Sunday at home

I intended to go out to Xochimilco Centro yesterday, to take a trajinera ride along the ancient Aztec canals (yes, james, I asked around, they are the ancient Aztec canals). Not the tourist boats but the local "bus" that is used by the people who live and practice agriculture on the little manmade islands created there more than a thousand years ago. But eventually, me dio flojera as they would say here, and I decided to stay home instead.

Still, it was a good day. Wrote 9 1/2 pages of poetry yesterday, part of the first draft of what might become my first long poem in sections (or a series of short poems). Was on quite a roll there! Also, 7 pages of prose in my diary, although that´s less of an accomplishment (judging by the length of my emails and blog posts, you can imagine that my diary entries tend to be long in general). Still, good writing day.

Currently reading "Inheritance of Loss" by Kiran Desai. I admit I was prejudiced against the book because of an interview I heard with the author, got annoyed by some of her takes on the writing life. But the book is utterly beautiful. I´m actually trying to hold off reading too much of it in one day because I am afraid it´s going by too fast, want to hold on to it, savor it more... finally realized I could always come back and reread it another time, and that allowed me to keep reading! The woman is a great story teller, but she´s also a poet, there are so many lines of poetry hidden in her novel (here´s one of my favoties: "his laugh would have registered bright pink on the litmus test"). In fact, this long poem of mine carries an epigraph from the book as well. It´s been a long time since I raved about a book like this, so yes, I highly recommend the read!

Also, finally finished converting hundreds of video clips towards our documentary into the right format for us to work with them. Utterly boring work, days of copy-paste, L and I are so glad to have finally completed it. Now, the process od actually trying to create a 30 minute video from this footage should be more interesting. I didn´t think I´d be learning iMovie, of all things, during this Mexico trip, but in some ways, that´s the nature of this work, isn´t it? The visible work in the community is one aspect, and all these other skills need to go into making that possible! Plus, I´ve wanted to learn to use iMovie anyway, so no complaints there!

Then there were the conversations with my host father. He´s such a wonderful man, old fashioned and the patriarch in many ways, yes, but so sincere and clearhearted, so honest and so simple, that it´s hard not to love him. He grew up in a small agricultural village in Oaxaca (which I visited for an afforestation campaign during my previous visit to mexico), came to Mexico City when he was 25, and for forty years worked at the same department store as a clothes salesperson. He retired last year at age 64, and now he has set up a little stand selling music outside his house. I shall take photos of that to explain what I mean, but it´s one of the things I love about this neighborhood: for many houses, the division between home and work isnt so sharp, all over the neighborhood you see posters outside houses advertising whatever they can sell-- from fresh cheese and lunch to dance classes to the lady who will read your letters out to you. Señor O sells music. His CDs hang off a special rack on his front gate, and he stands there in his sombrero, blasting pop music on the small stereo he has there. I haven´t seen more than a couple of people stop by in the course of an hour, sometimes he sells more than at other times, but the way L puts it, it isn{t so much about earning money off of this work but more as a therapy, a having "something to do" now that he is retired. My bedroom window is right above the gate, and I sometimes leave the window open at night because it can get very warm inside without even a fan, in which case I wake up to the mix of loud Mexican music and the calls of his roosters. It´s a wonderful way to start my day :)

He´s curious about India and about the USA, curioous about the world beyond Mexico, the only country he knows. Every so often, he will ask me a question that throws me off completely. One day, he wanted to know how well I have planned my life, do i know what age i want to be when my children finish primary school? (He was disappointed to learn that I didn´t). Another time, it was about whether men in other parts of the world are as attached to their mothers as Mexican men are (Have you heard of mamitis? Everyone here jokes about thsi peculiar disease that befalls mexican men, where they cannot stop comparing every woman in the world unfavorably to their absolutely perfect mothers!). He wanted to know what I would do if I were married to a man with mamitis-- how would I win him back? I laughed and told him I´d never thought much about that either, but he was dead serious about those questions, insisted that most divorces are born out of yong brides not knowing what to do about their husbands´ mamitis. Then, he talked to me, L, and two other friends who were having dinner with us about the importance of cultivating love like a rose... when it recieves the proper care, it blossoms beautifully. L joked that some love is like the camphor flower, parasitic, destroying everything in its path, caring only for itself.. that you never know if it is indeed going to turn out to be a rose. Different flower metaphors crowded around our dinner table, and he grew a little upset with L´s cynicism... finally just told us that, although we might choose to look at the world that way, he had tended love like a rose and it had given him beautiful results. L´s mother died 6 years ago, but you still hear him talk about her as if she just left the room for a bit, so much love, she is so present in this family, it´s hard to deny him his conviction in love like a rose!

