consueloroland

Woman killed for not having boy

consuelo1312 — Sun, 05 Feb 2012 10:23:10 +0000

Did you ever read a sadder headline?

“An Afghan woman was choked to death by her husband – a local militiaman – and mother-in-law for delivering a baby girl for the third time in northern Afghanistan, officials said yesterday.”

Which Officials? Is it possible that human beings actually behave in this barbaric way? Is it possible that this is a trumped-up news story to satisfy our lust for hating that which is unlike us?

I read the news report over and over, feeling sicker and sicker as the words sink in (not ‘killed’ – such an anemic PC word – murdered in cold blood!), and imagine the horror of looking into your husband’s eyes – the person you should trust most in the whole world – as he kills you, slowly and brutally, taking each breath of life from you until your body stops thrashing, For a moment I understand in my gut why a person might be tempted by organised religion. I want desperately to know there’s some neat answer to this in the hereafter. I want to believe that heaven and hell exist. I see the woman with a purple neck, her husband’s finger-prints fading as she dwells in a realm of peace and sweetness, and I see him suffering, a burning torch staggering around a wasteland of tortured miserable souls. For days I relive the sensation of believing that the abomination of suffering forever is a just punishment for the devil’s spawn.

My mind reverts to early childhood; the catechism books that showed levels of human beings, with my beloved pets right off the radar screen, unlovable and unbaptisable. I can’t help myself; when I read that headline I want the husband and the mother-in-law to burn in hell for a very very long time. But most of all I want the right authorities to step in and say this is not the way of our religion; we do not hurt women and children, we subscribe to the laws of civilised human behaviour that protect the vulnerable and honour grace and courage. Is that so diificult to do? Where are the wise men and women of the Afghan nation who can change the way their people think, and the way we think about the Muslim religion and its followers? May the gods (whoever they may be) help us all.

The Lighthouse Cat

consuelo1312 — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 19:53:14 +0000

Did you hear the true story about the lighthouse keeper’s pet cat that managed to wipe out a whole species of songbirds endemic to New Zealand single-handedly? Apparently this is the only known case of a single individual achieving that dubious distinction. It seems strangely ironic and so typical of our natural history; a tragedy almost kafkaesque in its inevitability and yet it shocks us. The extinction of a species is a huge thing to contemplate: the murder of an entire community; decimation on a scale of absolutes. It’s hard to accept forever as a reality. Surely somewhere on some other remote protrusion of land this foolish bird still sings? Perhaps all our natural scientists and field students have simply not found it?

I had the lighthouse cat at the back of my mind as I read the captivating The Story of Beautiful Girl . The lighthouse motif is used extensively and effectively to structure an epic story of indomitable love in the face of near-impossible circumstances. A much-used familiar theme but in this case skilfully crafted and alive with sincerity. Rachel Simon takes the idea of a lighthouse symbolising safety, moves from the existence of a unique postbox on a farm (a lighthouse with a man’s face that pops up when there are letters), extends the visual symbol to it’s fictional ‘real-life’ equivalent (a coastal lighthouse with a man’s face in front) and succeeds in keeping us glued to the page while she unwraps an intricate human drama around this major lighthouse metaphor with great sensitivity and empathy.

SPOILER ALERT!!! Read no further if you intend to read this novel…

I foresaw the happy ending but not the lighthouse’s major role; such a neat circling back to those first amazing 20 pages. How I admired the fact that Simon took her structural vision for her novel and ran with it! Simon goes where many authors are told not to go; she is unashamedly sentimental in handling a difficult subject; love between a deaf black man and a mentally challenged white woman who have been institutionalised and ignored by society. I wasn’t too sure about the race difference being necessary but that’s what’s admirable; Simon takes her story all the way; no holds barred; as far as she can, to make it absolutely clear that their bond is immutable; to squeeze every last bit of emotion out of the reader that she can. But in the background I had the disturbing image of a vicious predator, the lighthouse cat, chomping away one little bird at a time…

Is that what fiction should do? Take us away from the cold Darwinian hearth of real-life? Give us hope? Make us believe there’s always one songbird left, somewhere? T.S.Eliot said that the human race can’t bear too much reality. I suspect he was absolutely right; especially if you want a NY Times bestseller. Imagine the novel had ended with the lighthouse man metaphorically imprisoned in his tower (aka. lighthouse), consumed with sorrow and loneliness as he waits for the beloved who will never come… Nothing comforting about that. Real life, like lighthouse cats, can’t be controlled, but we can choose which books we choose to read and pass on by word-of-mouth to others. There’s probably a lesson there for writers wanting to join Simon on her New York Times Bestseller pedestal.

