strange gravity

there were strange things to recollect
as first recollections
like white rocks at sunset
a desolate waterfall
green! life.
it’s all i know
and it’s all nominal
everything’s nominal
i’m nominal
you’re nominal
and the water doesn’t really fall
it just nominates toward town.
strange things to recollect
la oroya of all places
and morococha—
i had to look it up
because i couldn’t even remember what it was called.
just pictures.
tired, static pictures.
a nominal town
for a nominal traveler.
nominal nominal nominal.
of course morococha is here tonight
4,500 meters above the level of the sea
where there’s less to breathe
because gravity has been busy putting it all down by that sea.
see?
the pearl that i don’t remember
and the family that i do.
strange gravity
in a first floor room.
strange gravity
and strange patterns
that those nominatives conform to, i guess.
conform isn’t a nominal
but it seems to be about the right kind of verb.
eat fish for a few cents more
feel them in your stomach
still swimming around
happy and free.
the fish are filled with good things
and with mercury.
thanks, industry,
for precious metals and toxic fish
that swim around in my stomach
happy and free.
white rocks
for cell phone reception!
they were right there
underneath me
forty feet.
ants.
dance.
dance for the phone reception—
to catch its eye over the low, ominous mountains.
just rest
be still be
together
a part
apart
up, art!
big tree,
comforter,
lightning-struck and tired
gentle rainfall
(lightning struck! sounds promising
for rain shelter).
rain falls
why?
strange.
gravity, strange gravity
inattentive.
squirrels!
not even a joke
strange
gravity-stricken.
a bump in the road maybe
me
i just in case
bump…
bump.
carry on. carrion? carry on carrion. care, eon!
carry on!
bump…
bump.
orbit! one
application of force away from freedom
if to be free
is to violate the heartless rules
(or constraints!)
of this strange gravity.

The Ik: Two Stories

Three years ago, i thought that by working with one of the Kuliak/Robic languages of northeastern Karamoja, i was sailing into uncharted waters. At the very least i hoped the waters were uncharted, as i wasn’t entirely confident in my cartography, and i feared lest an older account demonstrate my analysis to be clearly wrong or inadequate or overly ambitious or any other brand of incompetent.

i was blissfully ignorant, then, of such important works as Eithne Carlin’s 1993 grammar ‘The So Language’, with which most of my work would prove to be redundant. Perhaps even more startling, though, i was even ignorant of The Mountain People, a 1973 ethnography of the Ik (a closely related cultural/linguistic group) by Colin Turnbull that prompted quite the fracas within the field of anthropology.

Turnbull’s account was devastating. The first words in the 1987 edition that i read were a dedication: ‘to the Ik, whom I learned not to hate.’

If Turnbull ever learned not to hate the Ik, it was some 10 years after he lived among them, through Les Iks, a theatrical adaptation of The Mountain People by Peter Brook. The book itself is an account of the emotional torments accompanying Turnbull’s unrequited quest for goodness, truth, and beauty among the Ik.

‘If Dr. Colin ever comes back, we’ll bury him alive,’ an Ik teacher has been quoted as saying.

i read Roy Richard Grinker’s biography of Turnbull this week (over a month ago by now), and clearly Turnbull’s life was a mess when he was with the Ik in the mid-1960s (really, it was a mess from late 1950s onward). In any case, though, there’s no way to see the things that he saw, to experience the things that he experienced, and not be traumatized. The conflict between the response of many members of the anthropological community and the type of thing that Turnbull experienced can be seen in Grinker’s words:

‘The Mountain People stunned the anthropological community. The book and Colin’s personal letters described the Ik in terms that went further than most ethnographers would ever go. By the end of his fieldwork, when the famine was lessening due to a decent crop, he would refer to the Ik as “sub-humans,” a statement almost unthinkable in the anthropological profession, where a primary rule, usually called cultural relativism, is to refrain from judging people on the basis of one’s own standards or norms.’ (174)