So much for that. This week, L has classes everyday, leaves home at 7 AM, returns around 9 PM. I have to contimue working on that video, but also must find other ways to entertain myself. A trip to the city center sounds good today... hoping to visit a local handicrafts market, I love Mexican handicrafts, and handicrafts in general, and who knows, I might even find little gifts for some of you while I am there! :P

Dances, and then some

Yesterday, L, L´s father, and I went to a festival of Mexican folk music, being held at the National Teachers´ College in Mexico City. It´s a three day free festival, 10 AM to 10 PM, with God-knows-how-many groups playing 4 or 5 songs each. We spent about three hours there, listening to music from the states of Guerrero, Oaxaca, Veracruz, and Michoacan (I might have missed some others). What a treat, while I cannot at the end of the day tell the difference between the different folk traditions, the groups from Guerrero and Oaxaca really touched me in a way few musicians ever have. 

They had a huge wooden dance floor in the middle, and at any given moment there must have been 3 or 4 hundred people, perhaps more, dancing to the music. I found myself repeatedly amazed by how well people knew all the different folk dances, there was some free styling, but in general, you could see the formal elements of the folk dance throughout the dance floor. The dancers included everyone from young couples to parents out with young children to groups of teenaged friends to elderly couples or this one beautiful woman, probably in her 80s, who twirled her skirt and danced in a world all her own. There´s one dance from Michoacan, I forget its name but have seen it before, where the movements are those of "los viejos" (the old people)... it also involves making a train of people that moves across the dance floor. More than 9 trains of people formed across this dance floor when that music came on, each must have had 40, 50, 60 people, and as they all moved about the floor, I was amazed to note that there wasn´t a single collision across that very packed floor! It looked like so much fun too, one of those moments when I really wanted to jump up and join in, then had to remind myself I didn´t know the dance! There is something about Mexican folk culture, though... it´s the only music and the only dance that has ever made me want to join in. I´m thinking both about a community dance held at Zoatecpan while I lived there and at the Dia de los muerots celebrations in Santa Ana, the only 2 times in my life that i have voluntarily joined in a dance and enjoyed it. Partly, it´s the music that gets under one´s skin in a way that forces one to move, even if one is sitting in a chair, and partly it´s the community aspect of it... I remember watching a mother dance with an infant strapped to her back in a shawl. Amidst music so loud that we had to shout to be heard, and amidst her not at all subdued dance moves, the 1 year old slept blissfully. I loved that these moments were enough a part of that child´s life.

In the metro on the way back, though, I found some of that evening´s high slip away from me. I´ve written before about how Mexico City´s subways are full of people selling everything from lollipops to pirated DVDs and also about the variety of preformers who board the train and do their thing, then ask for money. In general, I enjoy that madness of the train, there´s never a dull moment. Yesterday, though, I had to shut my eyes and wish it away. A man got into my subway car, bare chested, and scattered broken beer bottles across the floor. Then, he began his stunt show, throwing himself against the pieces of glass, his back, his chest, breaking them further with the weight of his body and with his fist. I shut my eyes, but could still hear the sickning clink of flesh against broken glass. When he finished, nobody wanted to pay him for that stunt, so he gathered his glass and moved on to the next car. As he walked away from us, I searched his back for scars and saw none, just one gash across his shoulder. Then, I could hear the clink from the next car, and I felt my stomach turn. I can´t understand how one could do that to oneself, and as much as I outherwise like supporting street performers, this one just left me with a bitter aftertaste that I couldn´t quite shake off.

More settled

OK, so I am starting to feel more settled now than I was yesterday, and therefore also more comfortable with all the changes and uncertainty.

For one, I move to L´s house yesterday since Y left for BsAs. Since this is the house where I lived for 5'6 weeks in 2007, there is comfort in the familiarity of the place as well as the neighborhood. She lives at the southern extremity of the city, in a neighborhood that is still more reminiscent of a small town or village than of a bustling city. Everyone knows everyone, you shop at the nighborhood tienda, the little shop selling quesadillas, the lady who makes the wonderful licuados. The Mexico City overrun by Walmart, McDonalds, and boutiques with names like "American Hot" (I promise Im not making that one up!) ´seem to belong to a different time and place. it helps, of course, that her still very much a farmer father keeps dogs, birds, rabbits and roosters in the house. I woke up to the rooster ´s call this morning, and it´s hard to feel trapped in a big city when that happens!

