nigerian proverbs

February 2, 2010 - Leave a Response

from Little Bee

by Chris Cleave

“A dog must be a dog and a wolf must be a wolf, that is the proverb in my country.”

“That’s beautiful,” said Sarah.

“Actually that is not the proverb in my country.”

“No?”

“No! Why would we have a proverb with wolves in it? We have two hundred proverbs about monkeys, three hundred about cassava.  We talk about what we know.  But I have noticed, in your country, I can say anything so long as I say that is the proverb in my country.  Then people will nod their heads and look very serious.”

from little bee

February 2, 2010 - Leave a Response

“Everyone in my village liked U2,”  I said.  “Everyone in my country maybe.  Wouldn’t that be funny, if the oil rebels were playing U2 in their jungle camps, and the government soldiers were playing U2 in their trucks.  I think everyone was killing everyone else and listening to the same music.  Do you know what?  The first week I was in the detention center, U2 were number one here too.  That is a good trick about this world.  No one likes each other, but everyone likes U2″

little bee

by chris cleave

p. 134

beautiful scars

February 2, 2010 - Leave a Response

from Little Bee

by Chris Cleave

p.9-10

This small plastic bag is what I was holding in my hand when the detention officer told me to go and stand in the queue for the telephone.  The first girl in the queue, she was tall and she was pretty.  Her thing was beauty, not talking.  I wondered which of us had made the best choice to survie.  The girl, she had plucked her eyebrows out and then shehad drawn them back on again with a pencil.  This is what she had done to save her life.  She was wearing a purple dress, an A-line dress with pink stars and moons in the pattern.  She had a nice pink scarf wrapped around her hair, and purple flip-flops on her feet.  I was thinking she thinking she must have been locked up a very long time in our dentention center.  One has to go through a very great number of the charity boxes, you will understand, to put together an outfit that is truly an ensemble.

On the girl’s brown legs there were many small white scars.  I was thinking, Do those scars cover the whole of you, like the stars and the moons on your dress?  I thought that would be pretty too, and I ask you right here please to agree with me that a scar is never ugly.  That is what the scar makers want us to think.  But you and I, we must make an agreement to defy them.  We must see all scars as beauty.  Okay?  This will be our secret.  Because take it from me, a scar does not form on the dying.  A scar means, I survived.

In a few breaths’ time I will speak some sad words to you.  But you must hear them the same way we have agreed to see scars now.  Sad words are just another beauty.  A sad story means, this storyteller is alive.  The next thing you know, something fine will happen to her, something marvelous, and then she will turn around and smile.

from Lit

January 18, 2010 - Leave a Response

Lit by Mary Karr

from the opening:

Now nights, I sit downstairs on the porch and stare into the black hole of the garage, which, in my childhood cosmology, was where my oil-worker daddy sat in the truck and drank himself to death.  After he staggered into the house to pass out–first bumping against the sides of the hall like a train conductor–I’d go out the the garage and stand with my back to the wall, waiting for the headlights of my mother’s vehicle to come swerving up the dead-end street we lived on.  Through sheer force of will, I’d draw her drunk ass home alive.  Daddy was steady and stayed.  Mother was an artist and left.  Those two opposing colossi tore a rip in my chest I can’t seem to stitch shut.


on when she started drinking.

p. 156 from Lit

And that’s how–in some cosmic accounting of our family’s rampant dipsomania–Mother’s recovery dovetailed with the start of my own years’ long binge, for from that day forward, I drank in increasing amounts, as if our gene pool owed the universe at least one worthless drunk at a time.

after a describing a fight with her husband.

p. 96 from Lit

If we talked about the night before, I don’t recall it, which isn’t fair to either of us, for it doesn’t show our reasoned selves paring away at our scared ones.  But it’s a neurological fact that the scared self holds on while the reasoned one lets go.  The adrenaline that let our ancestors escape the sabertooth tiger sears into the meat of our brains the extraordinary, the loud.  The shrieking fight or the out-of-character insult endures forever, while the daily sweetness dissolves like sugar in water.

p. 182 from Lit

He says, You knew I was like this when you married me.

