Claiming Desiland

Geography of Romance

Letter to Paul

Hopi Corn: Gift of the Rain

The Shores of Sendai-Wan: From Shiogama to Matsushima

CREATIVE NON-FICTION

Claiming Desiland

We skirted the village in a direction I didn’t recognize and turned left onto a track lined with twin rows of mesquite trees. They were rangy and not over-tall, their delicate-looking canopies feathery, durable – made to withstand long seasons of no rain. The car crept along the humped road, made that way so that rainwater would flow off onto the surrounding fields. The wheat was foot-high in February, a vibrant springy green, uniform in height, with each little plant starting to make its sheaf of seeds. We pulled partway off the road and parked next to a buffalo heifer tethered to a wooden donkey-cart. The cart wasn’t hitched to anything – the platform’s back edge sat on the ground and its parallel bars (between which the donkey would trot) pointed up into the air. The calf stood with her front feet near the cart and her back feet up higher, on the shoulder of the road, in an uncomfortable-looking posture. She rolled the whites of her eyes at us and lowed. To our right lay a cracked plain of reddish-tan earth, broad and dotted with more mesquite trees, flat except for the mounds of soil marking the graves of the late people of Mirpur.

We trooped onto the plain, following a path between the last mud puddles of winter. My mother first, then Khala Bina, then me. They both walked with what I privately call their ‘village walk’: scarves wrapped tightly to cover their heads, eyes ahead, making efficient progress, one behind the other, not talking. It was the walk of grown women on a mission, on their way to take care of important business. I took pictures as I walked behind them, pointing my little silver camera sometimes at the backs of their heads, bobbing along in parallel like the heads of ducklings, and sometimes at the sister shadows they cast, shapes like nuns in their wimples. I felt torn between inhabiting the moment with all my attention and thoroughly documenting it. Imperfect sentimental memory fought with the documentarian’s urge to capture everything As It Really Happened. In the end I alternated. When I needed to see where to step to avoid the worn graves, I stopped snapping. I lowered the camera completely when we stopped at a group of graves that was better tended and less ancient looking than the rest.

Without pausing to explain anything to me, they faced the graves, raised their palms to chest height, lowered their heads and recited a prayer in a murmur. I didn’t remember what was the appropriate thing to recite on the occasion of visiting graves – either Sura Al-Fatiha or Sura Yaseen. I only knew Fatiha. Luckily it is an all-purpose verse, and one I hadn’t forgotten since childhood because I use it reflexively whenever I’m in a plane that’s taking off or landing. Though I had seen adults recite a prayer when they visited each other to condole after a death, I’d never taken part before. But I was 32 years old, and I supposed I didn’t have to wait for someone to issue me an invitation. I followed their example.

Al hamdu-lillah he rabbi l-alamin. Praise be to God, the Lord of the universe. Ar rahman ir-rahim. The Most Gracious, the Most Merciful. Malik e yawm iddin. King of the Day of Judgment. Iyyaka na’budu iyyaka nasta’in. You alone we worship, and You alone we ask for help. Ihdinas sirat al mustaqim. Guide us to the straight way. Sirat al lazeena an’amta alayhim gayril magdubi alayhim walad dualin, amin. The way of those whom you have blessed, not of those who have deserved anger, nor of those who stray. Amen.

Fatiha asks for mercy – obliquely, by reminding God that we remember him as the creator of all things and their master. Who else would you appeal to for mercy but the one who made all, including the Day of Judgment? The grave in Muslim thought is meant to be practice for that day – a proximate accounting for the ultimate accounting to come. And graves are not meant to ornamented and fussed over and visited ritually, but kept tidy and otherwise left alone.

