thetravelingminstrel

June 10, 2024 –Indian Mangoes

These mangoes were purchased from a side street in Jaipur to refute Aimee Nezhukumatathil’s claim that — *gasp* — India’s Alphonso mangoes are sweeter than Philippine Carabao mangoes!

Don’t get me wrong. I love A.N. She is the most wholesome and heartwarming author one can find on bookstore shelves these days. Her World of Wonders still keeps my heart soft. Before leaving for this trip, I suggested her latest book, Bite by Bite: Nourishments and Jamborees, to two friends who are also traveling, and then hinted that we discuss it over wine when we’re all back in Dipolog. But after scanning the first few pages, I ended up reading the whole thing even before I left! It was the last book I read in May.

I just had one problem with it: The mango verdict.

“I am the daughter of a man from India and a woman from the Philippines,” She writes. “They have argued all my life about whose mangoes are the sweetest, the best. Both have asked me to take sides, and for years I’ve refused until now. Alphonso mangoes, hands down. From India.”

And these were the lines that led me to a dark side street in India. I began to worry on my way back to the haveli. Not for my safety, but for the reason that, from within the bag hanging from my hand, the unbelievable fragrance of the mangoes were already invading my nostrils! I think my heart raced when I sliced one open with my Swiss knife.

My verdict? Maybe THAT will endanger my safety! Haha!

What I realized, however, as the two juicy mangoes were immediately reduced to seed and skin, was that THIS is nourishment — tasting, exploring, discovering, learning, reading, traveling, and eating the mangoes of another country. Once in a while, our hearts need this.

June 10, 2024 –In Jaipur, this is how each day arrives…

In Jaipur, this is how each day arrives. There are birds as timekeepers to wake me through the low windows of the 250-year-old haveli where I’m staying.

I’ve only been here for three days but it looks like I have already established the beginnings of a library on a small marble table.

Outside, the city is stirring. And I know that once I walk through one of Jaipur’s magnificent city gates and into its chaotic main streets, there will be an assault on the senses. But for a few silent hours, there will only be the duet of the chirping birds and the rustling of pages, and a reading traveler Mahmoud Darwish would describe as, “a woman sunbathing within herself.”

P.S. Play the video to listen to the birds.

June 8, 2024 –Jantar Mantar, Jaipur, India

A knowledgeable guide taught me how to distinguish between Rajput and Mughal architecture as we walked through the profusion of terra cotta pink which is Jaipur.

But to his surprise, it was here that I inspected the structures more carefully despite the onslaught of the solar noon. What looks like modern art installations amidst the flowery and intricate designs for which Jaipur is known, is Jantar Mantar. And it is not modern.

It is an astronomical observatory built in 1716CE by Jai Singh, the Maharajah of Jaipur. Jai Singh was born in 1688, and though he was crowned as monarch when he was but eleven years old, he continued his studies in philosophy, art, architecture, city planning, and astronomy. His passion for the latter manifested in the way he planned his city according to mathematical and astronomical patterns; especially in Jantar Mantar, which is the largest, most accurate, and most well-preserved observatory out of the five that he erected throughout India.

“Science,” an Italian poet once wrote, “was moved by beauty, and by the desire to understand it.” Jantar Mantar exhibits this.

On books and reading from Erri de Luca’s Three Horses

“This is what books should do: Carry a person and not be carried by him…”

“…Because every book can belong to many lives. Books should be kept in public places and step out with passersby who’ll hold onto them for a spell. Books should die like people, consumed by aches and pains, infected, drowning off a bridge together with the suicides, poked into a potbellied stove, torn apart by children to make paper boats. They should die of anything, in other words, except boredom, as private property condemned to a life sentence on the shelf.”

“I put the book in my jacket’s inside pocket… Where the gun used to be, now there is its opposite.”

Paolo Maurensig: Game of the Gods

Without meaning to, I read Paolo Maurensig’s three chess novels in chronological order of publishing dates. The Lüneburg Variation, Theory of Shadows, and Game of the Gods. The sequence in which I read these books were, admittedly, influenced by Goodreads ratings. Maurensig is quite obscure in my part of the world, so I had to consult Goodreads despite my distrust of its stars. Game of the Gods has the lowest rating among the three.

But I enjoyed it! It’s not exactly a literary masterpiece, but I found it to be an easy and entertaining read that has its gems. I think the low ratings come from readers who have particular expectations. Those who read this for chess will soon realize that it’s not wholly about chess. Those who read this for its biographical aspect might be disappointed because the story is mostly imagined from the little that the media knows about Indian chess grandmaster, Malik Mir Sultan Khan, who enthralled the chess world in the 1930s by defeating world champions but soon faded into the night sky like a shooting star.

