Fresh Air Fiend (2 page)

Nothing I can say in protest against the proliferation of the creepier manifestations of popular culture will change the continuous innovation in electronic media, which seems more and more to me like a cross between toy making and chemical warfare. Having lived through the whole electronic revolution, I know that much of what I have seen is not progress but
folie de grandeur.
It is misleading, creating the illusion of knowledge, which is in fact a profound ignorance. Obviously advances in communication are traveling so fast that you can accurately characterize people as writing at the speed of light throughout the world.

But of course not the whole world. The most aberrant aspect of the delusional concept of globalization is the smug belief that the world is connected and that everyone and every place is instantly accessible. This is merely a harmful conceit. The colorful advertisement for cellular phones or computers showing Chinese speaking to Zulus, and Italians speaking to Tongans, is inaccurate, not to say mendacious. There are still places on earth that are inaccessible, because of their geography or their politics or their religion. Parts of China are off the map, and for that matter parts of Italy are too—there are villages in the hinterland of Basilicata, in southern Italy, that are as isolated as they have ever been.

For the past ten years, since the disputed and disallowed election of 1991, the entire Republic of Algeria has been a no-go area where between eighty and one hundred thousand people have been massacred. Algeria—a sunny Mediterranean country, the most dangerous place in the world, with the worst human rights record on earth—is right next to jolly Morocco and colorful Tunisia, the haunts of package tourists and rug collectors. This bizarre proximity highlights the paradox, which is an old one, that close by there are areas of the world that are still forbidden, or terra incognita, where no outsider dares to venture. In spite of all our connectedness we have little idea of what passes for daily life in Algeria.

Distant and arduous travel is not always required to find a no-go area. For many years Northern Ireland was a patchwork of town and neighborhood strongholds, based on interpretations of Christianity. If you were the wrong sort of Christian, you might be killed. There are New Yorkers who think nothing of traveling to Tierra del Fuego but who would not set foot in certain parts of New York City. I am not saying all these places are equally dangerous, only that they are perceived to be so.

And while millions of people in the world are accessible, millions are not—many live in closed cultures, the sort of hermetic existence that has not changed for centuries. For well over forty years travelers were forbidden to enter Albania, and Albanians were forbidden to leave. This isolation ended ten years ago, and because the confinement had been involuntary, Albanians have found it hard to adjust—have "decompensated," to use the clinical term—and have suffered a decade of chaos and a sort of political dementia, which has in part fueled the Kosovo conflict. I was in Albania a few years ago. It was a glimpse of the past for me and, by the way, a place without telephonic connection to the outside world.

There are lots of such places. Zambians in their capital, Lusaka, find it much easier to communicate with, say, people in Los Angeles—just pick up the phone or log on to the Internet—than with the Lozi people, in Zambia's own Western Province, who live without electricity and telephones and in some cases without roads. Life goes on for the Lozis, and though they suffer drought and disease, their lives are in many ways richer, more coherent, for their isolation. The hinterlands of the world still exist, neglected if not inviolate, and thank God for them. But it is only a matter of time before they are violated, with predictable results. I have witnessed this in a number of countries. When I first traveled in Sicily in 1963, Uganda in 1966, Afghanistan in 1973, Honduras in 1979, the upper Yangtze in 1980, and Albania in 1993, I felt in each place that I was off the map. After me came a deluge—soldiers, tourists, developers, or the complex cannibalism of civil war—and the inhabitants of those places have been profoundly changed, if not corrupted in new and uninteresting ways, as though turned into gigantic dwarfs.

Anyone with money for a ticket can fly to any other big city in the world—an American airport is a gateway to Vladivostok and Ouagadougou. My reaction to this is: big deal. Cities did nothing for me. It was the hinterlands that made me.

