Cynthia James

Evening Walk

for Kamau

Washington Square, Sunday evening,

the riptide of strollers

searching for the stray wonder

cloud-clustered round a tree-ricked sky,

the chill of fall

here life takes time

on one side a tap-dancer

sweet in the smoky dullness of his brain

blows his blues out on an empty bottle

eyes-half-open,

he woogies down to meet his partner,

they share one spaced-out smile

in the centre of the dried-out fountain

an oriental youth psyches himself up

so far from home

Kumite!

The crowd begins to jeer,

he walks over to his bundle

takes out a cross-bow

and flings a challenge in the air,

the crowd applauds

old men bump through

infants mothed in pink and blue

biting the edges of fingernails

the crowds crisscross on the centrefold,

hard night descends on Washington Square;

park gates close at midnight

so un-scissor the ball in the crotch of the pocket,

the way’s ahead

the traffic lights say: “W A L K”

© Cynthia James – 2013-09-21

See how many reflective mirrors our planet throws up of itself- the womb, the marabunta nest – and how many man-made imitations –  the hand-grenade, the exploding bomb – we throw down to destroy.

I chanced upon this jep-nest hanging like a delicate porcelain lantern in my orchard, well camouflaged among green navel orbs, for the navel orange, even when it’s ripe, can remain green.

Inside this universe, the culture is ordered, self-contained, compartmentalized, territorialized with a few soldiers walking the perimeter on their watch while newts sleep in their chambers. Workers forage for food, for leaves, for earth – building, sustaining resources. They scour outside their borders entering many lands, every unguarded treasure, a trove for plundered spoils to bring back home to strengthen and protect their empire, their home ground.

As a child, not having such insights, I swashed  these jep-nests with long sticks from afar to throw them down, or loped projectiles at them to cut them from their stalks. They clung, built to resist the buffets of interfering cultures.

Not satisfied when they did not fall, I ventured closer with my stick. What joy to see a nation put on alarm! What a spectacular triumph to see everyone come out on the surface, crazed, headless! Refugees all, dangerous yet! Self-preserving in every sense, as they had a right to be, stinging mortally anyone in their path, as they sought safe haven to collect and build again. The survivors flew not far off to regroup at a later time.

Can I learn to co-exist with a different eco-system, a different culture in my front or backyard? Why tip-toe around the Eden I built  –  be cautious around my orange tree, which I planted for my sustenance, not to share, even those oranges that fall from the tree and that are useless to me, with another group, cultural poacher, in my opinion?

Why live in fear that one day I may forget that replicated me-s exist in my universe, and I may brush my head unawares against the orange (another replicated universal orb) and they will surge to sting me?

Why take the risk?

So far I have resisted ‘licking down’ this porcelain lantern hanging in my orchard.

But who knows? One day I may revert to childhood and stab the nest and run. When I’m sure they’re dead, I’ll come out to poke the ruins and stare in wonder at the last death throes of this magnificent culture that I splattered. After all, it was their fault.

© Cynthia James, September 2013

“If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?”

I visited Agawa Canyon for the Labour Day weekend. I have no certificate to show I climbed the 300 steps to the top of the lookout. It was an overcast September 1, 2013, and the gloom intensified the white waterfalls, the glassy lakes and animated greens.

Yet I would say fall or winter, or even early spring, would be better times to go. Not that Agawa’s Algoma country is not impressive all clad in green, (what with the decimating California fires as inverse testament***), but I could only imagine how much more breathtaking would have been the autumnal changing of the leaves. Or given my penchant for the starkly atavistic, frost-laden pines and forlorn trees.

The train ride itself is a fire-truck red wonderland, inside and out – red décor, wide windows, a dining cabin, an old century feel. And so, I went straight back in my mind to my first train ride to Flanagin Town (guess where, lol) to visit my school friend, the faithful Phyllis P. Flanagin Town, a weird lonely bush town – What would possess her family to live there?  I thought at age 13, leaning out to touch swathes of lastro bordering the meandering train to South.

By contrast the Agawa Canyon train is close-cabined, and as I gazed at the giddying green floating by, in that time bubble two prevailing thoughts crossed my mind.

First, it was as if for me a long-time Christmas had come again with its 1,000 pieces jigsaw puzzle. My brothers, sisters and I bend over a table. Hours and hours pass as we, transfixed, work tenaciously at fitting in a palette of minutely differentiated greens.