So, I´ll be in the city longer than I wanted to be here... will be spending 3 instead of 4 weeks in the mountains. L and Y are both overwhelmed by the things that need to be done before June 15th, at their universities, places of work, and for this project, so I´m going to help out with some fundraising work... mostly, editing a video of past workshops, which will accompany funding proposals for the next workshop. Yes, less exciting than being out in Zoatecpan right away, but this work needs to happen in order for that work to happen, so ah well.

Talking to L yesterday also reassured me about the project. Ironically, what reassured me was the realization that they already know they don´t have a vision or long terms sense of the work they are doing. Unfortunately, for reasons that range from funding to local politics in the village between the church and the women´s cooperative we work with, they are not sure they will continue working in the same region beyond next year. Thus, a certain level of fear as far as committing to a long term project there, or even building up too high hopes for what they could accomplish there. I did try posing questions about if we could find ways this year to make the work there sustainable in the future, if there was a way to build enough ownership for the older children and the members of the community to take off from where we leave, but I think the degree of work that would require is overwhelming for them right now. Fair enough, they are doing this project on top of being full time students and working part time, I can see why time and money have become precious resources. Their collective, they do hope to maintain, they do hope to continue working with children of indigenous communities and of migrants, just perhaps in other partes of the country. So, scaling down our ideas for the summer project considerably.

Here´s what it will probably look like at this stage: the children of Zoatecpan, aged 4 to 10, are preparing a book of local flora and fauna, with photographs and/or dired flowers and leaves, names of the plants and animals in Nahuatl and Spanish, and traditional uses of the plants and animal prodcuts. A biologist friend of L´s is helping them identify the less common plants, and their grandmothers are treasure troves of wisdom about possible medicinal and other uses of pretty much any plant. This book will then be compiled, and provided we get funding, 1000 copies will be printed for the local school(s) and students. It´s a fairly simple project, but it can accomplish several important objectives, from working as a team to understanding their environment better, from giving them a sense of pride in their work to bringing their lives and their geography into a classroom that teaches them only in Spanish and only about a world far removed from their own. In some ways, I would have preferred doing more long term work, but in other ways will also be good to have an open and closed project by the time I leave. Let´s see how it unfolds.

And before I sign off, here´s a story I cant get out of mind and should provide us all with some food for thought. L told me yesterday about an indigenous community in the North of Mexico that she visited a few months ago. There are only about 60 surviving members of this tribe and linguistic group, and they have long faced terrible discrimination. Recently, the community came together and decided that none of them were going to have children because they want the langauge and the community to die with the current generation. It gives me chills just thinking about it... what does it take for a people to decide that they no longer want to exist... not just in their current form but in any form? Shiver.

Lessons in flexibility

So, I already know what is probably going to be one of my biggest take-aways from this summer: learning to be flexible. In 2007, they used to talk about having "high hopes and low expectations" for our projects, and I never really liked that way of putting it— going in with low expectations always seemed like accepting things as less than they could be. Today, though, I am reminded of why that advice made sense in the context of trying to work here.

Before I got here, we had talked about spending all of June in the village, and me traveling through Mexico July 1- 15. On arriving, I learned that one of my friends needs to stay in the city until the 13th of June and the other until the 15th. Now, all of a sudden, one of them is going to Buenos Aires for a workshop today and will only return on June 14th. So much for my carefully planned schedule, I'm going to need to improvise and find ways of getting out of DF during this week, I really don;t want to spend that much time in the city (I do love Mexico City, and it does remind me of home in many ways. But right now, I need not to be in a city). It isn't that big a deal, really, but I like having things planned out and scheduled, last minute changes and flakiness always upset me. But I knew even before coming here that there's no way to work in rural Mexico (or rural India for that matter) unless one can get used to those last minute changes... here's a chance for me to become comfortable with the absolute lack of plans!

