Strange Shores
Notes on Being in the World
Posted: Vancouver / 23 April 2010
Altered State
My latest photo essay, an audio slideshow about mental health in northern Somalia, is now up at Broken Atlas. You can also view it here, in the photo essay section. The story behind it:
In the late 1980s, the people of northern Somalia rebelled against the government of General Mohammed Siad Barre. After four years of fighting, they separated from the rest of the country, forming the Republic of Somaliland.
The cost of their de facto independence was heavy. Tens of thousands of people were killed during the conflict, many during bombardments by the Somali Air Force. Half a million more fled across the Ethiopian border, settling in refugee camps. A struggle for control of the breakaway republic followed in the mid-1990s.
Rebuilding has been slow. The last camp was dismantled just a few years ago.
Today, as Somaliland thrives in the shadow of its troubled neighbours, the scope of the war's psychological toll has only begun to register. As many as two-thirds of people over the age of 25 have suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder in some form. Abuse of khat, a plant-based amphetamine chewed all over the Horn of Africa, complicates this and other mental health issues.
There are no psychiatrists in Somaliland.
The patients at Hargeisa Mental Health Unit receive professional treatment for only one month per year, when a Somali-Canadian psychiatrist returns to the country on holiday. He provides free treatment and diagnosis.
You can read more about the Hargeisa Mental Health Unit in this article I wrote for The Walrus awhile back.
Posted: Vancouver / 13 March 2010
Ethiopia's Sacred and Sublime
For a moment, as I ponder the mystery of Amda Berhan, the Pillar of Light, and resist the monumental urge to scratch my feet, I feel every bit the pilgrim, at home among the shawl-clad women who cross themselves and file past.
"The history of the world is written here: the past, the present, even the future," whispers my guide, Nega. He says this with conviction, having never seen the inscriptions for himself. Few people have: Only Lalibela's wisest priests are allowed to lift the cloth shroud that covers them.
In this atmospheric mountain town, the veil between the spiritual and material worlds is tantalizingly thin. Lalibela has been a centre of worship and illumination since the 12th century, famous for its monolithic in-ground rock churches and a potent expression of Ethiopia's ancient Orthodox Christian tradition. More recently, its remote setting and aura of mystery have proved irresistible to another kind of pilgrim: the tourist.
We've slipped into Bet Maryam, the oldest of the churches, depositing our shoes in a pile at the entryway. The ceiling glows in the half-darkness, a firmament of painted crucifixes and Stars of David catching daylight. Incense drifts from a pan. The floors are laid with tattered, flea-stricken rugs. They fizz with the tiny insects, but even as physical discomfort intrudes — when no one is looking, I rake my shins with the corner of my notebook — I feel the stir of something like awe.
"They say that Jesus Christ himself leaned upon Amda Berhan when he visited King Lalibela in a dream," Nega says. "If you or I could look at it, we would go crazy."
A few worshippers linger near the altar, their heads bowed and their hands clasped together, indifferent to the foreigners and the fleas.
"How do they do it?" I ask, admiring their stoicism.
"Do what?" says Nega.
"Stop themselves from scratching."
"They tuck their trousers into their socks."
"Oh." It's then I notice that Nega has done the same.
"A dash of flea powder works too. Did you see the lady selling it at the entrance?"
Apart from a few hotels and the souvenir stands that dot the main road, Lalibela remains the holy city that intrepid pilgrims would have encountered for most of the past 800 years, when the only way to get here was by mule cart or on foot. Its cobbled streets wind past stone-and-straw houses, a few dark strokes against the green wash of mountains.
King Lalibela is said to have ordered the construction of the churches after receiving news that Jerusalem, a Christian city at the time, had been captured by the Muslim armies of Saladin. Having visited the Holy Land in his youth, he commissioned the structures in homage to the city as he remembered it. The result was something uniquely Ethiopian: 11 churches carved vertically into rock faces, each in a deep quarried pit and connected by tunnel to the next.
Continue reading over at the Globe and Mail.