The righteous cry of married men everywhere, for it’s a cliche that every woman signs up thinking her husband will change, while very husband signs up believing his wife won’t: both dead wrong.

p. 183 from Lit

One night I get gussied up for a book party Warren would rather have been shot than attend, and sunk in the cavern of a leather armchair, I hold my liquor enough to hear–from the mouths of poets–work I’m itching to read, books I can vanish down into from my grind.  The night is a burst of sea spray washed across my face, tangible evidence of a fresh existence only slightly out of reach.

p. 241

Deb says, Mary’s reluctant to get down on her knees because she doesn’t believe in God.

I add, What kind of God wants me to get on my knees and supplicate myself like a coolie?

Janice busts out with a cackling laugh, You don’t do it for God!  You do it for yourself.  All this is for you…the prayer, the meditation, even the service work.  I do it for myself, too.  I’m not that benevolent.

How does getting on your knees do anything for you?  I say.

Janice says, It makes you the right size.  You do it to teach yourself something.  When my disease has ahold of me, it tells me my suffering is special or unique, but it’s the same as everybody’s.  I kneel to put my body in that place, because otherwise, my mind can’t grasp it.

p. 244

It’s funny, she says, how everybody else is traffic, huh?

p. 260

If you live in the dark a long time and the sun comes out, you don not cross into it whistling.  There’s an initial uprush of relief at first, then–for me, anyway–a profound dislocation.  My old assumptions about how the world works are buried, yet my new ones aren’t yet operational.  There’s been a death of sorts, but without a few days in hell, no resurrection is possible.  You don’t have to be Christian for the metaphor to make sense, psychologically speaking.

p. 300

Right before I hit a year sober, Joan suggests starting a women’s group for gab of some spiritual variety–think quilting bee where we stitch on each other’s souls, autopsy where the corpses take turns carving.  In my office at Radcliffe on Sunday nights, we meet–about four or five sober women trying to stay that way.

Nobody operates from a formal religious construct, no church ladies or temple mavens.  Joan rustles up a list of discussion topics she used in a similar group, and we start off talking about prayer.  When Deb claims her regular prayer is for a joyous day filled with serenity, I say, You can ask for that?

p. 334 on taking her son to visit churches.

…And I won’t say that the venal thought doesn’t flit through me that church folk look like they might have wrenches and lawn mowers to loan.

p. 385 (closing words)

Every now and then we enter the presence of the numinous and deduce for an instant how we’re formed, in what detail the force that infuses every petal might specifically run through us, wishing only to lure us into our full potential.  Usually, the closest we get is when we love, or when some beloved beams back, which can galvanize you like steel and make resilient what had heretofore only been soft flesh. (Dev, you gave me that.) It can start you singing as the lion pads over to you, its jaws hinging open, its hot breath on you.  Even unto death.

we create our own hells

January 17, 2010 - Leave a Response

p. 103 from Lit by Mary Karr

Love Song: I and Thou

a poem from Alan Dugan

This is hell,

but I planned it, I sawed it,

I nailed it, and I

will live in it until it kills me.

I can nail my left palm

to the left-hand crosspiece but

I can’t do everything myself.

I need a hand to nail the right,

a help, a love, a you, a wife.


why we create good stories for our daughters

November 19, 2009 - Leave a Response

No girl who plays the role of a hero dates a guy who uses her.  She knows who she is.  She just forgot for a little while.

Donald Miller

from A Million Miles in a Thousand Years

p. 54

on writing yourself into a movie character

November 19, 2009 - Leave a Response

It didn’t occur to me at the time, but it’s obvious now that in creating the fictional Don, I was creating the person I wanted to be, the person worth telling stories about.  It never occurred to me that I could re-create my own story, my real life story, but in an evolution I had moved toward a better me.  I was creating someone I could live through, the person I’d be if I redrew the world, a character that was me but flesh and soul other.  And flesh and soul better too.
Donald Miller

from A Million Miles in a Thousand Years

p.29

When Steve, Ben and I wrote our characters into the screenplay, I felt the way I hope God feels as he writes the world, sitting over the planets and placing tiny people in tiny wombs.  If I have a hope, it’s that God sat over the dark nothing and wrote you and me, specifically, into the story, and put us in with the sunset and the rainstorm as though to say, Enjoy your place in my story.  The beauty of it means you matter, and you can create within it even as I have created you.

I’ve wondered though, if one of the reasons we fail to acknowledge the brilliance of life is because we don’t want the responsiblity inherent in the acknowledgment.  We don’t want to be characters in a story because characters have to move and breathe and face conflict with courage.  And if life isn’t remarkable, then we don’t have to do any of that; we can be unwilling victims rather than grateful participants.