‘He [Turnbull] watched with horror as Ik men and women attacked each other, even within their own families, to induce vomiting and then eat the vomit.’ (4)

Or in Turnbull’s words:

‘Much to my regret, it is impossible to dislike the Ik because they have no concept of affection anyway. They are merely conscious, as far as I can see, of their stomachs, and of the need to fill them.
‘Another twist to the horror story is the fact that I can find no concept of goodness as expressed in action. Goodness only means a full stomach. Someone who gives food without getting as much or more in return is, I am told, merely stupid. I have been told not to give a dying man water, in front of his face, because he was so thirsty he would “drink like an elephant then there will be none for us, we’ll have to go and get more”…laughter is rarely heard, unless someone falls over or hurts themselves.’ (174, quoted from Turnbull 1973)

Turnbull describes the end of the life of Adupa, the only Ik in whom he saw goodness, truth or beauty. Adupa was in some way mentally handicapped. Due to her ‘handicap’, she seemed to rejoice in life and pleasant things. ‘She was a kind person because of her disability, almost always playful and smiling. But it was because she was kind that she was hungry. When she found food, she would look at it in her hand with delight before eating it, but other children caught on fast and attacked her for the food. “…As she raised her hand to her mouth, they set on her with cries of excitement, fun and laughter, beat her savagely over the head and left her. But that is not how she died. I took to feeding her, which is probably the cruelest thing I could have done, a gross selfishness on my part to try and salve and save, indeed, my own rapidly disappearing conscience. I had to protect her, physically, as I fed her. But the others would beat her anyway.”’

Adupa’s parents wouldn’t let her live with them. She cried incessantly for them to let her into the compound, until one day they let her in. Upon letting her in, they left, and sealed the compound door such that Adupa would never be able to leave, allowing her to starve to death inside. A week later, they returned to dispose of her body.

The anthropological response to Turnbull’s account raises a lot of criticisms—he often imputes thoughts to people that he can only have assumed that they had, he never spoke the language well, so his claims about interactions that never took place are perhaps unfounded, he was sufficiently dismayed by the traumatic events that he failed to even try to document the events that were indicative of culture (an economy involving reciprocal labor persisted at least seasonally, and a cave-centered religion still had some practitioners, for instance), and he probably didn’t represent the Ik as fairly as he could have. But when i read The Mountain People and In the Arms of Africa (the biography), i could almost always understand how he felt, and how he could write the things that he wrote.

Turnbull’s story is awful and complex and subjective.

This summer, though, i met the Ik.

i thought that they were probably about the most well-adjusted people i had contact with in Karamoja (although i certainly did not get to know them well). Karenga, where i spent most of my time, was significantly more adjusted to modernity than was Ik country, for what that’s worth. And, retrospectively, i’m not convinced that Ik country was characterized by any less a profound dependency on outside aid.

But one of Turnbull’s most profound condemnations of Ik culture was that the unit ‘family’ had no meaning in it. And i at least took this picture. It doesn’t look so incredibly different from a picture that i took of my own family this weekend.

misguided

dirt road hairpins
(*VP, still highly ranked)
war with the elk
that don’t creep
but stride over the sunrise-lit ridge
the shade comes too fast
chickasha.
warm, for once
wine and pasta
homemade sauce
smoke.
dirty water.
the rain,
and the rain, reprised
waterfalls and a puddle
watch the creek
not even this.
lighthouses and puddles
reflected trees
too early—blue.
finals week
just want to get home.
misguided.

be still.

i’ve been back from Uganda for over a week now. i was a little bit sick for most of my first week back, but i’m mostly better now.

i’ve had a little bit of distance from the experience, so maybe i’ve been able to process it all a little bit—to decide how i feel about my time there, or maybe even if i learned anything about the world or about Karamoja or even about myself while i was there.

i’ve only seen a few people i know since i returned. But, of course, each friend (particularly those who haven’t themselves been to Karamoja) has questions about the culture of the people that i spent time with.

i’m not a trained anthropologist. More importantly, perhaps, i didn’t have the energy (diligence?) to devote much mental activity to noticing cultural details. But some things stood out, and those things tended not to be positive.

