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[Page i]Religion • Society • Polity • Arts

WORLD ORDER

In this issue...

Travel: Reaping the Successes of Imagination Editorial

Filmmaking with a Conscience: An Interview with Mark Bamford by Robert Weinberg

In Deep Defeat by Ever Greater Things: A Canadian Artist in Salvador, Brazil by Nathaniel Vyklicky

in Gloria’s garden a poem by Heather Nablo Cardin

Matters of Opinion A Review by Peter E. Murphy of The Modern Elegiac Temper by John B. Vickery

Poem for Dizzy a poem by Betty Adcock

The Meanings of Travel

Volume 38, No. 2 [Page ii]Religion Society Polity Arts WORLD ORDER 2006-07 VOLUME 38, NUMBER 2

WORLD ORDER AIMS TO STIMULATE, INSPIRE, AND SERVE ITS READERS IN THEIR SEARCH TO UNDERSTAND THE RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARY LIFE AND CONTEMPORARY RELIGIOUS TEACHINGS AND PHILOSOPHY.

EDITORIAL BOARD

Betty J. Fisher Arash Abizadeh Monireh Kazemzadeh Diane Lotfi Kevin Morrison Robert H. Stockman Jim Stokes

CONSULTANT IN POETRY

Herbert Woodward Martin

INFORMATION FOR AUTHORS

World Order is published quarterly by the National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’ís of the United States, 536 Sheridan Road, Wilmette, IL 60091-1811. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the publisher or of the Editorial Board.

Peer review: Submissions to the journal will be subject to external blind peer review if they fall outside the expertise of the Editorial Board or upon request by the author.

Submissions and other editorial correspondence should be addressed to the Editor, World Order, 7311 Quail Springs Place NE, Albuquerque, NM 87113-1780 or e-mailed to <worldorder@usbnc.org>. Detailed information for contributors may be requested in writing or by e-mail.

Manuscripts may be typewritten or computer generated; manuscripts accepted for publication are requested on computer disk (Microsoft Word or WordPerfect preferred) or by electronic submission. Article and review manuscripts must be double-spaced throughout and prepared in a 12-point Courier font; the footnotes must be at the end of the text and not attached electronically to the text. Each manuscript should list on the first page the article title, the author(s), and addresses, including telephone, fax, and e-mail.

Articles may range in length from some 3.750 to 6,250 words.

Reviews vary in length. Review Notes run from some 500 words; Mini-Reviews run from some 1,000 to 2,500 words, and Review Essays, from some 3,750 to 6,250 words.

Poems should be single spaced with clearly marked stanza breaks.

World Order is indexed in the Index of American Periodical Verse, the ATLA Religion Database, and Humanities International Complete and is a member of the Council of Editors of Learned Journals.

INFORMATION FOR SUBSCRIBERS

Subscription Rate: U.S., 1 year, $25 USD; 2 years, $48 USD. All other countries, 1 year, $30 USD; 2 years, $58 USD. Single copies, $7 USD plus shipping and handling. Make checks or money orders payable to Bahá’í Distribution Service. Send address changes to and order subscriptions from the Bahá’í Distribution Service, 415 Linden Avenue, Wilmette, IL, 60091-2844 U.S. Telephone: 1-800-999-9019, United States and Canada; 847-425-7950, all other countries. Or please e-mail:<subscription@usbnc.org>.

Back issues still in print may be obtained from the Bahá’í Distribution Service at the mailing address above or by e-mail at cbds@usbnc.org>. Orders for back issues on microfilm or microfiche can be obtained from National Archive Publishing Company, 300 North Zeeb Road, P.O. Box 998, Ann Arbor, MI 48106-0998 USA. Telephone: 1-800-420-6272. E-mail: <info@napubco.com>.

COPYRIGHT INFORMATION

Copyright 2008 by the National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’ís of the United States; all rights reserved. World Order is protected through trademark registration in the U.S. Patent Office. Printed in the U.S.A. ISSN 0043-8804.

ART CREDITS

Cover design by Ric Doering: cover photograph, suitcases, Jürgen Platzman, fotolia.com, and visa and stamps, Christine Glade, iStockPhoto.com; p. 6, photograph, Cape of Good Hope poster, courtesy Mark Bamford; p. 14, photograph, courtesy Steve Garrigues; p. 17, illustrations, courtesy Nathaniel Vyklicky: pp. 18, 23, 24, 25, 27, 28, photographs, courtesy Nathaniel Vyklicky; p. 30, photograph, courtesy Steve Garrigues; p. 40, photograph, courtesy Lorraine Hétu Manifold: pp. 42, 48, photographs, courtesy Steve Garrigues. [Page 1]2006–07 VOLUME 38, NUMBER 2

CONTENTS

2	Travel: Reaping the Successes of Imagination Editorial
4	Interchange: Letters from and to the Editor
7	Filmmaking with a Conscience: An Interview with Mark Bamford by Robert Weinberg
12	Guadalupe rises from the sand to survey his beginnings a poem by Albino Carrillo
13	The Root of All Trees a poem by Michael Fitzgerald
13	Death Grip a poem by Barbara Darr
15	In Deep Defeat by Ever Greater Things: A Canadian Artist in Salvador, Brazil by Nathaniel Vyklicky
29	Cargo a poem by June Perkins
31	in Gloria’s garden a poem by Heather Nablo Cardin
41	An American Landscape a poem by Ray Hudson
43	Matters of Opinion: A Review of The Modern Elegiac Temper by John B. Vickery by Peter E. Murphy
46	Poem for Dizzy a poem by Betty Adcock

[Page 2]

Travel: Reaping the Successes of Imagination

One of the signature features of our age is the ever-increasing degree of mobility among individuals and entire populations, especially those in wealthy industrialized nations. Never have so many people found it possible to leave their home countries—whether through choice or necessity, for positive or negative reasons, temporarily or permanently. If we were somehow able to chart such events from space, it would appear as if humanity today were animated by a great restless energy.

Growing numbers of people assume that it is their right (and increasingly it is their practice) to travel as they like, sometimes over vast distances, and for any number of personal reasons. Travel has unarguably brought the world closer together. Travel contributes to greater understandings of cultures, histories, and peoples and has helped to shape an emerging sense of world citizenship. It makes significant contributions to the development of countries by infusing millions of dollars into transportation and city infrastructure and encourages economic growth through service-sector jobs. The term travel, like the term tourism, suggests freedom of movement and the desirable mixture of cultures and peoples.

But it wasn't always so. In earlier ages many people in a number of societies had no personal right to move from place to place. For most, travel meant short, sanctioned, carefully circumscribed journeys. The privileged few might, of course, travel greater distances, and do so for more diverse purposes than could the great masses of people. However, travel in those earlier times often had overtly symbolic social, religious, or governmental purposes—whether it was for religious pilgrimages, royal progresses, communal parish processions on important feast days, or to markets in other towns.

In other societies travel, be it for long or short distances, followed available water, food sources, and the seasons, and, of course, included trade, as can be seen from archaeological digs all over the world, in the artifacts, shells, and metals found long distances from their points of origin. Travel has also had warlike overtones, as clans, tribes, villages, cities, states jockeyed for space, resources, and control. Even in the twenty-first century some travel, if one can call it that in such a context, can be forced by fear, prejudice, repression, persecution, and genocide. In one way or another, travel has been and still is, in part, an expression and exercise by some party of trade or of power and social control, which in itself is part of the exercise of governance.

Today the new and growing mobility has become a fact. Much more interesting is the question: how is one to perceive this new-found freedom and access? Travel [Page 3]

EDITORIAL

is not only a physical but a spiritual, mental, cultural, and experiential journey. One might usefully ask: "What implications are we missing in what is rapidly becoming a near-universal access to travel? What should we, as humanity's fellow-travelers, be inculcating into our sensibility?" In this light we might pause to consider humanity's self-imposed disasters, which commentators frequently refer to as "failures of imagination" or botched opportunities. Much too little effort goes into considering, from the obverse perspective, "successes of imagination," the revivifying ability to perceive the wondrous possibilities lying nascent and invisible in "the seeds of time." Travel, one might argue, opens the human mind to possibilities.

If what Bahá’u’lláh so eloquently has said about our world is true (and we believe it is) that "The earth is but one country, and mankind its citizens"—then the nations are that one country's neighborhoods, and the citizens of those regions are, in a very real sense, members of an extended family. As the practical accessibility of extensive travel has grown, it has caused the world to shrink, physically, culturally, and, more importantly, perceptually. Returning travelers invariably say (with some wonder) similar things: "The people there were very warm. They welcomed me with great kindness and hospitality. I really like them." Wonder of wonders, they seem to be human beings too! That is, it generally appears to be impossible to come into contact with other peoples without experiencing great human empathy. In that sense, and in one of the supreme ironies of the age, travelers exploring every hidden corner of the globe are discovering that invariably they are never really leaving home.

Rather, if they have the imaginative ability to perceive it, they are immersing themselves in the vast spiritual ecosystem that is the human family on this planet. The teachings of Bahá’u’lláh ask them to see the holiness of the world: every person they encounter as a soul, and every object as radiant with possibilities. Now that is a journey worth making and one for which ever-increasing numbers of people are booking passage. [Page 4]

Interchange

Letters from and to the Editor

The myriad faces of travel engage a number of authors in this issue of World Order. The Editorial "Travel: Reaping the Successes of Imagination" includes thoughts on the accessibility to travel that many, but not all, of us have come to experience in the twenty-first century. It also poses provocative questions about the world mind-set that we should take with us as we physically leave our homes but, in another sense, as we only move to other rooms in our enlarged yet shrinking global home.

Nathaniel Vyklicky's "In Deep Defeat by Ever Greater Things: A Canadian Artist in Salvador, Brazil" is an edgy account drawn from the author's travel journal. "Honest, gritty, vibrant, and true," as one editor described it, the account challenges readers to think about the branches of our human family who are generally not seen from the safety of guided tours and the comfort of tour buses but who are, nevertheless, our brothers and sisters, our mothers and fathers, our aunts, uncles, and cousins, our relatives. The account, illustrated with two of the author's drawings made in Salvador and a number of his photographs of the streets on which he set up shop for sketching, also surprises and illumines with unexpected images: "the sea gives you a blistering sunburn and a gift" stresses a "recurring theme" of "life" and "the relationship of beauty and suffering." Vyklicky's piece is, in the words of a peer reader, "a remarkable story about humanity, heart, and hope."

A long prose poem by Heather Nablo Cardin, "in Gloria's garden," is another piece of creative nonfiction on the theme of travel. Based on the author's trip to Belize, Guatemala, and Honduras in 2002, the poem captures the lush beauty of some Central American countries and the joy of traveling to visit friends and relatives, but it also captures some of the underbelly of poverty.

Robert Weinberg's interview with producer Mark Bamford about his award-winning film The Cape of Good Hope examines "Filmmaking with a Conscience" (as the interview is titled). The conversation explores yet other rooms in our global home. In connection with a film festival in Cape Town at which Hero, Bamford's first film, was being shown, Bamford and his wife visited the South African city and decided to return for a year. But they fell in love with Cape Town and ended up staying six years.

Interactions with refugees from wars in the Congo and Rwanda and the many dogs left behind by fleeing white South Africans led the Bamfords to consider a film about post-Apartheid South Africa, using attitudes toward dogs to say things about how human beings treat each other. A story line began to take shape, "multilayered, multicharacter," as Bamford describes it, involving "a mosaic that is the new South Africa": blacks, Muslims, "Cape-coloreds," white Afrikaners, devout Christians, immigrant refugees. "Wonder of wonders," as the editorial in this issue exclaims, the disparate line-up of characters all have problems to solve, [Page 5]

INTERCHANGE

all need support, all need to overcome "fears and prejudices," and all need "to find love in their lives." Renting or purchasing the video of The Cape of Good Hope will take you to another continent and to other peoples, where you will find yourself surprisingly near home.