Posted: Vancouver / 12 February 2010
Seven Questions
Over on the Virginia Quarterly Review's blog I talk to Mary Beth Lineberry about Liberia's long-term prospects for peace. An excerpt:
VQR: President Johnson-Sirleaf has announced that she is running for re-election in 2011 (although she campaigned on the premise that she would serve just one term). What do you see in Liberia's future?
TS: I'm not sure that President Johnson-Sirleaf's decision to run for a second term heralds a return to politics-as-usual in Liberia — she's not rewriting the constitution, after all — but I do think it speaks to the enormity of the task of rebuilding the country. She inherited a failed state; if rebuilding the ruined infrastructure wasn't challenge enough, she has faced the obstacles of dismantling the country's entrenched networks of privilege (which include former warlords and Taylor associates) and reforming the military. Until the military is professionalized and accountable to a civilian government in the absence of peacekeepers, the situation will remain fragile. Continuity at the top would be good for Liberia in the short-term, I think.
A major ongoing concern is the crisis of leadership in neighboring Guinea, where the ruling junta that took power after President Lansana Conte's death last year is circling its ethnic wagons. The situation there is similar to Liberia's in the early 1990s: extreme poverty, the collapse of a repressive ethnic regime (Conte's) and subsequent power vacuum, an undisciplined and divided military, a surplus of natural resources (in this case, bauxite, gold, diamonds, iron ore), and rugged terrain that lends itself to balkanization. This is the classic equation for civil war in West Africa.
Already there are reports that the Guinean military is cleaving along ethnic lines and that mercenaries from Liberia and other West African countries have begun to show up in eastern Guinea, a densely forested area from which rebel incursions were staged during the Liberian civil war. It remains to be seen how far the situation in Guinea will be allowed to deteriorate. Another major conflict in this already-fragile region could be disastrous for Liberia and Sierra Leone. Liberia's greatest asset is the will of ordinary people to move on and rebuild. This bodes well for the future, but maintaining this momentum in the face of these obstacles won't be easy.
You can read the whole interview here.
Posted: Vancouver / 13 January 2010
Goodbye, Babylon King
The latest issue of VQR features a long narrative essay I wrote about the Liberian civil war and its aftermath. An excerpt:
As president, Charles Taylor ran Liberia as a fiefdom, handing out logging concessions to investors from Eastern Europe and Asia in exchange for cash and weapons. Preeminent among them was Gus Van Kouwenhoven, a Dutch arms dealer and Taylor's longtime business partner. Van Kouwenhoven had supplied Taylor back when he was fighting Doe in the early nineties. Flouting a UN arms embargo, Taylor's Oriental Timber Company shipped timber and Sierra Leonean diamonds to Southeast Asia in return for millions of dollars worth of Kalashnikov rifles, rocket-propelled grenades, mortars, and armed personnel carriers. At its peak, the OTC ran Buchanan Port as a private city, complete with workers' barracks and its own militia. It came to acquire a terrible symbolism.
Tamba parked beside the crumpled husk of a car. I walked ahead, through piles of shredded metal and pulverized outbuildings. Rebel fighters captured the city in 2003 and, with the help of locals, destroyed the port in a spasm of revenge. In a place where abject need trumped politics; where anything abandoned was stripped, looted, and repurposed or sold; the port's utter destruction was a testament to the kind of brutality Buchananites had been subjected to and the need for catharsis it had engendered. Someone had scrawled "Goodbye, Babylon King" on one of the few standing walls.
Two years on, the port was cannibalizing itself for scrap. We wandered past the empty shipping office to the dock, where a crane was arranging the guts of sawmills into sloppy piles. A security guard caught up with us. His name was Augustine, and we were trespassing. But Augustine was more curious than proprietary, and he was happy to talk. His uniform had the look of a hand-me-down: the braiding was frayed and one of the epaulettes had come unmoored at the shoulder. He'd been hired to guard the scrap until it could be shipped out on Chinese barges.
You'll need a subscription to read all 9,000 words of it.
Posted: Vancouver / 18 December 2009
Through a Glass Murkily: Georgian Landscapes from the Tbilisi-Zugdidi Day Train
I scribbled this in my notebook during the eight-hour journey:
"Out of Tbilisi the landscape yields already impressive foothills,
rugged and lightly vegetated. Mist through distant valleys gilded by
sun. Rusted train carriages sit idle on rails running parallel to this one. In the distance, an unfinished power station, a grid of untopped electrical poles like a forest of clearcut firs.