When I finished and ran my hands over my face, I noticed them both watching me. My mother looked at me for a long time. To deflect her attention, I took up my camera again and starting framing close-up shots of the red earth of the graves. They were clustered together without any space between, with a mound of soil covering each one. Two of the older ones were edged with unbaked bricks and low headstones; the rest were unmarked except for the raised soil. There was no way to walk between the graves in a Pakistani cemetery, unlike in an American one. Space in the plot was limited, and meant to be used again and again for generations. On occasion people digging a grave would unearth the bones of someone already buried there; they were supposed to respectfully move the bones to one side of the pit and keep digging. Sometimes, in crowded urban cemeteries, bones would make their way to the surface because of the continual reuse and churning of the same small piece of earth, and one could see the ground littered with femurs and jawbones.

This graveyard was not of that type. It had been in use since the early 1900s, when Mirpur was founded, and the people of the village maintained it. I asked my mother which grave was whose. The farthest one, with a brick headstone and some Urdu text on a broken glass pane, was my great-grandmother’s, she thought – Amna Bibi, the one I was named for. The grave of her son, my grandfather, was next to hers, and her husband’s just beyond. My mother’s uncle was also among them; my mother wasn’t sure which was his and which was her grandmother’s, and I found this vastly irritating. How does one forget which grave belongs to which person? It didn’t matter, I told myself: they all rested within feet of each other, buried in shrouds without boxes and turned on their right sides to face the Ka’aba. Their molecules had surely been moved around and redistributed by now, so that the inhabitant of each grave held atoms that had been part of all the others. But I was most interested in the graves of my grandfather and his mother, who I imagined I would love best, if I had known them.

The only photograph I have of my great-grandmother – as far as I know, the only one of her that exists – was taken after her death. I imagine that it was taken in the instant before her sons lifted her into the air and carried her to the edge of the village for burial. It is a picture of her looking asleep, with the peaceful expression of the virtuous on her face and a garland of jasmine and roses around her head. Her garment is unsewn white fabric as prescribed. The picture is crooked, her orientation in the frame not aligned with either edge. I wondered if the person who took it was too shaken to compose the shot properly, or if the camera had been shoved into the hands of some inexperienced person because the elders couldn’t bear to do it themselves. She looks just like her son, my grandfather, and when I saw the picture my dream of my namesake was shattered and rebuilt in an instant. From my mother’s stories, I’d constructed a picture of a frail, pretty, saintly woman, wise and imperturbable. But my great-grandmother was sturdy and handsome, with the arrogant nose and determined chin of my mother’s father’s people. From her face in death I gathered that she had been beautiful, but not in the delicate way I had imagined: more in the way of a dappled mare or a weathered piece of well-built furniture – beautiful to a purpose. Her family left Jallandar in a bullock-cart when she was a girl to settle a new village in Punjab, where water came from far away and the crops they planted ruled the cycles of life.

My parents’ house in Arizona was a little enclave of Pakistani culture, and we visited the mother country on summer vacations, spending three or four months at a time with my grandmother and aunts and uncles and cousins. I call it Desiland, after desi, a word used to describe South Asian people, places, and things. Arizona was where we spent most of our time, but Pakistan was where we lived. I spoke Urdu first and didn’t learn English until I started school. I wore shalwar-kameez to school on days when I had to dress up. Peanut butter and jelly sandwiches alternated with parathas in my lunchbox. Since halal meat wasn’t available in our little town, my father bought live animals and butchered them himself in the side yard, including goats for Eid and turkeys on Thanksgiving. My mother and I skinned the chickens in the stainless steel sink, me holding the legs and her wielding the knife.

I didn’t find it strange. Maybe because I was born in the era of “free to be you and me,” and this had pervaded the ethos of even our little town. Whatever the mechanism, I grew up thinking of myself as Pakistani. So through going was this identity that when I hit adolescence, I didn’t have any secret boyfriends (boyfriends were not allowed), or even any dates. This state of affairs persisted even after I left for college. I told myself that I was open to an arranged marriage or to finding my mate myself – whichever happened first. But the reality was that my inculcation in traditional ways was thorough. I had no idea how to go about it for myself. So when my parents introduced me to a handsome, sanctioned prospect when I was 23, I married him. Born and raised in Pakistan until he came to the U.S. for college, he and I, it turned out, had very different ideas of what our marriage would be, and within the year, we divorced.