In Africa as a
mzungu,
I was a stranger among the People, which is what "Bantu" means. I was not a person but rather a sort of marginal spiritlike being, and what I spoke was unintelligible to most of them. That was a good lesson. Until then, I had not known that most people in the world believe that they are the People, and their language is the Word, and strangers are not fully human—at least not human in the way the People are—nor is a stranger's language anything but the gabbling of incoherent and inspissated felicities.

I should have known this purely on the basis of Native American terminology. "Bantu" meaning "the People" has its counterpart throughout the world's cultures. The name of virtually every Native American nation or tribe or band—Inuit, Navaho, and so on—translates as "the People," the implication being that they are human and the stranger is not. For example, the earliest people in what is now Michigan called themselves Anishinabe, "the First People." Strangers named them the Chippewa, which was corrupted to Ojibway, a variation of "those who make pictographs"—because of the elegantly engraved birchbark scrolls they produced.

The early French travelers who were the first to encounter these Anishinabe were blind to these scrolls, could not read them, were interested only in the furs the people could supply. There are distinct disadvantages to being a stranger. The stranger is always somewhat at sea and, like a castaway, faced with unusual, unexpected problems.

Otherness can be like an illness; being a stranger can be analogous to experiencing a form of madness—those same intimations of the unreal and the irrational, when everything that has been familiar is stripped away. The stranger can feel like someone wounded or disabled. In
The Wound and the Bow,
Edmund Wilson used the Greek myth of Philoctetes as a metaphor to describe the relationship between art and illness. The underlying idea in the myth is that Philoctetes' wound is part of his character: "the conception of superior strength as inseparable from disability." It is not only Philoctetes' wonderful bow that makes him superior, but also his fortitude, a power derived from his bearing the pain of his wound. His unhealed injury gives him nobility. This notion of the link between trauma and art (or sickness and strength) was not new with Wilson; it exists throughout literature. It is in part the basis of the heartsick artist-lover of the Romantic movement, as well as much of what we understand as modern. Borges, who was blind, wrote, "Blindness is a gift."
^*

The greatest exponent today of this interpretation of illness as a possible source of imaginative power—though he has never referred specifically to the myth of Philoctetes—is Dr. Oliver Sacks. His patients are classic strangers. In the case histories collected in
The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat
and
An Anthropologist on Mars,
Dr. Sacks has explained how an apparent disability in one area of a person's life can grant an access of strength or inspiration in another area. More recently, in
The Island of the Colorblind,
he has described how achromatopes develop a keen understanding not of color but of what he calls "a polyphony of brightnesses." (The non-colorblind person is as helpless as the sighted man in H. G. Wells's story "The Country of the Blind.") And he tells of encounters in which the physician is revealed as less acute, less capable, and less perceptive than the patient.

To be a stranger is to be childlike, a bit defenseless and dim, and having to acquire a language. In
Seeing Voices,
his study of the deaf, Dr. Sacks compares Saint Augustine's description, in his
Confessions,
of his learning to speak as an infant with the deaf learning sign language. Wittgenstein's analysis of this experience relates this to the stranger's dilemma: "Augustine describes the learning of human language as if the child came into a strange country and did not understand the language of the country; that is, as if it already had a language, only not this one." This is precisely what the stranger feels: an inner sense of helplessness, almost infantilism, in this new place, as if the stranger had passed through the looking glass.

Living in the African bush for so long meant that I was dependent on the hospitality of Africans, the Nyanja people in Nyasaland. They could have managed very well without me, but I needed them. My first task was to learn their language, Chinyanja, also known as Chichewa. After that, my life was much easier, although I felt isolated: I had only a bicycle for transportation for my first two years; I had no phone, and for long spells of time—hours or days—no electricity. On the plus side, I was not far from a vegetable market and a post office. I raised pigeons and ate them. I liked my students. I had friends in nearby villages. Except for periods when there was political trouble in the country and rifle muzzles were pointed at my face, I did not feel I was in much danger, because in general I understood the risks. In spite of my sympathy and good will, I knew I lived apart, but that was not a new feeling. In terms of being a writer, I felt very lucky.