Now i’m back in America, and every once in a while people want to know what i think about the area. It’s hard to know what to say, but it’s easy to feel what to say. So i don’t end up saying what i think about the area—i say what i feel about the area. And when my experience is mediated to observers through my emotions, surely a darkness and misery exceeding the darkness and misery of day-to-day life in Karenga (is that a quantifiable kind of thing?) is communicated to the hearer—my emotions are clearly not a neutral medium of transmission; it is evident to me that my emotions distort the message, which i was never that careful with in the first place.

The children irritated me. They got inside my head. They would call me names. They would mock me. If i took a single step in their direction, they would cower in fear. They would sneak up behind younger children, pick them up (sometimes by their heads), and carry them toward me. Their reason for doing this was solely to frighten the younger children. And they would stare. Stare and stare and stare.

The children were cowards, and i usually hated them (i think). That’s a harsh way to feel toward kids—they’re young, you can’t expect them to behave like adults, whatever. They were cowards, and i usually hated them (if that’s what that emotion was). It wasn’t so much for their behavior that i hated them—although their behavior was usually heinous—rather, i hated them more for what their thoughts and actions suggested about their lives. It seemed that nothing was expected of them, they were held to no standards. They did not seem to be shown any love. Predictably, then, they did not seem to have the capacity to show love. And i wasn’t strong enough or wise enough or good enough in the five or six weeks that i spent in Karenga to shower the hundreds of kids i was in contact with with the love that i, in my feelings of western superiority, thought they needed. Or even one or two of the kids that i was in contact with. And i don’t think that i could ever be.

That doesn’t excuse hatred—if that’s truly what i felt toward them. In any case, it doesn’t excuse what i felt toward them, whether that was hatred or not. Whatever i felt toward the kids was wrong, but i assure you: i felt it.

This isn’t a post about what i should have felt. We could talk for ages about that. You wouldn’t come out of it saying ‘what you felt is what you should have felt, sam.’ But when i’m asked about the kids in Karenga, that’s what i know how to say right now.

There was a guy named Robert. He is about my age, maybe a little older. i think he’s around 27. Robert was really well built—even bulky, at least by local standards. He was usually one of the best players when we would go for football (or ‘play soccer’, for people who aren’t from Uganda). He’s applying at masters programs in United States—Michigan State and UConn, among others. When i returned from a week and a half of relaxation in Timu Forest, Robert stopped me in the road in front of the mission.

‘samuel! How was Timu? Do you remember my name?’

i had talked with him a little bit before we had left, but not much. Before i had the chance to vindicate my memory or to lose face by admitting that i had forgotten, he quickly followed his question with ‘anyway, it’s Robert, in case you forgot.’

We talked about Sudan—he had been there the day before—and he offered to take Stephen and me on his bike. We didn’t end up taking him up on the offer, but the offer was out there. As a friend.

‘i hope you go for football tonight,’ he said by way of parting.

i thought about Robert after unloading another round of harsh words tonight. If i didn’t see anything kind or compassionate or friendly or unselfish this summer, it’s because i wasn’t willing to see it. i’m always willing to allow a few exceptions—almost exclusively people who hosted us, be they mzungu missionaries or local priests and seminarians—but not for the culture at large. But Robert was just a piece of the culture at large, and he treated me kindly and unselfishly.