The failure of the marriage, and the smaller failures of communication and understanding within it, underscored for me how essentially American I was. I had certain (Western) expectations from life that could not be met in so traditional a framework. After the divorce, I let myself drift from desi people and social situations. I saw these ways as being in conflict with my adult human need to choose my path for myself. I couldn’t see a meaningful way to access the positive aspects of my cultural inheritance and get away from the patriarchal ones I found so odious – they were bound up together in my mind, so that if I wanted one I had to take the other as well. So I let it go. I didn’t visit Pakistan for eight years – the longest I’d ever been away. My cousins grew up; my aunts and uncles grew old. My relatives opened businesses, built houses, left the country for more options. Parcels of my grandfather’s land were sold off to settle disputes among my uncles, and the cities of Punjab encroached inexorably on formerly agricultural lands. Pakistan’s first motorway was built, allowing travelers to whiz from Faisalabad to Lahore without ever having to slow down to let a donkey-cart cross the road.

Through all these changes, I kept my distance. For those years, I avoided even desi music. It hurt too much to hear it; in its bittersweet evocation I felt the beautiful imperfection of all that I was cut off from in my self-imposed exile from desi culture. I listened to it in the occasional nostalgic mood with a pit of longing in my stomach, and some other feeling like guilt. I figured out that I felt to blame for letting my grasp of my Desiland slip, like I should have done something to prevent the loss.

I eventually became aware that this distance was costing me too much. I made a plan to visit, with the intention of collecting and documenting the stories of my family and their geography as a way of situating myself within them, and to give myself a project, legitimate cover for asking some of the questions I had never thought to ask. My first time back I went in the winter. I sat with my grandmother and collected and recorded all the family stories I could pry out. As part of my desi-ness reclamation project, my aunt arranged for me to see the traditional production of sugar, from the sugar cane being crushed in iron mashing jaws powered by bell-wearing, curved-horned oxen, all the way to the final step of cooking the juice for hours on a cane-fed fire and skimming it all the while. We sat on a charpai and watched the process from just outside the circular path of the oxen, their nailed-on shoes glinting through the dust with each step of cloven feet. We talked about everything I could remember to ask her: why villages in Punjab were identified by a name as well as a number, from the days when the British divided up Punjab for cultivation (the village we were sitting in was referred to as “Banwa,” or 92nd); how drinking water used to be delivered by the maashki in a water-skin (the maashk), and how he was also called behishti because he would go to heaven for quenching peoples’ thirst; how she made her radish parathas; and how I might be able to grow the special radishes in my Brooklyn backyard if I could figure out the difference in growing seasons. I left Pakistan relieved to be connected again, and with a trunk full of stories and images to fortify me until the next time.

The homeland for me is a different one than for my immigrant parents. I go there and feel the novel, unsettling feeling of looking just like everyone else. No one there would pick me out as anything but Pakistani. Being an anonymous part of the majority is a peaceful and delicious experience for me, used to being a novelty most everywhere else. Before I moved to New York City, I hadn’t experienced anything like it in the U.S., and even here in my beloved city, I’m a minority. Looking like everyone else gives me access to an experience I can only have in that part of the world, and I like knowing I have this option. Walking the streets in Lahore, I look like everyone else, utterly in place in that ancient, dusty cosmopolis, and no one glances twice. If the people thronging the streets look like me, and indeed many Punjabis are my blood relatives (as we would find if we stopped someone on the street and parsed our reticulating web of relations), then the symbols and culture they take for granted are my birthright too, reminders of the past I also inherited.