"Down the aisle sunlight slatting the floor. Someone has lit a cigarette.
"The foothills give way to gently rolling high prairie for a few minutes. After a few stops, more people board. They do not have assigned seats
and wait for people to leave. One huge man across the aisle from me
offers his to an elderly Slavic-looking man. He and his wife are
dressed like peasants and have exaggerated features. They
look friendly.
"Later some other men board and stand in the aisle talking intensely
with their friend, who is seated. One man is bald, another wears a
cap, and the third talks playfully but when he turns around has a
sorrowful face.
"The morning drifts by in a semiconscious haze: hillside villages,
stony riverbeds, blue winter sky. On the mountaintops the radio tower long ago replaced the crucifix."
Posted: London / 6 November 2009
Toronto, 1999-2008
Ten years ago, on a whim, S. and I moved to Toronto. Last summer, on another whim, we left. The intervening years were formative: graduate school, a year abroad, marriage. But it's the details that matter, and as I prepare to leave another city, London, I feel myself losing them. So much life, gone. Worse than gone: never-having-happened.
An image I cling to like a raft: Every July dragging a mattress downstairs and sleeping on the living room floor. Our own little island. The hiss of summer rain and the relief it brings from the heat. The bed-laziness of morning limbs, the sound of S.'s feet peeling from the hardwood as she rises, an hour before I do, to wash and dress for work.
If forgetting is a species of oblivion, then nostalgia is an act of faith. Herewith, snapshots from our life-within-a-life. I don't remember their provenance but I could make up a true story about every one.
Posted: London / 24 October 2009
Two Deserts and a Seascape
Salar de Uyuni, Bolivia. 2006.
Sahara Desert, Morocco. 2007.
North Sea, Scotland. 2009.
Posted: London / 14 October 2009
Sounds of Syria & Turkey
With William Dalrymple's From the Holy Mountain as my on-again, off-again guide, I spent the past couple of weeks seeking out the points of intersection between Islam and Christianity in Turkey and Syria. While southern Anatolia bore few obvious traces of its rich and complicated religious history, Syria was a revelation. Especially Aleppo, with its still-thriving Armenian, Maronite, and Greek Orthodox communities and its Dead Cities with their splendid Byzantine churches. So, too, the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus. Like the Aya Sofia, another magnificent house of worship from late antiquity, the mosque doubled, for a time, as a site of worship for both Christians and Muslims. Pictured above is a scene from inside.
During my travels I also managed to add a few more calls to prayer to my collection:
Ankara, Turkey (3:30). Broadcast over the p.a. system at the central bus station. The noise and neuroses of travellers hurrying onto buses probably explains its urgency. Very few people obliged.
Antakya, Turkey (3:08). I awoke to this on a black September morning. Dig the reverb. Haunting, lovely, maybe a little over-the-top.
Aleppo, Syria (1:45). The midday call to prayer from one of the mosques in the Old City. Very stern.
Aleppo, Syria (4:40). An Armenian marching band thrown in for good measure. We stayed in the Christian Quarter near the city's main Armenian Cathedral. The band practiced their instruments by torchlight, jostling against the walls of the smoking alleyway as they passed beneath our window.
Posted: London / 26 September 2009
My First Muezzin
A few years ago I lived across the street from a mosque. It was an ugly building, with a small and mostly impoverished congregation: my neighbours. They bragged that their muezzin had the most beautiful voice in town. It probably seemed so because their imam emphatically did not — his sermons were delivered in a thin, adenoidal Mandinka usually preceded by a gobby mic check. Still, I grew to appreciate and even take pride in our muezzin's prowess.
'Our' muezzin: A sentimental notion. I wasn't even a congregant. But half-waking to his morning call to prayer was the thing I missed most when I moved away. Since then I've recorded other muezzins and other imams wherever the opportunity presented itself. Inevitably, I suppose, none of them are equal to the beauty of his voice as I remember it.