The passages that describe the incorporation of Indian philosophy and thought in Sultan Khan’s games was what I appreciated the most. The book also introduces the reader to chaturanga, the precursor of chess, that had a more sacred aspect to the game, and wherein its player had to transform himself in order to succeed.

And from what this reader can conclude from the third of Paolo Maurensig’s chess novels, the “game of the gods” is not chess. It is fate.

Baqytgul Sarmekova: To Hell With Poets

Having loved the Hamid Ismailov Uzbek trio published by Tilted Axis Press, it was exciting news to me when they announced the release of a Kazakh work earlier this year.

When there’s a dearth of Central Asian literature in circulation, what’s a girl (who arranges her books by political geography and who loves to broaden the scope of her literary horizons) to do? She rushes to get her hands on it.

Any reader could have finished this in one sitting, but I read the stories bit by bit and in random order — as one should read anthologies, I’ve been told. Although the reason I took it in small doses was because of its bleakness.

I’m grateful to have read my first Kazakh work, but sad that it turned out to be an intimate peek into a joyless and disquieting world. Even its sunshine felt gray.

Tilted Axis Press describes this as “a sharp and honest rendering of daily life in Kazakhstan.” If it is, it makes you wonder if there is ever room for wonder or an enthusiasm for living in such a place, because one cannot find any of that in this volume.

Nevertheless, this book succeeds in wakening a slumbering part of one’s consciousness. And so I look forward to a Tajik and Kyrgyz release, Tilted Axis Press!

Laila Lalami: The Moor’s Account

Literature continues to witness the exciting rise of old stories and histories told in new perspectives. We now have Greek mythology narrated through the vantage point of the misunderstood or footnoted women, we have world history that challenges purely Eurocentric lenses, the Crusades recounted through the Arab viewpoint, and various retellings of otherwise prevailing narratives that have been unquestioned for years.

The Moor’s Account falls in the category of books that offer readers a new point of view. It is an imagined memoir of the first black explorer to the Americas. Although history will not remember him as such, as he was the Moroccan slave of Andrés Dorantes de Carranza. Together they would be half of only four survivors of the unfortunate Narváez Expedition, a Spanish expedition that set sail in 1527 with the aim of establishing settlements in La Florida.

The Moor in question is Mustafa al-Zamori, baptized Estebanico when he became a slave. This event at the beginning already hints at how, through an imposed name change, an entire history is erased: “A name is precious; it carries inside it a language, a history, a set of traditions, a particular way of looking at the world.” It was the first of many erasures, Estebanico would later learn.

My first attempt at reading this book was unsuccessful, but the recent announcement of Pulitzer nominees reminded me of this 2015 finalist that has remained sitting on my shelf for a while. Now that I have finally reached its last page, I have realized that the value of this novel lies in its reflections on identity, in its acknowledgment of the precarious power of stories, and in its critique on how history is written — how “unfounded gossip can turn into sanctioned history if it falls in the hands of the right storyteller.”

“How strange, I remember thinking, how utterly strange were the ways of the Castilians — just by saying that something was so, they believed that it was. I know now that these conquerors, like many others before them, and no doubt like others after, gave speeches not to voice the truth, but to create it.”

After dodging an ambush led by Indians, I found in Ruiz, a member of the expedition, an arrogant colonizer who felt victimized when natives tried to protect what was theirs — an embodiment of entitled powers that still plague the present: “‘Do you think we did something to them?’ Ruiz said. ‘No one did anything. That is just how the heathens are. Look what they did to me. He pointed to the dark socket where his left eye had been, oblivious to the role he had played in his own predicament.’”

This book does not contain literary acrobatics. The style is quite simple. But it lends the reader old truths and a new set of eyes.

Sophy Roberts: The Lost Pianos of Siberia

Before Iran, before Persian history, it was Russia, its music, literature, and history that I was preoccupied with for years. (Remember how I named a pet fish “Shosta,” after Shostakovich, who leapt out of the fishbowl to his doom, and died a very dramatic Russian death?) Adulting eventually distracted me from this obsession until Iran took over and began to burn as big a flame in my consciousness.

This book brought me back to my teen years of being fascinated with Russia. As I turned the last page of this beauty, the traveler, the pianist, and the lover of stories in me were all brimming.

After all, Russia is the country of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, of Rachmaninoff, and “piano music has run through the country like blood.”

Sophy Roberts, however, zones in on Siberia, that immense region that covers eleven percent of the world’s land mass, and home to ninety percent of Russia’s natural resources.

