We Are All Broken

I thought maybe I could use a funny photo to help make a point about Haiti, which I will get to eventually. One of John's childhood neighbors sent him this picture yesterday. It was taken sometime around 1964. John is on the right in the back row and his brother Tom is sitting next to him shirtless. The boys are acting goofy, as young boys often take pleasure in acting.

Over the past few days, I've been reading a book, Living Gently in a Violent World by Stanley Hauerwas and Jean Vanier. Stanley is a university theologian and Jean Vanier founded L'Arche, "an international network of communities where people with and without intellectual disabilities experience life together as human beings who share a mutuality of care and need."

So much of what is in the book reminds me of Haiti. First, just the juxtaposition of the words Gently and Violent in the title, for Haiti and Haitians are both gentle and violent. I find the people to be gentle and when they are not, it is often the violence of the poverty that elicits the violence.

Jean Vanier talks about God's vision for the world: "It is a promise that people can get together. It is a vision of unity, peace and acceptance. It is a promise that the walls between people and groups can fall, but that this will not be accomplished by force. It will come about through a change of heart--through transformation. It will begin at the bottom of the ladder of our societies." (Italics mine)

It will begin in places like Haiti.

I want to quote a number of passages in the book where Jean Vanier is talking about people with disabilities. What he says, I think, also applies to Haiti.

"Jesus wants to break down the walls that separate people and groups. How will he do this? He will do it by saying to each one, 'You are important. You are precious.' There can be no peacemaking or social work or anything else to improve our world unless we are convinced that the other is important. Your are precious. You--not just 'people' but you."

"When we listen to stories of terrible pain and know we can't do anything about it, we touch our own vulnerability. We have heard the scream of pain, but we don't know what to do with it. None of us knows what to do with the deep brokenness of our world. Maybe that realization can bring us back to community. We can do nothing on our own. We need somewhere to be together."

"We must begin at the bottom. Jesus came to announce good news to the poor, freedom to captives, liberty to the oppressed, sight to the blind. Let's help the poor to rise up, and then help those who have power and money to see that for the sake of peace, which is the greatest good human beings can seek, they too should enter into this vision and start helping the weak to rise up."

"Jesus came to change a world in which those at the top have privilege, power, prestige and money while those at the bottom are seen as useless. Jesus came to create a body. Paul, in 1 Corinthians 12, compares the human body to the body of Christ, and he says that those parts of the body that are the weakest and least presentable are indispensable to the body. . . Who really believes it?. . .Do we really believe that the weakest, the least presentable those we hide away--that they are indispensable? If that was our vision of the church, it would change many things."

"I have been trying to point out that our deep need is to meet those on the other side of the wall, to discover their gifts, to appreciate them. We must not get caught up in the need for power over the poor. We need to be with the poor. That can seem a bit crazy because it doesn't look like a plan to change the world. But maybe we will change the world if we are happy. Maybe what we need most is to rejoice and to celebrate with the weak and the vulnerable. Maybe the most important thing is to learn how build communities of celebration. Maybe the world will be transformed when we learn to have fun together. I don't mean to suggest that we don't talk about serious things. But maybe what our world need more than anything is communities where we celebrate life together and become a sign of hope for our world. Maybe we need signs that it is possible to love each other."

My head is swirling with the truth of these statements. Let me just add a few more thoughts. Sometimes I get a little nervous when people start talking about how happy the poor are, not that I think that's what Jean Vanier is doing at all. People living in poverty have much to teach us about what is important. But I also think that some of the horrid, torturous conditions that I have seen children living in shouldn't be tolerated and we should work fervently to alleviate those conditions.

Secondly, when I think about how people at the bottom of the ladder are seen as worthless by the rest of the world, I think of my son. My son, who is an absolute dynamo, smart, compassionate, athletic, loving, my son was on the last rung of this ladder until God brought him to us. For me, he represents all of the children in the developing world who exist in such conditions that their gifts are lost to them and to the world. We are not seeing clearly.

Thirdly, we are all broken. All of us, probably none so much as those of us overachievers in the First World. Even those cute, little boys in the picture at the top, who all went on to become successful men. But as Jean Vanier would point out, they are having fun.

Because I've been so inspired by him, I'll give the last words to Jean Vanier: "The heart of L'Arche is to say to people, 'I'm glad you exist.'"

Stuffed and Starved

Have you ever had the experience where you've learned something new and then, seemingly suddenly, you see references to this new topic all over the place? That's happened to me with the book Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System. I bought the book a couple of weeks ago from an independent book store, You Know You Love A Book, in Peoria Heights.

This isn't a book review, because I haven't even had time to crack the cover, though I am looking forward to reading it. But today on the Corbett list that I subscribe to was this link to the Brooklyn Food Conference, where Jean-Baptiste Bazaelais spoke on the program, Seeds for Haiti.

And also a speaker at this conference? Raj Patel, author of Stuffed and Starved. You can read more about his book at his blog.

We are surrounded, inundated by food in the United States. Meanwhile, my husband John is haunted by the image of a little boy Jimy and his father, who were so very obviously hungry, if not starving, in Haiti. "The father didn't ask for anything," said John. "He had so much dignity."

We have learned that since John has returned from Haiti, Jimy has had two fainting spells. You know, when you don't get enough to eat, this happens. We have decided to adopt this family in Haiti and send them money for food.

This action doesn't address the systemic problems that Raj Patel writes about, but it will make a difference to Jimy and his family.

