Peace Corps Writers

May 2003

WE HAVE WEATHERED a snowy winter here on the East Coast, but finally we have Spring and as the Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote

Nothing is so beautiful as spring —
When weeds, in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush.”

We greet you with a “lush” May issue, full of news, humor, political wisdom, fresh insights and, as always from RPCVs writers, great writing. But first the news . . .

Peace Corps country director wins United Nations literary prize
Andrew Oerke (staff: Tanzania, Uganda, CD-Malawi, CD Jamaica 1966–71) has won the Literary Prize of Excellence from the United Nations Society of Writers & Artists. On March 21, 2003, UN Under Secretary General Gillian Sorensen presented the award, and Oerke read from his yet-to-be-published books African Stiltdancers and San Miguel D'Allende.
     Oerke, who has been published in The New Yorker, The New Republic, Poetry, Mademoiselle, and other leading magazines, is a Golden Gloves champ, football player, university professor, Korean War vet, U.N. Gulf War consultant, and Peace Corps Country Director. A feature article on him in The New York Times called him a poet “whose muse is a world traveler.” The panel of judges included Norman Mailer, Hans Janitscheck, Bhikshuni Weisbrod and several others. Andrew Oerke is the first poet to be awarded the U.N. Literary Prize. With Andrew’s permission, we are reprinting three of his poems from his collection, African Stiltdancers.

A Writer Writes (Humorously)
Tina Martin (Tonga 1969–71) has written some wonderful pieces about her Peace Corps experience in Tonga. In one paragraph she has the ability to be sad, funny, and break you heart, and do it all without splitting an infinitive. In this issue, we are pleased to publish her creative non-fiction piece, “God, Kennedy, and Me” that shows that some people will do almost anything to get into the Peace Corps — even pray.

Two Ethiopia RPCVs speak out
“First generation” RPCVs from Ethiopia I, Dick Lipez (Ethiopia 1962-64) and Leo Cecchini (Ethiopia 1962-64), weight in on separate issues involving the Peace Corps, the recent war, and all of us. These thoughtful pieces are published here as our way of continuing the discussion about the impact and relevance of the agency.
     After his Peace Corps tour in Ethiopia, Lipez was an evaluator for the agency for several years before becoming a full time writer. His latest novel, Tongue Tied, written under the name Richard Stevenson, has just been published, and he is also an editorial writer for the Berkshire Eagle. The article we publish here appeared earlier this month in the Lesbian/Gay/Bisexual RPCVs Newsletter (www.lgbrpcv.org) and it is reprinted with their kind permission.
     After his Peace Corps years in Asmara, Eritrea, Leo Cecchini was a Foreign Service Officer for 25 years in Europe, Africa, Asia, the Americas, as well as in Washington, D.C. He is on the Board of the National Peace Corps Association (NPCA) and the Vice President of Ethiopia & Eritrea RPCVs. He lives most of the year in Florida.

(Note: We welcome other short essays or commentaries on or about the Peace Corps or the role of RPCVs today.)

Paraguay RPCV speaks of RPCV writers at international colloquium
“Writing American” is the title of a paper Mark Jacobs (Paraguay 1978–80) delivered earlier this May. It was given at the 20th Annual American Studies Colloquium held on Goree Island off the coast of Senegal, and which included Americanists of various disciplines from 14 African countries. The two participating Americans were Professor Richard Horwitz, an American studies scholar from the University of Iowa, and novelist and Foreign Service Officer Jacobs.
     In his essay, which we are publishing in this issue, Mark makes the point that “Peace Corps writers” are influenced by their experience, using Norm Rush, Marnie Mueller, Paul Eggers, Maria Thomas and other RPCV writers as examples.
     At the colloquium, Mark also read from the U.S. State Department publication Writers on America which he initiated at State, and from his most recent book, The Liberation of Little Heaven. In January 2004, his next novel, A Handful of Kings will be published.

Also in this issue . . .
Our project to publish the readings from the “Journals of Peace” continues with another set of touching and insightful statements presented by RPCVs on the 25th anniversary of JFK’s death. We also have “A Letter from . . .” Nicaragua written by Roderick Jones (Nicaragua 1992–96). There are new books to buy, new reviews of books written by RPCVs, and“ Literary Type,” a column that always has something interesting about what Peace Corps writers are doing around the world. And, finally, Andy Trincia (Romania 2002–  ) is back with his Peace Corps adventures in Romania.

And remember: PeaceCorpsWriters.org will be holding several writing workshops at the National Peace Corps Association & Columbia River Peace Corps Association meeting in Portland, Oregon over the weekend of August 1–3, 2003. If you plan on attending, and have an interest in being on a writing panel, please contact me at: jpcoyne@cnr.edu.

Now, back to the reading.

— John Coyne
Editor

— John Coyne
Editor

Recent books by Peace Corps writers — May 2003

Peace Corps Pioneer
Or “The Perils of Pauline”
by Pauline Birky-Kreutzer (COR Pakistan 1961–63)
(Self-published)
2003
376 pages
$20
(Order from: Jade Creek Books, 123 N. College Avenue, Ft. Collins, CO 80521; 970.484.3019)

Kill Two Birds and Get Stoned
by Kinky Friedman (Borneo 1967–69)
William Morrow
April 2003
221 pages
$24.95

Change Your Job, Change Your Life
Careering and Recareering in New Boom/Bust Economy
(8th edition)
by Ronald L. Krannich (Thailand)
Impact Publications
2002
336 pages
$17.95

Constant Battles
The Myth of the Peaceful, Noble Savage
by Steven A. LeBlanc (Western Samoa 1960s) with Katherine E. Register
St. Martin's Press
April 2003
$25.95

The Selected Letters of Dolley Payne Madison
edited by David B. Mattern (Mali 1976–78)
and Holly Shulman
Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press
April, 2003
$29.95

The Littlest Star
A Musical Story
(children's)
by Robert Roberg (Peru 1966–68) and Chuck Whiting
Shine Time Records & Books
2002
40 pages
$18.95

Mortals
by Norman Rush (Botswana CD 1978–83)
Knopf
May 2003
736 pages
$26.95

Literary Type — May 2003

Joe Kovacs (Sri Lanka 1997–98) was awarded a $1,000 small project grant from the DC Commission on Arts and the Humanities for a research trip to Nogales, AZ for his second novel, Across the Border. Cambridge Literary Associates in Newburyport, Mass. has indicated interest in representing his first novel, Journeying Away, after the manuscript is edited.

Paul Theroux (Malawi 1963–65) has a novel coming out this summer in England and next year in the U.S. Entitled The Stranger at the Palazzo D’oro & Other Stories, it is a short erotic novel that revolves around the affair between a young man and an old woman. Theroux wrote it while traveling overland in Africa researching Dark Star Safari: Overland From Cairo to Cape Town. He said he needed to do “something” at night to keep his mind off what was happening on the streets. “To restrain myself — because the place if full of prostitutes and opportunities — I kept busy writing a short erotic novel.” It is, we’re told, “a very erotic” novel.