Finally, not to push the travel theme too far, Peter E. Murphy's review of John B. Vickery's The Modern Elegiac Temper introduces us to the evolution of the classical form of the elegy in the twentieth century as human beings "travel" from one place to another while coping with losses. Part of the book examines personal elegies, and part of it looks at "a number of varieties of loss dealing with love, culture, and philosophy." Appended to the end of the review is a special treat about a Bahá’í musician: Betty Alcock's poem about jazz great Dizzy Gillespie—called "Poem for Dizzy" written because, in The Anthology of Jazz, she found no poem "written to, for, or about" the "cocreator (with Charlie Parker) of bebop."

Alessandro Bausani (1921-88), a Bahá’í and Professor Emeritus and Director of the School of Oriental Studies and the Institute of Islamic Studies at the University of Rome, and a member of the Lincei National Academy, has been honored with a street's being named after him in Rome.

Raniero Gnoli, professor emeritus of Indian Studies and one of Bausani's colleagues, remembers Bausani as "one of the most extraordinary personalities of our school," "a man of great intellectual curiosity of all aspects of culture." In a press release translated from the Italian, he goes on to say that Bausani's "translation of the Qur'án [Il Corana] is undoubtedly the best translation in Italian" and that his translation of the poet Iqbal is "well known." Of his many publications Bausani considered three to be his Persian triptych: Persia religiosa da Zaratustra a Bahá’u’lláh (The Religions of Persia from Zarathustra to Bahá’u’lláh); Storia della letteratura neopersiana (History of Neo-Persian Literature); and I Persiani (The Persians). Another of his important works is Poesie Mistiche (Mystical Poems), a translation of a number of the mystical poems of Rumi.

World Order has been fortunate to publish translations of two articles by Bausani: "The Religious Crisis in the Modern World" (Vol. 2, No. 3, Spring 1968) and "Some Aspects of the Bahá’í Expressive Style" (Vol. 13, No. 2, Winter 1978-79). Both issues are still available for sale from the Bahá’í Distribution Service, 1-800-999-9019. [Page 6]

CAPE OF GOOD HOPE

SELECTION WORLD PREMIERE OFFICIAL OFFICIAL SELECTION TORONTO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL HONORABLE MENTION PEOPLE'S CHOICE AWARD WINNER WINNER ARTNEM Thes WINNER OFFICIAL SECTION OFFICIAL SELECTION OFFICIAL ELECTION

"WONDERFUL! Expresses the joys and sorrows of human nature..." Roger Ebert

a MARK BAMFORD film

CAPE OF GOOD HOPE

Love connects us all.

Artistic License www.CAPEMOVIE.COM [Page 7]

Filmmaking with a Conscience: An interview with Mark Bamford

Mark Bamford and Suzanne Kay are an American husband-and-wife filmmaking partnership whose debut feature film Cape of Good Hope has been garnering critical acclaim and awards throughout the world.' The film, which they cowrote and was directed by Bamford and produced by Kay, interweaves fictional story lines revolving around staff at an animal rescue center in Cape Town, South Africa. Along with numerous Best Film and Audience Awards at film festivals around the world, Cape of Good Hope was also nominated for an NAACP Image Award for Best Independent or Foreign Film of 2005 and received special recognition for Excellence in Filmmaking from the prestigious National Board of Review. In April 2006 the Religion Communicators Council honored Bamford and Kay with one of its prestigious Wilbur Awards, rewarding secular work that highlights moral or religious themes. Among Cape of Good Hope's many positive reviews, the New York Times film review called it an "Uplifting, satisfying and memorable film," while Roger Ebert, movie critic for the Chicago Sun-Times, described it as a "post-apartheid film in which the characters are less concerned with politics than with matters of the heart. What Cape of Good Hope argues, I think, is that we live in sad times if political issues define our lives. When politics do not create walls (as apartheid did), most people are primarily interested in their families, their romances, and their jobs. They hope to improve all three. The movie is about their hope."

After living and working in South Africa for six years, Bamford and Kay have relocated to London, where they are currently working on their next feature film, which will be an international thriller.

-ROBERT WEINBERG

Copyright 2008 by Robert Weinberg.

1. Cape of Good Hope, DVD, directed by Mark Bamford (2004; New York: New Yorker Video, 2006).

ROBERT WEINBERG

who lives in the United Kingdom, is a freelance radio producer and writer, specializing in film and music. His film show, Classic FM at the Movies, broadcast nationwide in the UK and worldwide through www.classicfm.com, is listened to by some half a million people each week. In 1987 Weinberg received from the University of Brighton a Bachelor of Arts honors degree in expressive arts, specializing in videomaking, visual arts, art history, and music. He has published a biography of Ethel Jenner Rosenberg, a pioneering British Bahá’í, and edited Spinning the Clay into Stars, a collection of the writings of potter Bernard Leach. His photographs have appeared in Sacred Earth. [Page 8]

ROBERT WEINBERG

What initially sparked your interest in making feature films?

Suzanne had graduated from Columbia University in New York with a Master's degree in journalism and went on to be a news writer and producer at CNN. She was also an on-air coanchor of E!'s first entertainment news program. Around the time we met, she was working as a scriptwriter at 20th Century Fox. I had studied anthropology and French literature and linguistics at New York University but had moved to Los Angeles, where I was doing some freelance writing and also working for Roland Emmerich, the writer and producer of such blockbuster disaster movies as Independence Day and The Day after Tomorrow.

After investigating and joining the Bahá’í Faith in 1995, Suzanne and I really began to think about the Bahá’í concept of work being equal to worship when it is performed in the spirit of service to humanity. That is an appealing concept if you are someone who, like me, feels they can't pray and meditate too much. I thought to myself: Work is worship. Great! Now, that's something I can do and through my work bring the things I care about to an audience. Suzanne and I talked a lot about how we could bring together the ideals in which we believed with what we did professionally. There are some pointers in the Bahá’í teachings about the responsibility artists have to uplift humanity, but we wondered about how that could be translated onto celluloid and what would be the best way to tell the kinds of stories we wanted to tell.

You chose to make your debut feature film in South Africa. Did you not feel that there was scope within the studio system in Los Angeles to get your stories across through mainstream, commercial films?

We were disillusioned with the Hollywood machine, to be honest. Its main aim, of course, is to make money and not necessarily to convey the kinds of ideas we wanted to communicate. I wanted to try my hand at directing. Hence, to get things moving, Suzanne and I worked together on writing a short, fifteen-minute film, Hero. It is the story of an embittered American soldier who, toward the end of the Second World War, comes across a small farmhouse in Germany, which he begins looting. There's a pretty powerful encounter between him and the widow of a Nazi officer that says a lot about humanity in very few words.

Making the short was tremendously challenging and hard work. But it was very well received-I received an Atom Films' Director to Watch award, and we traveled to a number of film festivals, including one in Cape Town, where people seemed to like what we had made. With the success of Hero, we thought we would take a year off, get away from Los Angeles, and develop some feature film scripts. We decided to return to Cape Town because we liked it and thought there were good opportunities there for service. Our intention was to go for a year, but we fell in love with the place.

How did the concepts behind Cape of Good Hope emerge was it a product of the experiences you had in South Africa?

South Africa is a very interesting place- especially for a filmmaker. At that time, there was really no film industry to speak [Page 9]

FILMMAKING WITH A CONSCIENCE

of, but they did have the capacity and expertise in their midst with producers and crews making commercials and some television shows. So we started exploring how we could stay there and make movies. I guess we were among the first people to do that. Originally our intention was to write for a year and then return to Los Angeles with a finished script and shoot it in America.

However, after a number of things happened in our first year, including teaching English to refugees who were escaping civil war in the Congo and Rwanda, we saw how important the work was, and we decided to stay. You know, most films from, or about, South Africa have dealt with the apartheid years and their aftermath. As things unfolded, and we got to know diverse people, we decided we wanted our film to reflect the human side of South Africa. That is what made the country so interesting to us, and we ended up staying six years. We wanted to do something that would reflect more of the optimism of the new South Africa, which no one outside of the country had really seen.

The main metaphor of the film is dogs. It's centered around an animal shelter, and the characters' lives are intertwined with dogs in some way. How did that come about?

Suzanne had read something about the exodus of white South Africans to other countries and was fascinated to read that, as a result, the dog pounds were overflowing. You see, these people had to leave their animals behind because of quarantine or other laws in the countries to which they were going. Another thing we heard and actually witnessed was that some people in South Africa seemed to treat their dogs better than their domestic staff.

As a result, a very interesting concept began to take shape in our minds, comparing the way people treat their dogs to how they treat other people. Thus the dog shelter became central to the story. Now, in Cape Town, you have all kinds of people—blacks, Muslims, "Cape-coloreds," white Afrikaners, devout Christians, immigrant refugees. We felt that, by developing a multilayered, multicharacter story, we could present a mosaic that is the new South Africa, charting the efforts that the people are making to live together, but still, of course, experiencing some problems and challenges. It turned into a very layered film. There were things we wanted to communicate, but we didn't want to make it too preachy. We thought things could be better said if they were slightly sugarcoated. Using the dogs as a way of conveying some stark home truths—about attitudes toward purebreds and mongrels, for example—makes it more palatable for the audience.

Did the various threads of the story evolve simultaneously, or did one strand spark off another?

The first story that came to us was about the white South African woman, Kate, who runs the shelter. She's not racist, but she is insecure about her relationships, particularly with her mother and with men. She is involved in a dispiriting relationship with a married man. Kate's friendship with a very industrious little black African boy, Thabo, who has trained his dog to do tricks, was our starting point.

Then we have the story of Thabo's widowed mother, Lindiwe. She is working [Page 10]ing as a domestic maid but is trying to improve herself by getting an education. Lindiwe's mother hopes Lindiwe will take up with the local preacher, but Jean Claude, a former astronomer from the Congo and now a refugee working as a janitor, enters the picture and captivates both Lindiwe and her son Thabo. We then have a "Cape-colored" couple desperately trying to have a baby. Hence we have all these characters struggling in their own ways but also supporting each other to overcome their fears and prejudices in order to find love in their lives.

Have any audiences said you might somehow be reinforcing stereotypes? For example, there is the white Afrikaner who is clearly quite unreformed post-Apartheid, and the preacher who is not particularly demonstrating the values one would hope for from a man of God.

It's not entirely stereotypical. Each of the characters, regardless of their race, says or does something that has made people in the audience sit up and take note. People are reminded that they still carry with them prejudices or judgments that are no longer acceptable. Yes, Stephen is unreformed—but Morne, the vet, is also an Afrikaner, and he is shown as a very compassionate and open-minded person.

We were attempting, I think, to break preconceptions. Whites in the audience are challenged to think differently about their domestic maid, for example. She might have the potential to do something more with her life. We are showing Muslim characters who are just regular people with regular concerns, not fanatics or somehow dangerous, but trying to conceive a child. And look at the way that Lindiwe's mother shuns Jean Claude, who is a refugee from the Congo. This highlights the racism and tribalism even among the black people. Today the refugees in Cape Town are living in Muslim areas. They wouldn't last five minutes in the black townships where they would be scorned or accused of spreading AIDS it's just too dangerous and difficult for them.

Thus we showed racism being not just a white-black issue. Each of these characters starts off the film with his or her problems and challenges, and most of them end the film with some hope and love in their lives. It's really a film about the fact that love takes many forms while having an effect on all life. That is why we called it Cape of Good Hope. We wanted to create something that left people feeling hopeful and good about the future of South Africa. At one level it's a romantic drama, and that's why audiences have gone to see it or have rented the DVD. But the message is in there. And when you are doing something with a message you have to consider carefully the best way to do it.