More than that, though, I'm struck by how there isn't really a vision for this project... my friends know they want to work with the kids of Zoatecpan and have been working with them for almost a year, doing all kinds of fun stuff... but when asked what they hope to achieve, what their long term vision is for this organization they are trying to found, they don't really seem to know. As a result, the work too feels a litle scatteredñ for example, they did a series of workshops on art, a bunch of things about rights of children, and a group of their friends did workshops in many if the circus arts... if the photos are anything to judge by, the kids had a blast, and that's important. But surely it isn;t all that is important... we can't get away from questions about whether the workshop in children's rights became part of their lived experience, whether we are giving them the tools to make it so. We can;t get away from asking what our goals in working with these kids are and how these different activities are feeding into those goals. That that hasn't received much thought shouldn't come as a surprise, it's the case with most start-up projects, isn't it? But I'm afraid it's not going to last or grow unless they can find that larger work of which these activities are a part. The organization through which I did the summer project 3 years ago (and the only non profit these friends know closely) suffered from a similar lack of larger vision to guide the everyday activities... and it's falling apart now, they already can't secure funding to pay any of their employees, everyone assumes it will disappear within the year. As the Mexicans would say "¡Que pena!:— they are good people with good intentions, but one needs more than that to keep such an organization running, no?

Now more than ever, I go back to conversations with Paul about how 90% of start-up non-profits fail. I want this project to succeed, but I'm not sure how they'd secure funding or any of that without being able to explain the larger visions behind the project. And it isn;t just about funding either, it's the more fundamental question of do we know we are actually making a difference simply by playing games and doing art workshops? We might be, but we might not be, and unless we have a  sense of the difference we want to make,  how can we know if we are making it?

I feel like I have something to offer there. I;m the only one amongst the three of us who has actually worked with a non-profit for an extended period of time (and a non-profit that is growing and succeeding, at that). I'm also the only one who has received any training in instructional design and the like. My friends have more to offer in terms of on the ground experience— not only have they spent much more time in the communities than I have, one of them is doing her Masters in Rural Development and the other is just finishing a certificate course in the Rights of the Child. Between the three of us, we have quite an interesting and varied knowledge and experience base.

The question, then, will be to what extent we can make those three things work together. I realize I am afraid to ask tough questions and push them to clarify their vision because I feel like that would be arrogant. I feel like I am an outsider to the work... they are the ones who have been doing it all this while, I'm only here a few weeks, who am i to come in and say it needs to bedone differently? At the same time, I feel like I won't be doing justice to them, to myself, or most importantly to the children of Zoatecpan unless I start asking those questions. But I need to navigate this carefully, there are also cultural ideas about how best to do this work and mine will be seen (ironically) as too-Western at first. Let's see where we go from here.

In an interesting way, I'm realizing that doing this kind of work is like poetry in some ways. From the outside, people often seem to romanticize it as being all about the heart, whatever first finds its way onto the page or into the classroom is sacrosanct because it comes from the heart and that;s all that matters. It takes a lot of time, a lot of frustrated attempts at getting the work done, and sometimes a lot of failure before one realizes that structures and systems need to balance out the spontaneity, that while the work must always always come from the heart, it demands a certain rigor and discipline in order to become effective. I'm thinking now of all the times that I too was uncomfortable with structures and systems at Pravah, and I;m increasingly grateful I was held accountable to them anyway. By now, I feel comfortable enough with the structures that were put in place to know when I can break out of them. But I'm glad of having that scaffolding.

Day 2 in mexico

So, I;m going to take advantage of the fact that one of my friends has internet in her home in DF (for the uninitiated, DF is Mexican for "Mexico City" and probably a term I will use to refer to it more and more as I start thinking in Mexican again ;) ) and blog frequently over these next couple of days.

My initial slight disappointment at not going into the Sierra right away has changed to relief. I didn't know just how exhausted i was going to be, but i can barely stay awake today. I want to blame it on changing time zones 3 times in a week... not dramatically, but enough to throw one off a little. Also, I'm still fighting my glandular infection, and the resultant low grade fever does tire me out. So I'm glad now, not only to have a few days of rest in the city, but also to have a few days to get used to the language, the food, the water and all those things... I think this should dramatically reduce the chance of my falling sick once we get to the Sierra. And I hope it will also mean that I can recover completely from the infection and reach there high on energy and in perfect health.

L lost her grandfather yesterday and had to return to her family's village in Oaxaca for a couple of days, so I am now staying with Y until L gets back. In one sense, this feels like such a luxury, it's just the two of us at home, and I get a room to myself! In other ways, it feels strange-- I associate Mexico with too many people and animals in small spaces (L's father is enough of a farmer still as to have not only dogs and birds but also 4 roosters in their Mexico City house!). It's a nice change in terms of being able to get some rest, time to chant and read, time to blog... but in other ways, it feels strange and un-Mexican to me!

