Asakiyume mita

Here are three photos for you. Two I've shared elsewhere on the interwebs, so some of you will have seen them before, but the first one is making its world premiere right here, right now!

Dancing a cumbia with a candle.

Last month we went to see Yeison Landero and his band play cumbia in Amherst. (Here's what his music is like--he throws his head back and goes into a beatific trance as he plays.) It was marvelous.



When we were last in Colombia, we had one very brief session of learning to dance ;-) The teacher showed us several different styles of cumbia dancing, including one where one partner (traditionally, the guy) takes off his hat and holds it high, then low, as the two partners twirl round. That night in Amherst, the venue was full of people dancing their hearts out, including this one girl wielding a candle like a hat. How great to be dancing with fire!**

Ice Eye

Sometimes the frozen beaver pond glares up at you with a critical eye! (The eye is created by people opening a hole in the ice for ice fishing. It refreezes, and then it's opened again, and so on.)



Popcorn Blossoms



From swollen buds, just about to unfurl, to a double-petaled flower in all its glory, popcorn blossoms are rightly celebrated for their beauty. As the classical poet wrote

Seeing them explode
ought to be the end of it.
These popcorn blossoms!
--Nothing can keep their buttery goodness
from lingering on my fingers.

(apologies to the poet Sosei and the translator larryhammer for my abuse of Kokinshū poem no. 47. You can read more of Larry's for-real translations in Ice Melts in the Wind: The Seasonal Poems of the Kokinshu.)


**Actually we think it was an electric candle. But let's imagine!

UNESCO has conferred the status of intangible cultural heritage on casabe, flatbread made from cassava. It was nominated by several countries of the Caribbean including Venezuela, Cuba, Haiti, and Honduras ... but I remember fondly from Leticia, Colombia. (link.... but I just heard the story on NPR, so later this evening you can go there, too.)

The Ticuna word for casabe is dowü.

Here are some photos of my tutor's mom kindly letting me help with making one. You can make it with grated cassava, which is what I do at home, or with cassava starch (tapioca!), which is what my tutor's family does (and I think it's widespread practice).

... The photos are cropped to preserve privacy, but the woman in pink is my tutor's mom. I'm in orange ;-)

First we strained the starch. The tool used for this is called a cernidor in Spanish, cuechinü in Ticuna.



Then we pressed it onto a hot pan (look at the yummy fish in the foreground!)



And here it is, done!

There's a chair beside the path in the woods. Some leaves have collected on it.

Would you sit on it?



I sent the photo to my Tikuna tutor. She said maybe it's the seat of Madre Monte, a guardian of the forest and the animals in it, a terror to hunters, clearcutters, and fishers. She appears in the deep forest when there are storms, is responsible for water-borne ailments, and her screams are louder than thunder (says Spanish-language Wikipedia).

But maybe in her quieter moments, she appreciates a good place to sit down.

It takes temerity to sit in a seat that has "reserved" written all over it, but one of the fairies at my christening blessed me with temerity, so I gave it a try--and then jumped up, because when I sat, I sank riiiiiiiiight in, and I didn't want to find out deep the sinking would go.

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In my dad's front yard there are a sugar maple and a Norway maple. The Norway maple was shedding maps the other day.



Where would you like to go?

Each map is unique--you take it and follow it as you see fit. You could do this with ordinary maps, too. A map of London is great for navigating London, but what if you try using it in Osaka or Kota Kinabalu or Cairo? It could be interesting.

I spent two days together with my friend and Tikuna tutor this past June. I'm going to post about those days in reverse order.

On the second day, we rented bikes and rode past the airport (the airport in Leticia is adorably small and you can walk from it into town if you want) to the Leticia campus of the National University of Colombia. Wakanomori and I had tried to do that when we were there together two years ago, but the former president of the country had been speaking there and no one was allowed to even bike along the road to campus, let alone visit.

There's a fence around campus, and a gate.

"We can't go in, not without having made an appointment," my friend said. "But we can look at it from out here."

This surprised me, because Wakanomori and I certainly had planned to go on in, and we hadn't seen any indication that we needed to make an appointment ahead of time. But I figured she would know.

"Have you ever been on campus?" I asked.

"Once," she said, "for a school trip. You know, students come from all over Colombia to learn about Amazonas here, to learn about the ecosystem and plants and animals, and to learn about indigenous culture. But people here can hardly ever get accepted."

"That's terrible," I said.

"Yeah."

We admired the grounds through the fence.

A young man was walking by, and seeing us looking, he said, "Do you want to go in? You can, you know."

"Are you sure?" my friend asked.

"Of course--just speak to that man over there."

And the man in question said yes, we could look around campus, walk on the trails, and see the exhibits. "Just don't go into any classes in session," he said.

My assumptions versus my friend's. A brutal reminder of the difference growing up thinking that any and everything is open to you, that you can ask and you'll receive, and growing up thinking that everything is off limits, that nothing (at least in certain spheres) is for you.

But in the end we did get to go in, and it was a delight. There was a display on fishing:

The drawing shows people fishing. In the background is a maloca, a traditional communal house.