The film is very effective in its use of unknown, mainly South African, actors. Did you ever consider that using more well-known actors might enable it to reach a wider audience?

We wanted to use an entirely South African cast and crew to give it an authentic feeling and to give something back to the country that it could be proud about. Look at previous films about South Africa—Cry Freedom had Denzel Washington as Biko; Cry, the Beloved Country had James Earl Jones; the TV movie Mandela and de Klerk had Sidney Poitier and Michael Caine. We wanted to make something that was empower- [Page 11]

FILMMAKING WITH A CONSCIENCE

ing for South Africa and South Africans, as opposed to the Hollywood studio system where you have to have the big names to sell the movie. And our co-producers were excited about doing a film like this. We had a lot of things donated to the production and huge support locally.

Everyone can name a film with a conscience that has moved them or opened their eyes in some way, be it Schindler's List or The Killing Fields. Do you think film, perhaps of all art forms, has the power to really make a difference in how people perceive the world?

I think films can subtly change people's perceptions. We know from the responses we have received that Cape of Good Hope does make people look at their neighbors of different races in different ways. One thing that interests me is the emergence of social responsibility in people's professions and in industry. Some corporations have begun appointing ethical departments to make sure what they are doing does not wreck economies or ride roughshod over things that are culturally important to people. Military strategists these days operate with a view to preventing civilian casualties as much as they can. Hence there is a phenomenon of social responsibility coming into many fields of human endeavor.

When it comes to filmmakers, however, they seem to consider themselves exempt from social responsibility. Thus many of what we might call "establishment" movies quite casually show things that are irresponsible-such as the degradation of women, drug use, a glamorous gangster lifestyle. . . . It is strange that filmmakers who are generally quite progressive politically, environmentally, and socially-they are producing work that is socially destructive. Somehow they think they are beyond accountability.

Personally, I am inspired by films where the humanity comes through. I greatly admire the work of Paul Thomas Anderson, the director or Magnolia. This film has incredible humanity. Even his Boogie Nights, which is ostensibly about the California pornography industry in the 1970s and 1980s, is a morality tale. There's a message in it-that it's all "fun and games" until somebody gets hurt.

For me, how we tell a story is what's important-stories that are going to find an audience but carry some degree of conscience and responsibility.

As Bahá’ís in particular, then, do you think you have a responsibility to always make films that have a message or somehow communicate something profound to the audience?

get me I love every kind of movie, don't wrong, and there's room for all of it- not all films have to have a weighty message. But at the same time, I don't think the role for Bahá’í artists is to avoid crucial issues or to be "nicey-nicey." Not naïve either. Rather, it's about being optimistic. We want to give audiences energy to contribute something for the betterment of society. Hence I feel the result of our work has to be for the good of humankind.

Cape of Good Hope is a story of hope in which our characters slowly move from a bad place to a place where they find some hope. In the new feature film on which we are working, there is a spiritual principle at the heart of it, probably more central than even the message in the last one. But to say any more than that at this stage would be giving too much away. [Page 12]

ALBINO CARRILLO

Guadalupe rises from the sand to survey his beginnings

Now from under the certain grace of two stars I, Guadalupe, born my mother's little man Come round again to seal and insinuate myself Into the broad spectrum of life begun for me By my parents, those raptured two who spent The night wrapped in hotel room comforters Watching the war begin: as in most cities, there was A road that skirts the edge of their little island, a road That'll take you to the freeways and yearnings of America. As for my parents, I know a bit of their wanderings The day before: a glide past an abandoned hotel on Beale, and finally, Elvis' DC-8 drenched in summer sun. I was there only to whisper in your ear about what my brothers And sisters knew in their clear Midwestern daylight- I touched each sleeping sibling as if dreaming of a stream of light that leapt from heart to shoulder. That moment when prophecy wrecked any hope Of scrubbing my doped brain free of sin I covered Myself with the thin, thin blanket and left the beach. Hand over hand I climbed the cliffs of the dead city like I'd climbed the tumbling rocky beach watching for rattlers on the way up: in the scrub-oak my wildness left me for good. I was making prayers From the rain and the clouds. Before I drifted from the shore, I cut my name and story into the sandstone like The Spaniards did at El Morro. My heart rose with the wet air swimming in from the South. I had one last chance to see my City of the Dead, a possibility of hope beyond hydrogen: then I found myself Pulling shells from the thick mud of Middle America-realized then that I was dreaming, a male Aphrodite groomed in the solace Apollo felt when renaming himself Salaam Pax for a new century to interpret. And all about me curled the streams of gray Mississippi spray rising in the morning sun.

-ALBINO CARRILLO

Copyright 2008 by Albino Carrillo.

ALBINO CARRILLO holds a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of New Mexico and a Master of Fine Arts from Arizona State University. He teaches poetry at the University of Dayton in Dayton, Ohio. [Page 13]

The Root of All Trees

There is this Root of All Trees, Resonant Free, Ultimate Dream, Connector and Word- That Great Thou Who unfolds us, delivers us of our faults, polishes the stone, longingly holds us, applies us to our dreams and tenderly brings us home. We build His New World as may be our prayer and see that horizon even now. -MICHAEL FITZGERALD

Copyright © 2008 by Michael Fitzgerald.

MICHAEL FITZGERALD has published fifteen volumes of poetry, nonfiction, and children's literature and has won several awards.

Death Grip

Life is a process an endless trek of never arriving till the foretold is extended beyond our capacity to comprehend confined and clutched in the mulish reins of reason's no return policy -BARBARA DARR

Copyright 2008 by Barbara Darr.

BARBARA DARR, who for many years owned her own business designing home decor in New York City, continues to design and write for her own enjoyment.

[Page 15]

In Deep Defeat by Ever Greater Things: A Canadian Artist in Salvador, Brazil

The following text is based on two entries from the travel journal that I recorded during my 2005 trip to Salvador, Brazil, a city whose 2.9 million inhabitants make it the country's third largest, after São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. Because more than 83 percent of Salvador's population is of African origin, it is also considered one of the largest black cities in the world. The text takes the form of travel literature, a genre of literary nonfiction that combines narrative storytelling with insights into foreign cultures and into the values and pre-occupations of the visitors doing the writing. As is the case here, the author is often the main character, reflecting on his or her own experiences with new people and places.

Travel literature first appeared in the Middle Ages, when literate societies began to take pleasure in stories brought home from the expanding known world. The early travel writer best known to Western audiences is Marco Polo, who penned a widely read record of late thirteenth-century lands from the Mediterranean to China. The citizens of Song China (960-1279) also used travel literature to familiarize themselves with the far-flung corners of their own State, and in the fourteenth century the Sultan of Morocco had voyager Ibn Battuta dictate the story of his adventures throughout the Muslim world. During the Ages of Exploration and Colonization the diaries of explorers became an ancillary to imperial expansion and were eagerly consumed by officials and the public alike. The gaze of the British Empire, for example, was extended until the eve of World War II by writers such as Robert Byron (Central Asia) and Rebecca West (Yugoslavia). In the modern United States, travel literature by John Steinbeck, Jack Kerouac, and others has helped forge a unifying narrative about the nation. Colorful descriptions of little-known

Copyright 2008 by Nathaniel Vyklicky.

NATHANIEL VYKLICKY holds a B.A. degree in modern languages and translation from McGill University in Montreal. He lived in Brazil in 2001, 2003, and 2005, where he participated in Bahá’í-led development projects with urban youth and the homeless. He has also worked with communities in Japan, Haiti, Indonesia, and Barbados. He is now pursuing a graduate degree at the London School of Economics. [Page 16]locales are now as popular as ever, as are books that place fresh twists on familiar places. Many writers also tackle contemporary issues related to the individual's place in the flattened world.

As a privileged, white North American male, I have taken a special interest in the divide between the international "traveling class" and the people in poorer countries whose lives unfold in a far narrower geographical space than my own and who do not yet have the means to visit my country in return. In particular, I have explored the confrontation between my university education and the power of the mystical perspective that is shared by many of the people with whom I have spent time. My faith in the possibility of communication across different life experiences is informed by a belief in the oneness of humanity, a central tenet of the Bahá’í Faith. Although the primary purpose of my travel has not been religious, in my journals I describe a variety of activities undertaken with local Bahá’ís, which will perhaps be recognizable to readers who have traveled to take part in Bahá’í socioeconomic development projects. I have changed all names.

-NATHAN VYKLICKY

HOW NOT TO BE YOURSELF, IN THREE EASY STEPS

The city of Salvador, Brazil, comes to me in my sleep. When I dream, I'm back there. It is always unreal, always quite the same, a city teetering on the crests of hills, with twisting streets leading to colored churchyards above the sea, crumbling doorways opening onto strange, half-grasped histories, and me unsure about my purpose there: Shouldn't I be at home in Canada? How long is my trip? What am I supposed to be doing? I've had these dreams, off and on, since I first visited Salvador in 2001, and in them I navigate that phantom city with the same familiarity I feel now that I am back in the real Brazil this year—but today was the first time I ever remembered my dream version of Salvador in waking life.

This month I've started painting a series of colonial ruins that have trees growing behind their empty windows. Buildings like these are scattered all over Salvador, behind apartment blocks and above thoroughfares. Before sunrise this morning I filled myself with water so I could scout some out in a new stretch of town. One cobblestone road, snaking up the cliff that fronts the old city center, looked safer than expected in the morning light: farther up, the view over the bay is spectacular, but enjoyed only by cankered prostitutes and their clients in the run-down bars. And yet the base of the road was full of parked middle-class hatchbacks—which I took as a good sign as I nosed my way forward. The rock retaining wall against the mountain was lush with ferns, and directly above that rose a majestic tan structure, a revelation to me. Three tiers of blank windows, foreshortened high above, old scrollwork clinging wherever the walls weren't corroded back to naked brick, and everywhere vines and leaves and flowers, inside and out. I slowly stepped [Page 17]

IN DEEP DEFEAT BY EVER GREATER THINGS

around a sleeping streetwoman to follow a second cobblestone ramp that zigged back up past the building. While I watched the shifting angles of sky through crumpled arches, the branches overhead grew thicker, and the strangler vines grew more tangled until I was standing in front of a great tree-lined waterfall at the very heart of the city, a stone's throw away from the crowded reclaimed tourist squares up top, in a place I'd never seen or imagined might exist.

A black man, about my age, was watching me as he washed his clothes in the pool. We were alone except for the streetwoman, and he told me it was dangerous there. I was carrying a backpack of painting supplies, a plastic stool, and ten reais to get me home. I poked my head around one last corner and said it was a shame that the most beautiful places had to be the most dangerous. As I turned back down the hill, he stepped closer and asked for a real to get something to eat. Normally I tell people I "don't have the conditions" to help, which has the virtue of being simultaneously vague, firm, and a good streetwise expression that shows I know the language. This time I didn't want to leave the guy in any doubt-I lied and said all I had were my paints. He then asked me what time it was; I said I didn't have a watch, to which he asked what the cell-phone shaped bulge was in my pocket. I frowned and slipped it out just enough to read the time. He asked to hold it. I said I wasn't asking to hold his stuff, and by this time I was at the hatchbacks again, and he backed away, back up to his waterfall.

1. The Brazilian currency is the real (plural: reais). It is worth just over US$ 0.50. [Page 18]

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For the rest of the morning I sketched from that point of relative safety at the base of the cliff, getting to know the locals as they passed by. I'm coming to understand the transformative power in my paintings-people approach me with evil in their eyes but break into a smile the second they see the art I make. The guy came down and paid me another visit about an hour later, this time with a few scarred, tattooed friends. Out came my latest work, and suddenly one of them, Júlio, was happily swearing about the gift I had and asking me to draw his son for him. Drawing sons is easy.