David Foster Wallace and Haiti

What is the link between David Foster Wallace and Haiti? Well, for me, only that I planned to one day read his magnum opus, "Infinite Jest" in Haiti. I figured Port-au-Prince would be the perfect place to tackle this sprawling, diversionary, real yet unreal novel, Haiti's capital knowing something about these things as well. I thought I would get the chance to do this while the author was still alive, Wallace being a year younger than me. But, alas, this part of the plan was not to be as Walllace committed suicide last week.

Suicide seems to run counter to everything human from the instinct to stay alive to the ability to appreciate the beauty of a Monet painting to the universal experience of loving another person. For all the material comforts of the United States and all the horrible deprivation of Haiti, I believe the suicide rate in the States is much higher than in Haiti. In fact, I've never heard of a Haitian committing suicide. Haitians will do risky things like sail in structures that hardly qualify as boats, but they take these risks for a better shot at life not because they want to die.

Perhaps Wallace left a clue in a 1996 interview he gave with the Chicago Tribune after the publication of Infinite Jest. He says of the success that followed his earlier books,

"In a weird way it seemed like there was something very American about what was going on, that things were getting better and better for me in terms of all the stuff I thought I wanted, and I was getting unhappier and unhappier," he said.

Sister L, a Polish nun, who works near Port-au-Prince, has a term for this: poverty of the heart. She has a job running a clinic and feeding program for some of the poorest people in the world. But she knows there is a deeper kind of poverty, a poverty that is pervasive in the United States. I think the solution for both kinds of poverty is for people in the United States and people in Haiti to spend more time together.

I think about the children who lost their lives to the hurricane pictured in the previous post: they wanted to live. What would they say to David Foster Wallace as his spirit joined theirs? Maybe something like, "We wish you would have wanted to live too."

The Brothers Karamazov

Here’s some amazing trivia about The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky: it’s reputed to be Laura Bush’s favorite book. I don’t find it incredible the TBK would be the top book choice for someone. It’s a highly readable Russian epic that considers the spiritual questions and struggles that confront us no matter when and where we live. But I do find it amazing that that someone would be married to George W. Bush or as Garrison Keillor calls him the Current Occupant. But so she is, and we have yet another enigma to puzzle over regarding the First Couple.

I was first assigned to read TBK in graduate school. Sadly for me, I was only able to read about two thirds of it before the next wave of reading assignments hit. This time, I read a little more than 20 pages a day—a nice, thoughtful pace for a great book—and finished the 735 page book in about a month. TBK is about the relationships of three—possibly four—brothers with each other and their neglectful, sly, buffoonish father. Without giving away the plot, here are some comments about the book.

Dostoevsky is a master at creating characters and he has an appreciation of the complicated nature of human beings. Each of the brothers—the crass and impulsive Dmitri, the reserved, intellectual Ivan, and the saintly, kind Alyosha—seems complex and real. Their characters, along with Fyodor’s, their father, drive the plot, including the crime that is committed and its aftermath. I think Alyosha, who is non-judgmental and tries to see the best in everyone, is my favorite heroic character. Faith and doubt and what they mean for the world play out in the beliefs and actions of these main characters.

The most famous chapter of the book is “The Grand Inquistor.” Ivan describes his poem about what happens when Jesus comes down to earth during the Inquisition to his faith-filled brother Alyosha, who wants to become a monk. I find the preceding chapter, “Rebellion” more disquieting. Ivan graphically describes the suffering of children and asks, in effect, how can this be? A lack of a satisfying answer has convinced Ivan that there can be no God. By the way, in Dostoevsky’s notes he writes that all the horrifying examples that Ivan described actually occurred.

This chapter, of course, reminds me of Haiti, where we see so many suffering children and we constantly ask ourselves why we weren’t born here, why we’ve escaped this misery. One of the brands of misery is named TB and a child in TBK dies of the wasting disease as so many people did prior to the middle of the 20th century. Here is a line from the speech that Alyosha makes at the boy’s grave site.

“Ah, children, ah, dear friends, don’t be afraid of life! How good life is when one does something good and just!”

"Team of Rivals: The Political Genuis of Abraham Lincoln"

I've loved everything I've read by Doris Kearns Goodwin from the Kennedys and the Fitzgeralds to No Ordinary Life about Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt during WWII. Team of Rivals is no exception. Kearns latest tells the story of Lincoln's life through the prism of politics. Her depiction of Lincoln's rise as a politician willing to forgive his friends and enemies to a president who includes his talented rivals in his cabinet is a portrait of the temperament ideal and necessary to lead the country through the devastating Civil War.

Most fascinating to me was Lincoln's progression from a poor young man to an influential Illinois pol. He had to overcome disadvantage that his more privileged rivals--William Seward, Edwin Stanton, Edward Bates, and Salmon Chase--never dreamed of. Lincoln had the magnamity to appoint Stanton as the Secretary of War, even though six years earlier, Stanton had cruelly snubbed Lincoln, even referring to him as a gorilla. Stanton worked like a dog as the Secretary, though, and came to love Lincoln.

As in Haiti, children of the 19th century die frequently and early. The Lincolns didn't escape this scourge. Abraham and Mary Lincoln lost three of their four boys: Edward, 2, to tuberculosis in Springfield, Willie, the favorite child,11, to typhoid fever during some of the darkest days of the war, and Tad at 18, from "compression of the heart," likely caused from TB. Thousands in Haiti die of these diseases today; both are curable with antibiotics.