The May 26th issue of New York magazine carries an early review of Norm Rush’s (Botswana CD 1978–83) new novel Mortals. Reviewer John Homans writes in his glowing review of Mortals, “One wants to call him the best writer of his generation, but one imagines that Rush would reject the category, or at least have a fairly complex idea as to what it means. As with any great novel, one wonders how the seamless conjuring — the amazing precision and playfulness of the voice, the flashing river of thoughts and insights and formulations and feelings — was accomplished.” In the New York Observer (May 26 issue), Jennifer Egan reviewing Mortals writes, “In the course of this absorbing and variegated novel, Mr. Rush invites the reader to consider the origins of Christianity, the function of the C.I.A. in the wake of the Cold War (the novel is set in 1992–93), the tension between rebellion and conformity in Milton’s poetics, the nature of hell and the political future of postcolonial Africa. Fore readers hankering after a novel of ideas, it doesn’t get much better than this.”

This is an early “heads up” on a wonderful non-fiction book by Sarah Erdman (Cote d'Ivoire 1998-2000). The title is: Nine Hills to Nambonkaha: Two Years in the Heart of an African Town. It will be published by Henry Holt in August, 2003. (You may remember reading her short essay “The Guissongui Show” about her village that we published on our website.) Nambonkaha is pronounced "NAM-bong-kaa.” Buy this book! Tell a friend!

The Wall Street Journal on April 15 carried an op-ed piece entitled, “The ‘Obnoxious’ Threat to Nigeria and Its Oil” written by Ron Singer (Nigeria 1964–66). Singer, who teaches at the Friends Seminary in New York City, has kept up his interest in his host country since his Peace Corps years.

In early 1960, Maurice (Maury) L. Albertson, director of the Colorado State University Research Foundation, received a Point-4 (precursor to USAID) contract to prepare a Congressional Feasibility Study of the Point-4 Youth Corps called for in the Reuss-Neuberger Bill, an amendment to the Mutual Security Act. The Youth Corps was “to be made up of young Americans willing to serve their country in public and private technical assistance missions in far-off countries, and at a soldier’s pay.”.
     Pauline Birky-Kreutzer (Pakistan staff 1961–63) worked for Albertson at CSU at that time. In 1961, she went to Pakistan as the Field Representative (later called COR) for Colorado State University for the first group of Volunteers to that country. Later still, she directed one of the first training programs for Peace Corps Volunteers for Afghanistan.
     Pauline has just self-published Peace Corps Pioneer Or “The Perils of Pauline,” an account of her years working with Volunteers and living overseas. The book can be ordered from the Jade Creek Books in Ft. Collins, Co. 970.484.3019. For anyone interested in the early history of the Peace Corps, this is a must read.

Robert Roberg (Peru 1966-68) has published his first children’s book, The Littlest Star. The book comes with music on a CD and is published by Shine Time Record and Books of Nashville. The musical version of the story is sung by Margo Smith of Nashville fame. Robert wrote the story and did the illustrations for the book. To check it out, click www.littleststar.com
     Robert was a community development PCV in Peru, and today teaches Instructional Design for the University of Phoenix online, Film as Art for Ames Christian University, and Introduction to College Computing for Santa Fe Community College in Gainesville, Florida.
     Also a painter, he has two pieces in the Smithsonian American Art Museum.
     Robert’s own Peace songs can be heard at www.robertroberg.com. And Robert writes that, “Despite all my horror stories, my daughter, Mercy, is leaving for the Peace Corps in Gabon in June.” Runs in the family.

The “Kinkster,” Kinky Friedman (Borneo 1967–69) is back with another mystery, Kill Two Birds and Get Stoned. This is his first book in which the “Kinkster” isn’t a character. It is the story of a blocked Greenwich Village writer named Walter Snow who is jolted out of his doldrums when he meets a couple of colorful characters who include him in their escapades, such as stealing Donald Trump’s credit card and using it to throw a caviar and champagne party for the homeless.
     Kinky has made something of a career out of being friends of Presidents. He met Governor Bush a few years ago at a book festival organized by Laura Bush. At the party, Kinky wore a name badge that said “Larry McMurtry.” “Larry McMurtry didn’t show up so I took his tag and walked in so people could say, ‘I can’t believe I’m shaking hands with Larry McMurtry,’ and I would say, ‘Thank you kindly.’ George was watching this. He whispers to the security people. I thought I was gonna be 86’d. But it didn’t happen. I asked the security guy later, ‘What did the governor tell you?’ and he said the governor said, ‘I want that guy for my campaign manager.’ Later George wrote . . . from the White House inviting me to spend the night and do a reading. The Medina [TX] postmaster was very excited. He said, ‘Kinky, you got a letter from the White Horse Saloon in Nashville!’”

Review

The First Big Ride
by Eloise Hanner (Afghanistan 1971–73, Paraguay 1999–2000)
Nashville: Cumberland House Press, 2000
256 pages
$12.95

Reviewed by Rich Wandschneider (Turkey 1965–67)

IN 1997 ELOISE HANNER WAS 48 years old and tired of her life as a Merrill Lynch financial planner. Husband Chuck had already cashed in his Merrill job and Eloise was mentally done but hanging on when Chuck phoned her at work with the idea of a cross country bike ride.
     In an earlier life the couple had been Peace Corps Volunteers in Afghanistan. Now they were comfortable and living the good life in San Diego, California. But troubled too, looking for a next and more meaningful turn in their lives. After some discussion, Eloise gave notice, they bought new bikes and began training, gained some measure of acceptance from friends and family, and set out on the Big Ride from Seattle to Washington D.C.
     The book is a straight forward, cleanly written, chronological account of the ride: flat tires and sore muscles; wind, rain, snow, tornado watches, heat, bugs, state lines, Continental Divide and Mount Rushmore, Crazy Horse, and other geographic and geological markers and monuments. Unfortunately, there is little reflection on the things they see along the road. She counts 113 railroad cars of coal, and wonders who uses coal anymore, but drops it there. She wonders what the Amish farmers do for cash, but never asks. Although she loved Laura Wilder’s books as a child, and admires the fact that the Little House books are delighting children decades after the author’s death, there is no mention of later controversy surrounding Wilder’s writing and politics. Sometimes, she admits, it seems as if they are just “going from pit stop to pit stop.”
     The central purpose of the trip is stated concisely on page 199 of a 278 page book. “My biggest accomplishment at Merrill had been in making enough money for early parole. I wanted to do something now that was more meaningful. I kept hoping that the bike ride would show me what that was.” She connects with a friend from California, with relatives, and at one point they meet up with old Peace Corps friends, but we don’t get any reflection on previous experiences — don’t learn anything about their Peace Corps pasts and how it led them to Merrill Lynch and now to this ride. We don’t learn anything about the conversations with old friends or even with their biking mates that might help Eloise and Chuck find their next and more meaningful life.
     The ride ends. They are teary and sad that they will probably not see these fine people they’ve grown close to again. They go back to San Diego. In the Epilogue, we learn briefly that Eloise is writing the book, but nothing about the process or the reasons for doing so. They are talking about what to do next. They feel like they have “used up” the city. One day Chuck says “What about South America?”
     There are no children (but no discussion about this issue either). They are obviously OK financially. They had always talked about rejoining the Peace Corps, but had thought that it would be when they were in their 60s. I guess the Big Ride had somehow changed all that, because in the flick of a sentence they have their Peace Corps applications in — which explains why the Epilogue is written from Paraguay.
     So it is a pleasant little book, but unsatisfying too. Several times I wanted to jump up and say “Tell me more. And tell me why!” Good memoirs and good travel books explore the minds of the travelers and the people met on the road. They describe and relate inner and outer geographies. Writers discover things about places and about themselves, and share their discoveries. They whet your appetite for a Big Ride or for the Peace Corps. The First Big Ride: A Woman’s Journey didn’t do that for me.