This recording, of a sermon at Istanbul's Nuruosmaniye Mosque, somehow comes close. If you listen carefully you can hear the whoosh of two hundred people falling to their knees, the plaiting of birdsong and prayer, the falling away of footsteps and laughter as the crowd breaks.
Posted: London / 15 September 2009
Four Portraits
Ada Aden Hussein lives in the Mental Health Ward of Hargeisa Hospital, where she has worked for five years as an attendant. Ada took the job so she could take care of her daughter, who suffers from bipolar disorder, and her granddaughter. Hargeisa, Somalia. 2007.
Akaiyu, twenty-one, on a visit to a health clinic. Her infant son needed medicine for an eye infection. Her people, the Turkana, are nomads who migrate across the arid plains of northern Kenya in search of water and pasture. Akaiyu belongs to one of the settled communities near the Sudanese border. 2008.
Agness Nyirandibanzi lives on a government reserve in the hills above Gisenyi, Rwanda. Her people, the Twa, face discrimination because of their short stature, which distinguishes them from other Rwandans. They were murdered in great numbers during the 1994 genocide — a tragedy sometimes overlooked in historical accounts. The government moved Agness's community from their forest home because it was designated as part of a national park. 2009.
Name unknown, a resident of Conneh Internally Displaced Persons Camp near Kakata, Liberia. The camp took its name from warlord Sekou Conneh. His rebels forced many of the people here to flee their homes during the civil war. 2005.
Posted: London / 8 September 2009
Notebook: Bamako, Mali, 6 January 2003
As dawn's vermilion hem skirts the horizon, peasants rise from their makeshift beds on the floor of the bus station. They fold linen, pack baskets, pile millet sacks, ready themselves for prayer. We're obliged to rise with them: We've helped ourselves to the feet of their prayer mats as they slept.
Ablution kettles are passed around. A few of the men kneel, their damp faces shining in the twilight, and begin their morning salat. Others follow suit. For a moment, when all have begun praying and none has finished, they rise and fall in silent unison. The scene is missing only the blare of an imam reciting from the Koran over a jury-rigged p.a. system. When the prayers are finished the crowd disappears into the morning.
We cross the Pont des Martyrs bridge in a taxi. Already diesel fumes veil the streets, an intimation of the coming heat. Bamako's architecture records the faraway drama of first-world realpolitik. The city centre is a mix of peeling Gallic edifices and brutalist office blocks, the legacies of French colonial rule in the first half of the 20th century and Soviet patronage of dictator Mobido Keita's socialist regime in the second. Newer, Saudi-funded developments stand out here and there. I'd like to think that the BCEAO Tower, a handsome modern invocation of Mali's ancient architectural tradition and for symbolic reasons home to the Central Bank of West African States, bespeaks a country coming, finally, into its own, but the poverty and ruin of the city say otherwise.
African capitals are strange, ahistorical places, monuments to a recent, provisional past. Everything crumbles or is razed. Bamako is vibrant in the way any city is — people have a habit of making life interesting wherever they are — but with such a weak hold on the past, it appears to have little grasp of the future.
Published in a much longer version as "Mali's Ghosts" in Outpost Magazine, Winter 2005
Posted: London / 1 September 2009
Ferdynand Stiem, Fellow Traveller
I remember my grandfather as an old man, small and imperious and impossibly formal. I hated him, or I thought I did. His accent and the way he spoke to my mother; his Old-World manners and fastidious habit of dress: the polished shoes, the French cuffs, the pencil moustache. Even his little paunch seemed purposeful, a bulwark against suspender-slip.
In fact my grandfather was the son of farmers, and he, too, made his living by his hands. He worked as a barber and later as an unlicensed chiropractor, treating church friends in his basement. Like many immigrants who settled in provincial Canada, cut adrift from their culture and their class, he would have reckoned with the opportunity to reinvent himself. The temptation must have been great, though at eighteen it would have been less an act of reinvention than of invention. It was in the old man's weakness for bling, I realize, that the young man could be glimpsed — the Cadillac that breaks the bourgeois spell — and it's this weakness that kindles in me a kind of retrospective affection for him. Affection, and with it a strange, thin grief. Nearly everything I know about his early life comes from aunts, second-cousins, my father: uncertain details verging on the apocryphal.