How a fishing pole is made


My friend in front of a canoe--the water-ripple-like forms supporting the canoe are actually fish shaped! Water and fish are one.


Then we walked along the trails, and we saw an agouti! (The link below is to a 16-second video that keeps looping, so if you don't spot him right away, you'll have an infinite number of chances, heh.) We saw him trotting through the underbrush, we saw him playing in the water, and one time, after we thought he'd gone away, he crossed the path in front of us!

Agouti!

My friend pointed out his footprints.



It's wonderful to see wildlife so at home on campus. Now if only **people** could be equally at home there.

A trip

Come Saturday, Wakanomori and I are going on a trip to a language school in Medellín, Colombia, to (a) improve our Spanish and (b) visit a new-to-us city in Colombia. And I get to peel off for a very short side trip to Leticia to visit my friends there.

My friend and Ticuna tutor and I had a video conversation today. "It's cold here right now," she told me. "Na buanecü" ["it's cold" in Ticuna.]

"Oh yeah?" I said. "What's the temperature?"

"24 degrees [75 Fahrenheit]"--which is indeed pretty cold, for the Amazon.

Her grandmother was around, so I said hello to her in Ticuna, and she said hello back, and then Francy gave me an on-the-spot Ticuna test by asking, in Ticuna, "What are you doing?" And I was able to dredge up "I'm talking with my friend," and was rewarded by her grandmother laughing and looking surprised, which probably means mainly that I was really butchering the words, but I took also to mean that I was intelligible, YAYYYY.

... anyway, I probably won't be very active here for the next 17 days and change. "And change," because as soon as I come back, I have to head right out to help out a family member. Though at least once I'm back in the states, I can post.

A graphic novel

I came across this climate-fiction graphic novel in my wanders on the interwebs. It's readable online or downloadable here, from the Instituto Humboldt, in Colombia. I haven't started it yet, but I loved this cover art by Guillermo Torres Carreño.



In the year 2100, the planet is an inhospitable place for the humans and other species that still exist. Hidden in the Colombian Caribbean is Aguamarina, an enclave created by the last remnants of Earth's civilizations ....

No doubt you've heard the story of the four children--oldest only 13, youngest only 11 months at the start of the ordeal--who survived in the Amazon rain forest for 40 days after the small plane they were in crashed. The oldest, a girl named Lesly, was able to take care of her younger siblings, including the baby, until rescuers eventually found them.

The children were indigenous, and family members say that they were familiar with the forest, and Lesly had knowledge of which fruits and roots were edible and which were not. And apparently they started out with a supply of cassava flour. Colombian TV had images of a shelter Lesley built for the others to keep the rain off.

When I messaged my guides R & L about the story, they said the kurupira, the spirit of the forest who can either lead people astray or save them, must have been watching over them.

Here is a statue of the kurupira from Reserva Flor de Loto. She's got one foot facing forward and one backward (some representations of her have both feet facing backward), which confuses trackers. She can change her appearance to look like someone you know, but her feet are always the giveaway.



My guides also talked about the rescue dog, Wilson, whose tracks led rescuers to the kids--they talked about him because Wilson vanished. Like a trade: Wilson agreed to stay in the forest, and so the forest released the children.

... which is something that feels more comfortable to think about as a story than in reality. In reality, when a real flesh-and-blood dog is involved, you want him to come back as well. Here's a picture of Wilson that Lesly drew (from the paper El Tiempo)



And here is some art from CNN Español



There was a team of indigenous rescuers with the military rescuers, and when they found the children, they sang a song to welcome them back to the human world. The song was to encourage them to leave behind the heat of the forest and take up the heat of humanity.

Quite a story.

I learned so much in the Amazon: one, that the river inhales and exhales: when it has breathed in deeply and its waters extend the farthest, tall trees are underwater and the fish feed on palm fruits. Maximum expansion is March. And then it exhales, shrinks-shrinks-shrinks, and temporary islands appear, and people rush out and take advantage of the 40 cm of rich soil the river has left to grow quick crops that can be harvested before the river rises and swallows the islands back up again. The river is at its lowest point in September--at which time you can walk to the island across from the pier where we got boats when we went out on the water (this is on a tiny tributary--one of our guides called it a creek--but it looked pretty big to us!)

I saw all the types of liminal houses: houses on stilts, floating houses, and house boats. Here is a floating house.



I have more stories to share (of course!) but we caught Covid (despite everything; we were vaxxed and masked to the max), so I'll probably still be a little scarce around here for a bit.

One more thing before I go: I loved how indoors and outdoors blended. Here's a coffee shop and bakery where we stopped on the way back from a bike ride:

I've been listening to a lot of music from Colombia's Pacific coast; I love it. This song, "Yo bebí del agua turbia" (I drank the cloudy water), is not only beautiful itself, it has a beautiful video to go with it. Ever see a video of a place and feel homesick for it, even though you've never been there?

The white lacy dresses the women are wearing: I remember my sister and I had UNICEF cardboard figures from different countries, with facts about the countries written on the back. I had a girl, not from Colombia but from Panama, wearing an outfit like this, exactly like this, and I was entranced by it. I wanted my mom to make me a dress like it. That didn't happen! But I can still remember the cardboard figure of the girl from Panama, holding out her skirts.

