Adventure Divas (31 page)

“They’re blue. Care to expand on that?” I laugh.

“Well, don’t you think the world needs some blue people?”

“So are you playing God?”

“Yes, of course,” Keri says, running her nails across her lips and blowing. “My idea, though, is not just to rest for one day of the week but pretty well all of them.

“Everybody wants to play God and you do that by developing a set of humans of your own to play with. So I invented people who are roaming around the world and dripped them onto paper.”

“And fishing?” I ask, knowing she has stated publicly that both fishing and family come before writing in her holy trinity. If she’s God when she writes, what is she when she’s at water’s edge?

“Ah, fishing. It is, I suppose, my metaphor for life, death, and the universe. I have loved fishing ever since I was a very small child, and when I arrived over here on the west coast I discovered whitebaiting and I have become an
obsessive
galaxophile ever since. It’s not so much a game of fish and fishing, it is life during the two and a half months of the whitebait season. I collect whitebait lore and whitebait stories and eat them a lot whenever I can catch them, which is why the novel that’s coming out this year is called
Bait.
” (Hulme has described
Bait
as “a funny novel about death.”)

“Fishing is, it’s an art form of a very special and nurturing kind. But it’s a particularly civilized art form, too. You’ve got to be wholly aware of your surroundings and the fact that while you can cast quite deliberately to something, you never know what you will get, and the process of writing can be very big like that,” she says.

Yes!
I think. The marriage of fishing and literature is deeper than mere metaphor. The
act
of fishing is similar to the
act
of writing itself. The masochistic urge to wake up in the predawn hours and stumble with loaded thermos toward an icy-cold stream to catch something you ultimately let go . . .

“So . . . potential?” I say.

“Yes. Potential. The more you fish, the more directed you can become and the more open you can become for whatever is coming along . . . and that’s how you can explore ideas that don’t have the glamour or the sex appeal that as a young person you’d go for—there’s other things you’d mine later on.”

“Like what?” I ask.

“I think inevitably, the older you get as a writer, the more you start looking at the really big questions. You start looking at mortality in a lighter sense in that you start looking at the cycles of the world; the mortality of species; the vulnerability of environments, particularly when you live in a place like the west coast,” she says.

“You’ve talked about being a nomad, but you aren’t really, are you?”

“I’m not a nomad except in the head. I like comfort, and being a nomad can sometimes be exceedingly uncomfortable, in both the physical and the spiritual sense. . . . I don’t think I’ve got the mental stamina for it, really,” she says.

Personally I find the discomforts of the nomadic life bracing, and inspiring. But Keri must draw her creativity from somewhere else.

Then, for the first time, she takes off her glasses. She rubs her eyes. I notice that one of them wanders a bit.

“I think the riskiest thing that I do,” Keri says, “it’s not a physical thing at all, it’s being open to and exploring mentally every field of knowledge whatsoever that entertains, interests me, or I come across. I’m willing to test against currently established truths of anything and everything,” she says.

“You’re an intellectual bungee jumper?” I tease, knowing Keri abhors the sport.

“
Boinng!
There goes the eyeballs. Yes, you’re right. Put it this way: I am not devoted to comfort in the head, but I’ll leap off cliffs and hope there’s a sufficient updraft in the mental world. And so far there has been a sufficient updraft.” Her smile breaks through and around the hand that tries to cover her imperfect teeth.

Hours have passed, and videtape packaging litters the floor. The sun bolts tangerine through the window behind Keri’s desk and lights up the backpacks full of manuscripts. “Keri, can we go down to the beach and have a glass of wine?” I blurt out, a request devoid of fear or strategy.

“Why not,” she says. I grab my still camera and we walk together to a deserted stretch of beach nearby. The day is unloading its final shots of glory; pomegranate red, Valiant orange, and indigo. Keri Hulme, two bottles of wine, my old Polaroid camera, and a roiling Tasman Sea all reaching a confluence at magic hour. This is what the late Spalding Gray referred to as “a perfect moment,” LSD without the drugs—a blissful surge of contentment as all your stars align and the world seems to hum. Keri stands near the sea as I load my camera, but she doesn’t touch the water.