Review

In Revere, In Those Days
by Roland Merullo (Micronesia 1979–80)
NY: Shaye Areheart Books/ Harmony Books
2002
320 pages
$22.00

Reviewed by Margaret Szumowski(Zaire 1973–74; Ethiopia, 1974–75)

I’M FOREVER TELLING MY STUDENTS that a great story is good at the sentence level. Roland Merullo proves it. “My name is Anthony Benedetto, and I live what might be called a secret life.” Now there’s an opening sentence to kill for. It’s a mysterious sentence, too, because Anthony reveals much to the reader, even though he likes to think of himself as secretive. “I often feel the visible part of me is a plain wrapper that hides a gem . . . . This is a rescue of one soul. It’s the story of an ordinary kid who had all the shell burned off him, all the armor.” Anthony already knows the cost of living, because he loses his parents at an early age. Uncle Peter becomes the relative that no kid, certainly not Anthony, can resist. Peter is a “boxer who had worked his way up through the Golden Gloves finals, far up into the heavyweight ranks, only to be beaten senseless in his twenty-eighth professional fight.” Peter is Anthony’s hero, one who guards “this nucleus of unwavering affection.”
     I could write a love song for Merullo’s sentences. Nearly every paragraph has a zinger or two. When young Anthony lets himself cry over his parents’ death, his grandmother quietly cooks up eggs as if she knew exactly what was needed: “It seemed to me on that night that she had taken my thoughts as if they were fingers, and was weaving them along the fabric of that lining, letting me feel the weave of it.” I love the moment that follows, the boy imitating his uncles, covering his face with his hands . . .[later] rising from sleep, his head so “close to the plate that the next morning there was dried egg yolk in my hair, and she saw it and took me to the sink to wash it out.” They are dazzling, this family, in their spoken and unspoken connectedness. Uncle Peter worries “that this breath and pulse of companionship might suddenly expire, that the family might expire before his eyes.”
     Besides the beauty of language in this book, there’s a great power of characterization: the grandmother, the grandfather, and especially Uncle Peter and Anthony are strongly drawn. But it’s Rosalie, Uncle Peter’s daughter, who has my heart. Rosalie who’s French-kissing at 11, and has the misfortune to fall for a fiendish boyfriend, Cesar. “Cesar Baskine was the last boy her father would have wanted to be allowed to place his tongue in Rosalie’s mouth.” The only clue to Rosalie’s vulnerability in such a strong extended family is her mother, erratic, unfaithful, and self-absorbed. “For years Rosalie circled her, a hungry dog circling a piece of meat roasting in the flames.” Zing.
     Merullo helps us love not only families and their sorrows, he makes us love religion again if we’ve lost a bit of our enthusiasm. Saint Anthony’s Church “is a museum that holds the solids, vapors and liquids that make up human existence: the joy of birth and the sudden mysterious disappearance that is death, the wailing of babies, the shrieks and laughter of young children, the love of God and the terrors of hell as described to us by pale nuns in spectacles, the confusion of a Catholic boy’s sexual awakening.”
     Merullo makes us love family, neighborhood, and ethnicity again in a way we might have forgotten. He reminds us of the distance we sometimes have to go to save one another. As Anthony tells us, Uncle Peter “had a wife who’d cheated on him, a daughter with rope burns on her neck.” If only Anthony and his uncle could get Cesar out of the picture, so Rosalie can “blossom into the woman she was meant to be.” One part of growing up for Anthony is recognizing that neither he nor the strong Benedetto family can save everyone.
     This is a delicious book, but I’ll still raise a few questions. Is it necessary for Anthony to be a painter — we don’t need that information, and it seems forced. It is Anthony’s noble voice that we love. A bigger question: why the affair with the older woman? Does it add to an already overflowing book of experiences, love, death, danger? The reader will decide. I suspect that what the reader really wants is to enjoy this beautiful book, the complicated and loving family, and especially the wonderful characters: Anthony, Peter, the grandparents, and Rosalie.
     Thank you, Roland Merullo, for these words spun out in glorious fashion.

Margaret Szumowski teaches at Springfield Technical Community College. She is working on a new poetry manuscript, Night of the Lunar Eclipse.

A letter from . . .

Nicaragua

July 23, 1993
Dear Jessica,

Things are good down here in So-Town. The violence is closing in on us, but I have more faith than I’ve had at any time in the past ten months that we’re going to outlast it.
     Last night was a little chiva. Some Recompas, led by an ex-army officer known as Pedrito the Hondruan, stormed Estelí. They robbed two banks, cut the electricity, water, and phone lines, and took out about 20 civilians who were unlucky enough to be out on the street at the time. Half the people in Somoto were battening down the hatches and getting ready for war in the streets last night (Sometimes it seems like every family’s got their own cache of AK’s. The other half was brushing it off like nothing was really happening. I guess sitting by the radio in the candlelight, listening to the commentaries made it a little dramatic for me. This afternoon, the fighting had calmed down and about a third of the rebels had surrendered. Pedrito, however, is at large.
     My spirits are up, despite this Civil War stuff. Lisa (my sitemate) and I feel like if we can make it through this week without getting evacuated from our site, we’re set. At least that’s what I tell myself. You say something enough times and you start to believe it. Lisa and I have this stupid joke we do every time some more bad news shows up in the paper (every day). What we do is high-five each other, and say, “Burkina Faso, here we come!”
     These days I feel free. I’ve gone parasite-free for five straight weeks. And as of last weekend, I’m not living like a monk anymore. Now before you analyze my behavior too much, just take into account that I’m starting to get tired of always being so serious in the interests of cultural sensitivity. And that I had a blast. There’s a family here — they were my first friends, and as time goes on, continue to be my best friends. One of the sisters got married on Saturday, and I was invited. It was the sweetest wedding: civil ceremony, in the house, five minutes long, and pass the Flor de Cana. This was the fourth wedding I’ve been to. The first three are on my Top Ten List of all-time great parties. And now I’m adding this one.
     Let me tell you, it was great beyond words. One, it was the first time I’ve tipped a few back here in the pueblo. I never did it before because I was afraid of earning a bad rep as a machista or a drunk. But here I was among my best buddies, and they know who I really am, so who cares. Two, I danced and danced and danced. You know I don’t even know how to dance. I don’t even have shoes for it. But luckily, one of the brothers is a cop, and the day before the event, he presented me with a pair of size-13 dress shoes that had been donated to members of the police force by the Soviet Union. It’s the shoes. Three, this family is a big Sanidinista supporter, so the party was like a general meeting of every card-carrying Sandy in So-Town. Even the national president of the Sanidinista Youth was there from Juigalpa. And there I was, the gringo, the enemigo de la humanidad. It was exciting. It was the greatest.
     Part of the reason I let it all hang out that night was that, despite my happiness, I was feeling like Lisa and I were not too long for Somoto, what with the bands of rebels all around us. So what the hell? Might as well go out with a bang with your best buds, right? I don’t know why, but I think that party changed my attitude. I think I’m meant to be here, at least a little longer. We were out there moving nothing but our pelvises to the beat, and Carlos yelled across the dance floor to me. “Ya sos Nica!” he yelled. Now you’re a Nicaraguan! That might have been it. At the moment I wasn’t trying at all, I fit in better than ever before.

'Til soon,
Rodrigo

Roderick Jones (Nicaragua 1992–96) did make it through the week — and three more years! He is now working for the City of Chicago's Department of Public Health as a communicable disease epidemiologist.

Customer Service?