The book also describes Lincoln's connection with Peoria and other parts of central Illinois. In his great Peoria speech, in which the future president spoke opposite Stephen Douglas in support of keeping slavery out of Nebraska, "Lincoln implored his audience to re-adopt the Declaration of Independence (which stated famously that all men are created equal) and 'return slavery to the position our fathers gave it; and there let it rest in peace.'"

I wrote an op-ed about turning 40 that appeared in the Peoria Journal Star. In it, I quoted a stanza from one of Lincoln's favorite poems, "Mortality," by William Knox. Kearns includes the same stanza in Rivals. With death all around him, Lincoln became preoccupied with the subject as the content of the poem indicates:

Oh! Why should the spirit of mortal be proud?
Like a swift-fleeting meteor, a fast-flying cloud,
A flash of lightning, a break of the wave,
He passeth from life to his rest in the grave.

The older one gets, the truer those words become.

Kearns peppers her account with many of the amusing and illuminating stories that Lincoln told to emphasize his points. When Lincoln was making his historic journey to Richmond, the capital of the Confederacy that was now in Union hands, the president was forced to transfer from a ship to a barge to a row boat, due to torpedoes and other debris in the water. The military men were nervous and chagrined, but not the president. "The situation reminded him, he cheerfully noted, of a man who had approached him seeking a high position as a consulate minister: 'Finding he could not get that, he came down to some more modest position. Finally he asked to be made a tide-waiter. When he saw he could not get that, he asked me for an old pair of trousers. But it is well to be humble.'"

Finally, a piece of timeless wisdom from the timeless sage: While the disastrous battle of Bull Run was going on, Lincoln took the time to write a cadet who was miserable at West Point and was contemplating quitting. "'Allow me to assure you it is a perfect certainty that you will, very soon, feel better--quite happy--if you only stick to the resolution you have taken to procure a military education. I am older than you, have felt badly myself, and know, what I tell you is true. Adhere to your purpose and you will soon feel as well as you ever did. On the contrary if you falter, and give up, you will lose the power of keeping any resolution, and will regret it all your life.'"

This little blog review can't do Lincoln or Ms. Kearns' book justice. My advice to you is to read the book.

Books Gone Wild

I’m way behind in my book reviews. On this overlong trip (four months and counting), I have read Left to Tell by Immaculee Ilibagiza, Pride and Prejudice, To Kill a Mockingbird, parts of “The War Against the Cliché” by Martin Amis, “Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln” by Doris Kearns Goodwin, “Mediated: How the Media Shapes Your World and the Way You Live In It” by Thomas De Zengotita, “Inspiration” by Wayne Dyer, “Finding George Orwell in Burma” by Emma Larkin and probably a few more that I’ve forgotten. I’m currently reading “The Brothers Karamazov,” and at my 21 pages a day schedule, should finish it by the end of the year.

So which book was my favorite? “Team of Rivals,” largely because of its subject matter but also because of Goodwin’s writing talent. I will write mini-reviews of each of these books. In some way, these books have something to say about Haiti and as I know your interest in Haiti is why you’re reading this blog I will make sure to point this out.

I discovered the book blogs on this trip: Conversational Reading, Slush Pile, Syntax of Things, Book Fox, etc. Yikes! They are great and educational, but big time suckers too. The internet is infinitely interesting and a lot of other things too.

Labor Day

Today is Labor Day in the United States. Haiti has more than its share of holidays—Ancestors Day anyone?—but people who are lucky enough to have a job, don’t get off the first Monday in September day. Haiti’s unemployment rate is high, by some estimates 80 percent. This is only accurate if we consider paid employment. For in fact, the average Haitian without a job has to labor very hard just to survive. Getting water can require people to walk several miles a day carrying heavy containers. I think that’s one of the secrets of being poor: it is hard work.

I am re-reading “Down and Out in Paris and London" by George Orwell. Here is his description of tumbling temporarily into the suburbs of the poor.

“You thought it would be quite simple; it is extraordinary complicated. You thought it would be terrible; it is merely squalid and boring. It is the peculiar lowness of poverty that you discover first; the shifts that it puts you to, the complicated meanness, the crust-wiping. . . Your linen gets filthy, and you run out of soap and razor-blades. . . .You discover what it is like to be hungry. . . you go out and look into the shop windows. Everywhere there is food insulting you in huge wasteful piles; whole dead pigs, baskets of hot loaves, great yellow blocks of butter, strings of sausages, mountains of potatoes, vast Gruyère cheese like grindstones. . . [Poverty] annihilates the future. . . When you have only three francs, you are quite indifferent; for three francs will feed you till to-morrow, and you cannot think further than that. . . You think vaguely, ‘I shall be starving in a day or two—shocking isn’t it?’”

The people in Haiti know a different magnitude of poverty than the one Orwell is describing, but there are similarities. Haiti is largely deforested, a natural disaster complicating a humanitarian one. There are many reasons for this. Of late, Haitians cut down trees, turn the wood into charcoal, and sell it. The rich fuel this practice as much as the poor, often preferring to have their food cooked over this charcoal. A couple of years ago, John and I passed by a shanty. Out in front sat several coffee tins full of this blackened wood charcoal for sale. As we looked at it, the man there said, “We know it is not good for the land to cut down the trees. But we need to feed our families.”

Hidden Lives

I’ve read two books within the last few months that have talked about hidden lives. “My Life with the Saints” by James Martin, has a chapter discussing the largely unknown life of St. Joseph, one of the most revered saints. “Finding George Orwell in Burma” by Emma Larkin describes the repression and censorship in Burma that allow constant injustice to occur in secret.