A middle-aged woman, Laura, came over from the nearby bar where she works and asked to be drawn, and I said okay. I sat down inside the bar at a metal folding table and sketched her in pen. She laughed and said I made her look like a man. A light rain started to fall, and while I waited it out, I drew the woman behind the bar too and Marivalda said the same thing, that I made her look like a man, and I apologized profusely. She smiled and said it was fine, that I just didn't understand what was happening... What? What was happening? She asked what I knew about Candomblé, the African religion here. I said, "Only a little." She indulged me and said everybody has a bit of man in them, that it was the "Indian"- a male spirit who can descend and manifest himself in women-that I'd seen and drawn. I've seen the Indian take over women's spirits here and make them talk in a croaking voice and smoke a pipe, but I do not know what the experience is from within. Marivalda is a kind woman, and instead of putting a wall between us, she simply said, "Sleep on it, and you'll understand."

And so I'm told to return to my dream Brazil to understand this place. Everyone who comes here is confronted, at some point, by the unreality of the waking Salvador, as if, just here, just this once, our dream life might be the more true of the two: the tension is palpable. Anisa, a Swiss psychology student living at my house, [Page 19]says she feels like the whole place suffers from a psychological disorder. She met a student from Côte d'Ivoire yesterday who tried to explain the feeling by claiming the city clings to an Africa that doesn't exist. If the prism I see the world through is writing, I'm reminded of the first Portuguese story I read about this town, back in 2001. Jorge Amado was Salvador's great populist writer, a ribald communist whose novella The Death and the Death of Quincas Berra d'Agua told the story of an erstwhile accountant who one day, without warning, disappeared from his home, merrily landing among the whores, voodoo herbs, and lowlifes on those cobblestone ramps. When his upper-crust family hears he's died, they snatch his body back to lie in state, as if his humiliating fall had never happened. But-his drinking buddies come to pay their respects, and they suddenly see it's all one big joke. He's pretending to be dead, just for kicks, and they grab his limp grinning body and go out for a night on the town. This is the mental juggling that the dream-Salvador celebrates in its inhabitants: to be happy, they're asked to believe that people can be living and dead all at once and that in degenerate, rum-soaked death they might be more alive than others were (are? or will be?) in life.

How Not to Be Yourself: Step 1

Through a trick of grammar, even the language here tells, you that you aren't yourself. The Portuguese for "It's not me who understands" is "Não sou eu que entendo": in other words, any time you want to say "It's not me," you have to say, "Não sou eu," or, literally, "I am not myself." The effect that this construction must have on the nation's collective psyche. it boggles the mind. (Conversely, when someone calls asking for Nathan, and you want to say "Speaking," you say, "Sou eu," or, literally, "I am myself." Which would be reassuring if these constant mixed messages didn't give you such a headache right between your eyes.)

During my first two weeks here in January 2005, while my head was even more aswim, my parents came to find out what their son's other life was like. One evening on our way back from night-swimming at the local beach, they were walking so far ahead that I had to call them back to join the group: Sueli, who is the head of the household where I live and a leading light in the Brazilian Bahá’í community,² had noticed some piles of ribbons and hard-boiled eggs that I wanted my parents to see.

The hill we live on is surrounded on three sides by the sea, and on top of it stand a beautiful old church built by slaves, on the one side, and, on the other, a Franciscan hospital fronted by manicured gardens and high, spiky gates. It is one of the most sacred points of land in the city, holy to Catholics and believers in Candomblé alike. One of the latter had left an offering outside the hospital gates, which Sueli was busy interpreting. On the left, at the intersection between two of the walls

2. ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, the appointed successor of Bahá’u’lláh, the Founder of the Bahá’í Faith, in 1916 and 1917 urged the Bahá’ís to visit the Brazilian city of Salvador, formerly known as Bahia. In 1919, in response to ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s urging, Martha Root, a journalist and a world traveler, was the first Bahá’í to [Page 20]surrounding the hospital, lay a scattering of sugarcane shavings and plastic bags in the outline of a human being, with a dead black chicken deposited at the head. A black chicken means death, but then Sueli noticed the glass in one of the effigy's hands, and she realized it must have been made on behalf of an alcoholic interned behind the hospital gates. To the right, at the roots of a tree, lay clay plates and a shapeless heap of red ribbons and roses, with white popcorn and eggs-colors directing the supplication specifically to Iansã, the Lady of Storms, who was no doubt the ruler of the alcoholic's head, and with whom he needed to make peace in order to be healed.

My parents shook their heads, saying when they'd walked by, they'd wondered why people would dump trash so carelessly in such a lovely place--and were amazed at how the meaning of their surroundings could shift from under them so utterly and so fast. Candomblé offerings are called ebós, after the Yoruba word shipped in hundreds of years ago from Nigeria, spoken today by believers all down the hillside to the sea. By morning the Franciscans had made sure no trace was left of their blasphemous gifts.

How Not to Be Yourself: Step 2

Time is out of joint. After my parents left, I spent the month of February 2005 finishing the script to the graphic novel I'm writing, and, necessarily, drifting down to the ocean to doubt whether I shouldn't be doing something else with myself instead. From the loopholes in the whitewashed walls of the seventeenth-century fort above the beach, you look down on young women in scanty bikinis and skin in countless casual shades of brown, who in turn look down with frank interest on believers casting flowers into the waves for Iemanjá, Lady of the Sea. The business district spreading out from the base of the cliff downtown must have been an elegant Europhile dream at the turn of the last century, but the seething city that ballooned out around it has orphaned the delicate rococo center, and until very recently I'd seen it as a purely sinister place, block after block of cement eagle ornaments, peeling paint and caved-in roofs, by day usurped by bankers and reclaimed by crack fiends at night.

But when I sketched at the base of the cobblestone ramp leading up the cliff, I heard 1930s jazz coming from a record store at a lively street corner there, and it seemed so in tune with its surroundings, making such hopeful sense of the passage of time, that I felt the shopkeeper at least must be a happy man. On every grassy slope from the downtown core to the beach near my home, horses and goats are tethered in the evening light-and while it can't be said in good conscience that any place has been frozen in the past, Salvador does give you the impression that you yourself have been slowed down so that the past has caught up with you instead.

visit Brazil, including Salvador among the eight cities on her itinerary. In 1921 Leonora Holsapple (later Armstrong) was the first Bahá’í to settle in Brazil, where she remained for almost sixty years. She lived in Salvador between 1923 and 1938 before moving to other cities in Brazil. In 1980 she died in Salvador and is buried there. The Brazilian Bahá’í website now reports some 47,000 adherents in the country. [Page 21]

IN DEEP DEFEAT BY EVER GREATER THINGS

A few years ago, Sueli dreamed she was walking down to a river, perhaps the one where her family caught fish and freshwater shrimp to sell by a country road when she was a child. An immense serpent ordered her to look into the water, and at the bottom she saw a pile of cracked clay ebó plates. When the serpent told her she had to wash them, she woke up shaken. Her dad had been a Candomblé priest- a Father of the Saints-and among her first memories were the weeklong live-in cures that he performed for the community. Life takes strange turns, though, and in Brazil, where everyone from the President's father on down runs off to start new families, the strange turn is very often a broken home.

Sueli's dad left home with a young woman who had been training as his acolyte, and suddenly Sueli's life, which had been one of a twelve-year-old girl who was terrorized at school for her shabby clothes and who spent her time at home slipping from the clutches of a boarder who'd killed his wife, turned truly nightmarish: her mother went after the vagabond dad, and they all ended up coming to the big city to squat in his mother's house, along with him and his girlfriend. Sueli's mother grew steadily more violent with her children, sending the girls off to live as maids in unsafe homes and trying to abandon Sueli to her own devices.

The only reason Sueli didn't end up doing away with herself in the midst of it all was because one day she looked up and saw a strange word-"Bahá’í"-written on a building by a well she was about to throw herself down, and she went inside. Sueli became a leader, founding day cares for single working mothers in the slums, receiving awards from the city, and helping people the length and breadth of the dry Brazilian northeast fueled by a strength of character I can barely begin to fathom ... Her dad, who, she says, was a smart man, who had a benighted moral sense but encouraged her to read (just as she says she never stopped loving her mother, who has come to suffer great remorse for the way she treated her kids in those dark days), drifted away from his calling as a Father of the Saints and died some years ago without having prepared his passing over.

When the serpent told Sueli to wash the plates on the river bottom, she understood it wanted her to perform the rites her father had left undone and so put his soul at ease. She hasn't had much time, what with expending every ounce of energy for the Bahá’í Faith, but in the back of her head it preoccupies her. The few times she's brought the subject up with Fathers or Mothers of the Saints, these either have told her a family member would die every year until the rituals were performed, or they have backed away from the awesome energy they sensed inside her.

How Not to Be Yourself: Step 3

The omnipresent Atlantic Ocean disconnects you from yourself. On your first day plunging back into the high waves-which are home to surfer boys in Salvador and further north, and whose first downswell you wait for expectantly, to be pushed and lifted and drawn under in slaphappy union with the water-the sea gives you a blistering sunburn and a gift. During my visit in 2003 it was the sight of flying fish jumping across the face of a rolling wall of water. Now, in 2005, [Page 22]it was local kids clasping ink-black sea turtle hatchlings in their hands. On cloudy days the ripples are an opaque slaty grey, but when the sun slips out, the chin-level water all around you comes to blinding life, each oncoming wave is suddenly translucent through to the blue sky beyond, and bright white blazes dance across its surface. If you look down into that living sunlit water, your body is in a different world from your head, bathed in swirls of bubbles and with schools of fish glinting between your feet.

FOOD FOR THE CRACK ADDICT'S SOUL

The more you get to know anything at all in this world, the lovelier it becomes- and simultaneously, the more horrifying. In March 2005 I spent a week painting that ruin at the base of the cobblestone ramp, each day getting to know the community there a bit better. One afternoon a passing prostitute asked if I'd heard the latest: the night before, the military police had killed a man named Fred up by the waterfall behind the ruin. A co-worker of hers came by, and she repeated the story. "Fred? The guy who owed me three bucks?" That was the man.

I hadn't been back to the waterfall since my first day-in my mind it stayed beautiful, unsafe, curled up out of sight. But the next day a Brazilian friend wanted to see the place, and a local guy I'd drawn took us up for another look. The waterfall was there, as before, a silent retreat of wild jungle where by rights there should have been none: I was able to look directly into the pool this time, and right where I'd seen the man washing his clothes, it was swimming with countless rainbow-colored fish, tiny and thumb-sized, filling it restlessly to the brim. Did people eat them, sell them? Apparently not-they just lived there in that water on the hill, generation after generation, untouched. And then you turn around, and behind you on stone steps leading farther up are bright brown smears of blood, still there, of a man named Fred, whom you didn't know. . . and you ask yourself, what is this place.