I have traversed the dicey territory of meeting a person I have revered from afar, and survived to swoon about it. But Keri, of all people, would abhor the thought of me putting a diffusion filter on this moment. Let’s just say Keri still represents all things diva to me.

I came to New Zealand looking for political estro-power and am left with an image of Keri standing next to the sea, firmly rooted to this quirky, independent set of islands. In the face of relative isolation, she, and her country, have developed the personal strength
—
mana, if you will—to go their own way.

We are eye to eye, swiping at sand flies.

“Red or white?” I say.

“Ah, white preferably for me,” she says. I pour. Then I take a picture of Keri Hulme, and set it on the sand to develop.

“These little bastards here,” Keri says, swatting, “they were supposedly put here so that humans don’t get enamored with paradise—and you can sort of believe that.”

6.

CUD, SWEAT, AND FEARS

Aman iman.
(“Water is life, and life is water.”)

—TAMACHEK SAYING

T
ime has drained out of this reality,
I think to myself as I shove a needle through yet another set of blisters on this, the third long day of walking through the sweltering central Sahara with Tuareg nomads on salt caravan. I never knew that nothingness could take up so much space. And, since I can speak exactly three words of the Tuareg’s native language of Tamachek
—tanenmert
(“thank you”),
el ma tovlid?
(“how are you?”), and
iy uhen
(“hello”)—I pass the hours ruminating on the concept of ethereal nothingness—which takes up a surprising amount of time. When my mind starts to bead up and roll off and disappear into this overwhelming landscape, like runaway mercury from a cracked thermometer, I latch onto some more tangible activities: counting the razor-sharp whiskers that pop out of my camel’s muzzle, miming to my blue-swathed, all-male comrades, or tossing over in my brain how I could know so little about Niger, a West African country that is five times the size of Britain and sits just left of Chad.

The Scottish explorer Mungo Park traipsed through sub-Saharan Africa in search of the source of the Niger River in the early nineteenth century, although it was the French who eventually jimmied themselves into the position of colonialist power by playing tribal powers off one another. Since the country was not worth much—that is, there were only a few natural resources to exploit—the French bowed to political resistance in the mid-1900s, and Niger won its independence in 1960. France’s colonial legacy, including language, remains among the educated.

And now, a Tuareg rebellion simmers. The Tuareg, a disenfranchised desert warrior tribe, have led a rebellion against the government for three decades, ever since the droughts of the 1970s when the corrupt government failed to pass along its international aid resources to the desert people. This violence between the government and the Tuareg (who some say are armed by Muammar Qaddafi of Libya), significant banditry, and a few coups d’état have made Niger destination non grata for travelers. A cease-fire between the government and rebels opened up a political window, occasioning our unlikely presence. A crew of three and I are here making a program for Pilot Produc-tions. We have jumped through this current window of relative peace to walk through the Sahara with the “blue men of the desert,” regal-looking men swathed in fabric pounded with indigo, who are concerned, mostly, with salt.

Political, geographic, and economic realities have conspired to maintain a way of life that has existed since Muhammad and have kept this spot largely unmarred by the tentacles of the transnationals. This is in contrast to Borneo, where the value of the rain forest has meant relatively quick liquidation, accompanied by swift change for the Penan. I am learning that this long, long walk that has happened for more than a thousand years does not pause for a political rebellion, and that if the camel lumbering beside you tries to take a chunk out of your arm, a twelve-year-old boy mysteriously appears and whacks it across the neck with a long wooden stick.

“We’ll be there during the Salt Curée season,” Vanessa, my cohort in Borneo, and now in Niger, had told me over the phone before our departure. “All kinds of festivals take place because it’s right after rainy season. It’s considered a time of plenty.”

Plenty must be relative; seems to me it is simply the season least likely to kill you. The 115-degree heat is clean and dry and hard. To survive the desert you must regard it with proper respect. We breathe slowly, always through the nose, to avoid the blade in the throat that strikes when inhaling through the mouth. This section of the Sahara is called the Te Nere, which means “the void.”