Another important and common fact was that in the Africa I knew, and even the Southeast Asia I knew, local people did not think of solving problems by uprooting themselves and emigrating. They accepted that they would live and die in their own country, indeed in the village where they had been born. They did not have relatives or families elsewhere. A person who is in a country for life tends to see himself or herself as part of a community, with responsibilities. Because fleeing was not an option, the people I knew had a well-developed sense of belonging. They took the long view: they had been there forever, the land was theirs, they were part of a culture, with a long memory, deep roots, old habits and customs. Living among such people intensified my sense of exclusion, of being a stranger, and it fascinated me.

Haunted by the restless dead, these places are more populous than they appear, for most people share their existence with the unseen world of spirits. Ancestors live within us. There is an Inuit notion that a baby born soon after the death of a grandparent is actually the incarnation of the deceased, and the infant will be referred to as "Granddad" or "Grandma" and treated with the respect accorded to an elder. In most of the places I lived during my decade of being cut off, it was an accepted belief that the dead were not dead at all, nor even absent; for many people in the world no one dies, no one really goes away. The dead are present, friends are present, ancestors are present. Recognizing this, Lévi Strauss wrote, "There is probably no society which does not treat its dead with respect." At my present age I am more prepared to entertain the concept of ancestor worship and the proximity of the spirit world than of monotheism. Anyone who has grieved for the loss of a father or mother understands what I am saying, but it extends to all areas of time passing.

Turning up twenty-five years after leaving Malawi, I met people there who reminded me that I had not been forgotten. As a friend, I had not really left. For them, not much time had passed. Is this because we in the West tend to measure time in terms of a single lifetime? Perhaps in places where life expectancy is short (it has been calculated to be thirty-eight years in Zimbabwe), a life span is a useless unit of measurement.

Toward the end of a long day's paddling in the Trobriand Islands, off the northeast coast of Papua–New Guinea, I put ashore at a tiny seaside village intending to ask permission to camp on a nearby beach. "Stay here," the goggling villagers insisted. "You will be safe." That also meant they could keep an eye on me. No one ever asked me how long I intended to remain in the village, though they were bewildered that I should prefer my tent to the hospitality of their huts. Fear of malaria—endemic and often fatal in the Trobriands—was my only reason. After two weeks of utter contentment I paddled away.

They yelled: "Come back sometime!"

Six months or more passed before I returned, and when I did, without any warning, dragging my kayak out of the lagoon, a woman on the beach smiled at me and said, "We were just talking about you."

Her casual welcome delighted me. There was nothing remarkable about my reappearance. It was as if I had hardly left. I had thought of the intervening months as full of incident in my life. That same time was not long for them; it represented one harvest, one storm, and several deaths. But no one truly dies in the Trobriands. The dead simply go to another island: their spirits reside on Tuma, just a bit north.

The villagers' own notion of the passage of time made my return less stressful. There was Trobriand protocol—ritual greetings and presents—but none of the drama and forced emotion that characterizes an American homecoming. It pleased me to think that I figured in their consciousness. Death or departure was part of an eternal return.

And the friendship of people who come and go, for whatever length of time, is not diminished by their absence. What matters in the Trobriands is your existence in the consciousness of the village. If someone talks about you, or if you appear in their dreams, you are present—you have reality.

 

The most dramatic example of otherness occurs when two radically different cultures meet for the first time. This encounter is summed up in the expression "first contact."

In
First Contact,
their 1987 account of a series of such events in New Guinea, the authors, Bob Connelly and Robin Anderson, found people in the New Guinea highlands in the 1980s who had been present when Australian prospectors first came to the highlands in 1930. The Australians were in a hurry to find gold, but seeing them cross a river in their valley, the villagers believed that these white men were the ghosts of their ancestors. All used the word "spirit" to describe the strangers.