On the other hand happy endings don’t make us distraught or induce weeping and they don’t make us tremble; the thunder of unspeakable tragedy does. My physical responses to We Need to Talk About Kevin included dizziness nausea and weepiness, but I could no more have stopped reading than I could have stopped breathing. A marvelous book attacks you in the solar plexus and never lets you go. Perhaps, after all, humans are more robust than we might expect. Perhaps we need both kinds of endings, to remind us that lighthouse stories come in many guises. When does craft move into the arena of art? Is it not when the work itself can move the human heart in a new direction? And is the author who presents the possibility of joy any less an artist than the one who speaks of pain?

I can’t help thinking what a great short story The Lighthouse Cat would make. It should be full of carnage and destruction and unbearable pathos. It should be intensely disturbing; we should see the lighthouse lamp as a speck in the eternal void, hear the diabolical pet cat purr in the light-keeper’s arms.

What do I really think?

consuelo1312 — Wed, 14 Sep 2011 12:27:36 +0000

Oops…! Deleted my spam file without thinking and lost bald-head’s comment on the graves gardener blog. Basically telling me off for being spineless: come on (!) why don’t you tell everyone what you really think? I guess that’s blog protocol. Tell it like it is, get it out there, spill your guts, take sides, be up-front, controvery and confrontation is good, get naked, decide if you’re a lover or a hater; life’s essentially boring so use your opportunity to liven it up. This is where I point out that I’m a fiction writer experimenting with a new medium, not an amateur journalist or social commentator. Fiction writers are often fence-sitters; even famous ones admit to it happily in interviews. They’re born to dwell on moral conundrums, painstakingly seeing every perspective, lovingly walking in a character’s shoes until it’s almost clear to everybody concerned what drives this imitation of a human being to behave the way they do. I’m a life-long eclectic by choice. But in the midst of all of that truth is another truth; my personal truth that I’m still trying to figure out.

So here goes, for what it’s worth I find cemeteries claustrophobic, I’d want my minimised earthly remains (ashes) to be spilled from a mountain top over some endless wild expanse. Low-impact and clean. But… what if some dearly beloved family member or good friend died tragically in the line of duty on a foreign battle-field? Neither option seems optimal to me; not the pretty english flowers or the stark german simplicity.

So the provocation pushes me to realise two things: firstly, like Anthony Loxton in my novel THE GOOD CEMETERY GUIDE I prefer some wildness in the mix, a fenceless park-like area where visitors might wander in peace and privacy, a place of natural beauty with running streams and huge harbouring trees (Ah, but trees bring leaves and work…!) and secondly, that perhaps my gut response has something to do with the fact that I’m neither english nor german but afro-european. Do I think nations should honour and respect their war dead? Absolutely. Do I think it would be great if we were all more involved in how our country’s cemeteries are set up and run? Absolutely. Do I think governments, politicians and public servants should lighten up (and open up) on the question of public cemeteries and burial sites? Absolutely. The financial burden of running the war graveyards should not only be part of a national dialogue between government, the military, survivors and the rest of the population, it should be part of dinner conversations conducted with much gusto and opinionated banter.

Of course I have an opinion but it’s dull to me; using the imagination to explore other people’s motives is a far more satisfying activity. So how to keep faith with the characters who arrive out of the dark wanting me to tell their tale impartially, warts and all? I’ll just don my wizard’s hat and wander away from real-life blogs and I’ll soon be back in their zone.