We are walking to the oasis town of Fachi to trade the dried tomatoes and onions that weigh down our camels for salt. The salt caravan leader, Oumarou, like his men, wears a blue robe, cinched with an ornate leather belt. He, and every other man, carries a sword, a legacy of the Tuareg warrior tradition. Oumarou leads us along an invisible path; his daytime compass is the angle of the shadows cast by his camel’s ears, and how the winds sculpt the dunes. At night, he checks his naviation by the stars. Orion stays on the left cheek. We walk, leading our burdened camels, at a constant pace for ten, twelve hours a day. Our walk is filled with utter stillness and constant motion, and I sense that this is a place where even small mistakes have big consequences. This quiet caravan has little in common with our raucous orange-and-white Kiwi caravan. On this trek, there is no road, no gas; and there are no divas. The women stay in their home villages, in more fertile points of Niger, raising the children and growing the vegetables and spices that their mates haul, for months at a time, across the desert to trade for salt.

The Tuareg men’s eyes are warm and eerie, with the slightly nondirected look of the blind; they beam out a sliver of light from behind black head coverings called
cheches.
Keri Hulme created a set of unfilmable blue men to protect her art from the compromises of the camera. These Blue Men are filmable, but it remains to be seen whether or not we are compromising them. My presence and that of the crew must be strange, but the men seem to take it in stride, literally. Our to-ing and fro-ing and as-yet-unsettled relationship with the camel persona seem to provide a bit of comic relief, given the laughs that slide out from under the
cheches. Taddezza tifellas. Iba nit akennas,
goes the Tamachek proverb. Laughter creates accord. Its absence creates dispute.

The
cheche,
or
taguelmoust,
is a scarf that covers the head and neck, leaving a slit for eyes and mouth. I dislike veils and at first firmly resist wearing one.

Stupid.

Like many Western women, I have negative associations with veiling—something I’m hoping to explore on the next
Divas
shoot, in Iran. But for now, we’re here in Niger and anyone without sunstroke knows that the
cheche
is a savior from the punishing rays. It’s wise not to let politics obscure pragmatism in the Sahara. I clue in late, but from then on Oumaruo patiently wraps and rewraps my mustard-colored
cheche
(using a technique proving too complicated for those of us raised with Velcro), salvaging some of my dignity and most of my bright pink skin.

“Tanenmert,”
I say to Oumarou, relieved.

“Niger’s Islamic. Eighty-five percent of the people are Muslim. Men veil, and women don’t, or at least aren’t required to, which confuses the anthropologists,” says Vanessa, who has taken to wearing a Yankees baseball hat and given up on the
cheche.
Men rarely remove the
cheche
in front of others, as it protects them not only from the sand and sun, but from the
jinn,
evil spirits that occupy the desert.

A friendly banter of Tamachek punctuates the early morning hours of walking, but by noon the heat rules, and the Blue Men fall silent. I am trying to stay true to the “amazing cultural experience” and not start a bitching loop in my brain about the increasing discomfort, but it is hard. My calves cramp. Sand whips into my eyes. The heat saps everything, even the energy needed to complain. Oumarou veers his steady gait my way and hands me a hollowed gourd filled with water.
“Aman iman,”
he says in Tamachek.
“Ishou.”
(“Water is life, and life is water. Drink.”)

I hand the gourd back, and when Oumarou turns away, my camel hocks a loogie on my arm. I am wiping the shockingly large glob on my pants when Chris, the quiet British soundman, walks up. Chris, a consummate pro, melts into the background during shooting. If he comes front and center you know something is wrong. “We are in the quietest place on earth,” he says, adjusting the mic on my collar, “so quiet that you can’t wear synthetics. I’m picking up tons of rustle. Only cotton from here on out, okay?”

The hours wear on. The crew drives, I walk. Only the pain from my blistered feet provides the edge that keeps me from succumbing to woozy, heat-induced delirium. Everything happens on the move. Water passes from goatskin sheath to gourd to man, and the walking never stops. A pungent mix of millet, goat cheese, and water is mashed together and run from man to man to me by a nimble little boy, the twelve-year-old son of Oumarou, who is constantly trailed by a little white goat, and the walking never stops. The flat, featureless sandscape pours out into infinity; the desert is elegant in its simplicity, and both liberating and dangerous in its reduction of life to a fundamental resin—simple lines, food, water, salt.

When the moon rises and the walking finally does stop, the camels are relieved of their three-hundred-pound loads and are fed. Despite their uncouth habits and famously pissy personalities, I’m coming to appreciate these efficiently built dromedaries that can survive seventeen days without water and regulate their own body temperature. Their sexy eyelashes, and a bit of a squint, allow them to plod forth in any manner of sandstorm.