MARK MY WORDS: I will never again make fun of the Wal-Mart “greeter,” or any perky cashier back home who enthusiastically wishes me to “Have a nice day!” Or be annoyed by an eager clothing salesman asking, “May I help you find something?” Or Amtrak, or the U.S. Postal Service or . . . Let’s just say that “customer service” doesn’t exist in formerly communist Romania.
     There are many things that I like about Romania, my home of one year now, but the lack of customer service — actually, the rudeness and apathy — is definitely not one of them. It’s easy to blame the old regime, but c’mon folks, it’s been almost 14 years since the Revolution — and many of these indifferent employees are young enough to know better.
     I noticed it immediately upon arriving last summer, and it’s one of the things I’m now accustomed to but don’t want to accept, especially as my Romanian language skills improved. Don’t get me wrong, there are nice and helpful clerks and waiters here and there, and of course I’ve experienced bad service in the States and elsewhere, but nowhere compares to Romania. And it had better change to help a burgeoning tourism industry, one with great potential.
     OK, sometimes the clerks in America may be a little phony — do they really care if I have a nice day? But usually they are helpful, polite or at least efficient. Why? They know that the customers pay their salaries. The customer is always right, right? Simple concepts, no? Not here in the former Eastern Bloc.
     I could fill a book with examples. But to give you an idea, not once — not a single time — in eating out in Romania, from dirty fast-food places to smart cafes, from mediocre pizza joints to Peace Corps-budget-buster splurges at elegant restaurants that could be anywhere, has a waiter or waitress come up and asked if everything was OK or if I needed something. Never. The menu, usually shared among the table, may indicate certain entrees or choices, but that doesn’t mean they have it. You want the check and need to go? Good luck, it may be a while. Nine times out of 10, you practically need to tackle the server to get his attention. If the restaurant has a cash register, bonus! If not, wait while the server painfully calculates by hand.
     The other night, two Italian friends, who also live here, and I went to a restaurant with a nice terrace. None of our orders were that complicated, basically involving the ubiquitous chicken prepared different ways, and we waited more than two hours, even for our cucumber-and-tomato salads. We complained and the waiter shrugged without a word. We asked for toasted bread. “No way, the kitchen is too busy.” My Italian pal muttered, “Incredible. Romania is just incredible.”
     Another time, in the capital of Bucharest, a colleague and I walked into an empty café. Five employees (the Romanian employee-to-customer ratio, also a communist holdover, is another story) were at a table, smoking and chatting. Our arrival triggered only a furtive glance and we had to wait a few minutes for a waitress to finish her cigarette and saunter over to our table. This is nothing out of the ordinary. When I’ve experienced this attitude or flat-out rudeness in the company of Romanians and asked about it, they merely chalk it up to normalcy. “This is Romania,” they are fond of saying.


Walking up to a counter at a store, or at the farmer’s market, or anywhere else, more often than not you are greeted with a single word, “Spuneti” (spoo-netz) — ironically in the formal, polite form of you — and meaning “You speak” or “Say it (you).” Or maybe an abrupt “Poftiti,” (pof-teetz) or “Ce doriti?” (chay doreetz), or “What do you want?”
     Many a time I’ve entered a store only to get a “You are interrupting me” glare from a clerk, often seated. At a supposedly Western-style grocery store, the cashier scolded me for not bagging my groceries fast enough and clogging the counter. And you have to buy the bags, too.
     Once at a bank, a teller was excruciatingly rude to me, despite my best Romanian and polite salutations, when I tried to transfer cash to an account in another city. She just didn’t want to deal with the paperwork on a Friday afternoon.
     My favorite bookstore recently closed for two weeks for “inventory.” Two weeks? I remember checking into a motel on the Black Sea coast last summer, only to find a filthy room with bed bugs. The front desk manager didn’t care, offering a “take it or leave it” and no refund. I left.
     The “ladies” at Post Offices and train ticket offices — both state-run places with comfy jobs — are almost always curt and rarely make eye contact. I learned the proper terms and most polite way to ask for things, in complete Romanian sentences, but now I waste no time or energy. I just place the post card or letter on the counter and say, “To USA,” or ask for a ticket “to Bucharest, tomorrow, second class.” I once bought a bus ticket for a grueling 7-hour trip, but the bus was oversold and standing-room-only. I refused to go, marched back into the station and asked for my money back. The clerk was incredulous and yelled at me. I had to yell back and demand to see the boss, who reluctantly gave me a refund, creating a scene probably never seen in Timisoara’s grimy bus depot.
     Under the communist system, clerks were powerful and customers were at their mercy, whether waiting in line for bread or a bus ticket. It was their privilege, not the other way around, to be waited upon, and often bribes were necessary, rudeness customary. Unfortunately, this system hasn’t changed much. Tipping in restaurants or taxis is optional but more and more popular and becoming expected, but even that doesn’t seem to make much difference. Nor does complaining to the boss, who probably thinks the same way. Low salaries and morale are partly to blame, I assume, but laziness and apathy are part of it, too. Service, satisfaction, competition and profitability don’t seem to be in many people’s vocabulary. This attitude, sadly, is representative of many things in my adopted country. Depending on the situation, sometimes I call this to people’s attention, politely, in hopes that it will show them a different way. But it doesn’t seem to register. It’s a shame.

The next time you walk into Wal-Mart, think about Romania, and say hello to the greeter for me.

Before joining the Peace Corps, Andy Trincia was a corporate communications executive in the financial services industry. Sworn in on August 16, 2002, he is working at the West University of Timisoara, as a business consultant for the Center for Career Development, and is also teaching courses. We have asked Andy to file reports for his two years of service of what his life is like working and living in Romania.

God, President Kennedy and Me

by Tina Martin (Tonga 1969–71)

I

KNOW WHAT I WAS DOING THAT DAY before it happened. Praying. Not just because I was chairman of Religious Emphasis week at Greenville High School, but also because there was a beauty contest that night and, if it were God’s will, it was my will to win it. So I kept checking in with God, letting Him know that He was on my mind, and I sure hoped I was on His. I didn’t want Him to fix the contest. That wouldn’t be fair. I just wanted Him to help me do justice to whatever God-given beauty I might have so that I could honor the Future Teachers of America Club I was representing and serve as a good example for whoever needed one.
     “Dear God,” I whispered, “tonight’s the night. If it be Thy will for me to wear the crown of Miss Greenville High, Thy will be done, and” — I added with special emphasis—“I’ll give my first summer paycheck to CARE and the NAACP.”
     Living in The South twenty-five years ago, I was (1) in the habit of praying in and out of school and (2) in — and out of — beauty contests. We had them for everything, and at Ursula’s urging I’d started putting a red rinse on my hair at the age of twelve with the hopes of winning the beauty contest they had for Fire Prevention Week when I got to high school.
     That was when I first knew that Ursula could be nice — when I realized that this sister of mine, the one who’d previously just beaten me up and taken my lunch money, wanted to help me win. To this very day I don’t know why. It wasn’t like she was living through me. She’d won the same beauty contest in her freshman year, and it was rare that a girl won before she was a senior.

Greenville’s Elizabeth Taylor
Ursula looked like Elizabeth Taylor back in the days when that was a good thing. She had everything from almost-violet eyes to those eyebrows, that perfect nose, oval face, perfect teeth. The only thing that wasn’t quite the same was the black hair. Ursula’s hair was really dishwater blond, but almost no one knew that, like they didn’t know that I wasn’t really a redhead until after I’d lost the Miss Flame contest and went back to my real color.