To get home from my painting spot, I'd head back down the hill and cut through a side street to Cayrú Square, where a freestanding, twelve-story public elevator joins the upper and lower cities on the landward side, and against the sea is the block-wide colonial market building, whose basement is a half-lit memorial to the slaves who were storehoused there, in the damp, until the slave trade was abolished in 1851. Under the shade of the elevator today are seedy bars buzzing with secret street slang, which the milling tourists hurry past on their way to the batteries of stalls now at the market, to buy handicrafts and get their cameras stolen. Through the middle of it all runs a trunk road, where the bus stop will take you anywhere in the city and is busy at all times of day or night: university students, subsistence shrimpers, people high and low on either side of the tourist trade. As a hurrying tourist myself, I was used to making a beeline to the bus stop and home, only once ever having entered into any of those bars, on a late night in particularly dire need of a toilet, and never glancing at the homeless people lying on boxboard under the spreading trees. [Page 23]

IN DEEP DEFEAT BY EVER GREATER THINGS

After my second day in the neighborhood in March, I heard my name from one of the homeless men, which stopped me short. I looked, consciously: it was the young guy who'd asked me to draw his son the day before, and he was grinning broadly from the ground. My eyes flicked across the busy late-afternoon street life as I realized, improbably, that I knew his name, too. "How you doing, Júlio." He was all hospitality, wanted me to hang back and talk about his family. Before I knew it, he'd taken my plastic painting stool for himself and was beckoning me to sit in front of him on one of the concrete retainers around the base of the trees. [Page 24]

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A woman who'd been lying beside him muttered, "Mess with this kid and I'll kill you, Júlio." Júlio talked, eagerly, with little prompting from me. He was from an outlying cliff-top neighborhood I'd gotten to know and like on my first trip to Salvador in 2001, via a Swede who'd been working to help with the leprosy there. Júlio had been on the street for four months, was eating morning and night. ... it was better than the seven months he'd spent in jail, where he'd learned to shut his face up cold, like so. But as to why he was here today-his eyes flashed and his voice darkened when he described the "disgrace" he'd shot dead, who'd deserved it. I was looking hard at the furious man sitting on my stool. Júlio was just a few months shy of my own age, the whole right side of his face a sickle-shaped scar, and there were gunshot wounds to show me, too. No, I said, I didn't have the pen and ink on me to do any portraits today--but I'd bring them the day after next, after Sueli and I went to go check out a rehab clinic for a crack addict we knew. He said: "Aw, you're not coming back." I shot over my shoulder as I left with my things: "Júlio, we don't trust each other yet. I'll be back on Monday." He said he'd buy the paper for his portrait.

Taking the bus back to the square on Monday, I mulled over what I was about to do. I had my pen and ink with me, but I wasn't sure about drawing this murderer. I'd be able to take in the scene from the crowd before committing. He turned out to be sitting around with his friends, men and women, under the same tree where I'd left him, and somehow it looked okay- and the smile on his face was genuine when he saw me. No, he hadn't bought the paper, of course, but he ran off promising to be back with it in five minutes.

Meanwhile I teased a worn-down woman who said she was in no shape to be drawn that day; I said she was looking just fine, way better than any of the guys there. Júlio came back with a roll of poster board, and sat down on a tree retainer with his friend Zito. Pencil first, get the eyes to look alive, the features more or less in order, then layer on smooth ribbons of wet black India ink: sideburns, pectorals, tattoos. The work of twenty minutes for the two of them, big-and Júlio's eyes danced when he saw himself, and Zito groggily came back to life. Everyone who lived there came up to watch, Pedrinho, Vitória, Carlos, Délia, Cleverton, Leo, all of them shaking my hand or telling me I shouldn't waste my time on bums, I should set up in the upper city where the money is. I shook my head, promised to drop by the next day and do some more.

The bus ride home from there takes half an hour, enough time to heave my stool and paper folder through our front door in total darkness. I asked Sueli if she'd come [Page 25]

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by the square the next day to meet with Júlio-I'd built some friendships, maybe, but in doing so I'd reached the outer limits of my experience, and now that I might be poised to make a difference in any of their lives, Sueli was the only person I knew to turn to. What would she do?

The next Tuesday I introduced Sueli to Júlio as "good people" and then hung back and watched their conversation unfold. She sashayed along beside him in one of her long hippie dresses, she admonished, she needled, she leveled her whole charisma at gaining his filial respect. The work of twenty minutes.

That afternoon Júlio took us further up the cobblestone ramp than I'd felt able to go alone, to a house carved into the side of the mountain, where I drew Maria, the big-eyed, androgynous matriarch, and her coterie of young men lolling around on the street front. Sueli watched with pleasure as that door opened up too, and I was happy to have her judgment on hand as she accepted their invitation to come inside the house for a visit. It was two stories inside solid rock, who knows how many years old. When they'd moved in, they said, there'd been shackles strewn around the dusty floor. The steps leading upstairs would have been near-vertical concrete in a tight, lightless stairwell, but they'd decayed away to the point where we had to grope our way up on the remaining stubs of rebar. Later one of the neighbor boys would tell me these houses are also home to "crab spiders," tarantulas that can be caught and nursed to the size of dinner plates, to be sold to unconscionably morbid scientific institutions. We came out into the upper living area-under its curved ceiling was a TV burbling an afternoon novella, birds chirping in cages, dressers, hot plates, marijuana fumes, a whole whirring life. I think Maria must like showing off her place.

Sueli arranged to come back the next night-Wednesday-to start a weekly meeting with the homeless people living down below, to say some prayers and talk things through, starting with self-esteem. With Júlio and Maria in particular, I was to start a study course looking at the moral basis for the decisions we make and to discuss the direction we want our lives to take. We scheduled our first session to fall during an upcoming conference for the black community, which the Bahá’ís were holding on the other end of town. To Sueli, this was an opportunity for them to change their surroundings, see people thinking and celebrating, walk in quiet orchards instead of down a downtown drag. This all made sense to me. I was grateful and looking forward to what might come of it all-but when Sueli told them that we wouldn't pick them up, that they'd have to make their own change and take their own buses for an hour and a half, I bit my lip. With drug-addled lives like the ones [Page 26]they were leading? No way. They'd never come on their own steam. Sueli insisted they had to give us some concrete proof they wanted to leave that place. They were earnestly nodding their heads, saying they'd make it, Júlio writing down directions so he could take Maria, who couldn't read. Júlio bought us each a soursop fruit as a gift-Sueli ate most of mine; they look like artichokes filled with sweet mucus. We spent the conference weekend waiting. They didn't show. I crossed my arms; Sueli said how great it would have been if they had, in fact, come on their own. We made our way back to the square the next Wednesday, ready to hear their excuses and regroup. As it happened, Júlio was in no condition to defend himself. The night before the conference, Zito and Pedrinho had found him on a back street in a coma, bleeding from a gunshot wound to the back, and bundled him over to the general hospital. By now, the stories making the rounds were that he was either transferred to detention for his crimes-or dead.

Sueli and I have been paying Júlio near-weekly visits ever since. He's alive: paralyzed from the waist down, peeing down a catheter, handcuffed to the frame of a bed in a crowded ward marked "Orthotrauma." Sueli has history with this hospital: the loved one she took there years ago died with his drug-related bullet wounds untreated. She talks repentance with Júlio, who has his ups and downs with the thought that he has a detention cell in his future and will never walk again. We've met his too-young mother, who blankly refuses to believe her son's ever done anything wrong and wants a lawyer she can't get, and his son, who's a feral little creature who runs away with cookies. His street friends ask after him, and we ferry messages back and forth. One man who won't be running around with guns anymore.

So the weekly meetings with the homeless downtown are a going concern. Sueli and I, and sometimes another fearless young woman from one of the rough ends of town, we get there at night, when the handicraft booths are locked up and the square is a dark gridded maze of empty awnings. Out from under each one come sleepy-eyed occupants, who sometimes fetch us chairs, sometimes sit in a circle on the ground. We say prayers, which they're eager for, talk about life, try to understand what to do. The vast majority of them can read, and although most of them are deep into drugs, more of them seem to be lying low from the law, for various half-stated reasons, rather than simply down and out. Some have come from as far as the Argentine border.

Early on, Sueli gave bus fare to Cleverton for him to head home, and we gave Danilo a lift to his hometown on our way north to help set up a day care in a former escaped-slave community. . . . Within weeks, both guys were back in the square. Sueli fumed. They sheepishly apologized. She latched onto one pregnant woman who'd spent seven years in jail for what she called self-defense. Sueli made invitation after invitation and was devastated when she heard the woman had forced a miscarriage. I've been trying to turn to people who know the field, friends who distribute needles, women who've gone on to work with the Landless Movement in the interior, or the white-haired night guard who has the neighborhood's respect. In return, I've been learning about the inside politics of local detox centers, hearing that the people [Page 27]

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in the square need to learn to fight less, and, above all, being told: Be patient. Build relationships, and courses of action will become clear.

There's a mean streak in American writing, which I've heard described as "gangsterism"—as in, a nation founded on land grabs and self-made men is necessarily slow to condemn the guy with the gun. North Americans lap up the underbelly of just about anything, from caper flicks and CSI: Miami to tell-alls about the marginal and dispossessed. But try to be a humanist for just one second, and you get a sinking feeling that there isn't much more ghoulish than making a popcorn thriller out of young Brazilian lives destroyed by drugs.

This religion of mine, which I hold so high in esteem, tells me always to cast people in the best possible light, because speaking ill of others blackens your soul for a hundred years. Cohesive Society 101. But with the suffering here around us all ... we can't just meet that with an equally deafening silence.

One April night, after trying to get my paintings scanned downtown, I passed by the square and ran into Pedrinho, one of the guys who'd come to Júlio's help after he'd been shot. Pedrinho doesn't pray, but he shakes my hand like he means it, and he is looking bummed out. His woman, Vitória, whom he'd asked me to draw, and who later on had offered me some kind of dripping stewed meat that they were sharing, she'd lost it on him, demanded half the money from the shopping cart they'd bought to collect trash together and took off. He said he'd given her the money without a complaint, and he kept asking if I thought he'd done the right thing, as he went over and over their relationship.

She'd collapsed in a bloodied heap one day by the church steps where he slept, and he'd fetched a wet cloth from a nearby bar to wipe her face. From then on they'd been a good-looking item, through good times and bad—because she became a different person when she smoked crack, and now she was saying he'd thrown her to the ground in front of the city elevator, but it was a lie! And how was he going to spend the night alone. Vitória walked past drunk, holding for some reason a big carved wooden bird, and I talked between them both for a while. Once she wandered off again Pedrinho started fessing up. He'd used their money for crack, too; it's true he'd lost his temper. Lord, what do you say? Crack blots out people's character; I could expect as little from him in that state as he ought to have from her. I ended the conversation by clapping him with a hug, and it looked like he was taking things better. [Page 28]

NATHANIEL VYKLICKY

In his poem "Der Schauende," Rilke says we're all born losers. . . what matters isn't the size of our victories, but the size of the adversary we'll all inevitably succumb to. (The poem ends, "Sein Wachstum ist: der Tiefbesiegte / von immer Größerem zu sein," which I've never seen a good translation of. Something like, "Your growth is this: in deep defeat / By ever greater things.") Júlio, for his part, has retained his conquering gaze: The last time we went to visit him at the hospital, we ran into two pretty sisters who'd come in from out of town to fawn over their new paraplegic crush. If these stories are to mean anything beyond gangsterism, it has to be that they'll make us question the size of our own chosen battles, doesn't it? Doesn't it have to? I leave it in your capable hands. . . Me, I just got $500 and my only bankcard conned off me by an operation using fake bank machine slots at one of the ritziest malls in town.

Afterword, 2008

Hospital records show that Júlio's mother took him home. Maria's home was invaded in a drug bust, and she has not been heard from since. On my last day in Salvador, I passed through Cayrú Square at first light and ran into the woman who had forced the miscarriage. She gave me a sprig of rue-herb to tuck behind my ear as a ward against ill-wishers, and I gave her five reais (a good third of the money I had left on me, thanks to my stolen bankcard) before I headed up the cobblestone ramp to give a copy of a painting to Marivalda at her bar. Marivalda said she was falling on hard times, and I gave her the rue-herb as well, which she happily placed behind her ear. A morning drinker said to me, "You look like a tourist, but you're not a tourist, are you," and his drinking companion gave me two tangerines for my breakfast. [Page 29]

Cargo

JUNE PERKINS

Bubu wanted a motorboat & a life in Australia. But life was waiting for parcels that never arrived With photographs of absent grandchildren. Bubu’s daughter looked for her mother, In the blackberry pie baking neighbour Her children, called Aunty A woman with only one son who never gave her grandchildren & put her in a nursing home. Bubu’s granddaughter cared for Aunty Tried to remember her other aunties. Looking over a form her son had brought home "Non-English speaking background survey" She considered her mother’s offer to come share culture At the local school Sent photographs that always arrived.

