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scrapofpaper"You should be angry. You must not be bitter. Bitterness is like cancer. It eats upon the host. It doesn't do anything to the object of its displeasure. So use that anger. You write it. You paint it. You dance it. You march it. You vote it. You do everything about it. You talk it. Never stop talking it."
--Maya Angelou
"The garden is closed off by a tall wall, the top of which is studded with shards of glass in different colors, held in place by cement. From my vantage point they look like teeth. This fierce device doesn't prevent boys form occasionally climbing the walls to steal avocados, medlar fruit and papayas. They put a wooden board on top of the wall, and pull themselves over. If you ask me it's far too risky an enterprise for such meager pickings. But perhaps they're not doing it to savor the fruit, but to savor the risk itself...Maybe all risks to them will taste to them of ripe medlar fruit from now on. You can imagine that one of them will end up becoming a sapper. There will always be more than enough work for sappers in this country. Only yesterday I saw something on television, a report on the mine-sweeping operations. The director of an NGO was bemoaning how uncertain they are about numbers. No one knows with any certainty how many mines were buried in Angolan soil. Somewhere between ten and twenty million. More mines than Angolans, probably. So say one of these boys became a sapper. Whenever he drags himself across a minefield he'll always have that faint taste of medlar fruit in his mouth. And one day he'll be faced with the inevitable question, thrown at him by a foreign journalist with mingled curiosity and horror:
" 'So when you're there dismantling a mine, what goes through your head?'
"And the boy he still has within him will reply, with a smile:
" 'Medlar fruit, old man.'
"Old Esperança thinks it's the wall that makes the thieves--I've heard her say as much to Félix. The albino turned to her, amused:
" 'Who'd have thought I had an anarchist in the house?! Any moment now I'm going to discover that you've been reading Bakunin...'
"He said this, then forgot all about her. She'd never read Bakunin, of course; never read a book at all, come to that, barely knows how to read. But I'm always learning things about life in general, or life in this country--which is life in a state of intoxication--from hearing her talk to herself, sometimes in a gentle murmur, almost like a song, sometimes out loud like someone scolding, as she cleans the house. Old Esperança believes that she's never going to die. In 1992 she survived a massacre. She'd gone to the house of one of the opposition leaders to pick up a letter from her youngest son who was on service in Huambo, when bursts of gunfire suddenly erupted from all around. She was determined to leave the place, to go back to her old musseque house, but they wouldn't let her.
" 'It's a crazy idea, old lady. Just pretend that it's raining. It'll pass soon enough.'
"But it didn't pass. Like a storm the gunfire gathered, getting more ferocious and closing in, getting louder and closer to the house. Félix was the one who told me what happened that night:
" 'This brawling band, a mob of rioters, well armed and extremely drunk, forced their way into the house and slapped around all the people there. The commander wanted to know the name of the old woman. Esperança Job Sapalalo, sir, she said, and he laughed. Esperança--Hope, he joked. Always the last to die. The opposition leader and his family were lined up in the yard and shot. When it came to be Old Esperança's turn, the gunmen had no bullets left. You know what saved you, don't you? the commander shouted. It was logistics. We've never been very good with logistics. And he sent her on her way. Since then she's believed herself to be immune to death. And who knows, maybe she is.'
"It doesn't strike me as impossible. Esperança Job Sapalalo has a fine web of wrinkles on her face and completely white hair, but her flesh is still firm, her gestures solid and precise. If you ask me she's the pillar keeping this house up."
--José Eduardo Agualusa, The Book of Chameleons, translated from the Portuguese by Daniel Hahn
"Gaspar--that was the teacher's name--was moved by the helplessness of certain words. He saw them as down on their luck, abandoned in some desolate place in the language, and he sought to recover them. He used them ostentatiously, and persistently, which annoyed some people and unsettled others. I think he succeeded. His students started using these words too, to begin with merely in jest, but later like a private dialect, a tribal marking, which set them apart from their peers. Nowadays, Félix Ventura assured me, his students are still quite capable of recognizing one another, even if they've never met before, on hearing just a few words..."