     Ursula had been dying her hair jet black since she’d first seen Elizabeth Taylor in “Raintree County.” She’d also been dressing pretty much like Elizabeth Taylor in that film, which made people think she was a strange beauty because it was a period piece. Not that she wore bonnets or anything. But when other girls were wearing matching cashmere sweaters and straight skirts, she was wearing full skirts and lots of crinolines more reminiscent of the War Between the States, as southerners call the Civil War.
     In our family, we called the War Between the States the Civil War because — as my best friend Marcia told people when she introduced me — we weren’t from around here. Which is why I was bribing God with my summer wages, promising to give my first paycheck to CARE and NAACP, which southerners considered Communist organizations at the worst and soft on Communism at the best. My parents taught us something different from what my friends believed, and for some reason I thought God would be more on the wave length of my parents, maybe because they were older, as was God.
     Ursula, who — as I said — had won the Miss Greenville High contest herself, had come back from Winthrop College to help me win it. She’d picked out the pattern for the dress I was going to wear and helped Mother find the material at the remnant store because one of Daddy’s strongest convictions was that we shouldn’t spend money. He used to give Mother a budget, and she’d put five or ten dollars in each envelope, but sometimes she'd have to borrow from the clothing envelope for the food envelope and vice versa. Daddy was a history professor at the university, but the friend I felt I had the most in common with was Gwen, whose father was a shoe repairman, because Gwen and I both lived poor.
     Anyway, getting back to Ursula, she knew just how to get my hair to look like Jackie Kennedy’s. Beauty was Ursula’s greatest talent, and I knew I was lucky that she was doing this for me, but I wasn’t counting on luck or Ursula. I was counting on God, which was why I was praying more than usual that day.
     “Please, dear God, if it be Thy will.” The minimum wage had gone up to $1.15 an hour, and I would give all my first pay check to these good causes if God would support my cause and let me win the crown. It hurt me, I told God, and that not everyone believed in His existence the way I did. And it hurt me, too, that not everyone believed in the existence of my God-given beauty the way I prayed the judges would. Being beautiful — at least for one night — would be an answered prayer.
     “A thing of beauty,” I said, paraphrasing one of the poems I’d memorized to make up for being bad at math, “would be a joy forever.” I wanted to bring Joy to the World and prayed that I could do it this special way.

Really, beauty was skin deep, but . . .
Of course, other girls prayed. This was The South, after all. But their prayers were shallow. Mine, on the other hand, had depth because I had a social consciousness, which I figured God had too. That was one of my advantages in the beauty contest. I had a better idea, I thought, of what God wanted, though it never occurred to me that He would want Negroes in the contest. Of course, there weren’t any Negroes at our school.
     “It’s been a decade since the Brown vs. Kansas,” my mother would say, “and there’s not a face that isn’t white at that school.”
      “Or any other,” I’d say. I knew our school was no more prejudiced than any of the others. Most southerners thought the Supreme Court had been infiltrated by Communists, and the government was going to take over and destroy our way of life. People in South Carolina were saying that President Kennedy and his brother had already gone to Mississippi and Alabama totally disregarding State’s Rights, and they’d probably be coming here, but until they did, it was going to be Separate But Equal. Separate water fountains. Separate parts of the bus. Separate schools. And, of course, separate beauty contests for the whites and the coloreds, if they had beauty contests.
     I knew even back then that “whites and coloreds” sounded like socks, but black was a term reserved for Stephen Foster songs like “Old Black Joe.” Black was not yet beautiful. But that night I would try to be. Though I occasionally tried to rise above such petty aspirations, that night, with God’s help, I would indulge and achieve them. Once I’d gotten being beautiful out of my system, I assured God and myself, I could spend my time praying for the outcast. But tonight I would reserve my prayers for me — that I not be cast out — at least not until after I’d made the finalists. I knew beauty was but skin deep, but tonight skin deep got crowned. Skin deep got a dozen long-stemmed roses. And most importantly, skin deep got two full pages in our high school yearbook.

Making out with Jean Paul
When I look back, I realize that I didn’t really have to win that contest to take up more than my share of space in the high school yearbook. I’d been a dismal failure in junior high school. Partially because I got a bad reputation when I made out with Jean Paul Mathieu, the French exchange student, at the Thanksgiving homecoming game, and the Vice Principal had reprimanded me right in front of everyone: “You shouldn’t even be wearing lipstick, much less doing what you were doing.” But Jean Paul Mathieu was a foreign student, and from a very early age, foreigners were my idols. I regarded them as celebrities.
     In fact, I had a fantasy of marrying three foreigners — a Chinaman, a Frenchman, and a Mexican — and having a baby with each one. Then the children and I would travel around and spend four months in China learning Chinese and the Chinese culture, four months in France learning French and the French culture, and four months in Mexico, et cetera.
     That had been my fantasy until President Kennedy introduced the idea of the Peace Corps. Having three husbands was a beautiful fantasy. But the Peace Corps was a cross-culture dream that could come true. Anyway, girls weren’t even supposed to begin wearing lipstick until the second semester of seventh grade, so because of the lipstick and what I was doing with Jean Paul Mathieu people thought I was fast and cheap, and this was a school for nice girls, so I was ostracized. Now that I think of it, though, Ursula stood by me. But of course she was the one who’d told me to wear lipstick my first semester even though everyone in the car pool and at Miss Sloane’s Dance Class had agreed on the second semester. The point, though, is that I had a bad reputation in junior high.

Winning friends with Dale
But in high school I’d over-compensated. I’d learned that success consisted of being like everybody else, only better, and — God willing— prettier. I’d learned how not to be weird, not to look too eager. I’d learned how not to dress. (Not in my wilted, smelly gym blouse just because I could never get my locker open. Not with my bobby socks crawling down into my loafers.) I’d even learned how to open my locker. I’d learned when to help others and when to help myself. I’d read Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People, and I’d begun my negotiations with God.
     Gradually I’d become socially acceptable — even decent. I was DAR Girl and Chairman of Religious Emphasis Week. I’d accumulated awards and been elected to school offices. Now I was a member of Executive Council and the Editor of the literary yearbook, The Rebel. This was a big turn-about for a girl who’d been nominated for an office only once in junior high school and had broken out in a cold sweat because she feared the only vote she’d get was that of the kid nominating her. I was right. The teacher forgot to erase the board, and I saw it with my own eyes.

Homeroom Coupon Chairman
   Janet Donahue: 16 votes
   Matthew Kent: 8 votes
   Barbara Lee Shealy: 1

Did I mention that my name is Barbara Lee Shealy?