-JUNE PERKINS

Copyright 2008 by June Perkins.

JUNE PERKINS holds a doctorate in indigenous literature from the University of Sydney, Australia. She is a freelance writer and digital storyteller.

[Page 31]

in Gloria's garden

our Honduran relatives have told us to meet them at the air-conditioned restaurant just after the long bridge in Rio Dulce. the river opens into a delta full of sunshine and Caribbean Sea, palm trees and sailboats, and as we leave the bus, the cute Guatemalan girl who is the conductor grabs my twelve-year old son, and to his horror, gives him a kiss. "muy guapo," she says. he blushes and wipes off the kiss. in the restaurant, we drink from large, hand-blown thick glass goblets, fresh-squeezed orange juice sweetened with sugared water and ice. iced tea, with the bag in the glass, and sugar and lemon, ice and more ice, as well. our dollar goes a long way. we order chocolate cake and are brought frozen Sara Lee Deep Double Delicious. it is, in fact, delicious. we are cool by the time the truck arrives with the men. Gloria's husband has bought her the car. she lends it to us since she cannot yet drive. its motor struggles in first gear. the front wheel, driver's side, almost falls off and my sister's husband, his nephews, and our family run up and down Guatemalan highways searching for lugnuts. we find one so the men borrow an extra from each of the other wheels. the rest of the journey has an element of the tentative. Precarious. the Honduran border official is gay, a mariposa. Butterfly, his eye-makeup is done exquisitely. he is friendly and welcoming to Canadians. at the hotel, just over the Honduran border, we eat and sleep and walk in sand. the children bathe in the ocean in the early morning, ships pass from far-away lands, and the television under the palm trees of the hotelkeepers blares a Spanish evangelist. at breakfast in Puerto Cortes, we eat beans, omelettes, pastries, and chorizos, little sausages.

HEATHER NABLO CARDIN received her M.A. degree in 2005 from Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada, after teaching high school for twenty years. She is currently teaching at a private school in Summerland, British Columbia. Cardin has published Partners in Spirit: What Couples Say About Marriages that Work (Bahá’í Publishing, 2006) and A Warm Place in My Heart: Young Voices on Faith (George Ronald, 2007). Forthcoming from Bahá’í Publishing is "The Bright Glass of the Heart: Elder Voices on Faith." Her poetry has appeared in World Order and in several Canadian literary magazines; she has twice been short-listed for the national CBC Literary Awards for Poetry. "in Gloria's garden" grew out of a 2002 trip in which Cardin and her children visited friends and relatives in Belize, Guatemala, and Honduras, heather.cardin at gmail.com. [Page 32]the road from San Pedro Sula to Tegucigalpa starts hotter than any tropical port ever known, then gradually begins to lift into hills. alongside the road, every few kilometres, a somewhat rickety series of stands, from which to sell, offer the products of the season. august, and the watermelons are in abundance, piled so high they are like green grapes on steroids. people wait patiently beside the stands for the cars and trucks to stop, then smile. they are not over-eager but thankful. they load the fruit for transport somewhere else, take time, chat, or sometimes crack one open and the juice dribbles onto perspiring brown bodies. farther along, and up a little higher, there are bananas, and pineapples, the fruits so sweet that they seem to have been touched by sugarcane juice. soon, a local delicacy, a squash dried in bars and drenched in crystallized nuggets of cane, so sweet, so dulce. the pineapple juice drips from our tongues. there is a lake, Lago of the Savior, high in the mountains, and the vendors hang lines of fresh-caught bass and lake trout for purchase. a series of restaurants, open to the air but with the smell of the fresh catch on the grill, yields to the valley around Siguatepeque. there is a line of stores there, modeled after the Americans', with a big buffet dinner followed by caramel flan, and groceries, sweet blackberries, pastries, organic produce, packaged in plastic. then down through another valley to Comayaguas, evocative of impressionist paintings in memory, all homes, soft and rolling in the increasing dusk. handsome men in the back of the truck, relatives by marriage, are grinning, flexing their muscles. my son imitates them. one yells, "Comó Rambo!" my daughters laugh. Israel, the small one who is twentyish, has a daughter somewhere.

Snapshot: at the side of the road, three Honduran teenage boys, two on a trotting burro, one on a bicycle, ride alongside the highway and shriek with laughter.

the vehicle starts the climb into Tegucigalpa and the drivers are loco. there are two lanes but if you are too slow, the car behind you will zip out into the nonexistent passing lane. the cars almost graze one another like fruit flies spinning around rotting compost. oncoming traffic squeezes over as far as possible to the mountain's edge before the passing vehicle gets back into its own lane, continues the ascent up the mountain. at regular intervals are flower-covered crosses and painted rocks, reminding the wary travelers that these driving tactics are not always successful. all along the road, the Honduran equivalent of billboards: sheer faces of rock, from which the road has been sledgehammered and chipped, advertise with large paintings, "Cafe Maya." "Hotel Paradiso." "Toyota." [Page 33]

IN GLORIA’S GARDEN

then: Tegucigalpa. a city of a million souls, some very rich and some very very poor, still recovering from Hurricane Mitch. our Honduran family told us, after Mitch, that they feared how quickly the world would forget. they describe the bodies, mouths choked with mud, the drowned and bloated ones, trees torn like matchsticks from their roots. Limbs. now, a new section of the city has been built from the aid dollars, not yet occupied, waiting. Waiting. in the city proper, each suburb tucked into a hillside like a still-life painting, with a wannabe-Rio Jesus illuminated and overlooking all of it, just slightly managing to be more visible than the tall sign of the golden arches of McDonald’s in downtown. streets are narrow and some are one way; the airport is dead center of the city and it is miraculous that there are so few accidents flying into the capital. the Escuela Americana, the market, the bus station on a grungy corner, the mall. the only mall. armed guards at every place. photograph the one at the fast food playstation. watch your back.

everywhere, the begging of children. one girl, about eight, has eyelashes so thick that in the rich world she could sell mascara; does she have a mother? she begs, caterpillar-like, and receives a half-eaten ice cream cone from a beneficent tourist leaving Burger King. too full yields to half empty. these urchins are barely covered, but at least it’s warm, in the daytime. they are aggressive, so irritating; the saddest and happiest people in the world. "Dame, dame." Give me, give me. an irritation, a pimple on the face of the city. a country’s shame. people of good heart try to assist them, but there is a ferocity in abandonment that is suspicious of kindness. it is easier to feed a snarling beast than a child of the streets of this city. they will bite the hand of the tourist who feeds them. bees swarm. poor children? a congregation.

the road carries on to Santa Lucia. hills climb into dusk, and the road leans right to a small branch that takes you into a Brigadoon-like dream, a town cut like wedding cake into the side of the hills. here, as a young girl, Abuela Julia walked, down the twelve kilometres to the city, baskets laden with flowers and produce, sold roses and potted plants and chimole, a salad made from finely chopped tomatoes, cucumbers, cilantro, and lime juice, to be piled on slabs of salted beef, on lucky days, or fried tortilla. delicious. then she walked back up, slowly, patiently, arrived home to her eight children. alternative aerobics. the schizophrenic daughter, Dora, inarticulate in her insanity, could still [Page 34]cook and hang wash for her mother, and Abuela would arrive to tortilla and beans and rice, and the folding of the handwashed towels and tee-shirts off the line. the crazy lady daughter lives with her mother and produces a daughter of exquisite beauty and intelligence. Dora gazes at us with a shy smile, incoherent with strangeness. her daughter, too, is shy. on the line, the tee-shirts are all written in English and have the faces and slogans of unknown movie stars or businesses, all except Coke. ubiquitous. Abuela Julia, pregnant at 42, in the mid-60s, tired out just a little and was glad that the bus lines began, however erratically, to work.

Snapshot: she made coffee. literally, she made it. she planted the seedlings, nurtured them into bushes, grew them higher, pruned and coddled, watered and loved them, harvested the bushes, dried the bright beans, roasted the white beans, pounded the beans, ground the dark beans, made the coffee. Abuela Julia's Honduran coffee.

a few streets of Santa Lucia are of pavement. Gloria's house is the large one, at the entry to the town, by the verdant lagoon. the walk through most of the town is on the cobblestones set one by one over three centuries. redrock whitewashed by feet, rain, hooves, vehicles. the whitely luminescent church, built late 1500s, two square spires, stands in the center, half way down the mountain from houses that during the hurricane, slid down the sides of hills like legos falling from the sky. a river of mud carried the lives of families away, and now, you look up and see a new mini-suburban sprawl, three more pink houses of cement perched precariously on those same hills. the woman who lives at the top is a Bahá’í named Jesus, and climbs the angle up, every day. she is 4 foot seven. she says it was sometimes challenging going home during her last pregnancy. from top to bottom, you gaze over the village; the small marketplace, on Sundays full of corn and cabbages, broccoli and tall stems of gladiolas. there are stores for ceramics, small doorways into rooms full of pots and artificial turtles, frogs, butterflies, each one painstakingly hand-painted and sold, in groups of three, for twelve lempiras. a buck for three hours' work, but the family sits and chats and drinks coffee around the table as each slow turtle shell is inoculated first with black paint, then with yellowed tips of head, feet, and tail, a matched set. my son, for fun, paints his green. Gloria's husband comes home and embraces their first grandchild, a boy. across the street, bowls are glazed blue, decorated with sunflowers, and labeled from la tienda ceramica de Santa Lucia.

nurseries; places where the green-thumbed women of Santa Lucia raise every flower. in Gloria's garden, there is a red-satin hibiscus as big as a dinner plate. it makes every other flower look tiny, almost anemic. the bougainvillea spill like water from around the wrought-iron [Page 35]

IN GLORIA'S GARDEN

fences, and the roses bloom, white, yellow, reds, juxtaposed against an incongruous patch of eucalyptus. ceramic painted elves hide amongst the plants, and here and there, a bowl of cacti, different shapes, tastefully arranged, perhaps with a turtle or frog in the ceramic bowl. in a corner, a miracle: an apple tree. its small fruit are as yet inedible. Gloria planted it soon after the infidelity of her husband. somewhere, there is another child.

the villages of Honduras are rendered in broad, clay strokes on the side of two-foot high vessels, pots, vases, rust-colored or painted blue or black, with green trees, a cloud, perhaps a star or a half-moon. rustic clay buildings open to windows cut into the thick clay, fired in ovens like giant cement beehives, wood fires generating a heat that is reminiscent of San Pedro Sula's oven-like temperatures. Coca-Cola company does good business; sugar and water to keep the pottery workers fired up. they smoke cigarettes and turn the earthen clay of Honduras on the wheel, carve drawings and press animals.

Gloria has a little pottery store attached to the house. tourists wander in and browse, there are also traditional cups, bowls, saucers, remnants of a time when Abuela Julia, her mother-in-law, cooked outside on wood fires, the pots blackened with usage and smoke. they don't break, easily, thick with scrubbing and memory. the beans, refried, the carne asada, the taste of lime juice, or rice fried with onion and tomato. tortilla, hot and steaming, never ending. plantains, fried or baked in the skins, busting-open with banana sweetness, or minimos, tiny bananas the size of your little finger, washed down with coffee thick as gravy, sugared. for breakfast, pan dulces. rosquillos, sold from the bakeries on a long string of some rope made from a plant-like material, made from corn flour and sour cheese. break them into your coffee, and they swell up like fingers and the children spoon them into their mouths with delight. sometimes, even, Cheerios. corn is everywhere.

at a roadside stand, on the way to Valle de Angeles, a woman is thrilled because her first customer of the day is a man, a sign of good luck. he buys fritas de helote as fast as she can cook them, for everyone in the truck, loaded with kids and tourists, is hungry for a real breakfast at ten in the Honduran morning.