Yo bebí del agua turbia
Porque me apuro la sed
Yo bebí del agua turbia
Porque me apuro la sed

Nadie diga con orgullo
Que esta agua no es de beber
Nadie diga con orgullo
Que esta agua no es de beber

I drank the cloudy water
Because I was pressed by thirst
I drank the cloudy water
Because I was pressed by thirst

No one tell me arrogantly
That this water is not to drink
No one tell me arrogantly
That this water is not to drink

I went searching for the lyrics and found a book of couplets from the Pacific coast, including one that's almost exactly this:

Yo bebí del agua turbia
Porque me apuro la sed;
Nadie diga con soberbia
Que esta agua no es de beber

("Soberbia" also means pride, arrogance) I've asked for the book on interlibrary loan because I liked what I saw along with this one on the Google Books page result.

I saw dreadlock, deadlock, and deadname in quick succession and started thinking about not hair or tangled traffic or trans rights, but about a dreadful lock, a lock that dies--is executed even. A dead lock. And I thought, how do you kill a lock?

Answer:

The key was turned
The bolt slid into place a final time
Then liquid copper was poured into the hole
--the whole plate melted, a metal smear—

Then prayers, candles, incense
No more will people pass through here

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osprey_archer posted a very fun, very short Valentine's extra for her novel Honeytrap, readily understandable even if you haven't read the novel. All you need to know is it's set in the 1950s, and the characters are a Soviet agent and an American agent who are working together (for reasons). It's a discussion of the capitalist nature of Valentine's Day as celebrated in the America. (Read it here!) And then, coincidentally, a friend linked me to this TikTok video where a woman talks about how capitalist Valentine's Day is, and then provides links to her free anticapitalist you-can-use-them-for-Valentine's-or-any-day cards. I liked "Workers are Billionaire Creators" best.

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I love this art, located in London, by Colombian street artist Stinkfish:



Detail:



(Source: Hooked: Street Art from London and beyond)

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I'm doing some pro bono work for a friend of one of my kids, who's written about the Titanic. I reached a passage where it talks about the SS Californian, which was very close but didn't render assistance, and he describes how it seemed to the Californian that this ship--they didn't know what ship it was--that they had noticed was moving away from them, getting smaller, when really what was happening was it was sinking. It made me think of that famous poem by Stevie Smith, "Not Waving but Drowning.

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Well that would be a bad note to end on! So some light humor. Someone used Google translate to translate a packet of Chinese rice crackers and got this:


(Twitter source)

One of my kids retweeted it with "tag yourself"

So go ahead: Who are you?

We didn't make it to Medellín on this trip to Colombia, but in reading through our guidebook, we discovered that some distance outside of Medellín, drug lord Pablo Escobar had his private ranch, Hacienda Napoles, where he had, among other things, a menagerie of exotic animals, including hippos. After Pablo Escobar's downfall, the other animals were taken to zoos, but the hippos had managed to elude capture... and established themselves in Colombia's Magdalena River (and other watery locations), which they apparently LOVE.




(images from this National Geographic video about the hippos)

There were originally four hippos--and now there are more than 40. Unlike in Africa, there are no predators in Colombia, and there's also no hot, dry season, so the hippos are having babies every year instead of every two years, and they're coming to maturity sooner.

I thought this was a kind of amusing invasive-species story because usually invasive species are ... smaller? Zebra mussels or Japanese beetles or starlings or rabbits. But hippos are the third-largest land mammal (after elephants and rhinoceroses); adults weigh more than a ton. Hippos are not quite a godzilla-level invasive species, but they do represent a challenge for the ecosystem; Colombian zoologists worry about the impact on the local manatee population.

Lucy Cooke, a zoologist and filmmaker, has a great nine-minute video (and you can get a transcript if you don't like watching videos) describing the situation, here. Hippos may look kind of dopey-cute, but they're apparently pretty aggressive. It's made worse by the fact that male hippos have harems (the original four hippos were one male and three females), and they kick out newly mature male hippos to go find mates elsewhere--but of course, there are no other females elsewhere for these poor newly grown hippos. So they're lonely and sexually frustrated.


(image source)

Lucy Cooke said killing the hippos was unpopular among Colombians, so they they decided to try castrating the male hippos. But this is apparently very, very, very hard to do--it's hard to sedate a hippo because of their fat; you don't want the sedative to take effect when they're in the water or they'll drown, and--hippo testicles move about in their bodies when they're under stress, so you've got your sedated hippo, and now you have to find his testicles. .... Okay, they don't move around that much--they don't troop from the groin region up to the shoulders or anything like that--but apparently they can move like eight centimeters or so. One castration cost around $100,000, so that's probably not a solution either. She thinks they'll establish themselves and become a new subspecies eventually. Maybe the manatees and hippos will work something out...


Sources:
Marta Rodriguez Martinez, "Colombia Declares War on Pablo Escobar's Hippos," Euronews, February 2, 2018.

Lucy Cook, "Pablo Escobar's Hippos Are Now Colombia's Problem," Big Think, July 10, 2018.

Wikipedia, hippo entry.