Africa Trip Part 6 – back in Nairobi

We spent our last night in Africa in Nairobi at the same hotel where we started – the Fairmont Norfolk. It was nice to get back into civilization again with a working wifi system, a TV, and a lovely place to have dinner. We retrieved our luggage containing our city clothes that we had stored there, and immediately sent a big load to be washed.

The highlight of our stay in Nairobi, and probably one of the main highlights of our whole African trip, was meeting a young Nairobi man, Pascal, for breakfast the next morning. I had heard about him through my friend and writing instructor, Ellen Bass, and our tour director, Anastasia’s Africa, helped arrange the meeting.

My husband Bob and I spent an hour with him talking about the Kenyan orphan situation – out of 30 million people in Kenya, 1.3 million are orphans caused by HIV/AIDS and cancer deaths of the parents – the economy, the Chinese poaching, and the corruption in the Kenyan government. After breakfast we walked into Nairobi’s already crowded and hot business district near the hotel as the shops were just beginning to open.

Pascal and I also exchanged information about our writing lives. He’s been writing since boyhood, and he recently had some short stories and poems published. One won a prize, which appears below. Because of his brother’s suicide death ten years ago he has been writing to heal – a subject near and dear to my heart. It always amazes me that no matter where I go or whom I speak with, I find they have or know someone who has suffered a similar loss as mine. Now I’m happy to say Pascal and I are sharing our writing and continuing our conversation through email.

Pascal is the CEO of G.R.A.C.E. Grassroots Alliance for Community Education., a not-for-profit organization that provides programs in early childhood development, orphans and vulnerable children (OVC) education sponsorship, agricultural development at its ten-acre farm in the Nanyuki district in the Mt. Kenya region, legal and social justice, and technical and financial assistance to their grassroots partners. When I first found out about this organization through Ellen about a year ago, I gave a little donation. Please join me. Here are some its donor partners in the United States.

Here is Pascal’s award winning poem:

The Flags are tattered

by Pascal Masila Mailu

Winner of 2011 Hay Festival poetry contest

The flags are tattered and stained, brethren

From Cairo to Jo'burg, Tunis to Addis.

Should we take a break from the tweeted riots

To revisit the blurred transition from OAU to AU...

From Gaddafi to the rebels......or is it NATO?

The flags are in tatters, mother

For in SA, they openly discuss the price

of old Madiba's casket

While the old icon sadly smiles

Weighed down by the impossible food and fuel prices.

And the wind…O what happened to the wind?

The powerful, revolutionary wind of change

That blew across the then green continent

in the rolling 60's and coup-infested 70s and 80s?

Have we finally replaced the Kalashnikov

with facebook?

The AK 47 with twitter?

The flags are tattered, elders

For today's youth swim in alien terminologies

coated with violence – pre and post election

tribal and clan-based

Sometimes hanging out or in

Eternally glued to giant screens,

Dying of state-induced idleness and self pity.....

The flags are tattered, children

for I anxiously await my exit - surrounded by sinking nations

Torn apart by negative ethnicity, oil-coated imperialism,

hollow political pledges and dusty manifestos

While slums mushroom in every open space....

Brother – what happened to the land we fought for?

Who stole our land and future

Leaving us cramped in Kibera, Soweto, Kawempe and Kechene?

Let’s take time brethren

To slowly mend the flags in between disputed elections

And re-inject authenticity to the national anthems

Lest the continent implodes from internal bleeding

In her mid fifties

Note we're toasting
with water and tea

Soon after our meeting with Pascal, our tour company arrived with two vans to take us to the airport. One to carry our luggage and the other to carry the four of us. While our travel mates went directly to Paris, Bob and I stopped for about twenty-four hours in Dubai before going  on to Paris for the last four days of our trip. What we all call the nadir of our trip was waiting for our flights out of Nairobi in the so-called business class lounge – hot, uncomfortable tents with porta-potties next door. It looked like the Nairobi airport still had a way to go to recover from its recent fire.

But I don’t want to end my tale of our African trip on a sour note. Again, I have to say it was a trip of a lifetime. I recommend it to everyone whether adventuresome or not. The people, animals, birds, and landscapes are breathtaking. One of these days I’m going to put out a picture book that will show you what I mean.

Introducing Chanel Brenner, poet extraordinaire

I met Chanel last May at a poetry workshop led by Richard Jones. I was immediately taken by the poem she wrote during the workshop and that we have something in common - we each have lost a son. Chanel's grief for six and a half-year-old Riley who died from the rare disease Arteriovenous malformations (AVM)* is still new. And her beautiful poetry shares that grief with her readers. Here is Chanel's story, reminiscent of friends of mine who left after my son died.

My Friend From Another Life

            She sits across from me, wearing a purple sundress, her dark hair relaxed around her face.