But right outside our door, we are very much in Mexico. This morning, I awoke to loud bells, initially wondered if they were church bells but they went on too long; Y told me later that it was the garbage truck announcing its arrival. I also heard various hawkers' cries, not sure what they were selling, but it reminded me of home in India in many ways. And then there are the neighbors: Last night, I wanted to shower after my travels, but Y discovered that we didn't have gas at home because she hadn't paid the monthly gas bill, which not only meant no cooking gas but also no hot water. It was a cool night, she was afraid I'd catch a cold by showering with cold water, so I offered to wait until the next morning. No such compromises needed, she asked me to gather my things and we walked over to a neighbor's house, she explained our situation, and they let me shower there. This morning, we couldn't make breakfast or heat water for coffee, so we walk back to their house with all our ingredients in tow, Y lets herself in, and we make quesadillas on their stove, wash up after ourselves, and leave. All of that feels unusual to me, but in a good way... I like these neighborly relations!

OK, I'm going to go see what we can do for lunch today... not sure I am up for a visit to the center of the city, given that we live in the suburbs and that's a long trip, but would be nice to get out for a while and ground myself in the country again. Also trying to figure out which part of Mexico I want to celebrate my birthday in— it's two days before my friends get done with school, so I could stay here and celebrate in the city with people I actually know, or I could head into the mountains early and celebrate it with a long walk alone to the nearby waterfalls. The latter sounds more tempting, but we shall see :)

More soon.

In Mexico

Well, here I am. Blogging from my friend Yssel´s house in Mexico City. I haven´t yet figured out punctuation on the Spanish keyboard, so no one gets to call me out on that in this post :P

My journey here was surprisingly smooth. I had expected trouble at the Mexican airport immigration, seeing as they have just changed their laws to allow me to travel without a visa, but I was pleasantly surprised by how together they were. If anything, it was the staff at LAX that didn´t know what to do and made me wait around a while; once i actually got to Mexico, it took me only a minute of explaining the new rules for them to let me through! (although yes, i do think it amusing that i had to explain the rules!).

My friend was an hour late picking me up from the airport, so I got to sit around and absrob the Spanish sounds around me for a long time. I feel myself stumbling a little as I try havinga  conversation with her, but interestingly she thinks my Spanish is better than it has ever been. That makes no sense, I havent spoken the language in 3 years, and I feel myself searching for words and for correct conjugations in a way that I havent needed to do before. And yet, I am happy to realize we were able to have a real conversation, about the past, about what we have been doing, about ideas for the work we could do over the summer, and about other fairly complex issues. Makes me confident that, within a few more days, I will be fluent again.

This might sound horrible, but I;m also overjoyed to note that she isn;t in touch with that one-time common friend from Mexico some of you have heard about whom I really don;t want to run into again, being back here is bringing so much of the past back, the wonderful and the less than wonderful, but it;s good to also see that things have changed.

Quesadillas and sopes for dinner... made me happy to be back. If there;s one thing i truly love about Mexico, it;s the food.

As the project itself goes, turns out there really isn´t a plan, or even a proper vision, in place for what we hope to achieve this summer. I had learned to expect that, but it is still a teeny bit disappointing... but only a teeny bit because that means i get that much more of a role in figuring it out with them. Pravah´s and Paul´s training in asking hard questions about the whys of the work we do will stand me in good stead. I;m also hopeful about getting an oral history piece off the ground, brought my dictaphone, wouldn;t that be exciting? Lots of ideas, need to spend some time concretizing them before we head into the mountains.

Looks like we;ll be in Mexico City for a week or 10 days before we head out. Y and L are both still finishing up their school year. They asked me if i wanted to go to the city of Puebla with some of their friends who are part of a circus in the meantime, i;m not yet sure if I want to do that, although it does sound like fun, doesn´t it? Haha, will keep you updated.

Off to Mexico

So, disregard any panic that last post may have caused (although I do appreciate the concerned emails). I'm feeling better and heading to Mexico tomorrow. These should prove to be an interesting 6 weeks.

This past week in California has been utterly beautiful. Exhausting at times, yes, but also refreshing in incredible ways. Catching up with people I haven't talked to in months or years really helped me see myself differently... one conversation in particular, had after a 5 year silence, transformed so much about how I see myself and people around me. More on that some other time, perhaps, but it's really more diary news than blog news. Nevertheless an important week.