A Canadian landscape?  Agawa?  It could have been, since puzzles, ham, the holly and the ivy, sleigh bells and Christmas trees with angel hair (these I could imagine in every nook and cranny of the Agawa Canyon) came not from where I lived. Nor did Newfoundland salt-fish. Every childhood sip of ginger beer and bite of black cake back then was a deserved reward. Every successful fit of green jigsaw was a triumph, so intricately coloured are these landscape greens.

Second, I heard again that enigmatic question that I had not remembered in a long long while: “If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?” What an epiphany! This time I had an answer. So far from home, in many ways I am and have always been that tree.

***I awoke on September 1, 2013 in Algoma Country to learn that the main building at St. Jacobs Farmers’ Market had burnt to the ground.

My Addiction to Competitive Food Television

As corny as it sounds, I just can’t get enough of shows like Sweet Genius and Les Chefs! (‘aspirants chefs’ Quebec). Run of the mill save-a-penny, save-some-time meals don’t excite me. Nor does comfort food. After all, as a denizen of the lower order, the shows that feature this latter named fare are like “A day in the Life of Me’.

But to hear the mental ticking of the stopwatch, the see the puzzlement at the mystery ingredient, to feel the trauma of mistakes and experimental corrections of wannabes, nose-tips dripping sweat at their countdown plating, to see the karate chop cuisine, the acrobatics and the war of Iron Chef America, where the take down of the Mighty One-With-Folded-Arms is so tension-filled, these shows pump up my adrenaline.

Never mind the snootiness of the judges, never mind the semblance of wastage, never mind the humiliation for the loser who double-dipped or left behind a strand of hair on his or gourmet oeuvre. These performances, these excruciating displays are not only fodder for my imagination.

The eye candy is also a rush that satiates enough to keep me off from being chosen as The Biggest Loser, a pummeling, grinding uphill battle I fight every day (a show BTW, that deters me, nay scares the hell out of me from me opening my fridge during commercials).  

I am also a fan of messy fun food challenge, which I believe is at the heart of experimenting with taste. Keep with “Can you Blend it?’, O Carla of The Chew! After all it’s this kind of zany art that leads to the salivation experienced at, say,  the thought of that dab of Nutella or I can’t Believe it’s not Butter that we now take for granted.

“ – but she talked and talked, perhaps because of the newness of her own voice” (p. 177), or

Why I chose Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie to lead off my blog.

I didn’t plan to use Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah as my first blog post, but there is something prophetic about how this tome kept falling in and out of my hands.

When I came upon the centrality to the novel of the blog of her main character Ifemelu, I knew with a writer’s uncanny discernment for the gift that comes at right moment out of nowhere, that I should sit up and take some lessons. But there are good lessons and bad lessons, for Ifemelu, like the rest of us, is no saint.

From Adichie’s Ifemelu, here’s what I’ll take:

I’ll take the vigor of the speaking voice, the welcome of challenge to tackle hard but interesting subjects. I’ll take the urge to spontaneous response that knows that sometimes the only choice left is tough – you have to get in there and do the job, even though you’re likely to emerge with battered self-esteem and sticky hands. I’ll take the astuteness and good eye for the contemporary, the breadth of reading on and the analysis of human endeavour. The intelligence, the depth of introspection and the electrifying no-holes-barred confrontation with honesty, these, too, I’ll take.

For although Ifemelu’s blog is fictive, it is palpably real; I want that high bar for my blog.

But from Adichie’s Ifemelu, here is what I will not take:

I promise this blog will not be used to dissemble and disguise rant, to rationalise failings, or to bully the reader into accepting self-righteous morality.  

But what I’ll certainly emulate is the spunk and the aura of possibility that make Ifemelu, the blogger, a credible character – a seeker, a watcher, a learner, and a go-getter, a person who would rather go silent than settle for convenient chatter.

Still the blog lessons are not the only reason that I’ve chosen Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie to lead off this blog. 

The novel’s debt to the hair braiding salon, the invisible powerhouse behind the blog, is just as large.

Don’t take for granted this house of mirrors.

The blog arises here – in the shedding and the cleansing and the weaving and the letting down of hair. The process is a long patient, talking-through of crafting towards renewal. A fresh, tight, but comfortable face emerges to front decisions made.

This is why I could never forgive Ifemelu’s betrayal of Aisha. And please don’t tell me that after 6 hours of letting down her hair and having it all done up again in a do that gives her a brave face to meet the world, all Ifemelu can leave Aisha are tears of defeatism and a 20$ tip.  I know this is not a fairy tale. More to the point, her nephew Dike is not a plot-plausible excuse. Not good enough!

That hurt.

Go read Americanah and you’ll see what I’m talking about.