I find the lives of the poor in Haiti to be hidden from modern view. Oh, the media occasionally punctuates its free flowing, hip, upper class, western narrative with pictures of famine and war victims, refugees and AIDS orphans. But they appear as an exception, rather than the rule, when in life the opposite is true. And the coverage is thin; we only get a snapshot. What are these people’s lives really like? What are their dreams? What are their gifts? What do they contribute to their families and communities? What will they tell you they need for life to be better? What are their personalities like? What makes them laugh?

When a mother and child sit in front of John at the clinic, I wonder what their home is like; what they will do the rest of the day after they leave; what does the mother think about her status as one of the poorest people in the western hemisphere? Does she wonder why people don’t do more to help or just accept that this is the way it is? Who knows about her and her suffering?

We are very familiar with a three-year-old Haitian boy, whose first year of his life is a secret to us, as it soon will be to him, buried in the deep chambers of his memory. We will wonder about this hidden year all of our lives.

To paraphrase Henri Nouwen, poor people may be hidden from the world but they are visible to God. Important things are often hidden. We know very little about the life of St. Joseph or even the first 30 years of Jesus’s life. While the developed world lacks the will to “find” the hidden people of the developing world, most of us want others to know of our good deeds. Jesus said to do good and pray in secret. We have it backwards.

There are those people who are determined to record the secrets that everyone should know, sometimes at great risk to themselves. Emma Larkin writes of such people in Burma. “One friend of mine spent hours each day in front of a run-down computer recording the day’s events as he heard them through the grapevine. ‘I have to do this,’ he said. ‘Nothing is reported in the official news here, so, if I do not write these things down, tomorrow they will be forgotten.’ I also met a historian who is busy compiling a modern history of Shan State in eastern Burma. It is a history of the military occupation of the Shan lands by this government, he explained. ‘I know it will not be published, but I must write it. I must make a record. Then at least it is there, and maybe one day . . .”

I hope this blog reveals some of these hidden people to you, not completely, but at least you will know they exist and a little of what their lives are like.

My Life in the Middle Ages: A Survivor’s Tale--A Book Review

Here is the next entry in my ongoing series of book reviews.

I went to the Pekin Library in search of another book, Mediated, which I will review later on this trip, and wound up checking out three other books: The Good Life by Jay McInerney, Let Us Praise Famous Men by James Agee and James Atlas’s memoir, the subject of this review.

My Life In the Middle Ages is a series of essays about an upper middle class New York writer. The book was inspired by articles on his life that Atlas wrote for The New Yorker. I remember reading one, about his children’s private school. It was a good relic of a certain upper middle class New Yorker kind of a life, fascinating and privileged, but also insulated and thus lacking perspective. As New York is the center of the universe, though, it’s good to keep abreast, so I gave the book a try.

Each chapter has a theme which is helpfully indicated by its title: Money, The Body, God, Death, 25th Anniversary. In many ways, the author is the typical intellectual yuppie boomer who came of age in the sixties. I guess it’s hard not to seem self-absorbed when writing a memoir but Atlas’s self-absorption is a little annoying, tinged with self-pity as it is. He intellectually seems to recognize his privileged position but is somehow disappointed when he doesn’t measure up to some of his high octane New York peers and friends. This “poor me” attitude especially rankles, as I think about the book in Haiti. I know the author didn’t have the Third World in mind when he sat down to write, but a few compassionate thoughts about those who’ve had it worse than he has would have served his book and his life well.

My two favorite chapters were the first one Mom and Dad about his father’s illness and death and another entitled Failure. His father, a physican enchanted by poetry, especially that of Yeats, seems a charming character. But Atlas seems ashamed that his father is merely a physician and not more accomplished like his friends’ fathers. His father provided the line from the book that has stuck with me. Atlas’s father and mother followed a health regime, which included healthful, light eating, maintaining as he put it, “a thin edge of hunger.”

In “Failure” Atlas describes getting fired from a major magazine writing job. In this chapter, he explores the process of accepting one’s limits, which truly seems to be one of the development tasks of the middle years. Atlas stops writing fiction and devotes his time and energy to areas that better suit his talents, like writing biographies and non-fiction articles. This recognition of our limits is a good lesson for everyone past 40.

Of Benjamin Franklin and the Elections in Haiti

I am a little over halfway through “Benjamin Franklin: An American Life,” by Walter Isaacson. A marvelous, fast, fascinating read—though it would be difficult to make B. Franklin anything but fascinating—Isaacson weaves together the diverse but related strands of Franklin’s life as a printer, inventor, scientist, newspaperman, writer, charmer, down home philosopher, postmaster, founder of civic groups, statesman, etc., etc. What a guy! Why do I waste so much time when there is important work to be done? Not that Franklin didn’t have a good time, too; he did. He loved his food, wine, and conversations with the ladies and other enlightened people. Anyway, of all the founders, Ben is the most modern and much of what he wrote and thought applies to current events. To whit:

As relations deteriorated between Great Britain and her colonies,“ [Franklin’s] outlook, as usual, was from the perspective of a new middle class: distrustful both of the unwashed mob and of the entrenched elites.”

