Asakiyume mita

It was a peak linguistic delight to listen to a presentation, given in Portuguese by a charismatic Colombian researcher named Mayra Ricardo Zuluaga, on a film she and a Tikuna scholar (meaning, in this case, a scholar who is Tikuna) named Sandra Fernández Sebastián had made about huito (in Tikuna, é), the fruit that's so important in Tikuna culture. It makes a deep, blue-black dye, and painting this on you confers protection and blessings. It's used on babies for this purpose, and in coming-of-age ceremonies and at other important events. (And/but it can be given more casually, too: I got to grate huito, squeeze the pulp, and dye my hands with it.) The film was in Spanish, with some phrases in Tikuna.

huito/é (screenshot from the film)


grated huito/é (my own photo)


I really loved both the film (which you can see here) and Mayra's talk (which you can see here). Mayra describes going to meet Sandra with all the focus of someone educated in the European-heritage way, and Sandra got her to slow. down. The two spent time together, got to know each other, and Mayra got to learn in a different way. "Reading for the Magütá (autonym for Tikuna) doesn't begin with books, it begins with the body," she said, and "a child reads the threads of the forest."

reading the threads of the forest (screenshot from the film)


And Sandra says about maintaining the Magütá/Tikuna language, "If one doesn't talk the language, well, one loses the land,** because our mother tongue is the way we communicate with those spirits who don't speak Spanish."

Sandra harvesting huito/é (screenshot from the film)


I found a PDF made in conjunction with the film which contained contact information, so I sent a thank-you email to the two creators, and Mayra wrote back! And she linked me to more language-learning materials, records from an online class offered a couple of years ago by a French researcher. Who of course conducts the class in French! I had laugh (and thank my lucky stars I learned French in high school). A bouquet of languages to learn another language.

The butterfly is a blue morpho--if it opened up its wings, you would see the brilliant blue. And the pink wall is one wall of the Museo Etnográfico in Leticia. (screenshot from the film)


...In the European-heritage way of learning things. While meanwhile, with my friend and tutor in Leticia, we go slow, and I learn through friendly conversation. We're a continent apart, so we're not walking together, but we ask each other, "What are you doing right now?" "Numa, tacu tai cu u?" (there should be bunches of diacritics on those vowels, but my teacher is pretty haphazard about them, and I'm not sure with my ears about what they represent, so... ) or "What are you cooking?" "Tacu tai cui feim?" And then we answer each other, and we get a big laugh if we're cooking the same thing, which has happened.

**she says "territorio," but she's meaning everything that goes with territory/land: connection, sense of self, tradition, way of living.

I finished my six-page picture book about planting eggs and incubating avocado seeds. Behold! The egg grew into a tree that has eggs on it:



And the avocado seeds that the hen sat on hatched some avocado chicks:



I sent the text and pictures to my friend and Tikuna teacher and said if she wanted to put it into Tikuna, we could create a dual-language book ;-) (And I said she should tell me if I'd messed up the Spanish, which is highly probable.)

The complete PDF is too large for me to send to my guides, let alone my friend, so I will try printing it up here and mailing it--though I'm not sure postal mail will reach anyone. But in any case, they have the pictures and (minimal) text to get a smile out of, and if my friend does put it into Tikuna, I'll add that in and send her the text and pictures again.

I get a lot of hope and ideas for ways things can be better from stories about what people are doing in so-called developing countries. Often they seem like things I myself could tackle, or I with a few friends--like writing a newspaper to cover events of interest or concern in my local neighborhood. Unlike Mohammad Hasan Parvez, I could even do it with aid from a computer. He writes out the newspaper by hand.

Parvez lives in a small village in southern Bangladesh, and to earn money, he does various jobs--works as a brickmaker or goes to sea to fish. There are no newspapers in his area, and in any case the national papers have no interest in reporting on what goes on there, but a mentor of Parvez's, an award-winning journalist, suggested to him that he himself could publish a paper.

He calls his paper Andharmanik:

The river Andharmanik is known for some characteristics. The most common myth about it is that if someone splashes the river water in the dark, it emits light and creates an arc.