--José Eduardo Agualusa, The Book of Chameleons, translated from the Portuguese by Daniel Hahn
"Once, when I was in my old human form, I decided to kill myself. I wanted to die, completely. I hoped that eternal life, Heaven and Hell, God, the Devil, reincarnation, all that stuff, was no more than slowly woven superstition, developed over centuries out of man's greatest terror. There was a gun shop right by my house but I'd never before set foot in it, and the owner didn't know me. There I bought a pistol. Then I bought a crime novel and a bottle of gin. Then I went down to a hotel on the beach, drank the gin in big gulps with considerable distaste (I've always found alcohol repulsive) and lay down on the bed to read the book. I thought that the gin, in combination with the tedium of a pointless plot, would give me the courage to put the gun to my head and pull the trigger. But as it turned out the book wasn't bad at all, and I kept reading right to the last page. By then it had started to rain. It was as though it were raining night--or to explain myself a little more clearly, it was as though falling from the sky were the thick fragments of that sleepy black ocean through which the stars navigate their course. I kept expecting the stars to fall and shatter on impact with the window, with a flash and a crashing. But they didn't fall. I turned out the light. I put the pistol to my head,
"and I fell asleep."
--José Eduardo Agualusa, The Book of Chameleons, translated from the Portuguese by Daniel Hahn
"In olden days stories for children always used to end with the words, and they lived happily ever after, this being after the Prince has married the Princess and they've had lots of children. In life there's never a plot that works out like that, of course. Princesses marry bodyguards, they marry trapeze artists and life goes on, and they live unhappily until they separate. And years later, just like the rest of us, they die. We're only happy--truly happy--when it's forever after, but only children live in a world where things can last forever."
--José Eduardo Agualusa, The Book of Chameleons, translated from the Portuguese by Daniel Hahn
"Imagine a young man racing along on his motorcycle, on a minor road. The wind is beating at his face. The young man closes his eyes, and opens his arms wide, just like they do in films, feeling himself completely alive and in communion with the universe. He doesn't see the lorry lunging out from the crossing. He dies happy. Happiness is almost always irresponsible. We're happy for those brief moments when we close our eyes."
--José Eduardo Agualusa, The Book of Chameleons, translated from the Portuguese by Daniel Hahn
"In the book the minister conversed with real people (sometimes with royal people) and it would be most convenient if these people should tomorrow believe that they had indeed traded confidences and opinions with him. Our memory feeds itself to a large extent on what other people remember of us. We remember other people's memories as though they were our own--even fictional ones.
" 'It's like the Castle of São Jorge in Lisbon--do you know it? It has battlements, but they're fake. António de Oliveira Salazar ordered that some crenelations be added to the castle to make it more authentic. To him there was something wrong with a castle without crenelations--there was something monstrous about it--like a camel without humps. So the fake part of the Castle of São Jorge is today what makes it realistic. Several octogenarian Lisboans I've spoken to are convinced the castle has always had crenelations. There's something rather amusing about that, isn't there? If it were authentic, no one would believe in it.' "
--José Eduardo Agualusa, The Book of Chameleons, translated from the Portuguese by Daniel Hahn
"What is a poem but a means of making sense of all that comes through the senses, a senseless dream decoded? What is a dream but a story broken into fragments and scattered, card-like, before a child as a test of memory? What is memory but a warm welcome from a stranger who knows you by name and perhaps a kiss and invitation to board in a larger room with greater storage space and more natural light? But there are also memories that haunt, past moments that we'd rather think of as belonging to past lives. And then there are those stored in books and records for the sake of collective memory: history."
--Saul Williams, The Dead Emcee Scrolls: The Lost Teachings of Hip-hop
How could you not
Realize the power of word
After being forced
To serve a sentence?
--Saul Williams, The Dead Emcee Scrolls: The Lost Teachings of Hip-hop
I am not a writer
I am the plight
Of unfigured equations:
A stick of cinnamon
A grove a cloves
Cayenne and a bowl of honey
Water and money
--Saul Williams, The Dead Emcee Scrolls: The Lost Teachings of Hip-hop
As an artist
First, I was black.
I wrote with a yearning
To be a leader. I was
Born into a mourning
Race. We mourned
The death of a king.