Haiti presents a modern example of why Franklin’s concerns are merited. Rene Preval is the huge front runner for president in the recently held Haitian elections and the heavy favorite of most of the poor who live in Haiti. After carrying up to 60% of the vote in the initial days after the election, Preval has seen that percentage shrink to under 50%, meaning a runoff election would be necessary. This seems highly suspicious given that blank ballots are being included in the total, lowering Preval’s percentage, and even more damningly, that huge bundles of ballots marked for Preval were found burning in a PAP dump.

What may explain this is that the powerful elite, who with assistance from the U.S., control things in Haiti, don’t want Rene Preval to be the next president of Haiti. In fact, Charles Henri Baker, the light-skinned, third place finisher, with about 6 percent of the vote, voiced their anti-democratic sentiments when he said after the election that in no way should Preval become president.

People have taken to the streets in huge numbers to protest the voting irregularities and likely fraud. They stormed the luxury hotel, the Montana, and frolicked by the pool. Cars and tires have been set aflame, but no one has been hurt in the demonstrations, except a couple of people who were killed by the U.N. soldiers. The protesting people are calling for Preval to be declared the outright winner.

Fortunately, good, old Rene Preval, is troding the middle ground that Ben loved so well. In a Franklinesque statement, Preval declared that while “massive fraud and gross errors had stained the process," order must prevail. "The Haitian people are frustrated. They have a right to be frustrated. And they have the right to protest. But we must respect private property. We must respect the law. We must respect the rights of others.Do not give in to anger. Today, let's conduct politics intelligently, without violence."

Here! Here ! President-elect Preval. Here! Here!

The Year of Magical Thinking: A Book Review

When I flew home from Cleveland at the end of December, I bought “The Year of Magical Thinking” by Joan Didion at the Cleveland airport. As I already have so many books, I felt slightly guilty about this purchase. I brought the book to the check out counter and the clerk commented, “This is really a good book.” I sheepishly replied that I really should wait and get it at the library. She said, “Sometimes you just have to buy it.”

This book, which recounts the death of the author’s husband from a heart attack, at the same time their only child is hospitalized in critical care with an unknown disease, and the aftermath, is, of course, THE memoir of 2005. And for good reason.

I began reading it on the plane from Cleveland. The date was December 30, 2005. The author’s husband, writer John Gregory Dunne, died on December 30, 2003. My beloved grandpa died on December 30, 1984. I was a little freaked out by these coincidences, but kept reading anyway. I’ve decided I don’t believe in bad omens, only good ones as befits the world view of someone who’s had a charmed life. For example, I’m typing these words on a flight to Atlanta. Who should show up at the Bloomington airport this morning but my cousin Jay, who is also making his way to Bradenton/Sarasota. So now I know the plane won’t crash. Talk about magical thinking.

When I got home, after having only read the first 30 pages, I lent the book to my mom, who found it depressing—“She (Didion) doesn’t seem to have any faith,” (she does, but in geology—the inevitability of earthquakes, mudslides and tsunamis—and not in God) and didn’t resume reading it until I was back in Cleveland for the third time when Jackson died. I have to say that it was the perfect book to read while mourning Jackson. The grief and sadness are as tangible as the printed pages. “This is my attempt to make sense of the period that followed (her husband’s death), weeks and then months that cut lose any fixed idea I had ever had about death, about illness, about marriage and children and memory, about grief, about the ways in which people do and do not deal with the fact that life ends, about the shallowness of sanity, about life itself.”

Jackson died just past midnight on Saturday, January 21. We continued to hang out at The Clinic for several days: John attended the autopsy meetings, we met with the genuinely compassionate family liaisons who helped us make arrangements for the discharge of Jackson’s body, we picked up his belongings, we went to the medical library and bought some used books at a buck a piece, we talked with funeral directors. I would sit in the comfortable, airy waiting lounge near the chapel with the lively classical music, waiting for John and reading the book.

Didion so precisely describes her husband’s death and her emotional state—details, details, I always told my composition students—and backs them both up with research ranging from an article on sudden cardiac death in the Journal of American Medicine to a section on bereavement in a 1922 Emily Post book. As Didion said, “In time of trouble, I had been trained since childhood read, learn, work it up, go to the literature. Information was control.” I’ve listened to John talk enough about medical situations that I could appreciate how right Didion got her descriptions, which I would read to him to verify and also to make him diagnose what was being described.

In 2000, my uncle Joe died in Manhattan also of sudden cardiac death. When my dad and I went to NYC to make arrangements, I remember the need I had to go to the restaurant to talk with those who were there when he died, to recreate what had happened. Joan Didion has that compulsion too, even though she was present when her husband had his heart attack. For Didion it was about relieving guilt. Was there something she could have done to save her husband? I think that’s one of the reasons John went to Jackson’s autopsy: he wanted to know that he had diagnosed and treated Jackson properly. This was confirmed. The main cause of Jackson’s death will likely be listed as a stenotic (tight) mitral valve. John and I both feel guilty for other reasons, though. John wishes he had never taken Jackson back to Haiti. I wish I had spent more time with Jackson the last two months. I could have sat by his bed more.

As time went on, I felt like we were haunting the clinic, a spectral presence. I saw the doctor who would be Jackson’s surgeon four times. The Clinic is huge. Why did I keep seeing him? Once he saw me, and acknowledged me with an embarrassed-looking nod. Did he remember who I was? What were his feelings about Jackson’s death? Maybe that’s why I felt like we were haunting the place: our guy died. He was a medical failure. What doctor wants to remember/be associated with that? “We’ve done all we can. We’re sorry he didn’t make it. He’s been gone four days. It’s time for you to leave now.” Actually, we bumped into two of Jackson’s nurses who expressed the most heartfelt sympathy and said they would always remember Jackson.