“Andharmanik means a ruby that lights up the dark. I want my paper to be like that — a beacon of hope for our community,” Parvez said.

The paper has been running since May 1, 2019:

In the past four years, Parvez has cultivated a team of 15 volunteers — labourers, farmers, and fishermen — who work as newspaper reporters, feeding Parvez with the daily happenings in different corners of their district. Once a month, they have a team meeting where Parvez gathers all the news from his volunteers.

Parvez writes headlines and gets them printed out in a big font from a local cyber cafe. He then pastes the headlines onto A3-size papers and writes the rest of the content with a fountain pen. He prints at least 300 copies from a Xerox machine. His volunteers also act as hawkers and distribute the paper in different villages.

You can read the whole story here, in a story by Faisal Mahmud, a journalist based in Dhaka, Bangladesh. The story is published in a Turkish newspaper. I discovered it because it was tweeted by the mentor, Rafiqul Montu (and retweeted into my timeline by my friend Jaspreet Kindra).

I'm grateful to everyone along that chain, and Parvez himself, for this work and for the spark of energy it gives.

Parvez at work

Last year, when wakanomori and I went to Amazonas, one thing I really loved was fariña, a preparation of cassava made by grating it, then roasting it. After returning home, I found a great video on the making of it among the Tikuna (I wrote about it here; the entry had screenshots from the video). And I knew that was something I really, really wanted to participate in if I ever got the chance.

And I did get the chance, and it was (a) just like the video and (b) lovely, and (c) I made a great friend who had nearly the same name as me.

First went to a little shop in a residential part of Letícia to get rubber boots for me. Then we went by taxi to a point in the middle of apparent nowhere, and the taxi let us out. There was a tiny path leading into the landscape, and we set out on that:

( four photos: little shop, taxi, and two of the path )

All along the way there were wild fruits we could just reach out and eat. Here, granadilla, a type of passion fruit. This one isn't ripe, but we had some ripe ones.



And there were garden patches and fields all along the way, too, but blending right in to the riot of other growing things. Here, pineapples:



There was also sugarcane, bananas, and... cassava! Here's a bunch which even I could see was a grouped planting (you can see some small bananas in there too, though):



At last we came to the place where the fariña roasting was happening. You can see the machine used for grating the cassava--just like in the video! But they were past that stage. The big roasting pans are also just the same! And the paddles for turning it. They graciously let me take a turn. My new friend Francy and her mom are feeling the fariña to see if it's still damp, or if it's dry. If it's dry, it's done.

You can see that the fariña is being roasted over a fire that's contained by a wall of corrugated metal that's then insulated with a mud-grass mixture. Very cool.

( the roasting area--three photos )

When it's done, it gets strained to take out the large lumps, the quiebra muelas, or tooth breakers. But one of my guides likes snacking on those, and they can be good if you soak them in something, like açai juice. Açai was in season, and people were selling the juice (actually somewhere between a juice and a puree) everywhere. People like to have it mixed with ordinary fariña (not the tooth breakers) and a little sugar--wonderful.

You can see that the sieve is handmade. Beautiful.

And then it's ready to be put into a sack to take home. Francy used a scoop made from a gourd to put it in the sack, a beautiful item. On another occasion I had cassava beer, which we drank out of gourds like that, coated on the inside with a local resin. They filled a 50-lb sack with fresh-made fariña. They also had buckets of cassava starch (used to make that beer, among other things).

( straining the fariña, scooping it, plus the starch (three photos) )

At some point before we left, we took a little walk around, looking at the fields. When the cassava is grown, you can walk underneath it, like in the first picture. They told me that it's ready to harvest when all but the top leaves have fallen off.

One of my guides was asking about different types of cassava, trying to correctly identify ones that were sweet (don't need to soak to remove the cyanide) from the ones that are bitter (that do need to soak). They looked at things like the leaves to be able to tell, and I was reminded of the dissertation by Clara Patricia Peña-Venegas that I've been reading, which has this diagram of all the places indigenous people look to make distinctions between types.