He was admittedly much wealthier and better educated than most other people in Karenga. But on the other hand, that meant that his English was much better than that of most other people in Karenga. And that, in turn, meant that i could communicate with him much more easily. Perhaps if i had been able to speak and understand Karamojong, i would have had access to more such experiences in the culture. It’s dangerous to form too strong of opinions about those that you can’t even speak with.

i don’t think i should think that Karenga culture is awesome. It’s clearly not. But i’m embarrassed by some of the things that i feel about Karenga. And when i’m asked about it, those are the things that i say.



come, be still
be together
told about the
joys and victories or
at the very least the
gracious finesse
of each blessed
failure come,
be still
be together
hold one another
in a sort
of esteem and
persuasion
of each self
will be sure to
follow
one
another
across
the
silence
would speak
and surely would to
the other
say come, be
still be together
but i don’t
even know how to
hear
what that one says
with words or not

come! smell the fish.

i’ll be on a plane departing from entebbe in less than 15 hours.

in the past four days of traveling, i’ve eaten ethiopian food, indian food, and chinese food. i have not eaten any american food (if such a thing exists) or ugandan food. i guess i had some pizza. maybe that’s ‘mer‘can.

i’ve seen the children in kitgum, the rain in gulu, and a small fishing village on lake victoria in entebbe.







when every person that you meet could probably be subject to a couple of pages of commentary after only first impressions—when every person has an elaborate backstory of hopes, expectations, wishes, disappointments, and successes—it’s hard to know which particular one to write about at a given moment.

when it’s 1:30am and you decide that you’re getting too old for such hours (at least when in africa), you don’t worry about who you’re going to write about. you just say ‘eh… i’ll write some things later.’

and then you say goodbye, africa.

goodbye, Africa.

the grind

it has been some time since i last said anything—spotty internet access and a dearth of things to say have contributed to that.

we returned to karenga on wednesday.

our plane leaves entebbe two weeks from tomorrow. we will leave karenga on either july 13 or july 14, giving us 11 or 12 more days here, during which we will wrap up our research.

everything that we have done in the past 11 days, we have done as vigorously as possible. when that was relaxing with the schrocks, we relaxed as vigorously as possible—there was not an hour of the day at which you could reliably assert that i could not possibly be in bed while i was in timu (although, of course, i was often not in bed, too). upon returning to karenga, we have similarly set back to work as vigorously as possible. we reached karenga at around 12:30pm on wednesday, and we had set off for lobalangit by 1pm. 7 miles of hitchhiking and 13 miles of walking later, we had contacted komol yet again, and he had agreed to come to karenga for another short stint. once komol arrived, i worked with him for 6-8 hours per day. he stayed three days, returning to lobalangit yesterday. i have essentially been asleep since then, although i am contemplating waking up again soon, so as to begin processing that data, collecting more mening data, and possibly giving katibong the old college try. again. (i wrote this four days ago, just as the phone network crashed for the rest of the week. retrospectively, katibong looks like it’s pretty much finished—at least as far as i am concerned.)

in timu, people spoke ik. in timu, we looked at kenya. in timu, we drank french-pressed coffee, ate popcorn or chili or pudding or poached eggs or whatever other delicious thing amber felt like preparing. i recorded two hours of ik men singing wordlists to me, in order to give me a preliminary survey of what sort of patterns of nasal coarticulation present in the ik language. we went for four hour walks in torrential downpours (or, more accurately, we went for a four hour walk in a torrential downpour). we watched movies and played scrabble and made really bad jokes (i, at least, made really bad jokes).



rainstorms have been something more of a norm since timu than they were before. apparently mid-june is a dry-spell in rainy season (not that we would possibly have known, given the great storms that would hit twice a week). so it was when we went to lobalangit.

komol was at home in puda village when we reached, so the local government officials sent a piki to fetch him. a short time later, the din of the local horde that had gathered at the door of the subcounty headquarters to spy on the mzungu visitors (the horde probably numbered ~60 or 70) was interrupted by the coughing of a tired karamojan motorcycle engine. an old man sat on the back of the bike, completely unaffected by the ride—aloof, confident, and smiling wryly. a leather hat emblazoned with ‘USA’ hung behind his head. he would come, but tomorrow. ‘metenuk!’ he proclaimed. ‘metenuk!’ i concurred.