“You look really great,” she says, her voice thick with surprise, her eyes approving as they scan me from head to coral painted toenails. It’s not what she’s said, but what she’s left out, “compared to a year ago,” the last time we had lunch together at this restaurant, shortly after Riley died.

She scooted away after that, one email at a time. First, “If you ever need to talk, call me,” then radio silence for two months. Then lunch plans initiated by me and canceled by her. One after another, with each excuse making less sense.  Then, an email from me asking how she was doing, because I hadn’t seen her in so long. “I’ve never been happier. My life has never been better,” she replied. I couldn’t help filling in the blanks… since your son died and you are not in my life. Then, the kicker email. The one where she asked if I was lighter these days. I couldn’t respond. How could I tell her that I didn’t want to be lighter? That without the weight of grief, I’d be nothing, and so would Riley—how could I say I wear my dead son proudly like a pregnant belly? I want to ask her if she’d be lighter without her daughter.

         “You look great too,” I say, “I like your dress.”

         “It’s old,” she says, “So, I don’t feel good in it.”

         We trade awkward pauses and polite questions. I’m distracted by the bugs that accompany the creek-side view. Two land in my tea, one in my water. She notices and comments there are none in hers, says I manifest them. I think about trying to manifest them in my house. I wonder if she thinks I manifested my son’s AVM, his brain hemorrhage and his death. I wonder where the line gets drawn in this whole manifestation thing. I wonder why we are having lunch. Closure or starting over? Her guilt or my curiosity? Nostalgia for a time when two women became friends over pre-school chauffeuring because it was easy? A time when conversation flowed lightly. A time when both our children were alive and we had that in common.

***

I also want to share one of her lovely poems. It won first place at the first annual Write Place At the Write Time poetry contest, judged by one of my poetry teachers, Ellen Bass.

July 28th, 2012

It’s Riley’s second birthday,
without us.
He would have been
eight.
Instead of dead.
Instead of chalk dust.
Instead of oysterless chips of pearls.
Instead of a giant,
insatiable pit.
Instead of a collage of photos
and cutout red crayoned hearts.
Instead of our tears.
Instead of a vanilla birthday cake
bejeweled with his name.
Instead of a ghost,
haunted by us.
Instead of frozen
at six and a half.
Instead of this fucking poem.

Chanel's bio

Chanel Brenner is a writer living in Los Angeles with her husband and their five-year-old son. She is the winner of the First Annual Write Place At the Write Time poetry contest, judged by Ellen Bass, for her poem, “July 28^th,  2012.” Her work has been published in Cultural Weekly, Foliate Oak, Forge, Memoirs Ink, Sanskrit, The Coachella Review, The Poetry Juice Bar and The Write Place At the Write Time. She also won a nationwide contest for her poem “What Would Wislawa Szymborska Do?” and, as a result, it was displayed at the James Whitcomb Riley museum in Indianapolis, Indiana.

Chanel studies with the poet Jack Grapes and is a member of his L.A. Poets & Writers Collective. She has written a collection of poems and essays about the death of her six-year-old son, Riley, called The Christmas Boy Will Not Disappear.  It was written during the first two years of grief. Her hope is that her writing will help others heal and realize they are not alone in their pain.

*AVMs are defects of the circulatory system that are generally believed to arise during embryonic or fetal development or soon after birth. Although AVMs can develop in many different sites, those located in the brain or spinal cord can have especially widespread effects on the body. 

Poetry revision is no different than revising our other writing

Every morning during the poetry workshop I attended last week at Esalen, one of our three instructors gave us a poetry craft talk. The workshop, called Writing and Knowing and led by Ellen Bass, Dorianne Laux, and Joseph Millar, gave me a lot of new information about how to write  - and revise - poetry. As promised, I'm going to try to relate some of the things this wise trio of poets taught us.

Ellen discussed revision - and this information sounded very much like what I've heard about revising  memoirs, novels, and works of non fiction. Revising poems takes a lot of work. As she said, we must work at it. In fact, she said, good poets like to revise. Here are some of her hints:

• Keep original versions so you can go back and compare
• Simply cut out the bad parts - easier said than done
• Distinguish between the essential and non-essential
• Pretend it isn’t your poem when you sit down to revise - I love this idea
• Delete unnecessary opening lines, repetition, explanation, adjectives, adverbs - sound familiar?
• Try rewriting without looking at the original
• Put best line at the top and then start a new poem
• If one line goes to the next page, take one line out - it's always easy to delete a line - right?
• Find what the poem has to have
• And if you're still stuck, get help - by the way, I asked Joseph Millar to help me with my poetry manuscript a few years back. He helped a lot.
• Deeper revision: reshape the entire poem and then do major surgery on it - that's right, murder those babies.

Right now I'm just sitting with this list and taking it all in. It looks like a lot of work. Of course that's what revision is all about - doing the hard work.

Poetry books by Ellen Bass