Yet I recognize that it’s this distance, this not being swaddled in desi culture, that makes me see it as something elusive and precious. If I had followed a more traditional path, I might be living in a little pocket of Pakistan right here, in an old-fashioned family that conflated caring and controlling in one big paternalistic stew. It would bear down on me so hard that I wouldn’t think to miss it. As much as I’ve lamented my distance from the motherland, in this way I believe I dodged a bullet: as an educated North American woman living in New York City, I can do whatever the hell I want. The city confers freedom from the Desi-net – that chain-mail network of aunties and uncles who are everywhere you go, no matter how old you are, and who will call your parents as soon as they get home to share information on your whereabouts and whether there were boys in the vicinity. In Brooklyn, no one bats an eye when I walk next to a boy. The feeling of being always under observation carries autonomy costs too heavy to bear, and I am grateful for the absence of this tension. Still, total separation from all aspects of the homeland was not what I wanted. My ideal was to be free to live a grown-up Western life and still integrate the homeland into myself, so the journey home would be a short one I could take whenever I want.

Now, I visit every year or two (though two years feels like too long). I drink up the place greedily. I let myself get sentimental over the fields of yellow mustard flowers in bloom. I listen to ghazals with no more sorrow than their poetry demands, and if I don’t understand some of the words, I don’t lament my two-sided past. Home has become a path instead of a destination. The longing for home hasn’t subsided, but the ache now is more sweet than bitter. I understand that I will never get there, because “there,” the place where I fit perfectly, doesn’t exist. I am a true hybrid, distinct from both my homes and a wholehearted belonger to neither. They combined to make me, and there’s no aspect of me that isn’t influenced by the dual legacy.

We filed out of the graveyard in the same way we’d gone in: by rank. My mother, the general, led the queue; my aunt (her lieutenant) followed; and I, foot soldier and archivist, brought up the rear, photographing their silhouettes against the emerald backdrop of baby wheat. We piled in the car and drove into the village, where we had plans to call on relatives and visit the abandoned wells giant banyan trees that were characters in their stories, and in mine.

I want to be buried there, in that graveyard. It may be impossible for me to claim Desiland while my identity lives: I am, after all, a hybrid, and there’s no escaping all the forces that shaped me. But what about after death? When I die, I will be beyond categories and compartments and partial allegiances. How better to claim the land than to be buried there and let the land claim me? My molecules will go back to the earth – completing the nutrient cycle, commingling with my relative-particles underground. Being buried without a coffin, with only a shroud separating me from the earth, I would very soon be returned to the raw materials that made me. I will belong wholly to that ground in a way that escapes me now. And knowing that I will go back there in the end, no matter what, frees me of having to connect to it too tryingly in the meantime. I am of it, and it is of me, and there I will return. The inevitability is beautiful to me, and makes me want to write my last will and testament more than anything ever has – to specify that I wish to be buried in Mirpur, among my ancestors. It comforts me to imagine it: my body would be flown there immediately, if the three-day burial rule were to be met. I would be laid out in the courtyard of the house where my mother was born, in a white shroud, and lamented over until it was time to bury me. I can imagine it: at some moment in the afternoon, well before sunset and the time for maghrib prayers, a male elder says it’s time to go. And the mourn, and they gather around while the men move in close to lift the platform with its burden into the air and out of the courtyard on their shoulders, to the graveyard where the earth awaits with its open hands.

I know very little about the rest of my life. I intend to live in Brooklyn for a good part of it, and someday I might move to the country, perhaps to the desert, or maybe to a little village near the Mediterranean. I don’t know if I will marry again, have children, live near my family. Nothing about my future is certain, except that I will die. When I do, that graveyard where my ancestors rest will still exist. And the final thing I know with any surety is that my atoms come from that soil and want to return. My particles don’t experience my ambivalence – they interact with other particles wherever they find themselves and call it home. In returning to that soil, I imagine contaminating things a little bit in the opposite direction – stirring up some ambivalence in the molecules that were formerly my relatives, widening their once-eyes with my foreign ways, compelling them to consider the wide world of their descendants, so much grander and better and worse than the one they lived in – and letting their particles influence mine. When I am finally returned to that dusty red plain in Mirpur where my grandfather and great-grandmother rest, I will again be a daughter of the soil, and the grubs and roots and leaves that spring from me will be native of that earth.