Splendor in the grass
But now in my senior year of high school, I was president of two clubs, including Future Teachers of America, which was sponsoring me in the beauty contest that night. If I won, in a way it would be a boon to American education. But I have to admit, it wasn’t just for that that I wanted to win. I wanted to win so that I’d have a permanent record of how I was before I started to grow old. Ursula always said that from the age of sixteen, we start to die a little bit every year. “Nothing can bring back the hour of splendor in the grass, glory in the flower,” Ursula said, “So gather we rosebuds while we may.” I wanted a two-page spread of how I was before I started to wither and wilt.
     Ursula had told me to cut classes that day so she’d have longer to work on me — after all, she was cutting three days of her classes at Winthrop to come home to help me — but the principal had a new policy. He saw how girls were being absent from their classes to have their hair done on the day of the beauty contest, so this year he’d announced that roll would be taken, and any girl absent from any of her classes would be ineligible to compete in the Miss Greenville High School Beauty Contest. So Ursula agreed to start in on my Jackie Kennedy “do” right after school got out.
     Before I left for school that morning, I caught my mom reading when she was supposed to be working on my dress.
“What’s The Feminine Mystic about?” I’d asked her.
     “It’s Feminine Mystique,” she’d corrected me. “It’s all about the sacred feminine ideal.”
     I’d nodded. I had a sacred feminine ideal: God willing, I’d be the prettiest girl of all — please, dear God, just for one night. If mother ever finished the dress! When Ursula got up, she could nag her while I was in school. She’d driven up the night before in the little Fiat Daddy bought her because he wouldn’t support the re-industrialization of Germany by buying a VW, and she and I had had a little bit of time to confer on how I should walk, how I should smile, and things like that. She’d been nice until she just had to ask that question she’d been taunting me with all semester.
     “How’s your campaign going?”
     “What campaign?”
     “You know. The one for the highest possible moral standards award?”
     “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Glenn McAteer Scholarship
“Yes, you do!”
     “No, I don’t!” I said. I looked at her as if she were crazy and I had a low tolerance for the mentally ill.
     But I knew. She was talking about the Glenn McAteer Scholarship, which was awarded to a high school senior every year. Glenn had once been the president of the student body at Greenville High, and then he’d been killed in action in Korea. In his memory they gave an award to the senior who most exemplified the characteristics he embodied: Service, leadership, and the highest possible moral standards.
     They didn’t have the term “short list” back then, but if they had, I’d have been on it. Unless they found out about me in junior high.
     Mother put down her book and told me to try on what she’d done so far.
     My gown was long and straight — something like the one Jackie had worn when she’d gone to France with President Kennedy and he’d introduced himself as “the man who accompanied Jacqueline Kennedy to Paris.” And she’d spoken French with DeGaulle. Someday I’d know French too. I’d join the Peace Corps right after I finished college and I’d go to some French-speaking country and learn French while I did good deeds.
     “Are you sure this is going to be ready by tonight?” I asked her.
“Don’t worry. It’ll be ready,” Mother said through the pins between her front teeth. I remembered how I’d had to wear pins in my clothes on the occasions when my formal wasn’t ready — like for the junior-senior dance the year before.
     “Please God, please,” I prayed silently. “Let it be ready by tonight. Help Mother focus.”

Being Jackie Kennedy
There were few occasions when I didn’t turn to God, and I prayed silently all the way to school. After our classroom prayer during homeroom period, I added my own silent P.S. “If it be Thy will . . .”
     People came by me at my hall monitor post, and a lot of them said, “Good luck tonight.” I looked back at them quizzically, as if the beauty contest were the furthest thing from my mind.
     “Why don’t you get your hair fixed like Laura Petrie on ‘The Dick Van Dyke Show’?” someone asked. “You already look a little bit like her.”
     “But it wouldn’t be right to copy her,” I said, and I shrugged. “I just have to be myself.”
     And I was going to be Jackie Kennedy. Mary Tyler Moore was cute, but I wasn’t settling for her. I was going to be the President’s Wife.

The auditorium
I walked by the auditorium where we’d be having the contest in just a few more hours. The faculty sponsor of the yearbook, Miss Carver, had vetoed the students’ vote for “The Days of Wine and Roses” as the theme because she said it wouldn’t be seemly to have wine bottles decorating a high school stage. So tonight we’d hold crescent-shaped cards bearing our numbers, and “Moon River” would play as we walked across the stage — the same stage where Strom Thurmond had stood while getting a standing ovation earlier in my high school career. I had stood and applauded, too, because even though I disagreed with everything Strom Thurmond stood for, I didn't want to stand out by not standing. I knew I would probably not have made President Kennedy’ Profiles in Courage, but how many of the men in that book had been rejected for Homeroom Coupon Chairman? I didn’t want to alienate my southern friends, and I knew their fears.

Civil Rights and Communists
In spite of Strom Thurmond’s stand against civil rights, the Civil Rights Bill had become law. And those Kennedy Brothers were starting to enforce it. Other things were happening too. Back in April Sidney Poitier had won the Oscar for “Lilies of the Field,” and no colored person had ever won an Oscar before. There he was, up on stage with Patricia Neal, a white lady, and they were hugging each other, which was worse than what I’d done with Jean Paul Mathieu. Jean Paul Mathieu might not have been “from around here,” but at least he was white. Sidney Poitier and Patricia Neal were on their way to misogenation!
     Then, in June, there’d been that big civil rights march in Washington with more the 200,000 people showing up and hearing Martin Luther King talking about making all people equal no matter what color their skin. If God had wanted all people to be equal, my friends reasoned, wouldn’t He have made them equally white? And then President Kennedy had sent troops to Alabama to force an all-white school to accept two colored girls, and they’d enrolled in spite of Governor Wallace’s efforts to protect states’ rights. The federal government was becoming Communist and taking over the country, stirring discontent into the heads of colored people who had been perfectly happy before.
     I certainly didn’t let my classmates in on my promise to God that I’d give my first paycheck to the NAACP if I were chosen our school beauty queen. But I thought God might like that, not necessarily being Southern — a possibility I never suggested to my friends. The leader of the NAACP had been assassinated in June, and four Negro children had been killed in a church bombing in Birmingham. I had a hunch that God didn’t buy that thing about their being Communists.

So few of her kind
I don’t remember any of my morning classes; I assume I prayed my way through them. But I do remember Miss Goldman’s Problems of American Democracy class after lunch that day because that was when the news came.
     Miss Goldman was my favorite teacher. She was a Democrat, too, at a school where the principal himself — Mr. Kirkley, an otherwise nice guy who’d coached football before coming to our school — had started The Young Republicans Club, which he himself was sponsoring. The South had finally caught on that the Republican Party was no longer the party of Lincoln, who had done such terrible things to the South. The parties had switched, and the South was turning away from the Democratic Party. In fact, there was no Young Democrats Club at Greenville High, and Miss Goldman had protested.
     “If you think the school should have a Young Democrats club,” Mr. Kirkley had told her, “you’re free to start one.”
     But she wasn’t free. She was already the sponsor of the International Relations Club, of which I was president. She was one of the few people outside my family who was enthusiastic about my plans to join the Peace Corps as soon as I finished college, culminating a five-year plan that only began with tonight’s beauty contest.
     Miss Goldman was the only Jew at our school. As chairman of Religious Emphasis Week, I thought of her and suggested that we drop the “in Jesus Christ we pray” part of our prayers so she wouldn’t feel left out. But Miss Webster, the sponsor of Religious Emphasis Week, said, “I’m sure she doesn’t mind if we pray our way when there are so many of us and so few of her.”