I awoke to find
My tongue a scepter.
--Saul Williams, The Dead Emcee Scrolls: The Lost Teachings of Hip-hop
"Penelope's Song"
Little soul, little perpetually undressed one,
do now as I bid you, climb
the shelf-like branches of the spruce tree;
wait at the top, attentive, like
a sentry or look-out. He will be home soon;
it behooves you to be
generous. You have not been completely
perfect either; with your troublesome body
you have done things you shouldn't
discuss in poems. Therefore
call out to him over the open water, over the bright water
with your dark song, with your grasping,
unnatural song--passionate,
like Maria Callas. Who
wouldn't want you? Whose most demonic appetite
could you possibly fail to answer? Soon
he will return from wherever he goes in the meantime,
suntanned from his time away, wanting
his grilled chicken. Ah, you must greet him,
you must shake the boughs of the tree
to get his attention,
but carefully, carefully, lest
his beautiful face be marred by too many falling needles.
--Louise Glück
"Parable of the King"
The great king looking ahead
saw not fate but simply
dawn glittering over
the unknown island: as a king
he thought in the imperative--best
not to reconsider direction, best
to keep going forward
over the radiant water. Anyway,
what is fate but a strategy for ignoring
history, with its moral
dilemmas, a way of regarding
the present, where decisions
are made, as the necessary
link between the past (images of the king
as a young prince) and the glorious future (images
of slave girls). Whatever
it was ahead, why did it have to be
so blinding? Who could have known
that wasn't the usual sun
but flames rising over a world
about to become extinct?
--Louise Glück
"Moonless Night"
A lady weeps at a dark window.
Must we say what it is? Can't we simply say
a personal matter? It's early summer;
next door the Lights are practising klezmer music.
A good night: the clarinet is in tune.
As for the lady--she's going to wait forever;
there's no point in watching longer.
After awhile, the streetlight goes out.
But is waiting forever
always the answer? Nothing
is always the answer; the answer
depends on the story.
Such a mistake to want
clarity above all things. What's
a single night, especially
one like this, now so close to ending?
On the other side, there could be anything,
all the joy in the world, the stars fading,
the streetlight becoming a bus stop.
--Louise Glück
--Maya Angelou
"The garden is closed off by a tall wall, the top of which is studded with shards of glass in different colors, held in place by cement. From my vantage point they look like teeth. This fierce device doesn't prevent boys form occasionally climbing the walls to steal avocados, medlar fruit and papayas. They put a wooden board on top of the wall, and pull themselves over. If you ask me it's far too risky an enterprise for such meager pickings. But perhaps they're not doing it to savor the fruit, but to savor the risk itself...Maybe all risks to them will taste to them of ripe medlar fruit from now on. You can imagine that one of them will end up becoming a sapper. There will always be more than enough work for sappers in this country. Only yesterday I saw something on television, a report on the mine-sweeping operations. The director of an NGO was bemoaning how uncertain they are about numbers. No one knows with any certainty how many mines were buried in Angolan soil. Somewhere between ten and twenty million. More mines than Angolans, probably. So say one of these boys became a sapper. Whenever he drags himself across a minefield he'll always have that faint taste of medlar fruit in his mouth. And one day he'll be faced with the inevitable question, thrown at him by a foreign journalist with mingled curiosity and horror:
" 'So when you're there dismantling a mine, what goes through your head?'
"And the boy he still has within him will reply, with a smile:
" 'Medlar fruit, old man.'
"Old Esperança thinks it's the wall that makes the thieves--I've heard her say as much to Félix. The albino turned to her, amused:
" 'Who'd have thought I had an anarchist in the house?! Any moment now I'm going to discover that you've been reading Bakunin...'
"He said this, then forgot all about her. She'd never read Bakunin, of course; never read a book at all, come to that, barely knows how to read. But I'm always learning things about life in general, or life in this country--which is life in a state of intoxication--from hearing her talk to herself, sometimes in a gentle murmur, almost like a song, sometimes out loud like someone scolding, as she cleans the house. Old Esperança believes that she's never going to die. In 1992 she survived a massacre. She'd gone to the house of one of the opposition leaders to pick up a letter from her youngest son who was on service in Huambo, when bursts of gunfire suddenly erupted from all around. She was determined to leave the place, to go back to her old musseque house, but they wouldn't let her.