Geography of Romance

by MAJED AKHTER

Consider the spatiality of romance in urban Pakistan. Once you get past the trappings of diamonds and roses, gaudy weddings, and cheesy pop songs, you have a site of extreme intergenerational and ideological contestation.

Romance as an idea is dynamic: how we fall in love today is different from how it used to happen two hundred--or even fifty--years ago. Of course it’s a difficult matter to define love, or decide whether it is a universal experience. But it is hard to argue that the process of arriving at love has stayed the same throughout time. My father met my mother on their wedding day. They do not expect me to subscribe to the same notion of romance.

The single most significant factor affecting the dynamic geographies of romance is the increased physical mobility of women and the number of legitimate spaces they occupy. According to the Penguin Atlas of Human Sexual Behavior, about 60 percent of marriages around the world are still arranged. Contrary to Western belief, this does not preclude the notion of romance. What is usually idealized, at least in Pakistan, is the romance that occurs immediately after marriage. The secret surprises that emerge as the young couple gets to know each other, and the initial coyness flowering into warm intimacy is the stuff that respectable Pakistani romance is made of. But this notion of romance is rooted firmly in the idea that marriages should be arranged by parents or elders of the family, which is itself rooted in young women being spatially segregated from young men. After all, how is a young man to meet a nice eligible lady, when all the nice eligible ladies, by definition, do not enter public spaces?

This is no longer the case, at least for middle- and upper-class Pakistanis. The institution of arranged marriage, and the notion of romance associated with it, is being rocked by the increased spatial ambition of women in today’s urban Pakistan. There are now spaces that are legitimate for ‘nice ladies,’ but that are nonetheless in the public sphere. Universities and offices are just two examples of spaces where women have made massive inroads. These dynamic geographies have expanded the possibilities for romance; they have modified the ways in which we fall in love. Whereas before, a single picture (if that) was all you had to fuel your passion before marriage, full-out courtships are now possible in the new legitimate spaces.

The public parks of Lahore, lush and green, provide an ideal place for lovers to stroll. Because the images here are not of bearded fanatics and violent militants, the gardens of Lahore do not make their way into the imagining of Pakistan, either within its borders or without. But here is where I see society changing, where I see the true aspirations of young people, regardless of class or religious intensity. Intertwined fingers, hushed voices, stretching out under trees, with shoes removed and placed neatly to the side. And always, the woeful glances at watches ticking away time left together. The men are well groomed and full of strut; the women glow with audacity. Their bodies move to a dance that is as old as the sea, yet at the same time thrillingly new.

Technology has also changed the geographies of romance. The internet and, especially, mobile phones have opened up a new kind of space for both women and men: virtual space. Although a young man dialing random numbers, ad nauseam, until hitting gold, is not normally seen as romantic, it is not much different from frequenting pick-up bars every night. For those more comfortable with the anonymity provided by the written word, chat rooms and messenger services like ICQ and MIRC provide the perfect ‘place’ to meet someone. Not only does the novel spatiality of cyberspace offer great potential for romance, Pakistani youth, and corporations, are responding vigorously to the opportunity. To what other goal, if not a new geography of romance, are the giant billboards that offer “completely free, late-night mobile conversations” striving for?

Failure to accept the fact that romance is a product of material conditions, among them spatial possibilities, has led to much resentment and resistance from older generations to the changing forms of romance. The clamping down on a romantic space (a secluded bench behind a rose bush) at Government College in Lahore is a case in point. Of course, there are factors more sinister than stodgy old party-poopers at play. The patriarchal habit of delegating women to be the manifestation of society’s moral condition has justified restrictions on their personal mobility and freedom in the past, and continues to do so today. The attitudes and material conditions that used to underlie those acts are rapidly changing though, and it remains to be seen whether the older generations can keep up.