The news
Close to the beginning of our 1:15 class, Mrs. Lindly, a math teacher who had an Algebra by TV class, came to the door.
     “You know what?” she said. “They interrupted our Algebra lesson for a news bulletin. There’s been some shooting around President Kennedy’s motorcade in Dallas.”
     “Oh, how awful!” Miss Goldman said. “I hope nobody’s been hurt.”
     I dropped God a quick line.
     “Dear God, let everyone be all right.”
     But I knew that no one had been hurt — not seriously, if at all. I was so certain that President Kennedy was all right that I felt foolish wasting my prayers — prayers that should be directed towards the less certain outcome of the night’s beauty pageant.
     We went back to our lesson about voting precincts. And then the principal came over the PA system.
     “President Kennedy has been shot,” he said. “We have not yet received word on whether or not the shot was fatal.”
     Fatal? Of course the shot hadn’t been fatal. Why was Mr. Kirkley being so melodramatic? Presidents didn’t get assassinated nowadays. Not in our country. Maybe he’d been shot at. I could picture him in a Dallas clinic now, charming the staff as the nurses bandaged a slightly knicked shoulder.
     “I had hoped for a 20-gun salute,” he might say, “but not directed at me.”
     That night I was going to look like his wife. The time he took her to Paris.
     A few minutes later Mr. Kirkely came over the PA system again.
     “May I have your attention please?”
He had our attention.
     “President Kennedy is dead.”
     There were cries and gasps of disbelief. Nora Thigpen began to cry. I turned to her.
     “It’s not true,” I told her. “I know it’s not true.”
     A couple of students cheered.
     “He asked for it,” Sam Davidson said. “He was practically becoming a dictator.”
     “I think he was a good president,” Miss Goldman and I said in unison. Was?
     “This proves that God didn’t want a Catholic president,” Sam continued.
     “Oh, shut up!” I said. And then I remembered my responsibility as a possible future Miss Greenville High, and I added, “Please.”
     I still couldn’t believe that President Kennedy was dead. Reporters made mistakes. They were almost always wrong about the weather.
     “Dear God,” I prayed silently. “Let President Kennedy really be alive. Make this news a false report, and I will give up being Miss Greenville High School.”
     I paused for a moment. I knew I had to go further still.
     “I’ll even give up being among the finalists.” I added silently.
     In sync with my prayers, Mr. Kirkley continued.
     “There have been some questions about tonight’s beauty contest. If this was a frivolous affair, we would cancel it. But it’s been planned for a long time, and the publication of the yearbook depends on the money we raise tonight. So the contest will go on as planned.”

Last minute preparations
I convinced myself — sort of — that since I was representing the Future Teachers of America Club, it was my duty to participate in the contest. I decided I would go on, but I wouldn’t smile — not unless the news was false and Kennedy was really still alive. Then I would go on and I would smile but, in keeping with my vow to God, I wouldn’t win. I wouldn’t even be among the finalists.
     It was while Ursula was teasing my hair to make it look like Jackie’s that we received a phone call from the school secretary.
     “Some of the judges don’t feel like coming,” the secretary said. “So the beauty contest will have to be postponed.”
     Mother stopped working on my dress, and Ursula stopped working on my hair, and we all sat down in front of the TV and watched a disheveled Jacqueline Kennedy stand beside Lyndon Johnson as he was sworn in as our next president. She had a dark smear on her dress, and even though we didn’t have a colored television, we knew it was blood. She’d taken his head in her lap and then she’d crawled over the open limousine to get help.      “Now you look more like her than she does,” Ursula told me.

Everything had changed
We all spent the weekend right there in the living room, watching all the Kennedys. Caroline, who’d once come to her father’s press conference in her mother’s high heel shoes, was now crying as she held her mother’s hand. John John, sometimes photographed romping around in his father’s office, was now saluting our dead president’s flag-draped coffin. But the biggest change was in what they were saying about Jacqueline Kennedy. No one was talking about her sable underwear or who had designed the dress she was wearing or how much it had cost. All anyone noticed about her dress was that it wasn’t the pink suit with the blood stains on it. It was all black. A black mantilla replaced the pill-box hat. They were using words like courage and dignity. Everything had changed, and I knew I had too.
     As Ursula was getting ready to drive back to Winthrop, she said, “I came home for nothing.”
     “Well, you were here to watch President Kennedy’s funeral with us,” I said.
     “But that’s not something only I could do,” she replied. “Well, when they reschedule the beauty contest, let me know the new date, and I’ll see if I can come up.”
     “Thank you, Ursula,” I said, “But I ‘m not sure I have my heart in things like beauty contests anymore.”
     “Oh, that’s right. Now all you care about is the Highest Possible Moral Standards Award.”
     On Monday morning, Mr. Kirkely came over the PA system once again. He gave us the new date for the beauty contest.
     “And now, let’s have a moment of silent prayer,” he said, “for our country and in memory of President Kennedy.”
     That’s when I realized that in spite of what had happened, I still cared about the contest, and even though my silent prayer was all about Kennedy and his family and the nation (I was, after all, DAR Girl), I had to add a little PS about the contest. I was too ashamed to ask God to help me win it, with President Kennedy up there within earshot. Still, I had to ask God for something. It was my tradition.

Praying for the Peace Corps
“Dear God,” I told Him silently, “I guess, the way we left it, I could ask You to help me win this contest because I only offered not to win if Kennedy didn't die. But, even though we’re back where we began, I’d like to move forward and do something to honor Kennedy.” I didn’t mention anything about meeting foreign men and seeing foreign lands and learning foreign languages. I didn’t want God to think I had ulterior motives.
     “When the time comes and I’ve finished Winthrop College and got my BA in English, could you and President Kennedy help me get into the Peace Corps?”

When the time came, God and President Kennedy got me in.

Tina Martin applied to the Peace Corps, and requested any French or Spanish speaking country. She was sent to Tonga where they speak a Polynesian language in no way related to French or Spanish. After Tonga, she use her readjustment allowance to traveled to Spain where she taught English in Madrid for a year and then moved on to Algeria where she taught at a girls’ lycee for two more years. Finally she returned home to California, married, had a baby, and began to teach ESL students at City College of San Francisco, where between classes she has made trips to Japan, Cuba, Chile and Mexico. “My ESL students,” Tina writes, “have made it possible for me to travel around the world just by coming to class.”
     Her other writings include 28 Peace Corps journals, three plays, three novels, and numerous short stories which she keeps in a trunk for her son to inherit. In the meantime, this year “How Getting Robbed Can Enhance Language Learning” and “An Algerian Wedding” have been selected for an upcoming travel book, I Should Have Just Stayed Home.

P.S. Tina, who loosely based this story on her own experience, won the Beauty Contest after it no longer meant as much to her, and during her two years in Tonga she lived in a tiny hut made of bamboo and coconut leaves. After dating men of almost every nationality, she married a U.S. citizen and learned about American culture.

A Writer Writes

Writing American

by Mark Jacobs (Paraguay 1978–80)