We set up camp in silence smattered with camel groans of relief. The hay that has been on their backs is arranged in something like a Western “open-space cubicle layout.” The Tuareg start fires with wood and dried camel dung. Small dancing flames bounce subtle hues of indigo around us. Meals of millet seem simple compared to the effort that goes into the tea. Tea preparation is a high art that includes a series of glasses of tea in varying strengths: “The first is drunk strong and bitter as life; the second one sweet as love; the third one mild like death,” the Tuareg say.

We sit down one evening by his fire to do a “formal” conversation on camera with Oumarou.
Formal
here does not mean hair, makeup, and Barbara Walters. It simply means we are not walking while it is going on and we use some artificial lighting, that is, flashlights. Tim, the cameraman, has a respectful manner and warm rapport with those not used to being around cameras that is appreciated by all of us. He clips a mic on Oumarou, who is brewing up a batch of tea. Oumarou pours the thick liquid three feet from the kettle to a shot glass to another glass, back to the kettle, and back into a glass in a confusing caffeine jig that would rattle even a Seattle barista. The long-distance pouring creates a layer of foam and cools the tea quickly. I sip the second shot glass of thick, sweet tea that Oumarou hands me. I have convinced myself that Oumarou and I have bonded, though we have exchanged mostly gestures and smiles—not words—throughout the hours and days. Still, I have decided (unilaterally) that he is not simply putting up with us. But now, as the cameras roll and it comes time to actually talk, the difficulties of forced intimacy show themselves. The questions and answers go through three translations—English, to French, to Hausa, to Tamachek—then the answer comes, Tamachek, to Hausa, to French, to English. This also means an entire group of people participates in our “intimate” conversation.

“What do you think of the future of the caravans?” I ask.

“My youngest son has taken an interest in this life,” he says, gesturing to his son, who is pounding millet. “And his son will do the same.”

“Have you ever seen a camera before?” I ask after ours is clicked off.

“No, but ten years ago my eldest brother saw one,” Oumarou tells me.

Cameras, and interference
in delicate cultures in general, always brings up mixed feelings. A no-interference prime directive seems right and honorable, a lot of the time, but sometimes tradition or circumstance creates injustice, and interference seems justified. I think of how Ruchira Gupta’s film gave visibility to the issue of sex trafficking, and how Pratibha Parmar’s film
Warrior Marks
shed light on clitorectemies in Africa. I wonder if our shows—covering Borneo’s threatened Penan, and now, the Tuareg—support the right cause by giving voice and exposure, or simply add to the white noise of cultural interference.

Irony may have
scorched sincerity in my life, yet somehow the searing sun seems to be reversing the effect. It is rare that I feel honored or privileged in the moment—or, God forbid, actually utter such words, even if I feel them. But here and now I am keenly aware of this magical swatch of experience, and its precarious existence. Oumarou said that he expects his son and his son’s son to live the circular life of the caravan. But that is unlikely. Ironically, it is the unrest and poverty of the region that have protected this way of life. If the country becomes more affluent, from foreign investment or other factors, there will likely be more trucks than camels carrying salt, and tourism may gain a bigger place in the economy. Out here, in the middle of the desert, to me, life feels gilded by being as it always has been. The oceans of sand and pure blue indigo make it easy to forget the punishing poverty of Niger that was so evident when we arrived in the capital city of Niamey.

Our arrival in Niger
seems like months ago, although only a week has passed. We drove from Niamey to the holy city of Agadez. Agadez was founded roughly five hundred years ago and has long been regarded as the gateway to the desert. It is considered holy because of its many religious festivals and its great mosque, which was built in the sixteenth century and topped with one of the highest mud minarets in Africa. We hired a Tuareg guide named Aghali, whose
cheche
covered everything about his face except his aviator sunglasses and mustache. Aghali drove us through the naked Sahara in a beat-up old Land Rover piled high with firewood and camera equipment, and initiated us into this mostly flat, featureless scape where the winds’ sculpting and unsculpting of the dunes was his only map. Reading the winds, divining by their direction, takes a special cartographer.