So, what does it have to do with pianos? A lot, apparently. This account traces how the instrument began to grip the heart of the country during the reign of Catherine the Great, how this mania was fueled by concert tours by Liszt and Clara Schumann, and how political prisoners from Poland, the land of Chopin, and Decembrist intellectuals (members of the unsuccessful revolt against Tsar Nicholas I in December 1825) who were exiled to Siberia made culture flourish in the hinterlands by bringing their books, their learning, and their music with them, leaving precious pianos in their wake. It also poignantly mentions that the only thing that survived the Romanov massacre was the piano that the young tsarevnas brought with them and on which they played during their last days.

But who would be insane enough to go to Siberia and track the lost pianos of Russia’s history? Sophy Roberts. And she’s my kind of insane. This book is already making me dream of becoming this kind of journalist and writing this kind of book when I grow up. Haha

Which lost things should I go looking for?

P.S. One simple paragraph also made me understand the rise of Putinism and why he still has a strong following. This doesn’t mean I’m going to start being a Putin apologist, far from it. But it is a sign of a good work of journalism when it makes you see the other side of the coin.

Suad Amiry: Mother of Strangers

*“It is human kindness, rather than religion or nationality, that conquers the human heart.”*

The “Mother of Strangers” is Jaffa. In case you, like me, wondered to whom or what the title referred.

Jaffa that was the richest and largest Arab city in Palestine. Jaffa, known all over the world for its pure gold — its oranges and orange groves. Jaffa, named after one of Noah’s sons who purportedly built the city after the great flood. Jaffa, a major city during the Ottoman Empire. Jaffa that was designated as part of Mandatory Palestine / the Arab state through the Partition Plan, but which Irgun decided to conquer before the end of the British mandate when Arab armies (Egyptian, Iraqi, Syrian, and Jordanian) could enter Palestine. And therefore, the helpless Jaffa that surrendered to the Haganah who promised to protect Jaffa and its people. (“However, before the ink had dried on the agreement, the city was violated, robbed, and the Haganah forces terrorized the few thousand Jaffans who remained.”)

It is more than a sad tale of young love as the blurb describes. Based on a true story, it tracks a seldom mentioned, but significant aspect, of history that is vital in our understanding of the Palestinian struggle. This is one of those books that show us that what is happening in Gaza is never so simple, and that it did not abruptly begin on October 7, 2023.

Mahmoud Darwish

By now, Palestine and Israel are probably on everyone’s radar. By now, young and old have probably taken a side, or have opinions; but sadly, based only on social media algorithms. By now, many have probably come across that post about the Palestinian writer, Mahmoud Darwish, who fell in love with a Mossad agent, reposted many times however false. (He did have a relationship with an Israeli-Jew that would haunt many of his works: “Rita” in his poems, Tamar Ben-Ami in real life, who later served for a time in the IDF.) Or he may be known to some as the controversial poet who criticized Hamas.

I know his name from every important Palestinian work that I have read. It’s sad that it took a war for me to try harder to acquire his books and finally experience his writings. I have been reading these four collections slowly and carefully, in random order, and in-between other books. The very last piece, I read today. And yet, here I am, still lost for words that will give justice to this body of work.

How beautifully he writes! And how enlightening his works are of the Palestinian sentiment and predicament!

A River Dies of Thirst is where one will find the famous line, “All beautiful poetry is an act of resistance.”

“In the Presence of Absence” hints at the term “present absentee” that refers to Arabs who fled or were expelled from their homes during the Nakba, and it is the volume that touched me the most.

“Poetry, then, is an act of freedom.”

“For what can a poet do before history’s bulldozer but guard the spring and trees, visible and invisible, by the old roads? And protect language from receding from metaphorical precision and from being emptied of the voices of victims calling for their share of tomorrow’s memory on that land over which a struggle is being waged? A struggle for what lies beyond the power of weapons: the power of words.”

“What does it mean for a Palestinian to be a poet and what does it mean for a poet to be Palestinian? In the first instance: it is to be the product of history, to exist in language. In the second: to be a victim of history and triumph through language. But both are one and the same and cannot be divided or entwined.”

Why Did You Leave the Horse Alone? is special not only for its poems but for being a bilingual edition! Even though I cannot read Arabic, I love tracing the elegant curves of its script with my eyes.

Journal of an Ordinary Grief is anything but ordinary and it is the volume out of these four that I would readily recommend, no matter whose side one is on. Because maybe after turning the last page, one will be less concerned about taking sides, but be more concerned about having humanity.