Snapshot: cut the raw corn off the cob, by the dozen. grind it up. if you don't have a grinder, a blender will work. add a pinch of soda. if you use milky Canadian corn, you will have to add, perhaps, just a bit of flour to the mixture. add a tiny bit of sugar, to taste, and then, an egg to hold it together, each dozen cobs. make little spoonfuls of patties and fry in hot grease, one by one, preferably over wood smoke on a [Page 36]

HEATHER NABLO CARDIN

sunshiny Honduran morning. eat hot if you can, but they are also tasty later, cooled off. meanwhile roast corn cobs on the same fire, and then eat them too, just like that. or, taste otol. the corn is ground so fine it becomes milk, and then sugar is added to the pot and you spoon the drink like a hot sweet milkshake into the waiting mouths of children. then keep driving to Valle de Angeles.

here are rooms full of wood. there are chests, tables, wall-hangings, carved, glazed, painted in the Honduran style. they depict a lifestyle where children do not know the meaning of boredom. palm trees, stone fences, cobbled streets, houses with welcoming doors open are chipped from blocks, made into large cedar or pine chests, into coffee tables for the tourists, in a room as large as a furniture warehouse. lined up in the next room: ceramics, an entire wall of brightly-painted, life-like roosters next to a row of Honduran women, wooden in time with their ceramic baskets on their heads and their hands on pregnant bellies. green dresses, red dresses, yellow dresses. brown faces. bare feet.

there is leather work, pot holders and even some faces carved into masks. wooden masks, grotesque gargoyles of Mayan history. necklaces and shells and beads and even some precious stones. tee-shirts embroidered with the world circled by children of all colours, each one about two inches high and spaced regularly. hammocks, woven meticulously and carefully to hold even the most corpulent. peasant blouses in cottons, with massive embroidered decorations. baby cradles. ceramic plates and cups for your table: in white on black, the shape of lizards, iguanas, geckos. Mayan carvings and small painted wooden picture frames. big cotton bags with Mayan themes. all of the arts and crafts of Honduras are condensed into four blocks of shopping for tourism. credit cards gratefully accepted; all prices in Honduran lempiras.

work of incredible delicacy. woven baskets, large and small. in one section of a large tienda, a wall of painted feathers is framed and sold. each picture is a feather with a typical scene of Honduras. entranced by the one depicting a woman of the country with her ceramic pot held on her head, each painted stroke a wisp of color against the grain of the feather, we buy, for remembrance.

in the fields, poppies grow, California orange and lipstick red, surrounded by the undulating coconut palms. buildings are made of cement block and are built with the curved arches and rounded porches of Latin America.

in our Honduran home, the children swing in the hammock and [Page 37]

IN GLORIA'S GARDEN

overlook the valley of Tegucigalpa, sometimes through the mist of morning, later in the day, through the mist of heat. In evening, the lights are jewels reflecting off the side of mountains.

supper is at Burger King in Tegus. MasterCard feeds thirteen of us for less than fifty bucks. American. to these people, the fine point that we are actually Canadian seems less than significant. Gloria's children are my children's cousins' cousins. sometimes, we just want a hamburger. Snapshot: my son in the back of a truck with his Honduran cousins, joyfully freed from the restrictions of seatbelt laws, and inside the car, jokes of how many elephants can you squeeze in a Volkswagen yield to how many Canadians can you fit into a small red Datsun?

the road to the summer house at Chimbo is uphill, steep. there are stones, fields, a small shop for repairing tires, until you reach another iron. gate which swings open to admit us all. the car makes it up. at auntie's house, in the outdoor kitchen, a barbecue grill covers a fire simmering beans, there is a potato salad and a big jug of apple juice, bizarre luxuries in a country of rice and corn. the ever-present bottle of Coke. sweet water, and our hostess brews tea for us, lemon grass fresh from her garden, while the children laugh and run through a brook running down a slight incline. always, angles and planes, the verandah surrounds the house and is laid in small red tiles, accentuating the beauty of the ceramic tile rooftops and cobblestones. rustic, but not, by any means, primitive, this corner of Honduras is so replete with beauty that we are full before we eat, on the way back a tire flattens; we wait by the highway in the Sunday dusk, two gringa mothers, one pregnant, and ten children.

back at Gloria's, in the evening, the hibiscus flowers close up and fall to the ground. the baby goes to bed after being held almost all day by his fourteen-year old auntie. neither complains. the children watch Spanish Bugs Bunny cartoons but somehow the humor doesn't translate and they quickly go out to play soccer in the sand between the gate and the garden. Tio Tulio arrives from the bus to Tegus, and there is a pot of supper in the kitchen. in the morning, Gloria will send the children for fresh milk and orange juice. one night there is a treat: pizza. on the third morning, the hibiscus blooms are so large the red looks like a candy apple, so shiny and round. Gloria's husband returns. his eyes are liquored, his expression: male. we say goodnight. that next evening, we say goodbye. [Page 38]

HEATHER NABLO CARDIN

the road from Tegucigalpa to Esquipulas takes us over familiar ground, so for the most part it is time for sleep. we branch north, bypassing the crowded city of San Pedro Sula. fields are full. banana plantations are green and each hanging of fruit is swathed in large bags to protect it from marauders and insects. coffee plants grow on impossible hillsides and are reminiscent of Starbucks. corn is high in some places, new and young in others. small children play in dirt in front of roadside houses, and gradually, the road yields to reach the Guatemalan border. our Canadian passports are the gates to each city. in this place, there is a sense of something special, different from the everyday streets lined with hustlers and vendors. here is awe.

the most famous church in Latin America is found in the town of Esquipulas. it is a place of pilgrimage; the Jesus of the church is made of black wood. the town center is a square, lined with royal palms and white cement pathways, more hibiscus, trimmed back from riotous explosions to decorous decorations. there is a fountain, lit, in the center of the square, and the Church, doors wide open, beckons all, tall enough that you have to crane your neck to see the gargoyles at the top. a procession of short women, all in bright clothing of Guatemalan weaving, their babes held close to their bodies in the original cloth of a loom, walk up the short steps to this shelter of Spanish history. colonial remnants, pious faith and devotion. the clicking sound of prayer beads. inside, the dark is lit by hundreds of votive candles, everywhere in the church. pews are made of rich woods, and line the front part of the holy place, where some fifty souls sit and pray. smoke rises high to the balconies and each corner, a center of Gothic art in Latin America. there is an eeriness, mystical and spiritual. people make the sign of the cross, and we leave soon, overwhelmed by piety.

outside, the market is in full swing at eight-thirty p.m. there are religious icons and symbols, tall blue, red, or purple candles of Jesus, pictures taped to the sides. five quetzales; about fifty cents. scarves shot through with gold and silver threads bear the legend: Jesus, Esquipulas, Guatemala. everything is labeled. everything a tourist could want. much is plastic, imported from China.

the hotel is in the downtown district and the complete bathroom within is the size of a handicapped toilet stall. turn on the water on the shower head, just beside the sink and with the toilet against the wall, miracles happen. hot. beds are creaky and the bar down the street is playing Spanish love songs, till three, loudly accompanied by drunken men, singing. at four, quiet, cockroaches scuttle over the tiles and we walk outside and over cobblestones to the bus, continue from Esquipulas to Flores, capital of the Petén. Curvas pelligrosas, say [Page 39]

IN GLORIA'S GARDEN

the signs. dangerous curves. the signs for Copan, yesterday, and Tikal, today, are en route but it is time to go. we have seen ruins. the bus is stopped and four officials enter to search and spray. insect aliens may come from one part of Guatemala to another. a rotten apple is found and thrown into tight plastic. outside, passengers wait and buy orange juice and banana chips, local, or potato chips, imported. at the next border, in Melchor de Menos, the moneychangers are friendly and accept my son's last few coins, trade him for ten Belizean dollars. the closer you get to the States, the easier life gets. home in Belize. the baby turns a year old, my little Honduran-Canadian niece, and we plant a frangipani, pink, in front of her house, to grow with her. there are already many hibiscus plants there; also, jasmine. the walkway from house to house is short, and a green snake slithers across the pathway in the evening, is stepped on but disappears safely into the underbrush. the tropical night falls promptly at six and the cool begins, the drive along the main highway from Guatemala to Belize, to another town named for saints, San Ignacio, and the lights sparkle across the hillsides, cut by three rivers which flood, from time to time. not too far, rising into the mountains, an ecological refuge. the road from our Belizean home to Mountain Pine Ridge is good, now. there is a blight on the pines but the Rio Frio Caves are still there, timeless and eroded from the water of centuries pounding through the rock to leave stalactites like icicles leaning from the rock ceilings, and pools of water dappled green in the dim light, the Five Sisters waterfall pounds over the ledge in the river and picnickers frolic and play in pools. a courting couple hides behind the stream of waters and finds an indentation behind the end of the cascade. it is no Niagara but is cool and beautiful, the baby drinks lime juice from a water bottle. we sunburn, despite precautions. at home again, in the evening, a Honduran man makes Jell-O.

in Gloria's garden time disappeared into a hibiscus the size of a plate, letters were written, children were held, coffee tasted. the lagoon, green and full of interesting creatures, lay somnolent in the Honduran sunshine and the children did not swim. they waited for it to clear, and played games with stones and small objects in the dust. a toad hopped through the yard, and a dragonfly, iridescent, hovered helicopter-like above an invisible minnow. in the house, Gloria heated water and we poured the liquid over our shoulders from the pink baby bath in the shower stall. the soap was strong and sweet, as was the scent from the women who board buses, shouting loudly, "Comida, comida caliente," the Latin American equivalent of a drive-thru. do they have children? [Page 40]

did Gloria cry?

snapshot: three Canadian children with their cousins, in Central America, in the back of a red truck, well-tanned, grinning, surrounded by aunts and uncles and Grandmas and Grandpas, flowers in the girls' hair.

in Gloria's garden, a tree bears small apples, and a hibiscus is in bloom.

somewhere, a Child is begging.

-HEATHER NABLO CARDIN [Page 41]

An American Landscape

I am working on a poem tentatively called "Driving Across America with Mark Tobey" in the backseat wrapped in blankets, not the resurrected artist, but two late monoprints. My friend is doing this as I write. There is nothing in either painting that is not a particular line leading past wheat and alfalfa fields, silos, wind-barrier poplars, a man climbing a ladder, a solitary pine or street light. Here is an aura of belief in a material world as resplendent as things can get. At each increment of warmth, isolated violets split the soil, stalks of hyacinths erupt. Out of this chaotic sleight of hand, an emerging order. Out of this multitude, one. There are people whose parts are as beautiful as the whole city. The man behind the carved totemic mask lifts the final adz as he leaps into the patterns of traffic. Night covers us like a Spanish shawl. Everywhere people are driving across America. We are carried from city to city. We arrive whole.

-RAY HUDSON

Copyright ©2008 by Ray Hudson.

RAY HUDSON, a former school teacher in the Aleutian Islands for almost three decades, has been collecting oral histories about villages that disappeared from the Aleutian Islands during the twentieth century.

[Page 43]

Matters of Opinion

Review of a Book BOOK REVIEW BY PETER E. MURPHY THE MODERN ELEGIAC TEMPER BY JOHN B. VICKERY (BATON ROUGE, LA, USA: LOUISIANA STATE UP, 2006): IX + 256 PAGES, INCLUDING NOTES, WORKS CITED, AND INDEX

O happy race of mortals if your hearts are ruled as is the universe, by Love. —Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy

In his great work written in prison while awaiting execution, Boethius, the sixth-century philosopher whose death marked the end of the Roman Empire, managed to find solace in his dire situation. But rather than lament, he composed the most important discourse in medieval Christianity. In The Consolation of Philosophy Boethius describes himself wallowing in self-pity, writing sorrowful, grief-stricken verses until Philosophy, dressed as a woman, appears in his cell and his consciousness, driving out his poetic muses while exhorting him to abandon the seduction of lament and poetry and to return, instead, to rational thought and reason.