It hasn't yet hit me that I shall be in Mexico at this time tomorrow. Hasn't even hit me enough for me to feel nervous or excited or anything. But yes, there you have it, one more adventure. I am looking forward to it when i think about it, and I'm sure it will become more real as soon as I check into that airport tomorrow.

Well then, that's all for now, will blog again from Mexico City in the next couple of days. Stay well, and stay in touch!

Back at SUA

I've been back in California this week, and it's been both wonderful and exhausting. There's a lot going on inside my head, but most of it is diary-worthy, not blog-worthy. Still, I feel the need to touch base a little.

Staying with J & W, that's been wonderful. Also really glad I came out early enough int he week to actually get a chance to meet and talk with TL, PV, and JK... even when all the students had changed and the cafeteria seemed weird, it felt good to have these guys still be there, to be able to talk to them as an alum but also as a student. I feel like my favorite part of being an SUA alum is having such close relationships with my teachers.

In some ways, of course, the ceremony was overwhelming. Not the ceremony itself, but all the people gathered there. There were so many more people to talk to than was possible; I hugged more people yesterday than I have all year, but I didn't get a chance to talk to anyone for more than a couple of minutes. That's not how I work; I know I need to do more catching up... so, in a weird way, I feel less like I caught up with people at graduation and more like I now feel more motivated to catch up with people after I return from my summer adventures. Including with people who weren't there today but whom I would have loved to see. I feel more connected to the alumni in general after today, and it's a good feeling.

Two more people to meet, hopefully tomorrow, and then I head on to LA to spend a day with L, then off to Mexico on the 1st of June. So glad I did this week at SUA first.

Suddenly very nervous about the whole Mexico experience, though. I'm sick. More than I have been in a long time now... walking in very painful right now. It's a scary context from which to be going into a rural summer... I'm not sure how to deal with it yet. Trying to see a doctor tomorrow, but struggling with the medical system in the USA and figuring out health insurance details. J & W have both been so wonderful, so grateful they are here through this, but still scared of what next. Even briefly considered dropping the whole Mexico plan, but couldn't bring myself to do that... I really, really, really want to go. But I have to weigh this out carefully and make sure I'm taking all necessary precautions. Don't want to repeat Mongolia. (Yes, this is more than I would usually admit about my health on a public space, at least during a crisis, but I'm trying to be more upfront about things, in general and therefore on this blog as well.) We'll see, I hope that my next entry is indeed from Mexico.

Returning to "the hill"

In 2 days, I'm going back to SUA for the first time since I graduated. M is graduating, I'm so proud of her for getting there despite all the odds she faced that I have to be there to celebrate. I'm also looking forward to a week of catching up with friends I haven't seen in way too long, haven't spoken to in a while either.  At the same time, I'm so sad about all the friends who won't be there, especially two close friends I was counting on being able to hug and catch up with after too long... but I guess that's part of what moving so much involves. I'm especially looking forward to one person, whom I haven't seen or spoken to since sophomore year of college, driving up to the OC to say hello... that's going to be the most interesting, even if intense, meeting of this next week, I think.

But a little part of me is in disbelief. That world feels far away. Mexico, where I return on June 1st, feels even further away. I can't exactly say I'm nervous-- it feels too far away for me to feel anything about it-- but I am curious to see what happens. I know I'm not the person I was 3 years ago, and I know that's probably going to be true for most of the people I'm going to see again after this interval, so I'm curious to see who we are now in relationship to each other now. That's especially true of my Mexican friends and even the village I'm going back to... 3 years is a long time, the toddlers I carried in my arms will be running all over the place now, the 10-year-olds will be teenagers, probably with a bit of an attitude, and none of them will remember me. There's something humbling about that.

And yet, I feel I will be more myself by the time I return to New York City in July. It's almost as if I no longer know who I am without the confusions of identity... being an international student from India in New York is almost too simplistic, I need to be all of those other people in order to feel whole now. It's a little bit like when you've been sitting in one place too long and your foot goes to sleep (is that the expression in English too, or am I just translating literally from the Hindi?)... waking it up involved those pins and needles that are uncomfortable but not in a bad way, just in a strange way. Once you move it around a bit, though, the blood starts flowing again and you can walk and feel your feet below you as you do so. I'm in the pins and needles stage just now, but I do look forward to feeling my feet again.