it was getting late—maybe 330—so stephen and i decided to quickly head to the pire junction on the kitgum-karenga highway, where we were more likely to get a ride back to karenga than on the seldom-traveled lobalangit road. a man who had translated for us accompanied us.

at 4, ominous clouds converged on us from all sides. ‘do you think we should go shelter in some huts?’ our companion asked. we assured him that for us, walking in the rain was no problem.

five minutes later, he said ‘maybe for my books i will shelter in these huts.’ we joined him.

rivers poured across the so-recently dry soil as soon as we ducked under the roof of a local cooking hut. rain didn’t fall, per se—it attacked or charged or surged against the hut. every 45 seconds, another roll of thunder shook the countryside.

then there was a lull. i was getting antsy—i wanted to get to pire junction to maximize our odds of getting a ride back to karenga. our companion then pointed once more to the west—‘maybe we should shelter in the house.’

we fled the open-walled cooking hut, and found ourselves in the home of an unknown family on an anonymous stretch of potholed dirt highway in an out-of-the-way corner of karamoja region, as the rain continued to beat against the bare soil.





at 430, we decided to set off once more, and we reached pire junction by 450. nobody in pire seemed to think that anybody would be able to get through from kitgum, so we set off on foot for karenga across the muddy road, as quickly as we could—occasionally breaking into a slow jog.

the sun ducked behind the nyangea mountains at 650. we strolled into karenga town at 7.

we had managed to travel from timu to kaabong to karenga to lobalangit to karenga in a single day, and had managed to inform komol that we were ready to work again.

in the three days that komol was here, i was able to record six or seven short stories. i was able to freely translate four of these stories into english, and the remaining stories into karamojong. additionally, i have been able to elicit several hundred words and some basic grammar. on the one hand, it’s amazing how much progress you can make in just three days, but on the other hand, it’s amazing how much you learn about what you don’t know anything about after three long days. at this point, i’m not sure that i know anything about the nyangi language, but i am starting to know a fair amount about what i don’t know anything about.

otherwise, being back in karenga is being back in the grind, to an extent. we wake up, we eat breakfast (which has included far more chapatis than it did before we went to timu, which is nothing but a positive development), and then we have a day to make the most of—often a stiff challenge, given the difficulty inherent in communicating our objectives to people around here.

these are some of the sorts of things that we do (some of them are productive, others of them are recreational):

we walk to the center of town, and tell 30% of the population of karenga that we are, in fact, walking to the center of town.

we buy nice beverages and make plans for their consumption (for a time, stoney cola was our beverage of choice, but we found a single shop that carries guinness. in these parts, when you can guinness, you guinness (if you’re me, at least).

we kill wasps, flies, and anything else that lives with rubber bands (if you’re stephen, at least).

we talk about food—to our shame, surely, but while in timu, we realized that this is an unavoidable pastime of mzungus karamojaside.

we each recall amusing, stupid, or embarrassing things that the other has done.

we play soccer with the local folks—the going defensive strategy seems to be a high line (as if for a hard offsides trap) with a deep sweeper. i have not yet unlocked the secret brilliance behind this defensive scheme.

we speculate that a local gentleman who likes to sit under some trees in town and listen to the radio may, in fact, be an australian aborigine in an international witness protection program. of course he appears to be komol’s closest friend in town.

we throw a frisbee on a muddy highway for an hour and a half until our hands (to halfway up our forearms) are red with oklahoma-like clay. this may or may not be preceded by watching a chameleon cross the road, suddenly becoming a much more pleasant shade of green upon reaching the foliage on the far side.

we walk to towns three or so miles away in quest for a bar that might be showing euro 2012 matches (congratulations, spain). we may find that we are in such towns at sunset, at which point i may shoot stephen and his very reflection.



we observe swarms of oversized ants carrying home their termitey spoils. in fact, we watch these ants until some of them choose to very painfully bite our feet. once my feet are bitten, i wait for a few hours until my foot swells up to a rather distasteful size and my head itches and my ears turn dark red.

we try to convince people that they are good enough speakers of karamojong to say the word ‘akirik’.

we make plans to have lunch with ryan mccabe, until his car is eaten by the roadmudmonsters. and until the network is down for days. maybe another week…

the thing that i promise we don’t do enough is write poetry.

i’m ready from this man to come back from roadinspectionfest 2012.

