone of wonder, amazement and gratitude that Obama displays, in the passage above.
She is so moved by Obama’s book, so incredibly moved.
Stay tuned.
More of Barack
October 31, 2012 at 11:27 pm (Books)
Tags: inspirations, memoir, Obama
from pp. 344 – 345: Barack meets with his half-brother, Mark.
“Other things move me. Beethoven’s symphonies. Shakespeare’s sonnets. I know — it’s not what an African is supposed to care about. But who’s to tell me what I should and shouldn’t care about? Understand, I’m not ashamed of being half Kenyan. I just don’t ask myself a lot of questions about what it all means. About who I really am.” He shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe I should. I can acknowledge the possibility that if I looked more carefully at myself, I would . . . ”
For the briefest moment I sensed Mark hesitate, like a rock climber losing his footing. Then, almost immediately, he regained his composure and waved for the check.
“Who knows?” he said. “What’s certain is that I don’t need the stress. Life’s hard enough without all that excess baggage.”
We stood up to leave, and I insisted on paying the bill. Outside we exchanged addresses and promised to write, with a dishonesty that made my heart ache. When I got home, I told Auma how the meeting had gone. She looked away for a moment, then broke out with a short, bitter laugh.
“What’s so funny?”
“I was just thinking about how life is so strange. You know, as soon as the Old Man died, the lawyers contacted all those who might have a claim to the inheritance. Unlike my mum, Ruth has all the documents needed to prove who Mark’s father was. So of all of the Old Man’s kids, Mark’s claim is the only one that is uncontested.
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
The Discovery of Self
October 29, 2012 at 7:07 am (Books, Conversations, Memoirs)
Tags: Bacolod, elections, inspirations, memoir, memories, Mondays, Obama, travel
“You’ll miss the elections,” The Man told her.
Yeah, she knows. She knows! She would have given anything to be able to cast her vote for Obama. Now she can only pray.
The only other time she missed the election was in 2004. She was a visiting writer in Miami University in Ohio. The campus was alive with trees in autumn splendor. Football games were in full swing.
Self would return from teaching her class and watch The Daily Show. The night of the elections, she watched in stupefaction as Jon Stewart called state after state for Bush. In the end, there were only two little smears of blue on the whole map of the United States. They enclosed the red heart of American states like two parentheses: one on the East Coast, one on the West. There might have been little blobs of blue here and there, self can’t be sure. “If it makes you feel any better,” one of her students told her the next day, “it was close.”
Self is still enthralled by the Obama book. She’s just begun Part III (It’s taken her weeks to get here). Obama, on his way to visit Kenya, his father’s native land, is “a Westerner not entirely at home in the West, an African on his way to a land full of strangers.” Self feels she and Obama have similar journeys.
On the way to Kenya, he stops over in Europe. All through his European sojourn, he is “edgy, defensive, hesitant with strangers.” He writes:
I hadn’t planned it that way. I had thought of the layover there as nothing more than a whimsical detour, an opportunity to visit places I had never been before. For three weeks I had traveled alone, down one side of the continent and up the other, by bus and by train mostly, a guidebook in hand. I took tea by the Thames and watched children chase each other through the chestnut groves of Luxembourg Garden. I crossed the Plaza Mejor at high noon, with its De Chirico shadows and sparrows swirling across cobalt skies; and watched night fall over the Palatine, waiting for the first stars to appear, listening to the wind and its whispers of mortality.
And by the end of that first week or so, I realized that I made a mistake. It wasn’t that Europe wasn’t beautiful; everything was just as I’d imagined it. It just wasn’t mine. I felt as if I were living out someone else’s romance; the incompleteness of my own history stood between me and the sites I saw like a hard pane of glass. I began to suspect that my European stop was just one more means of delay; one more attempt to avoid coming to terms with the Old Man. Stripped of language, stripped of work and routine — stripped even of the racial obsessions to which I’d become so accustomed and which I had taken (perversely) as a sign of my own maturation — I had been forced to look inside myself and had found only a great emptiness there.
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