I've noticed over this past year in New York, more than ever before in my life, that I switch, from one hour to the next, between feeling surrounded by the love and care of so many beautiful friends that I can't believe my good fortune to feeling utterly alone. That's at least in part because most of those beautiful friends are physically not here, and it's easy to let them slip to the back of one's mind sometimes... and i haven't had the time or emotional energy to create that community here yet. Yet, I know by now that, for the rest of my life, my "real" community will probably live inside my head and all around the world, not in any one specific geographic location. That's both wonderful and frustrating.

Speaking of which, I owe at least two of those friends a phone call before I set off on my summer adventure. And my apartment is demanding a thorough cleaning spree, and my bags haven't even come out of the closet yet, and I have SO many important errands to run, and I leave in less than 48 hours. It's time to sign off, and I look forward to seeing many of you lovely readers soon :)

A gift... and gifts

I was given a beautiful gift today. By a woman who has given me many beautiful gifts over the last few months-- my poetry professor in Spring semester, Suzanne Gardinier.

It was the senior lecture, a tradition at SLC where the graduating class selects a professor to give them one final talk before they leave. This lecture was called "A life of learning: How to tear down a house and build a boat" and it reminded me of so many beautiful things that I asked her for a copy, knowing I would need to go back to it at different points in my life... as I reread it late at night, I can only think of it as a wonderful gift that someone gave me and that I gratefully received.

Do you know the feeling of being at home in a talk? Suzanne's talks and writing make me feel at home in a way that only one other person's talks and writings do-- Sarah Wider's. they both talk about poetry and activism in the most beautiful, most gentle of ways, with a love that makes me feel so complete and so utterly... at home, that's it. Here's a quote from it, something I needed to hear today, something I need to hear often:

You're not lying awake worrying because you're neurotic.  (Or not entirely anyway.)  You're worrying because you're awake.  And the question isn't how best to anesthetize yourself against this, but how to live with it.  How to dance with what's true.... you can be trained enough not to panic, but to dance

Anesthesia is sometimes the easier choice, but I want that training she talks about, and I know that all of this past year's struggles with illness, with confronting mortality, with everything, have been part of acquiring that. Have been part, simply, of learning to dance.

Suzanne would often talk to us in class about what a gift our art can be, would encourage us to think of ourselves as creating gifts that we can give to people we may have never met. She wants to see a world where people leave poems around for others in to read in phone booths and coffee shops and public places, where who wrote the poem is less important than the gift of that piece of one life to another life. Today, I read a blog posted on the facebook page of a friend who recently did something called "poetry in unexpected places"... a group of young poets/ spoken word artists who spent one weekend afternoon performing poems in the subways of NYC. The blog post mentioned something to the effect: "The greatest part was that nothing was expected in return." Because if something was expected in return, it wouldn't really be a gift, would it?

I can't get these thoughts about gifts out of my mind. I have been thinking a lot lately about what it means to give something without expecting in return... when the other party doesn't quite believe you expect nothing in return. So, when you give because you find joy in giving, and the other party starts feeling uncomfortable because they assume you want something back that they cannot give, should you feel apologetic about giving in the first place?

S told me this morning that I can come across "too strongly"; that he knows me well enough to understand where I am coming from, but that for someone new, it can be hard to realize i honestly don't want anything in response. I'm talking here not so much about literal gifts as just about love and support... there have been a few different people in my life whom I have tried reaching out to over the past few weeks, people I don't really know that well but, for different reasons, connected to and wanted to reach out to. I ignored the voices, once on the outside but now well settled into my head, that tell me I "care too much," felt comfortable in reaching out with all the love in my heart. I knew I couldn't get hurt because I really wasn't looking for any specific response, or even a response at all necessarily, that was not the point. But I hadn't realized that other part enough until recently... that even if I don't expect anything from someone, they often still think I do, and that often still makes them uncomfortable. I am starting to see that over the last few days, and S was right in stressing/ explaining that in a way that drove the point home. It almost feels selfish not to have realized it on my own.

Except that I don't know where that leaves me. I don't want to apologize for caring; I don't want to apologize for the gifts I want to give. Mostly, I don't want to apologize for who I am. But do I want to apologize for their discomfort? I'm not sure.