Didion describes a thought process she called “the vortex.” She would be in a familiar place or pass a landmark that would trigger a memory. This memory would inexorably lead to others, which would either take her to a comforting place, where she could forget that her life as she knew it was in shambles or bring her to a place that accentuated her pain. I feel so bad about Jackson; sometimes I have to think about something else and I force myself into a vortex having nothing to do with Haiti or death.

I have a strong faith in God and heaven, so in that way my thinking is different than Didion’s. But for expressing the sadness, difficulty, and insanity that accompanies death “The Year of Magical Thinking” has been the perfect accompaniment to my mode of thinking these past days.

A note about these book reviews: a couple of Haiti trips ago, I read the first volume of George Orwell’s collected works. Orwell reviewed many books. Most of these reviews were an excuse for him to write about what he wanted to write about, somehow linking his subject matter with the book. My reviews will likely follow a similar pattern.

Last Book Review from Haiti:

If all goes well, we’ll be departing Haiti tomorrow. So the last book I will read in its entirety on this trip is “The Jane Austen Book Club,” by Karen Joy Fowler, which I finished last night. I purchased a hard bound copy at the Peoria Public library for $3. Why do we pay retail for anything?

With so much attention being paid to Jane Austen these days, mainly thanks to Hollywood, I felt out of the loop, only having read part of one of her six novels, Sense and Sensibility. Somehow, I also own unread copies of Northanger Abbey and Pride and Prejudice, which I will throw in the suitcase for future trips.

“The Jane Austen Book Club” describes the conceit of the novel well; it’s about a group of six people, five women and one man who meet monthly to discuss one of Austen’s novels. The women are Austen fanatics—in real life they seem passionately devoted too—and the man is a newcomer, which puts him a little at a disadvantage. Each chapter discusses one of the novels and the history of one of the character’s lives. There is probably interplay between the characters and the novels that I don’t get, being under read in Austen.

Fowler is a fine writer who coins nicely turned phrases and makes observations that raise a window shade on reality. “Sylvia thought how all parents wanted an impossible life for their children—happy beginning, happy middle, happy ending. No plot of any kind. What uninteresting people would result if parents got their way. Allegra (Sylvia’s daughter) had always been plenty interesting enough. Time for her to be happy.”

In the end, “The Jane Austen Book Club” isn’t really my kind of book. It was easy to read and not too long, but filled with characters that I have a hard time connecting with. Some of them were kind of snobby and not-so-nice; the histories of their lives were unpleasant in a vague, American, late 20th century way. But a lot of people, particularly other women writers, really like this book.

I read parts of two other books “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer” and “Bonjour Blanc” by Ian Thomson. Tom Sawyer elicited memories of reading his adventures while at my grandparents’ farm. They had an illustrated copy of the book. Hmmm. . . when I return home, I think I’ll ask my mom if she knows where it is.

Earlier this year, I bought “Bonjour Blanc” for John, as he said it was the best book about Haiti he’d ever read, and he’s read a lot of ‘em. Thomson is an English author; I had to order this book on line and wait several weeks for it. Thomson packs a lot into each chapter—history and observations. His writing is good—detailed and dense. I would read a chapter and then have to put the book aside for awhile.

Some of his chapter titles include: In Cahoots with the Macoutes (the Tonton Macoutes were the murderous henchmen of the Duvalier years), Paris of the Gutter (Port-au-Prince), The White Black Men of Europe (The Polish men who came to fight with Napoleon against the rebellious slaves but defected in mass when they saw how evil the cause of the French was).

I am looking forward to finishing “Bonjour Blanc” soon. By the way, the title refers to the name the Haitians call foreigners. It’s vastly preferable to the “Hey you!” that is hollered at us regularly, a lovely legacy from the Marine presence in Haiti in the early 1990’s.

Tomorrow (Tuesday, 12/27) will be a long and hopefully not too tough day. We are leaving here at 6:30 am to go to Haitian immigrations to get Jackson’s passport and then to the U.S. consulate to get his visa. Then we’ll return here, pick up our bags, and head to the airport, only about five minutes away, for our 3:30 flight to Miami. It will be a grueling day for Jackson, so please say a prayer for him.

I think this will be my last post from Haiti from this trip, but I will keep you updated as to how Jackson is doing.

Burmese Days and an Ode to George Orwell:

George Orwell (née Eric Blair) was born in India at the beginning of the 20th century. His family returned to England when he was young. When George was in his early 20’s, he spent five years in Burma, working as a military police officer. The novel Burmese Days is one of the fruits of this stay.

The novel tells the story of John Flory, a 35-year-old man who has been in Burma for 15 years. Like many expatriates, Flory finds himself at home neither in Burma nor in England to which he hasn’t returned. Through Flory’s life and those of seven fellow citizens, Orwell exposes the wretchedness of the colonial system, both for the colonizers and the colonized. The petty, awful prejudices the Englishmen hold, the ridiculousness of their sacrosanct Club, which serves gin before breakfast, the inhuman kowtowing the natives perform before the all powerful white man—the servants refer to their masters as holy god—and a myriad of other despicable details combine to make palpable the bleakness of this outpost of the British Empire.

