ABlog

So, I’ve had to stop blogging for a while. Summer seemed like a good excuse. Now it’s Labor Day, which means to me that routines must be resumed or forever abandoned.

Resume, then.

Efficiency is going to be the watchword this time around. First thought, best thought. (As if I’ve ever been that Zen.)

Summer was a rapid sequence of (dis)locations and the emotions they produce: gray sky light flashing off the mirror of water-logged Vermont field ruts, assessment of the progress of corn in Carriacou, vision of Portland with Mt. Hood subtracted by smog, lacinato kale growing in the front yards, banks of the Willamette scorched to a hip crisp. The jingle of slot machines in the Las Vegas airport. Final approach into Phoenix, coming in low under a dense black curtain of stormcloud, sun setting in the distance.

And the dreadful events that happened in Lebanon. And Gaza. (I must not call it a “war,” not a separate war: that is how they want us to think. I mustn’t say “happened”; I must say “happening.”)

We were in Carriacou for much of the thing’s duration. The talk in Bill’s place on the main drag in “town,” where the guys go to drink Carib and talk shit, and women and Fruta sippers are kindly accommodated, was invariably of the possible run-up to Armageddon. Amazing concordance with biblical prophecy! I don’t know if anyone was serious about this; there was a tone about it of marveling at far-off wonders, a sort of National Enquirer suspension of disbelief about the possible implications of the cable TV images.

“It’s terrible,” people said. “The news is so depressing.” I think they wanted us to know that here, in “little Carriacou,” it wasn’t as if they were out of the loop. (Though Winston told me that when he went to Bill’s without me, the talk had moved on to the Wars of Succession and the possibility that medical warnings about cholesterol have been overblown.)

Every couple of days, we’d go to one of the several Internet cafes in town and pay for our information by the hour. Massacre in Qana. Threatened strike on Tel Aviv. Or I’d stand in the long bank line, waiting to change money, watching CNN play in the corner.

Only late in the trip did notice the contexts in which what I’ve come to think of as Grenada’s ghost revolution had come up--infrequently, obliquely, always in passing. “During the revo, land prices dropped way down because nobody knew what was going to happen.” “During the PRG, agriculture got a lift. Now it’s all tourism, tourism.” “We were civil servants. We were trained, you see, that it wasn’t our role to take a position. But when Bishop and them came in, everything was politics.” And the plaque on the wall in the lobby of the little hotel, shaped like Grenada, with a photo of Maurice Bishop superimposed—the man was beloved, even beyond what he stood for. People still remember how he gave them that lift, made it seem like "little Grenada" counted for something.

When we passed through St. Georges, where Winston went to secondary school, he pointed to the hill crowned by the fort we’d visited in 2000, my first time on the island. This time we didn’t go up there to pay our respects to the crumbling wall in front of which Bishop and the others were gunned down by their erstwhile comrades.

Where are you going, world?

As for me, I’m back, obviously, in Brooklyn, which is really mostly the Caribbean pursued by other means. For much of last night, the J’Ouvert processions and blaring car stereos kept me awake, heralding the advent of the West Indian Day Parade. I won’t be jumping up today, I’ll be refining syllabi. But I want to tell you I just read Octavia Butler’s The Parable of the Sower, published in 1993 and, with its vision of the disintegrating fabric of American society (including the reappearance of slavery), totally relevant to our moment. I just read in the latest American Poetry Review Anne Carson’s hard-hitting translation of Euripides’ Hekabe, with a typically wry Carsonian introduction analyzing what she calls “the unpleasantness of Euripides.” She seems to intend a parable for our time, a homily about the fate of narrative in an era of endless wars—kill too many people and you forfeit narrative closure; revenge is not a motor of catharsis. I just received from a literary agent a “positive” rejection of The Company of Cannibals; she praises the writing, but finds that “the story is too fabulist” for sale to a general trade publisher, “nor can I see a way to make it more marketable without compromising some of the things I loved here.”

There is, quite frankly, no way to make “marketable” so much of what we might love and ought not to compromise: products as humble as Grenadian soursop, sugar apples, local corn and callaloo; goals as grand as an end to the U.S. torture and domination of Iraq, an end to the U.S.-funded Israeli torture and domination of Palestine and Lebanon.

The point is not original with me, but I think it bears repeating: what could be more “fabulist” than a true account of the world in which we find ourselves?

Which is, no doubt, why the “market” adheres to a fundamentalist Realism.