Madeleine McCann loves pink

consuelo1312 — Fri, 09 Sep 2011 10:55:20 +0000

: Madeleine loves pink

Ironic that soon after my post “Pink is the new Blue” I started reading the book Madeleine, Kate McCann’s heart-rending account of the abduction of her 4-year old daughter in Praia da Luz, Portugal in May 2007. It turns out that the little girl loves pink. Suddenly it seems unbelieavably irrelevant whether little girls wear pink or not. I even have the feeling I should be ashamed of having wasted time on that blog. The little girl is still missing, still missed after 4 long years. There is now no law-enforcement agency in the world actively looking for Madeleine. Her parents are conducting a private search with the help of hired investigators. To date no-one has come forward to identify a man seen by witnesses walking away from their apartment with an (apparently) sleeping child in pyjamas in his arms. Who was he? What of the other sightings? Who were the other strange individuals hanging around the apartment preceding the abduction? Somebody must know…

Kate McCann mentions her daughter loving pink several times and proudly describes her as ‘girly’. Her grandmother mentions it staunchly at Christmas time (See quote below). Are we wasting too much time on irrelevant stuff? Who are these evil people that are taking children all over the world? Why are we not holding vigils outside our police and justice departments? Why does the media not focus on these horrific crimes with the same assiduity and persistence as they do political fraud and corruption? The slut walk has engendered huge amounts of commentary in the print and online media, but missing children as a major reflection of our damaged society are completely off the radar unless one of them happens to be yours, in which case you live, dream and think about nothing else. Why are our governments not working towards creating an effective integrated trans-border child abduction unit with real powers to work with other similiar bodies across the world? Could it be that nobody’s interested? That it’s easier to ignore the real under-our-nose horror than to face it?

Could it be that there’s no commercial aspect to grip the politicians’ and media’s interest? If every one of the long-missing children was treated as a stolen oil-field we might actually get somewhere. I don’t actually care anymore if girls wear pink or not: I just want them to grow up warm and safe, wearing whatever colours they like and free to choose their own futures (with a little bit of help from the loving people that surround them).

Visit http://www.findmadeleine.com to see how you can help.

Madeleine and her cousin

“Mrs McCann [Madeleine's grandmother], 67, said she planned to put a large pink teddy bear with a big white heart on the four-year-old’s bed, ready to welcome her home.

She said: ‘I always pick out clothes and put money in a little envelope for each of [Madeleine, Sean and Amelie]. This year I did the same for Madeleine. I’d never leave her out.

‘She loves the colour pink. I have a huge pink teddy bear with a white heart on it -’ “

Add a touch of sex…

consuelo1312 — Thu, 08 Sep 2011 16:25:19 +0000

‘Add a touch of sex and we’ll have them…!’ He emphasized his brilliance with a casual click of fingers to attract a waiter’s attention. The man’s capitalist orientation was all there in the casual certainty of his educated voice. You couldn’t have missed it. We’ll satisfy the insatiable appetite, attract them with plastic breasts, draw them in with what they can’t get enough of and feed them our subliminal message. They won’t even know that we’re selling them something else… was the implicit message. Sex. The cherry on the top. The sweetener. The appetiser. The addiction. He reminded me of a thirty-something self-starter I once worked with who owned his own Company and developed client training material for the big ERP software providers like SAP and Oracle. A successful businessman who wore an earring and long shining black hair in a ponytail; nothing wrong with being smart and arty his whole attitude seemed to say. Contrary to what you might expect the big corporate executives loved him. We put it down to the confidence he projected. That’s what this guy in the coffee shop was like too; super-confident, no doubts in his mind about sex being the ultimate additive. The woman opposite him was listening closely, her head to one side; she wasn’t going to challenge him. He could have been an advertising executive or a literary agent. I keep thinking back to what Saul Bellow said about every serious writer having to write a book about death and another about sex. Sex is as weighty a topic as death is, I want to say to the stranger I overheard on my way out the coffee shop. It’s not just a throwaway line. I want to tell him I find gratuitous sex to be nasty and horrible. He wants to sell me cheap perfume and I want to buy a timeless erotic fragrance. I want to tell him: Sex isn’t just about pelvic thrusts and bared boobs in our faces; it’s physical contact between living breathing thinking human beings. A mysterious alchemy of mind and skin. That’s the secret space that could fascinate one. It’s a great comfort that what goes around comes around; everything’s going retro these days. My coffee shop man may even impress a future acolyte with the immortal line: ‘add a touch of class and we’ll have them…!’ One can live in hope.