" 'It's a crazy idea, old lady. Just pretend that it's raining. It'll pass soon enough.'
"But it didn't pass. Like a storm the gunfire gathered, getting more ferocious and closing in, getting louder and closer to the house. Félix was the one who told me what happened that night:
" 'This brawling band, a mob of rioters, well armed and extremely drunk, forced their way into the house and slapped around all the people there. The commander wanted to know the name of the old woman. Esperança Job Sapalalo, sir, she said, and he laughed. Esperança--Hope, he joked. Always the last to die. The opposition leader and his family were lined up in the yard and shot. When it came to be Old Esperança's turn, the gunmen had no bullets left. You know what saved you, don't you? the commander shouted. It was logistics. We've never been very good with logistics. And he sent her on her way. Since then she's believed herself to be immune to death. And who knows, maybe she is.'
"It doesn't strike me as impossible. Esperança Job Sapalalo has a fine web of wrinkles on her face and completely white hair, but her flesh is still firm, her gestures solid and precise. If you ask me she's the pillar keeping this house up."
--José Eduardo Agualusa, The Book of Chameleons, translated from the Portuguese by Daniel Hahn
"Gaspar--that was the teacher's name--was moved by the helplessness of certain words. He saw them as down on their luck, abandoned in some desolate place in the language, and he sought to recover them. He used them ostentatiously, and persistently, which annoyed some people and unsettled others. I think he succeeded. His students started using these words too, to begin with merely in jest, but later like a private dialect, a tribal marking, which set them apart from their peers. Nowadays, Félix Ventura assured me, his students are still quite capable of recognizing one another, even if they've never met before, on hearing just a few words..."
--José Eduardo Agualusa, The Book of Chameleons, translated from the Portuguese by Daniel Hahn
"Once, when I was in my old human form, I decided to kill myself. I wanted to die, completely. I hoped that eternal life, Heaven and Hell, God, the Devil, reincarnation, all that stuff, was no more than slowly woven superstition, developed over centuries out of man's greatest terror. There was a gun shop right by my house but I'd never before set foot in it, and the owner didn't know me. There I bought a pistol. Then I bought a crime novel and a bottle of gin. Then I went down to a hotel on the beach, drank the gin in big gulps with considerable distaste (I've always found alcohol repulsive) and lay down on the bed to read the book. I thought that the gin, in combination with the tedium of a pointless plot, would give me the courage to put the gun to my head and pull the trigger. But as it turned out the book wasn't bad at all, and I kept reading right to the last page. By then it had started to rain. It was as though it were raining night--or to explain myself a little more clearly, it was as though falling from the sky were the thick fragments of that sleepy black ocean through which the stars navigate their course. I kept expecting the stars to fall and shatter on impact with the window, with a flash and a crashing. But they didn't fall. I turned out the light. I put the pistol to my head,
"and I fell asleep."
--José Eduardo Agualusa, The Book of Chameleons, translated from the Portuguese by Daniel Hahn
"In olden days stories for children always used to end with the words, and they lived happily ever after, this being after the Prince has married the Princess and they've had lots of children. In life there's never a plot that works out like that, of course. Princesses marry bodyguards, they marry trapeze artists and life goes on, and they live unhappily until they separate. And years later, just like the rest of us, they die. We're only happy--truly happy--when it's forever after, but only children live in a world where things can last forever."
--José Eduardo Agualusa, The Book of Chameleons, translated from the Portuguese by Daniel Hahn
"Imagine a young man racing along on his motorcycle, on a minor road. The wind is beating at his face. The young man closes his eyes, and opens his arms wide, just like they do in films, feeling himself completely alive and in communion with the universe. He doesn't see the lorry lunging out from the crossing. He dies happy. Happiness is almost always irresponsible. We're happy for those brief moments when we close our eyes."