Flory alone of the characters seems to understand the moral dilemma of the English: that they are in Burma to steal from the Burmese. He alone has a Burmese friend, an ingratiating doctor, who argues for the superiority of the Englishman. Flory is so lonely, in his intellectual and moral isolation, that he falls in love with a newcomer, Rebecca, who he imagines will sate his loneliness. But she is clearly wrong for him and more closely resembles in interests and beliefs the other members of the Club.

Burmese Days isn’t a happy book. Like the other works I’ve read of Orwell’s, it’s a highly moral and political book. Orwell gets away with this because he is such a good writer, and the morality that infuses his work I find admirable. He largely conveys his point of view through the details of his story, but is more didactic, in a good sense, then a writer like Graham Greene. Burmese Days reminds me a little of Greene’s The Comedians, which tells the story of an Englishman in Haiti. Both books describe oppressive places through the eyes of privileged participants.

Haiti, which has suffered so much under colonizers—the native Arawak Indians were exterminated and the slaves kidnapped from Africa were treated brutally—is a good place to read a book like the Burmese Days. Orwell is fast becoming one of my favorite authors. I am trying to space the reading of his work, to make it last as long as possible.

Some Effects of Reading:

I’m a little behind in my book reports. I’ve read George Orwell’s “Burmese Days”—excellent, and I’ll comment on it more fully in a future post. Yesterday, I started and finished “Among Heroes,” about the people on board Flight 93, the plane that crashed in Pennsylvania on 9/11.

This book kept me from sleeping last night. I kept replaying the following scene in my mind—or rather trying to as the picture the words conjure exceed the capacities of my imagination—: a 757 flying upside down at more than 500 miles an hour, 30 feet above a person on the ground, seconds before it crashed into said ground. No wonder nothing was left to find. Equally disturbing were the author’s profiles of the generally stellar passengers on board. What a waste.

I can’t say I didn’t know what I was getting into with this book, as we all know what happened on 9/11. Nonetheless, it was disturbing. I don’t usually choose to read books like this, but I was on a plane at Newark, on the same runway, only a few planes back. Our flight never made it into the air, as one of the other hijacked planes had already hit the World Trade Center. If everything had just been delayed a bit longer, maybe Flight 93 would have been grounded too. Anyway, I feel a little bit of a kinship with these people as we were all passengers at Newark, on an uncrowded Tuesday.

John was in Haiti on September 11. These were the days when it was still somewhat safe to go into Cité Soleil. He and Rich Bertchi spent part of their day there. Later, Haitians offered them condolences. Like everyday’s not 9/11 here.

With our extended stay, I have had time to dip into Mark Twain. Let me paraphrase a story Twain told, relevant to this blog. A missionary preaches in church one Sunday. He preaches so movingly Twain knows he will put a dollar in the plate. As the visitor goes on chronicling the wretched misery of the foreigners’ lives, Twain ups the amount to $5. And a bit latter, he thinks he’ll write a big check. As the plate is passed, the missionary continues on with the deprivations of these poor people. On and on he talks. Twain abandons the idea of the check. The pathetic descriptions continue and the amount he wants to contribute falls from $5 to $2 to $1. When the plate finally arrives, Twain takes 10 cents out of it.

Okay, I don’t want my blog to do this to you, dear reader, regarding the problems of Haitians. Non, non, non. There’s a moral behind Twain’s story, which I know you’ve figured out, but I’ll let another writer, Chuck Palahniuk, elucidate it. I haven’t read any of Palahniuk’s books, but he wrote “The Fight Club.”

Palahnuik’s thesis, probably not original to him, states how crucial humor is, especially when the topic matter is sad. As he said, “tragedy on top of tragedy is overwhelming.” Furthermore, it’s not very effective.

“In college, we read about a group of people who were shown photographs of dental decomposition in various stages. The people who were shown photographs of mild deterioration and mild tooth lose increased their dental care, their dental hygiene. But people who were shown severely deteriorated mouths, hideous photographs, these people just shut down entirely. They quit brushing their teeth and flossing altogether. It actually made them worse. That’s why if you’re going to portray sadness, if you’re going to have enormous amounts of sad, dark material, it has to be presented in a funny way, or there has to be intermittent funny scenes to release that tension, to bring people back up, to contrast with the sadness, so that it can occur again and again.”

I remember noticing this strategy at work in Steven Spielberg’s movie, “Schindler’s List.” Scenes of overwhelming brutality would be leavened by a humorous scene here and there. These alternating scenes produced an almost wave-like effect, as if the viewer was running emotional wind sprints.

Haitians are funny people and goofy, hilarious stuff happens all the time. I’ll try to portray more of this, as I haven’t enough. It can feel callous to do. But in the name of results and good writing, I’ll do it. By the way, all this writing about writing has a name: meta-writing. I learned that in graduate school.

Yesterday afternoon, Faustina’s mother, who is normally pleasant and mild mannered showed up, roaring mad at Jackson. Seemed she’d been calling his cell phone since 5 am to pass on a message to us. I tried to tell her that Jackson was really sick and probably not thinking much about his phone. She didn’t care. As she stormed off to the room, John jumped up to accompany her. “I better go down there to prevent a homicide.” Sometimes Haitians don’t feel a lot of pity for each other, even when they’re friends.

My Losing Season by Pat Conroy:

My fourth reading selection here in Haiti is the appropriately named “My Losing Season,” an autobiographical tale of the author’s last year playing varsity basketball at that citadel of tolerance and gentleness, The Citadel. This is a good read for when you’re in a bad mood, because pages of the book share this sentiment, especially the parts about Conroy’s physically and emotionally vicious dad and his only emotionally vicious college coach (unless you count running the suicide drill physical abuse).