PS. Blogging is turning out to be more fun than I thought. There’s something therapeutic about being able to respond to a stranger’s words without ever speaking to him.

Words of a feather flock together

consuelo1312 — Tue, 30 Aug 2011 20:13:33 +0000

I came away from seeing the movie Conviction inspired and humbled. Not only did I get an inkling of what a truly amazing brother-sister relationship might be like, I also acquired the word ‘setback’ for use in my daily life. In the past I have used the word ‘disappointment’ (as in ‘life is full of little disappointments’) far too frequently. I now realise my world-weary attitude is a cop-out because I can then stop trying; contemplating a ‘disappointment’ gives me permission to be miserable. Thanks to Conviction I realise that all the little disappointments are in fact nothing but setbacks to be overcome (a la Hilary Swank as the lawyer sibling on steroids). The French word ‘contretemps’, now also in english dictionaries, has a wonderful elegance that implies a similiar obduracy, but it’s not as durable or as down-to-earth as a setback. Today my husband asked if anything exciting had happened in my day. I replied that a whole lot had happened but nothing that he would classify as exciting. ’So you had a lot of niggle,’ he said. Apparently ‘a lot of niggle in the game’ in rugby parlance means there’s been some rough stuff like the odd punch thrown here and there and an altercation or two or three, but nothing major enough to change the course of the game. Don’t you just love words? Who could get depressed about a whole lot of niggle in their day? And that setback I mentioned? I’m working on a publishing contract for my second novel as we speak…

Pink is the new Blue

consuelo1312 — Tue, 30 Aug 2011 17:35:44 +0000

Well, not so new actually. Apparently, according to a book review read along the way, baby girls’ rooms decorated in blue were all the rage before the first world war, and a baby boy dressed in pink was the norm. It’s an intriguing thought; that a daily reality we treat as fact might be viewed as the wrong way round in an earlier age. The international SlutWalk phenomenon with all its controversy has finally hit South Africa. While pondering my own point of view on the great divide between the ‘proud to be a slut’ and the ‘keep your slut word to yourself’ brigades, I came upon Joanne Hichens’ thoughtful riposte to the ‘common sisterhood’ line of argument (Cape Times, Aug 29, 2011). And that got me thinking about the whole pink debate. There’s an organisation in the UK that has its knickers in a knot (some might say) over little girls dressed in pink from top-to-toe, playing with pink toy ponies, riding pink bicycles etc. These strong women have devoted themselves to convincing politicians, business moguls and unaware parents that it’s best to avoid pink for the nation’s daughters, thereby challenging society’s views on little girls who are only supposed to like sugar and spice and everything nice (aside: my first memory of pink for girls was pink candy floss; the boys got blue) and encouraging the girls themselves to avoid being pigeon-holed. Could it be ‘slut’ is a pigeon-hole just like the colour pink? To paraphrase Hichens we not only have to challenge the attitudes men have towards women, but also have to discuss attitudes women have towards themselves and their sexuality. Odd thing is I disliked pink growing up, but these days I have plenty of pink items in my wardrobe. Does that make me less or more of a feminist? Have I perhaps come out on the other side as a fully liberated human being who wears pink and blue with equal abandon?

PS. Read ‘In the pink’ on MercatorNet for an interesting viewpoint on the link between breast cancer and reproductive risk factors, including oral contraceptives and induced abortion.

Thank you, Harrison

consuelo1312 — Sat, 20 Aug 2011 13:06:22 +0000

Harrison Ford to interviewer Margaret Gardiner (The Good Weekend, August 20, 2011): “… I thought the trick to this business was that they pay you fairly. Since they respect you based on how much they pay you, I’ve never been shy about asking for money… I also mean it when I say that I’m in it for the money. That is to say, this is my job. I don’t have another job. I don’t do it for free any more than a plumber does it for free.”

Any book publishers out there listening? Any literary agents out there listening? All you gung-ho wannabe authors out there, I dunno if that would be a wise career move… Consider the energy expended to potential income ratio: a friend of mine paints; it took her about a day to finish a painting she later sold for R12 000 to an American; that’s what I would call a decent return for her time. How long will it take you to complete your first book? Double that. How much of your own money will you spend on learning your craft and editorial advice? Triple that. Before you leave your boring/stressful/dead-end/impossible/unsatisfactory paying full-time job take a long cool sober look at a standard publishing contract. What kind of book sales would you need just to get you through the month? Never mind, there’s always acting… Or plumbing.