--José Eduardo Agualusa, The Book of Chameleons, translated from the Portuguese by Daniel Hahn
"In the book the minister conversed with real people (sometimes with royal people) and it would be most convenient if these people should tomorrow believe that they had indeed traded confidences and opinions with him. Our memory feeds itself to a large extent on what other people remember of us. We remember other people's memories as though they were our own--even fictional ones.
" 'It's like the Castle of São Jorge in Lisbon--do you know it? It has battlements, but they're fake. António de Oliveira Salazar ordered that some crenelations be added to the castle to make it more authentic. To him there was something wrong with a castle without crenelations--there was something monstrous about it--like a camel without humps. So the fake part of the Castle of São Jorge is today what makes it realistic. Several octogenarian Lisboans I've spoken to are convinced the castle has always had crenelations. There's something rather amusing about that, isn't there? If it were authentic, no one would believe in it.' "
--José Eduardo Agualusa, The Book of Chameleons, translated from the Portuguese by Daniel Hahn
"What is a poem but a means of making sense of all that comes through the senses, a senseless dream decoded? What is a dream but a story broken into fragments and scattered, card-like, before a child as a test of memory? What is memory but a warm welcome from a stranger who knows you by name and perhaps a kiss and invitation to board in a larger room with greater storage space and more natural light? But there are also memories that haunt, past moments that we'd rather think of as belonging to past lives. And then there are those stored in books and records for the sake of collective memory: history."
--Saul Williams, The Dead Emcee Scrolls: The Lost Teachings of Hip-hop
How could you not
Realize the power of word
After being forced
To serve a sentence?
--Saul Williams, The Dead Emcee Scrolls: The Lost Teachings of Hip-hop
I am not a writer
I am the plight
Of unfigured equations:
A stick of cinnamon
A grove a cloves
Cayenne and a bowl of honey
Water and money
--Saul Williams, The Dead Emcee Scrolls: The Lost Teachings of Hip-hop
As an artist
First, I was black.
I wrote with a yearning
To be a leader. I was
Born into a mourning
Race. We mourned
The death of a king.
I awoke to find
My tongue a scepter.
--Saul Williams, The Dead Emcee Scrolls: The Lost Teachings of Hip-hop
"Penelope's Song"
Little soul, little perpetually undressed one,
do now as I bid you, climb
the shelf-like branches of the spruce tree;
wait at the top, attentive, like
a sentry or look-out. He will be home soon;
it behooves you to be
generous. You have not been completely
perfect either; with your troublesome body
you have done things you shouldn't
discuss in poems. Therefore
call out to him over the open water, over the bright water
with your dark song, with your grasping,
unnatural song--passionate,
like Maria Callas. Who
wouldn't want you? Whose most demonic appetite
could you possibly fail to answer? Soon
he will return from wherever he goes in the meantime,
suntanned from his time away, wanting
his grilled chicken. Ah, you must greet him,
you must shake the boughs of the tree
to get his attention,
but carefully, carefully, lest
his beautiful face be marred by too many falling needles.
--Louise Glück
"Parable of the King"
The great king looking ahead
saw not fate but simply
dawn glittering over
the unknown island: as a king
he thought in the imperative--best
not to reconsider direction, best
to keep going forward
over the radiant water. Anyway,
what is fate but a strategy for ignoring
history, with its moral
dilemmas, a way of regarding
the present, where decisions
are made, as the necessary
link between the past (images of the king
as a young prince) and the glorious future (images
of slave girls). Whatever
it was ahead, why did it have to be
so blinding? Who could have known
that wasn't the usual sun
but flames rising over a world
about to become extinct?
--Louise Glück
"Moonless Night"
A lady weeps at a dark window.
Must we say what it is? Can't we simply say
a personal matter? It's early summer;
next door the Lights are practising klezmer music.
A good night: the clarinet is in tune.
As for the lady--she's going to wait forever;
there's no point in watching longer.
After awhile, the streetlight goes out.
But is waiting forever
always the answer? Nothing
is always the answer; the answer
depends on the story.
Such a mistake to want
clarity above all things. What's
a single night, especially
one like this, now so close to ending?
On the other side, there could be anything,
all the joy in the world, the stars fading,
the streetlight becoming a bus stop.
--Louise Glück
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