But I’ve noticed something.  I’ve never walked out of a meaningless movie thinking all movies are meaningless.  I only thought the movie I walked out on was meaningless.  I wonder, then, if when people say life is meaningless, what they really mean is that their lives are meaningless.  I wonder if they’ve chosen to believe their whole existence is unremarkable, and are projecting their dreary life on the rest of us.

p. 59-60

…once you know what it takes to live a better story, you don’t have a choice.  Not living a better story would be like deciding to die…

p. 66

I found myself wanting even better stories.  And that’s the thing you’ll realize when you organize your life into the structure of story.  You’ll get a taste for one story and then want another, and then another, and the stories will build until you’re living a kind of epic of risk and reward, and the whole thing will be molding you into the actual character whose roles you’ve been playing.  And once you live a good story, you can’t go back to being normal; you can’t go back to meaningless scenes stitched together by the forgettable thread of wasted time.  The more practice stories I lived, the more I wanted an epic to climb inside of and see through till its end.

p. 155

more on poetry and prayer from mary karr

March 8, 2009 - Leave a Response

…if you’re in a frame of mind gloomy enough to refuse prayer, despite its having worked bona fide miracles for you before, nothing satisfies like a dark poem.  Maybe wrestling with gnarly language occupies the loud and simian chatter of a dismayed mind, but for me the relief comes to some extent from a hookup to another creature.  The compassion innate in having someone–however remote–verbalize your despair or lend a form to it can salve the jibbering psyche.

from the afterword to Sinners Welcome by Mary Karr, p.74

sinners welcome

March 8, 2009 - Leave a Response

“Sinners Welcome” by Mary Karr

I opened up my shirt to show this man
the flaming heart he lit in me, and I was scooped up
like a lamb and carried to the dim warm.
I who should have been kneeling
was knelt to by one whose face
should be emblazoned on every coin and diadem:
no bare-chested boy, but Ulysses
with arms thick from the hard-hauled ropes.

He’d sailed past then clay gods

and the singing girls who might have made of him

a swine. That the world could arrive at me
with him in it, after so much longing—
impossible. He enters me and joy
sprouts from us as from a split seed.

…from an interview with Mary Karr about her volume of poems, Sinners Welcome and this poem in particular:

Your work demonstrates that appeal of the carnal–some of your poems are sexual metaphors for faith.
Yes, “Sinners Welcome,” the title poem, certainly is. Everybody thinks it’s about having sex, but it’s about taking communion. Being entered by the God. I said, “He enters me and joy sprouts…” In any Christian church, communion is supposed to be about someone’s passion. Someone lends you their passion, someone suffers for you. You take someone’s suffering into your body, and you’re transformed by it. It’s such a great idea.

Why did you choose the title “Sinners Welcome” for your book?
At the church that I went to in Syracuse, there’s a banner outside that says “Sinners Welcome” It’s in the poorest part of Syracuse, where all half-way houses are, so about 20 to 30% of the parish is disabled, either physically or mentally. I always loved walking in under that banner. I used to think you had to be good to go to church.  You can go even if you haven’t been to confession, if you haven’t been absolved. Who needs it more than a sinner?

mary karr on poetry and prayer

March 8, 2009 - One Response

In this state–what Dickinson called “sumptuous destitution”–prayer was a slow spin on a hot spit, but poetry could still draw me out of myself, easing my loneliness as it had since earliest kidhood.  Poets were my first priests, and poetry itself my first altar.  It was a lot of other firsts too, of course: first classroom/chatroom/confessional.  But it was most crucially the first source of awe for me, partly because of how it could ease my sense of isolation: it was a line thrown from seemingly glorious Others to my drear-minded self.

From a very early age, when I read a poem, it was as if the poet’s burning taper touched some charred filament in my chest to light me up.  The transformation could extend from me outward.  Lifting my face from the page, I often faced my fellow creatures with less dread.  Maybe buried in one of them was an ache or tenderness similar to the one I’d just been warmed by.  Thus, poetry rarely failed to create for me some semblance of community, even if the poet reaching me was some poor wretch even more abject than myself.  Poetry never left me stranded, and as an atheist most of my life, I presumed its comforts were a highbrow, intellectual version of what religion did for those more gullible believers in my midst–dumb bunnies to a one, the faithful seemed to me, till I became one.

from the afterword to Sinners Welcome by Mary Karr, p.70-71

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