IN THE ESSENTIALS, being an American writer — even in 2003, a year in which the global reach of the United States has been demonstrated in ways that are at once both clear and ambiguous — is not much different from being a Senegalese writer, or a Paraguayan writer, or a Tunisian writer. What do I mean by the essentials?
     First, a writer writes. He may talk about writing — either too much or too little. He may succeed: with readers, with critics, or on the terms of success that he has set himself. More likely he will fail in each of those endeavors, or he will fail partially, or his most complete success will seem incomplete to him. He may make money from his writing: a little money, or a lot, or some amount between those extremes. He may drink too much, or procrastinate. He may allow the multiple pressures of work and family, along with the world’s constant deadly chatter, to distract him and affect his writing. Or he may not do any of those things. Perhaps he gambles. If he has a different sort of temperament, he may build houses for the poor, or spend his weekends cleaning up litter from mountain trails so that the hikers who come after him have a clean view. Maybe he is in prison, or maybe he constructs a prison in his own mind. He may rail against God, or against the absence of God, or what he perceives as God’s monstrous indifference to human suffering. In the end, none of these facts or factors matter. In the end, a writer writes.
     Next, a writer demands the freedom to choose what he will write about. I believe this is true regardless of his or her nationality. This is not to say, of course, that political pressures, political realities, do not powerfully shape the work and thought of many writers just as they shape their circumstances.
     In the Soviet Union, writers found ways to write about prohibited subjects because those were the subjects that, in a sense, chose them. In impoverished places, hunger has a way of making its way onto the printed page — I’m thinking of Son of Man, an early novel by the great Paraguayan writer Augusto Roa Bastos, who spent much of his career in exile writing about the country in which he was not permitted to live. Even in countries where the only constraints on subject matter are self-imposed, such sheer freedom itself can become a kind of anti-political force and a drag on writers.
     Still, despite the press and impress of politics, despite what Wallace Stevens called “the poetry of war,” which invariably speaks in a louder voice than “the poetry of a work of the imagination,” it is writers themselves who determine, finally, what they wish to write about.
     Writers write, and they choose what they will write about. Those are the essentials that American writers share with their sisters and brothers from every other country on the planet regardless of circumstance. Those essentials, the basic facts of the craft, are the foundation on which every writer builds the house of his life. But there are ways in which the experience of being an American writer may differ substantially from the experience of writers in other countries, and it is worth the effort to identify a few of them here.
     Start with the size of the market. According to the Census Bureau’s “Pop Clock,” which is found on the Internet and continuously updated, the United States has a population of about 290 million. Every American writer wishes every American citizen were a voracious reader, particularly of his books. That’s not the case. But out of those 290 million, there does exist a substantial body of hungry readers, and some fortunate good writers find a readership that sustains them critically, financially, and even emotionally. The size of the market alone, its very bulk, tends to affect American writers. I don’t mean to suggest that there are no other large markets in the world, only that the phenomenon invariably has an impact on writers in the U.S. Add to that the fact that some American writers — both commercial and literary, both Stephen King and Paul Auster — are published in significant numbers in countries around the world, and the impact of market size begins to matter still more.
     It cuts both ways. In the U.S., selling ten thousand copies of a literary novel may appear a kind of failure, or at least a disappointment, although major novelists in other times and places have launched their careers with a novel that sold five thousand copies. Probably every American writer thinks at one time or another about Moby Dick. There is a difference of opinion about just how poor the initial reception of that great American novel was when Melville first published it in 1851. Regardless of the sales figures, and what they meant in the mid-nineteenth century in the United States, I think the early fate of Moby Dick — its virtual disappearance for a full generation — stands in the minds of many American writers as an image of oblivion that really is, as they say, a fate worse than death. Everybody dies. Not everybody endures oblivion.
     So much for the size of the market, which can cripple as easily as it can liberate an American writer but is in any case a major shaping force. As Americanists, you know more than I do about another permanent — or at least semi-permanent — influence on writers in the U.S I mean what has been called American exceptionalism, the conviction that the United States was called into being as a nation to play a leading role in the world. Beginning in the colonial era, Americans frequently imagined their New World to be a unique creation, exempt from the sins and the sadnessess of the Old World, which they had left behind. In ways that often frustrated others, Americans believed themselves to be exempt, almost, from history. Even today, many Americans would instinctively understand what we mean when we talk about our country as a “city upon a hill” even if they don’t remember that is was the Puritan John Winthrop who first expressed it in that way.
     The notion of American exceptionalism has long been under siege, both at home and abroad. In the U.S., the notion of being separate from the world, or exempt from history, does not stand up to analysis, particularly in an age of global connections, global disconnects. In the countries in which I have lived and worked, thoughtful people have found the idea of American exceptionalism preposterous, or hubristic, or just plain inaccurate. Such reactions are bound up in the stereotype of Americans as a naïve and a historical people.
     In a way, none of that matters. Many, maybe most, American writers are still affected by the notion of their nation’s exceptional status. In some cases, they work hard to debunk the notion. That’s the thing about a tradition. There are as many ways to respond to it as there are writers who think about it: You can celebrate a tradition, or you can condemn it. You can amend it, ridicule it, endorse it, camouflage it. You can blow it up and rebuild it. Maybe the only thing you can’t do with a tradition is to ignore it. It changes, but it probably won’t go away. For better or worse, I think something like that is the case with American exceptionalism. Does it touch every last imaginative work written by Americans? Does it figure in the reflective poems of a poet like E.L. Mayo? I wouldn’t go that far. I wouldn’t say it does, but I wouldn’t be sure that it doesn’t, either.
Ironically, the power and reach of the United States today appear to endorse the notion of American exceptionalism. There are many names for the position the U.S. occupies in the world today: the sole superpower, the hyperpower. There are those who want to believe America is the new empire, while others believe with equal conviction that the U.S. is incapable of empire. Whatever you choose to call it, however you choose to interpret the facts and circumstances of U.S. global power, it seems to me that those facts must affect every American writer regardless of his or her subject matter.
     Let me take the most extreme example first. The intelligence that takes as its ostensible subject a pine tree on the lee side of a hill at a particular hour, in a particular cast of light, cannot help understanding that the tree, the hill, the light, are located in time, which is to say in a political context. The consciousness that conceives the poem does not exist in isolation. The writer may resent that fact and struggle against its tyranny. In some poems, the results of that struggle are evident as sparks, or as flaming branches; in others, they don’t show at all. But the woman who sees the tree and writes the lines is in some respect a political creature no matter what she wills, and if she is an American poet she lives in a country whose influence is felt almost everywhere, and she knows it.
     There are other, more obvious cases of the effect on writers of America’s global presence, and that is the presence in America of the world. The extraordinary enrichment of the corpus of American writing by new citizens — writers like Edwidge Danticat and Bharati Mukherjee — is easy to understand, and Americans have learned to celebrate their arrival, to savor the meal they bring to the American table. They have expanded our understanding of what it means to be an American.
     Not quite as obvious, but in some ways just as interesting, is the influence of American writers who consciously seek to understand cultures that are not their own. John Coyne, a writer and editor, identifies a group — if not exactly a movement — of American writers who emerge from their experience as Peace Corps Volunteers with a passion to convey to American readers what they have seen and lived beyond American borders. Writers like Norman Rush, Marnie Mueller, and Paul Eggers continue to do that in writing that has little to do with expatriate fiction of the colonial era. Before her death in an accident, Maria Thomas wrote about Americans and Africans in stories that did imaginative justice to the fine mesh of relationships between them. In my own writing, almost all of my published work comes out of my own experience abroad, first as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Paraguay and then later in the foreign service.
     I think writers like Thomas are onto something. What binds together their diverse perspectives and politics and styles is an attempt to make narrative sense of the interactions among people of different cultures. Those interactions take the form of clashes as often as they are of understandings, of miscues as often as rapprochement. There are more disasters than triumphs, and more middle-ground consequences than either of those. But the writers I mentioned seem to me to be paying attention to something fundamental. They seem to understand that the U.S., questions of power notwithstanding, exists in the world, and that our human connections matter. They matter to Americans and non-Americans with equal weight.
     How do we get at these human connections? How do we begin to understand one another? One way is to tell each other stories. We talk and we read. It seems to me that this is what the colloquium is all about. We’re talking, and we’re reading. So let’s listen — with pleasure and passion and strict attention — let’s listen to each other’s stories.

This paper was read at the 20th Annual American Studies Colloquium. The Colloquium, held in May on Goree Island off the coast of Senegal, included Americanists of various disciplines from 14 African countries. Mark Jacobs’ next novel, A Handful of Kings, will be published in January 2004.