Interlude: Timu Forest

We set out from the mission with some notebooks and a recorder.

“Where are we going?” Stephen asked.

“Eh… just through the center, i figure. And then maybe swing back to Mening Quarter and try to find Augustine, if nothing else presents itself.”

“What do you need to do in the center?”

“Not a thing in the world. But i imagine that if we walk to the center and back, we’ll run into somebody offering more promising prospects.”

And yet I wasn’t too surprised to find that nothing awaited me in the center except for beggin and passionate (almost angry-sounding) cries of ‘uru aja!’, a greeting in the Mening language.

We turned around and started back toward Mening Quarter. Maybe we would find Augustine. Maybe not.

But suddenly i was greeted more graciously by a few ladies on the left side of the road—a sister from the convent (Stephen’s second-favorite person in Karenga) and Pasca, who had told us that her aunt speaks Katibong and would work with us!

“Very sorry,” she said, “my aunt is only remembering just some few words of the Katibong language. She says that you should go talk to that musé in Nakitoit who you talked to last week, Akika. He is remembering. We will go right now, and I will translate for you.”

After a 45 minute hike, we had crossed the two or so miles to Nakitoit. Akika sat under a tree, looking various shades of amused, annoyed, uninterested, and eager to begin. A number of men of the town loitered about.

We started negotiating a price. And then things got weird.

“The musé says,” began the LC1 (a locally elected government office), “that he will not begin until you have paid him 50,000 shillings up front.”

“50,000 shillings!?”

“Ée… this man, he is the only one remembering this language. And so when the time comes for him to bring the rains, he will have to go to the cave just here. If he helps you and is crossing in the cave, then the spirits will bring bad things to him. Unless he has sacrificed a goat to them for giving away the language. So you will give him 50,000 shillings, and then he will buy a goat and sacrifice it in the cave. This is the message of God for him, that he is the one to smear the what? the cud of the goat in the cave, and to bring the rain. So he will not help until you have given him 50,000 shillings.”

i’m not particularly interested in violating the consciences of my consultants. i’m not particularly interested in being ripped off by my consultants. It seems like one of the above was going to be a factor in such an arrangement. i’d rather not help the last speaker (or one of the last speakers) of a language sell his birthright for a bowl a stew—or a $25 goat. Similarly, i’d rather not give a cash advance to somebody i’m only going to have a very limited amount of time to work with in the remaining two weeks that i will be in Karenga.

We walked back to the mission in beautiful evening light.



We have retreated from Karenga now. We are currently relaxing in Terrill and Amber Schrock’s Icien Paradise, a fine lodge (they call it home) on top of a mountain in Timu Forest, where the Ik live. Two Ik accompanied us on the drive up from Kaabong. As i heard them speaking to each other in the backseat of Terrill’s Land Cruiser, i realized that i have been studying Kuliak languages (So, Ik, and Nyang’i make up the Kuliak family) for three years, but this was the first time that i had ever heard a Kuliak language used conversationally.

We go for walks, we relax on comfortable beds, we chat with Terrill, and we eat delicious, delicious, delicious food prepared by Amber.



We will be here a week. This week will give us the opportunity to relax, to enjoy the company of people who are easy to relate to, to collaborate with Terrill, who has done extensive research in the Ik language, and to get ready for a productive last two weeks in Karenga.

This is our palace:



We’re halfway through our time here. Things don’t seem as distinct to me as they did at first. i am not as quick to notice flashes of recognition across the eyes of a child or uniqueness in a street-corner exchange. Hopefully having some time to relax in Timu will make me more attentive and sensitive to everyday moments again.