Poor Boethius! What could be more universal than grief and more natural than the impulse to articulate it? We experience unhappiness as part of our human experience, although not everyone expresses it in a way we can call poetry. However, the elegy, one of the oldest forms in literature, still manages to engage poets seeking to lament the death of loved ones whether personal

PETER E. MURPHY is the author of Stubborn Child (2005), a finalist for the 2006 Paterson Poetry Prize, and a poetry chapbook, Thorough & Efficient (2008), both from Jane Street Press. His poems and essays have appeared in The American Book Review, The Atlanta Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Commonweal, Cortland Review, The Journal, The Shakespeare Quarterly, World Order, and elsewhere. He has received fellowships for writing and teaching from The Atlantic Center for the Arts, The New Jersey State Council on the Arts, The Folger Shakespeare Library, Yaddo, and the White House Commission on Presidential Scholars. In addition to teaching poetry writing at The Richard Stockton College of New Jersey, he is the founder/director of the Winter Poetry & Prose Getaway held annually in Cape May, New Jersey. [Page 44]friends or family members or cultural and historic figures. John B. Vickery's book The Modern Elegiac Temper examines how this classical form evolved in the twentieth century from World War I to the present (although only two of the poets whose works are cited are still alive) and how these modern poets have tweaked the elegiac form to express the particular grief of the present era.

Vickery divides his book into two sections. In Part One, "The Personal Elegy," he discusses elegies that, like those of previous eras, mourn the deaths of friends, relatives, and historical presences. Because he equates the loss of life in former centuries with the loss of civilization in the twentieth, it is natural that he would begin his study by discussing World War I poet Siegfried Sassoon, whose "Elegy" both uses and departs from the traditional elegy. In Part Two, "Other Elegiac Modes," Vickery explores a number of varieties of loss dealing with love, culture, and philosophy as he discusses works by Dylan Thomas, Theodore Roethke, Seamus Heaney, and others. Unfortunately, Vickery chooses few women poets for his book, Edna St. Vincent Millay and Edith Sitwell being the only ones discussed in detail.

I suspect that Vickery, a professor emeritus of English at the University of California, Riverside, came of age in the 1950s when New Criticism was in vogue, for his analyses of the poems are strictly textual. He includes no Freudian or feminist interpretations, no postmodernism, no deconstruction. Instead, he applies his analytical skills to ponder and reveal what each of the poems he examines is expressing.

Vickery asserts that in the modern era the elegy has diversified in "form, theme, and attitude":

This diversification leads to at least two things. First, the multiplying of traits to be associated with a genre that consequently, like many others today, appears to be veering toward fragmentation if not actual dissolution. And second, the developing of a culturally generic attitude or temper marked by the effects of consciousness of loss, of regret for the fact and infinitude of losses suffered, and of the generation of a reflective spirit largely devoid of final or, often, even satisfactory answers.

"Generation" is an interesting word choice, as it refers not only to age group but also to the act of poem making, which is at the heart of The Modern Elegiac Temper. Vickery defines the subject of the modern elegy as "not only death but loss of love, family, ways of life, cultures, and even spiritual and philosophical answers to existence." While the modern elegy continues to lament death, regret, and sorrow, it also expresses confusion, alienation, anger, anguish, and despair. Think World War I ("The War to end all wars"), the Depression, World War II. Think the Holocaust. Because we experienced so much horror in the twentieth century, we need new ways to understand and express it. It is no wonder that modern poets have expanded the elegiac form to include existential loss in addition to mortality. Even the conventional sanctuary of religion has given up its ghost and been banished, and with it the consolation of eternal life, particularly in traditional Christianity. This loss becomes for writers another subject for lament.

In an insightful comparison Vickery discusses W. H. Auden's "In Memory of W. B. Yeats," William Carlos Williams' "An Elegy for D. H. Lawrence," and [Page 45]

MATTERS OF OPINION

Thomas Merton's "In Memory of the Spanish Poet Frederico Garcia Lorca." All three poets remember a recently deceased literary virtuoso who challenged history and culture and endured the consequences. Yeats suffered through the Irish rebellion, independence, and the formation of the new nation while he counseled against Catholic control. Lawrence wrestled sexual politics and physical love out of the bedroom and into the canon. Lorca was assassinated for his political writing opposing fascism. What Vickery writes about Merton's poem is true for all three: "the poet's role is not to mourn personally and eloquently as it is with Milton and Shelley. Instead, it is to record simply and economically the common, habitual actions of mourning for a national cultural hero struck down by his own people."

Dylan Thomas is a recurring topic of The Modern Elegiac Temper, both as writer and as the object of elegies by other poets, specifically Edith Sitwell, Hugh MacDiarmid, Vernon Watkins, and George Barker:

Each of these poets presents a significantly different master-image of the poet as embodied in Thomas. Where they converge is in their insistence on the poet's perdurability as a figure central to the world and mankind. Edith Sitwell sees the poet as a major figure of myth; Hugh MacDiarmid sees him as a creature of historical legend; Vernon Watkins, who knew Thomas best, treats him as the embodiment of the force of nature itself; and George Barker asserts that he is the epitome of language most fully realized. All, almost instinctively, veer away from the poet as individual rooted in a specific historical period. They avoid regarding the poet as a creature increasingly isolated by and from his society.

It would be illuminating to read the works of the several poets side by side to appreciate fully Vickery's analyses of the poems. However, this is not an anthology, and the poems in question are, unfortunately, represented only by occasional lines. Publication economics force a book such as The Modern Elegiac Temper to violate William Carlos Williams' famous cry, "No ideas but in things," because, like many other works of literary criticism, it talks about poetry, but it does not present the actual poems. The casual reader is unlikely to seek out The Norton Anthology of Poetry or another collection to appreciate fully Vickery's hard work. For example, he refers to, but does not discuss a piece by Betty Adcock titled "A Poem for Dizzy" about jazz legend (and Bahá’í) Dizzy Gillespie. Adcock's poem, originally published in her Intervale: New and Selected Poems, is also collected in Inventions of Farewell: A Book of Elegies, an excellent anthology that contains some of the poems s and many of the poets in Vickery's study, as well as poets on both sides of his scope, including such forerunners as John Donne, Emily Dickinson, and Rudyard Kipling and such contemporaries as Gwendolyn Brooks, Mark Doty, and Sharon Olds.3 I can almost imagine Boethius in his cell sneaking a look at his time-traveled copy of Inven-

1. See The Norton Anthology of Poetry, ed. Margaret Ferguson, Jon Stallworthy, and Mary Jo Salter (New York: Norton, 2005). 2. The poem is reprinted on pages 46-47. 3. See Betty Adcock, Intervale: New and Selected Poems (Baton Rouge, LA, USA: Louisiana State UP, 2001) 163, and Inventions of Farewell: A Book of Elegies, ed. Sandra M. Gilbert (New York: Norton, 2001) 335. [Page 46]tions of Farewell, while Lady Philosophy is out running an errand, or sitting noisily by his side, sharpening her sword; the book is that good! However, had Boethius faced life imprisonment rather than a death sentence, I am sure he would have gotten around to Vickery's commentaries as well.

Poem for Dizzy

written after discovering that no poem in The Anthology of Jazz Poetry is written to, for, or about Dizzy Gillespie, who was cocreator (with Charlie Parker) of bebop, the style that ushered in the modern jazz era. -Betty Adcock

Sweet and sly, you were all business when the old bent- skyward horn went up. Sometimes it went up like a rocket, sometimes like a gentle-turning lark high on a summer day. It could blow an island wind snapping a line of red and yellow clothes hard against blue.

The breath pouring into that banged-up brass inclination heavenward gave us lesson number one: Be.

Lesson number two came naturally. And you were serious as sunrise. Those who scoffed or bristled at the little stageside dance, the cutting up, the jokes and jive, have all gone off to other targets. And you Dizzy, you've gone off too, asleep in your chair, leaving us bereft. There was nobody better.

But there were lives the poets would want more— for tragedy or politics, harsher experiments: Bird's drugged vortex into gone, Coltrane's absolute, Monk's edgy monologues, the demon Miles Davis posed as, then became.

But you played clown, put everybody on. You played the house, but played a soul into the horn. And you outlived them all. This too was real jazz. [Page 47]

A POEM FOR DIZZY

Talking, you were evasive, slant as riff around a melody, more private maybe than anybody knew. I remember one week in our town, 1970: afternoons you'd wander with your camera. Putting his flute back in its case, Moody told us: He does that every place we go, walks around for hours by himself, just taking pictures of wherever it is he is. Lesson number one. You looked like the face of South Wind in my childhood picture book, like the best cherub Italy ever chiseled above a doge or saint, rich man, or pope. What were you storing in those blown-out cheeks all the years? Your darkest jokes? some brand-new pure invention, notes outside our hearing? Or perhaps some simple tune we'd never have made much sense of, the one about hope. The one about oldest love. -BETTY ADCOCK

Reprinted by permission of Louisiana State University Press from Intervale: New and Selected Poems by Betty Adcock. Copyright 2001 by Betty Adcock.

BETTY ADCOCK, the author of five books of poetry, including Intervale: New and Selected Poems, all published by Louisiana State University Press, teaches at Meredith College in Raleigh, North Carolina, and at the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers.

[Page 49]

CALL FOR PAPERS

WANTED-SHORT ARTICLES ON THE DESTINY OF AMERICA AND ACHIEVING WORLD PEACE DEADLINE FOR ABSTRACTS: JULY 1, 2008

World Order is seeking short articles (circa 1,000-1,500 words) on the topics of the destiny of America and achieving world peace. This is your chance to write on a topic close to your heart without writing a long article that seems like a chapter for a book. Think short, tight, and focused. The topic could be poverty, education, global warming. Or terrorism, religious tolerance, health issues, freedom from prejudice, some aspect of the advancement of women, the maturation of humankind.

To get your juices flowing, you may want to revisit Shoghi Effendi's Advent of Divine Justice. The sections on the acquisition of qualities North American Bahá’ís need for fulfilling their destiny (pp. 16-43 in the 1990 pocket-size edition) and on "The Destiny of America" (pp. 85-90 in the same edition) are bound to give you ideas. For issues related to world peace, you may want to reread The Promise of World Peace.

In short, we invite you to write about an issue that you feel needs urgent attention-and that will contribute to the health of the nation and of the world.

Manuscript Submission Information

For a copy of the World Order style sheet for preparing a manuscript (and other tips), send an e-mail to cworldorder@usbnc.org>, or write to the address below.

Submissions to the journal will be subject to external blind peer review if they fall outside the expertise of the Editorial Board or upon request by the author.

Manuscripts (in Word or WordPerfect) should be sent to World Order, Dr. Betty J. Fisher, Managing Editor, 7311 Quail Springs Place NE, Albuquerque, NM 87113-1780, USA or to <worldorder@usbnc.org>.

World Order has been published quarterly since 1966 by the National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’ís of the United States. [Page 50]

Forthcoming...

A selection of previously unpublished letters from the 1950s, introduced by Firuz Kazemzadeh, provide new insight into the persecution of the Bahá’ís in Iran.

Christopher Buck introduces four talks by Alain Locke, the Dean of the Harlem Renaissance and a member of the Bahá’í Faith.

Mike McMullen reviews Lights of the Spirit: Historical Portraits of Black Bahá’ís in North America, 1898–2000, edited by Gwendolyn ‎Etter-Leweis Etter-Lewis‎ and Richard Thomas.

Anne Gordon Perry reviews The Russo-Japanese War in Cultural Perspective, 1904–05, edited by David Wells and Sandra Wilson.

Melanie Smith reviews Taking Social Action in a Changing World by Aaron Emmel.