In her disssertation, she also said that special landraces (local cultivars) get given special names, and I saw this! "Does this one have a special name?" my guide asked of one plant, and Francy's father said, "pajarito."

Under the cut is the diagram, and also: a cleared area for farming, some stems of cassava, which are used for planting (each one is cut into smaller sections for planting), an example of one of those in the ground, and what it's like under a canopy of cassava.

( cassava agriculture (five photos) )

When we were finished, we waited for a long time for transport to come. Francy's parents had huge loads: her dad carried the 50-lb bag of fariña, and her mon was carrying a similar amount of firewood. The mom, Mateas, and the bag of fariña went off with one motorcycle taxi, and the dad, the firewood, and Francy went off on another (I think: memory hazy, now). Francy's boyfriend (brother of one of my guides) and my guides and I went back in ... I can't remember now if it was a taxi or a tuk tuk!

Waiting

My Tetun classmate alerted me to this film on healing in Timor-Leste. It's beautiful in every way: as a respectful inquiry into other people's ways of living and dealing with injury and illness, as cinematography, and as a meditation on what healing and care is. As the introductory text on Vimeo says,

The film asks viewers to consider what we understand health and wellbeing to mean, showing how healing is intimately entangled with forms of belief and care grounded in deep connections between people and their environments.

The directors interview a number of healers, including one doctor from what they call the formal sector. Everyone shares their thoughts and personal history so generously--including three smiling little girls, who talk about the little remedies their mother has taught them.





This is something we can all relate to! Put aloe on a burn, put jewelweed on poison ivy (if you live in the US), put a dock leaf on a nettle sting (if you live in the UK). And probably all of us have others--I remember being told sugar would draw out a splinter, for instance, and to gargle with hot salt water if I had a sore throat.

More broadly, though, the US medical system is alienating in every way that the healing practices described here are affirming. I'm not saying everything about traditional healing is perfect--humans are still humans, and any system is open to human failure, and Timorese people themselves (as the directors talk about in a scholarly paper on the same topic) are uneasy about the possibility for charlatans. ... But of course US medical practice has its charlatans too.

( I felt a powerful longing... )

I think the thing I felt most strongly in the film was the sense of connection between and among everything, the sense that a single act of healing reaches back into families and down into the earth.

Link to the film is here. It's 30 minutes.

During the summer I took the level-one Tetun course (Tetun: the lingua franca in Timor-Leste) offered through Timorlink. It's an Australia-based program, but the teachers all have deep connections with Timor-Leste.

Next week I'm starting the level-two course, and--because life is stranger than fiction--my teacher is going to be none other than the inestimable Kirsty Sword Gusmão.

Life keeps thrilling me--I feel so lucky to be alive!

I have a pen pal in Brazil (we have a great story of how we became pen pals, but I'll save it for another day) who told me about this dessert, paçoca, which is served during Festa Junina, in June. It's *very simple*: ground peanuts and sugar and a touch of salt, ground to the consistency of wet sand (as one recipe I read described it), and then pressed together in a form.

Eating the foods of faraway places that I'd like to visit but can't is one of my favorite things to do, so just now I made some.

At first I tried to pack it into a star-shaped cookie cutter, but it didn't work too well--the mixture was maybe not ground-up enough (I re-blender-ified it--but you don't want to blender-ify it too much, or you end up with peanut butter), but also all those points are tricky.



Wakanomori suggested I try this little press-thingie that we got at a tag sale forever ago and which I've never used.



So I did, and it worked very well indeed!





Wakanomori tried one, then came back for another. "Very more-ish" was his verdict. Here is the exceptionally easy recipe I used.

And here's something else that's nice--a pre-release review of Lagoonfire in Publishers Weekly. It starts out "Regret, perseverance, and love drive Forrest's sparkling second Tales of the Polity Fantasy" and ends with "this evocative and ultimately uplifting story is sure to please" which--well, I hope so!

It reveals a little bit more of the plot than is maybe ideal? So if you don't click through and read it, I won't mind ;-).

Oh what the heck, I need also to link to this great song I'm listening to because the video is a delight to look at and the song is, as they say in brazil, otima!