Ferdynand Stiem was born in a village near Warsaw that no longer exists, one of those ancient settlements dispersed by the riptides of modernity. His mother died when he was very young and his father moved the family to Russia for a few years. At some point the name changed, or reverted, from the Slavicized 'Sztym' to the Germanic 'Stiem.' As a teenager he fled conscription by the Polish army, securing a berth on the Frederick VIII with a loan from his father. In Canada he learned English and Yiddish, his fourth and fifth languages, taught himself to cut hair, married, raised my father and his sisters. He never set foot in Poland again.
This, Ferdynand's immigration record, is all the evidence I have of my grandfather as a young man. To me it reads like a poem, pregnant with implication, a life in eight lines:
Surname: Stiem
Given name: Ferdynand
Age: 18
Sex: M
Nationality: Pol
Date of arrival: 1928/06/30
Port of arrival: Halifax , Nova Scotia
Ship: FREDERICK VIII , Scandinavian American
Posted: Calgary / 22 August 2009
Beauty and Sadness (from the Globe & Mail)
I like our chances, even as the front tire throws rags against the highway and the dusk-soaked hills wobble and shrug their silhouettes. The taxi driver steers the motorcycle into the shoulder and we slide to a sprawling stop in the dirt. I extract myself from the mess, filthy and unhurt. Unbelievably — because this is East Africa — I'm wearing a helmet. But this is Rwanda, and they do things differently here.
A farmer rushes over to see if we're all right. It wasn't a bad crash, but the bike's front rim is a mess. The driver hovers mournfully over his taxi. I can see the curve of electrified shoreline where the towns of Gisenyi and Goma meet on the Congolese border. Lake Kivu is a lurid mirror, inset.
"If this was Uganda, our heads would be on the other side of the road," he jokes, in a sudden fit of good humour.
You arrive in Rwanda with certain ideas about the place. If you work in the region, as I sometimes do, then you've heard the stories about the country's "miracle" recovery from the 1994 genocide. When I told my Ugandan colleagues about my holiday plans, they were enthusiastic. Rwanda, they said, is safe, orderly, prosperous. In spite of the accident, I'm inclined to agree.
Continue reading. . .
Posted: London / 15 August 2009
Notebook: Monrovia, Liberia, 9 October 2005
On Sundays, church. The day's ritual begins hours before the service, on the verandah, where Rose styles her daughters' hair. Belloh is first. She sits between her mother's legs, head in her lap, eyelids sliding sloe as the yank and twist of the braids grows rhythmic. Segbe Jr. stomps around the yard in his shirt and tie, tempted by the bright hem of garbage at the riverbank and the kickable treasures bobbing therein. Through the trees I can see the goldleaf dome of Congress. Two days until Liberia votes.
Posted: London / 11 August 2009
Notebook: Koundara, Guinea, 23rd March 2003
Eleven a.m. Boy washing viscera in a plastic tub, indifferent to the sun already hot. The town a shambling transport hub with no roads to speak of, no transport to be found, just forest tracks and idling Peugeots. Waiting, waiting.
The wet rope of gut proving difficult to handle. One end coils in the dirt as the boy squeezes effluvium from the other. Ate same last night in broth ladled from an oil drum. Chased it down with a day-old boiled egg sliced in half and besmirched with ketchup.
Hotel doubled as the town brothel, as they do in places like this. On the radio, from adjacent room, after my neighbour achieved satiety, news that Bush has invaded Iraq.
Posted: London / 28 July 2009
Sunshower over Romilly Street
Rain leaps like sparks off the cobbles, shadows blacken the pub wall.
Posted: London / 4 July 2009
Notebook: Kololi, The Gambia, 5th Nov 2002
A photograph in the Centre's library: Ugandan women mutilated by the Lord's Resistance Army in 1991. Their mouths and their noses have been cut off. Some of the women have wrapped scarves around their torn faces. One woman, who has not, faces the camera. The contrast is cruel: the subtle, skittish intelligence of her eyes, full of fear, sorrow, hope, with the ragged gape of mouth, teeth bared in a permanent skeletal grimace, and the awful, almost porcine half-nose.