PS. Have I broken the cardinal writers’ rule? The comment above is intended to be full of wry wisdom gained with not a note of whine but it’s a fine fine line and easily crossed.

Departures

consuelo1312 — Tue, 16 Aug 2011 17:13:51 +0000

Departures is the cool name of an astonishingly beautiful Japanese movie (academy award for best foreign-language film) about an out-of-work cellist who ends up working in a funeral home by mistake and proves to have a calling. It makes one think of a Departures lounge at an airport - as if we’re all just in transit from here to somewhere. In the movie the father bequeathes the wonderful idea of stone letters to his young son; he disappears out of the boy’s life but the quaint story remains behind. I experienced the pang of writer’s envy – what a fantastic idea… wrapping the fingers of the mother of your unborn child around a stone you have selected… a simple powerful image to weave past and present together, as well as make the emotional high point (see the movie!) - a potentially corny moment – totally believeable. In The Good Cemetery Guide the only thing Anthony Loxton’s father left him was the ability to speak to the dead; imagination and a reaching out for grace was not permitted; so Anthony unloaded onto a Mexican puppet and dreamt of Mexico which was as far away from Kalk Bay as any place he knew. Being the kind of person who picks up random stones and rocks everywhere she goes the delightful idea of the look and feel of a stone evoking unspoken thoughts and emotions – a wordless letter - resonates with me in a big way. One can almost hear the beating heart of a stone as it rests quietly in one’s hand; it’s sometimes warm and sometimes cold but always oddly mystical, this nugget of rock created by cosmic activity and ancient weather patterns. Hence the borrowed category title: Stone Letters. The entire significance always seems to escape one: the felt whole is always greater than the sum of words written on the page. Maybe stone letters will work better…

D-Day for Paloma

consuelo1312 — Thu, 11 Aug 2011 10:32:49 +0000

Shitty morning. Carried through on a responsible decision. In my latter more ‘conscious’ years I’ve tried to follow the picked-up advice of a woman’s magazine psychologist responding to a reader’s angst-filled enquiry over a moral quandry. The psychologist responded by posing the question: ‘What do YOU really think?’ The reader was advised to find a quiet place and make sure that whatever decision she reached was her decision (not everybody else’s) based on what she really really believed within herself was the right thing to do. Hah! Easy to say. So why is is that having brought Paloma, our mantle Great Dane female (yes I know bitch is the right word) who thinks she’s a hyperactive retriever, to be spayed this morning I feel as if I’ve personally killed a whole litter of unborn pups? I had a major wobbly at the vet, had to talk it all through again so that I remembered why it wasn’t a good idea to breed with her. Our beautiful imported puppies who struggled to settle into South Africa, the recurring struggles with stomach bugs (unhygienic chicken carcasses?) and mysterious ailments, the constant antibiotics, the supplements and the probiotics that live in our fridge(the best on the market for humans), the four changes of dog kibble, the wonky hips of our harlequin male and Paloma’s puzzling small stature compared to their prize-winning parents, and not to be forgotten small local veterinary practices that no longer offer after-hours services (no call-outs) so if our precious Paloma needed a caesar we’d have to rush her off (probably after midnight) to a strange vet at a big practice in the northern suburbs that we’d have to drag out of a warm bed etc. etc. Had to fight off a severe dizzy inclination to load her back in the car and drive home. Sometimes common sense and sentiment are in total opposition. Our family has had generations of Great Danes, going all the way back to the 2nd World War. I can almost see those chunky knobbly-kneed beautiful mantle and harlequin puppies we dreamt of introducing into South Africa. Couldn’t help sparing a thought for all those young girls and women who make a life-and-death decision to abort their own child. How come what you know is the right thing to do for everyone concerned so often still feels wrong?

PS. Should I use a word like ‘shitty’ in a public blog? I don’t swear aloud if I can help it and I only let my characters ’use profantities’ if it is an inescapable part of their personality but blogging feels like venting to a diary so I’m letting it stay for now…