The same day my friend showed me the photo from the previous entry, I had a great encounter in a pharmacy. There were two pharmacy technicians, young women, chatting. One came over to give me the prescription I was picking up, and I saw on her name tag that she had the same surname as Em in Pen Pal, and a really pretty, unusual first name (so unusual that when I typed the whole name just now into Google, a picture of her popped up on the first page of results).

I don't know if you've seen that meme on Twitter that goes

don't say it
don't say it
don't say it
don't say it

And ends with you blurting out the thing, but that was what happened with me. Don't say she has a pretty first name; that's intrusive, I told myself. And DEFINITELY don't mention that her surname is the surname of a character in a story you wrote.

But I did, and she smiled and said, "Oh really? My name? Where does the story take place?" So I told her, describing Mermaid's Hands, and said that it was kind of a fantasy, and she said, "I love fantasy! You know, that was one of the things I wanted to do before I turned twenty-one--write a book. I started, too, and got 2,000 words ... but then I stopped."

"Oh no! Why?"

"Oh, I let a friend read it, and she had so much to say. She was really sarcastic."

"That stinks! What a terrible friend!"**

"I know, right? The story was about the four elements, and now I see so many stories like that! If I had only finished it. . ."

"So maybe if you write your next idea? It sounds like you're tapped into what people want to read."

... I love encounters like that.

**I really believe this. When a beginning writer gives you something to read, it's terrible to close them down like that. I'm not talking about a situation where you're in a writer's group together and sharing critiques, or if an experienced writer asks you to beta read something--that's different. (Though even then there are ways and ways of giving criticism.) But if a friend shares something they've created with you, you don't shit all over it, any more than you would if they showed you their first photos or their first pottery or knitted item or sketch. If the thing genuinely appalls you, there are still ways of begging off without giving the creator a world of grief.

In this entry, osprey_archer talks about short films she's watched recently, and one of them, "Lost World," by Cambodian American director Kalyanee Mam, captivated me.

It's narrated by a young woman, Vy Phalla [surname comes first here], who lives on the island of Koh Sralau. The way of life there is threatened by sand dredging: sand is dredged in Cambodia and taken to add landmass in Singapore.

Scooping up Cambodia ...



... To create more Singapore




The film's write-up at shortoftheweek.com says, "Kalyanee Mam’s film encompasses vast juxtapositions in a slow-motion lament against environmental degradation, loss, and rapacious capitalism." Yes. It is that, powerfully.

But I was also there for foraging clams at low tide, in among the mangrove spiracles:





And for hopping from prop root to prop root, looking for snails (though the kids did complain about the mosquitos).



Beautiful place to live...



... very different from futuristic Singapore**



At one point Phalla sings a beautiful song about the mangroves. "The beauty of the mangrove forest / rivals the palace gardens" So right.

mangrove seedling



And Phalla goes to see the palace gardens, so to speak: in Singapore she visits an artificially created cloud forest. "Lost World," the exhibit is called. Please do not touch, the signs admonish. "Camelia," Phalla says. "I've only heard the name. Now I see its face."



Back in Cambodia, watching the dredgers, she says, "The law has given us all kinds of freedoms. Here we only have the right to sit, shed tears, and witness the destruction." ... I would like to say something in answer to that, but I think maybe the appropriate thing is to sit, witness, and maybe shed tears.

Thanks for sharing this with me, osprey_archer!

Lost World from Go Project Films on Vimeo.

**Don't take this entry to be anti-Singapore. You can point out a wrong practice without condemning a country (or person or organization or....) wholesale.

Who found this image and story of a tiny floating shelter that, as she says, looks like it could be from Mermaid's Hands! The houses in Mermaid's Hands are made of salvaged wood and roofed with thatch, but with corrugated metal over the kitchen portion, but people living in Mermaid's Hands are adaptable and would love the painting on the side.


Source

It was found floating 180 miles south of Grand Isle, Louisiana. Pen Pal starts with Em wondering what would happen if she could detach her house and have it go floating free--I guess this little house was finding out! (It turned out to have been a floating dock in Key West, Florida--so that's quite a journey it went on.)

Gotta love the art ♥