Conroy was the most valuable player his senior year, the season his team went 8-17. Talent-wise, his teammates ranked him 11th of the 12 players, which may tell you something about the book and the team. Despite the lack of success, Conroy made me feel his love for basketball and how it rescued him from an abusive, peripatetic childhood.

By the way, one of Conroy’s teammates, Greg Connor, did his residency at OSF. He’s a few years older than John. When John was working as an orderly at the hospital, Connor used to page him and ask of the popular pickup games that go on all over Peoria, “We’re playing tonight, right?”

Conroy’s writing style is opposite of Khaled Hosseini, author of The Kite Runner: complex, loquacious, and full of bright similes and metaphors. Here are a couple of examples: Of Hell Night, the Citadel’s initiation into the life of the college, “It was a night that my own soul felt like an acre of Omaha Beach on D-Day.” I think that about conveys the harshness of it.

He comes up with numerous ways to describe the swish: “His shot would soar toward the rafters, go higher than any jump shot I had ever seen back spinning beautifully, until the laws of gravity brought the ball rippling through the net with that sweetness of sound—the swish, like a flower inhaling grass.”

I could feel Conroy’s ambition, which he almost always writes up to, and hear his first born male’s voice, personal and moody. My sister-in-law Diane lists Conroy’s “Beach Music” as one of her favorite books and it’s one I am going to read when I return to the developed world.

I checked out “My Losing Season” from the Lakeview Library, but I’m going to buy a copy and, as a writer’s exercise, underline all Conroy’s descriptive turns of phrases. The book will be marked up.

We don’t see a lot of reading going on in Haiti. John remarked that when he opens the office door at the clinic to call the next patient, “I see all these moms sitting, there and none of them are reading. It’s sad.” Not that there are racks of magazines on the waiting room walls; even if there were for lack of literacy, they would go unread.

I used to think John was exaggerating about the classes for new Haitian immigrants that were held in Little Haiti, a neighborhood in Miami. “The teachers would try to teach them to make circles, squares, and triangles, and the Haitians were awful at it.” How could adults not be able to do what kindergarteners are capable of?

Then, this summer, we brought Frandy and his mother to St. Louis for medical treatment. Frandy can read and write and speaks English, but his mother has had little education. The hospital wanted her to sign a consent, and said it was fine for her to make an X. She kept trying to hand the pen to Frandy, but we insisted that she had to put her mark on the paper. She grasped the pen, as awkwardly as I would a pair of knitting needles, and she put one little line on the paper and tried valiantly to cross it with another little line. It was hardly what you’d call an X, but we counted it.

Frandy’s mom is not dumb; living in her world, we would be completely reliant on her skills—going to market, cooking over a fire, keeping their little cement house as clean as possible, getting along without electricity. But what seems natural to us is the result of years of schooling, which she hasn’t had the advantage of. She can haul water like you wouldn’t believe though, and has the biceps to prove it.

If the Haitian women in the waiting room could read, they could probably appreciate like few others the notion of being losers among winners. As Conroy writes, “Loss is a fiercer, more uncompromising teacher, coldhearted but clear-eyed in its understanding that life is more dilemma than game, and more trial than free pass.”

Haiti Trip Reading Selection #3: The Kite Runner

Bobby Ferlmann told me about this book by Afghani-American Khaled Hosseini, a few days before I left for Haiti, as we were standing in line at Office Depot. I told him we were adopting a child from Haiti, and it put him in mind of this novel, though it’s not really about international adoption. I really enjoyed this book. Like Isabel Allende says in a quote on the cover, “This is one of those unforgettable stories that stays with you for years. All the great themes of literature and of life are the fabric of this extraordinary novel: love, honor, guilt, fear, redemption.”

Without giving too much away, the book is about how one man, actually a boy, twice betrays the person who loves him most, changing both of their lives forever. The big question the book addresses is this: after committing a major crime, it is possible for one to redeem oneself? Happily for all of us imperfect creatures, the answer is yes. “There is a way to be good again.”

The Kite Runner also highlights some of the terrible prejudices that exist between different ethnic groups in a country. The reader learns a lot about what Afghanistan was like before the invasion of the Soviet Union and the rise of the evil, fascist Taliban. Hosseini, like many foreign born English-language writers, has a lucid straightforward writing style; he strings his words together, like a pure stream of water running through the reader.

So would I recommend this book? For you, dear reader, “a thousand times over.”

Don't Freak--It's Still Live from Haiti:

After my husband John started a blog, dyinginhaiti.blogspot.com, (our blog names reflect the ying and the yang of our relationship) I was jealous of his snazzier template, so I decided to change mine, though I do know that my discerning readership realizes that content is king. You also don't mind reading really long sentences. One of these days, I will learn to post pictures and save us all 1,000 words.

Here's an embarrassing admission: I'm a sucker for self-help books, but only good ones. And so the second book I read in Haiti was "It's About Time: The Six Styles of Procrastination and How to Overcome Them" by Linda Sapadin and Jack Mcguire. It is a good one, and here's what I learned. My dominant procrastination style is Dreamer with some elements of Worrier and Overdoer mixed in. I also learned that I need to differentiate between feeling good--like after I eat chocolate--and feeling good about myself--like after I jump rope. Got it? Hopefully, I do. Blogging is fun for me, so I'm off to do some more difficult writing--like the long awaited tuberculosis tutorial.