Posted: London / 22 June 2009
Notebook: The Caprivi Strip, Namibia, 12th May 2005
The truck, an ancient Datsun, gears down and pulls up. People are squatting in the back, where a broken cabinet, a donkey, and a mattress have been laid. They look on without interest or expectation as I approach. Dust settles over their slick faces and arms, the air sways in the heat. I recognize in their expressions the practiced self-absence of peasants on the road, a state I've begun to aspire to myself as I hitchhike across Namibia's Caprivi Strip. If they suffer, bracing themselves against the stinking, shuddering cargo on these backroads, it's impossible to tell. This in contrast to the hilarity of the men in the cab, who remind me of soldiers on leave. They're drunk.
One of them leans out the passenger-side window, still laughing. "Hello, my friend. Where do you want to go today?"
I tell him I want to go to Sergona, a fishing village in the panhandle of the Okavango Delta.
"Botswana? Ah, sorry, we are not crossing the border today. But maybe we help you anyway. Maybe you want some stones."
"Stones," I say. "You mean diamon—"
"Yes. Stones," he interrupts, his voice demonstratively lower. He thumps the side of the truck and laughs again, as if to put the moment's indiscretion behind us and summon the high spirits such an auspicious meeting of future business partners calls for. "You see, you are lucky to meet me! My brother is coming from Angola tomorrow. I arrange with him to bring. You have a mobile phone?" he asks, his rounded African vowels snagging on what must be Portuguese trills.
The Caprivi Strip borders lucophone Angola to the north, Zambia to the east, and Botswana, my eventual destination, to the south. It's a colonial oddity, a 400-km corridor in the far northeast of the country that once joined the German colonies of South West Africa and Taganyika and continues to disjoin the peoples of the Caprivi, whose homelands bleed across its borders.
"Ah, you're from Angola. A beautiful country," I say, having never set foot there. Only a con artist, or a smuggler, a desperate one, would try to foist diamonds on a hitchhiker. Namibia is not a good place to launder stones into the legal market, nor is it a good smuggling route. UNITA rebels used to cross the border to trade with Caprivan merchants, diamonds for supplies. The Namibian government has since tightened the border.
I explain that I don't have a phone.
The man smoothes the door with his palm and sucks his teeth, breaking eye contact. "Anyway, it is no problem. I take you to see my brother and we make arrangement. You come with us."
"Thanks, but as you can see," I say, indicating my shabby clothes and yet shabbier bag, "I'm not looking for stones."
His voice grows urgent. "Come, we go. My brother will give you good price. You will see. Very nice price."
I refuse, trying to sound like I mean it. I'm glad of the passengers in the back. They're a sure thing, I'm not. The man speaks to the other men in a language I do not recognize. Then: "Okay, because I like you, I tell my cousins we come back later. If you are still here, we take you to the border."
They drive off. Best not to stick around, probably.
Posted: London / 20 June 2009
Notebook: Ndemban Jola, The Gambia, 3rd March 2003
At the compound of Ebrima Colley, written in felt marker above every doorway, in Arabic: "Allah will protect us from evil." My friend Buba's translation.
Posted: London / 18 June 2009
Notebook: Kerewan, The Gambia, 2nd Feb 2003
The day after the night of the party. Eating benachin at a shack in the middle of town. High tin roof, concrete walls with islands of yellow plaster on which sums have been scrawled. Enamel food bowls and dirt-scored jerrycans stacked beneath the counter. The proprietress a woman in late middle-age, though you can never tell. Her daughter nursing a child, a boy of maybe six months, on a breast furrowed with veins. The child holding his fistful of teat as we do the bagged water we drink at the low wood table. Across the table Laura, her collarbone twinkling with sweat, and Chad, hungover. From the radio a griot singing to us through the static of years. Leaning against the doorframe an older boy, watching us, his legs splashed with grey mud and a football sagging under the weight of his arm. Beyond him: dust, sun. For a moment an impossible nostalgia for this place seizes me.
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