One year into Graduate school

I'm not sure today is the best day to restart this blog, but I figure I'll never start if I keep waiting for the right day to start it. So here we go, this probably won't be my most interesting entry, just think of it as my ramp back in :)

I feel strangely exhausted. I finished my first year of graduate school 5 days ago, and I haven't really done anything since, but I'm still so drained. Most of the time, it's a good exhaustion... you know how, after a really excruciating workout, you wake up the next morning and every muscle of your body hurts but in a really good way? That's how I feel emotionally, spiritually, and intellectually right now. Everything hurts after this past year's excruciating workout, but in a good, satisfying way.

I'm not sure how to sum up this year.

Am I a better writer than I was when I got here in September 2009? Yes. 100% yes. It feels really good to be able to say that with such conviction... I'm not sure I could have said it after my first semester, but definitely by the end of the year. I've grown in craft, but the really important part of this year has been becoming much more honest to my experiences, much less conscious of other people's thoughts about my work while I am doing my work, much more comfortable in my voice.

It's also been a process of deconstructing my education, so informed by first British and then American literary traditions, and ask what that means for the understanding of literature that my generation of writers in postcolonial societies has grown up with. In my first school, we could be punished for speaking Hindi; we learned early that English was the language of intellectual work, was somehow more respectable. Although speaking in Hindi would not have been an issue in the school where I did most of my schooling (moved there in 2nd grade), I refused to speak Hindi in school, outside Hindi classes, until my friends in 10th and 11th grade made me do it. I was never sure why I wasn't comfortable speaking this language in school when it was my home language just as much as English was; I guess lessons learned in childhood go a really long way. Now, as I think about writing multilingually, I realize that my diary is naturally multilingual, but the moment i "sit down to write," I switch into English and have a hard time being flexible. Interestingly, though, when we did pure sound and rhythm based exercises in class, I found myself composing in the devnagari script-- it just didn't work in the roman script-- partly because Hindi is more phonetic, but i think also partly because when you reach beyond language into more primal rhythms, then Hindi's rhythms inform me in crucial ways. Now, my program director is strongly encouraging me to do translation work (from Hindi and/ or Spanish) as part of my thesis next year... which sounds like an amazing idea, and feels like a logical next step, but is still incredibly daunting. We'll see.

In the context of those questions and explorations, it's been an interesting journey being the only international student and the only non-white person in my poetry workshops. Even though I've lived in so many different places, somehow I've never really had to think about being a cultural outsider as much as here at SLC, except perhaps in the Catholic University in Argentina. I guess all of those spaces have had enough diversity within them for me to find a home in it; here, being the only one, I've been pushed to think about it in a whole different way. I have also never had to think about race before; this year has shown me that, even if I'm not thinking actively about it, there's no way for me to avoid it while I live in the USA... and has thereby forced me to reflect on how it informs my everyday experiences here. At first, all of that was incredibly unsettling: being surrounded by one specific poetry tradition, hearing a similar voice around me and knowing that that was not my voice, but not really knowing what was my voice. Over time, though, it became a useful exercise: every time I read-- or wrote-- something and knew "that's not how I sound," I was forced to ask myself, "well, then, how do I sound?" A few months ago, my poetry changed incredibly as a result... everything, the content, the structures, the rhythms, the line lengths... and for the first time I felt like I was really hearing my own voice in my work. Other languages I speak, other traditions that speak inside my head, other experiences that are close to my heart, all slowly began to creep into my work.

And, frankly, that scared me.

I don't know if I can explain that fear to someone who doesn't create and think about art on a regular basis... but it was outright scary to hear this raw voice and realize it was my own and then to have to wonder what the other voices were. Not that they are in opposition to each other; the new writing just felt deeper and more gut level than anything that came before, but it's still scary. And the further I'm trying to go down that road, the more scared I am, but also the more excited I am.

Now, I feel I'm "talking like an artist," and that isn't a comfortable feeling either! I don't want to be obscure, and I'm always wary of pompous artist-y talk. But this feels so utterly true in my heart, I'm just going to accept that this is coming from me :)

In that context, I'm curious to see how my writing evolves while I am in Mexico for the summer, utterly away from both English and Hindi, surrounded by Spanish and Nahuatl. Even if I continue to write in English alone, will the rhythms of those other languages creep into my work? I hope so. I can't wait to see.

Life between continents

Just to say "I'm back, sort of, but don't have the time for a real post yet," here's a short video/ slideshow that I made for my Oral History class. My only suggestion on how best to "get it" is don't try to hard; don't look for a particular time and place and context for each photo. Just follow the journey from the waiting room onwards into a place that only exists inside my head.

More soon, I hope!