Not all changes in romance have to do with aping the West, as older folks might decry. Some members of the older generation understand this, and are content with the older forms being merely acknowledged. Thus, “arranged” marriages become “approved” marriages, and “romance” becomes the more sanitized “understanding.” Not wanting to betray the romantic ambitions of my generation, but at the same time understanding the difficulty of letting go, my response to this cautious change in labels is: good enough, for now. The dynamic geographies of romance are responsible for at least some of the changes that we are experiencing as a society.

Letter to Paul

by JEREMY FREY

Imitating many courtiers of writing, I wore my best shirt on the first date. And a borrowed shirt it was. Naïveté and the good looks of great ideas seemed my only reserve. Idea, innocence and passionate concern the bouquet of flowers behind my back. The childlike desire to change the world with words. I am yoked, so it seems, to writing. Instruction from a fanatic: “Do not be yoked together with unbelievers.” You the letter writer, to the early church at Corinth, among others. She believes, Paul: Writing believes, in me. We are yoked, we got that part down. It is my doubt you might call sin, or darkness.

Paul, I remember this your most intimate letter, and your traveling to Damascus. That blinding light on the road, in the way, seeing through you, your eyes bursting with pain, you turning your back. The surrounding wave that light becomes. The darkening of your internal world. Your kinship with Jonah.

Your being spit out of the belly of the whale of shame. Your retching. That first deep breath in the air of the changed world. “All things change when we do.” So you changed your name. Left the womb of darkness, your rage at the failed kingdom, on your road to Damascus, your proverbial Nineveh, that rage still a thorn in my side, the bouquet rejected. Later, your friends lowered you and your hair and your shirt in a basket from a window. Even later, rumors of your being beheaded – or was your death at the hands of stones? – the stones still unconscious of their fullness in sin, the casting off of responsibility. Your death like swallowing water when compared to the intense light on your road. The face of God. Horror.

And still later, in the fourth century – after the pagans ran Damascus for thousands of years, after the Jewish presence for another thousand, after your lowered status from a window, your escape in a basket – Constantine takes up your Christ and converts the synagogue. In 634 the Muslims conquer Catholicism’s dominance; the church shifts to the mosque. The Great Mosque stands today. Three fires have not brought it down. Its dome, and tens of minarets, and three towers still stand. Three towers. I wish we understood these as the three sibling religions having found a home in the oasis that Damascus rests. The dome in the center the breast of the mother, worshipped by three siblings. We’re all still children trying to shape the world with words.

Paul, I love this world and everything in it. Two towers in a new city now crumbs of dust. We wept for a week. We babble, children lost in pride, now wander full of aim, enraged, the targets of shame invisible to blind eyes. We should stop building monuments; we do not yet understand a grain of sand. The terrible blessing disguised in destruction: New language.

Paul, your rage stills a thorn in my side. But the flowers have not wilted. “Do not be yoked together with unbelievers ... what fellowship can light have with darkness?” Paul, why do you still fear darkness? Surely there can be no such thing as light without dark. And this: dark is made heavier by the presence of light. Dark is lighter than light.

Hopi Corn: Gift of the Rain

by LARRY LINDAHL

Dusty sunlight streamed in through his workshop windows on Second Mesa, in northeastern Arizona, as artist Duane Tawahongva showed us his handcrafted jewelry. Sacred symbols of the sun, moon, storm clouds, rainbows, and the revered corn plant appeared on many pieces. Ancient petroglyphs on others, all hold meaning and stories from relating to the Southwestern landscape for over a thousand years. Living on the outskirts of Mishongnovi, the village where he was born, Duane sells his award-winning silver overlay earrings, bracelets, belt buckles, brooch pins, and pendants at art shows across the country.

On the hot afternoon that we first met, Duane crafted a silver overlay pendant, as I photographed him for an Arizona Highways assignment about Hopi artists.

In his workshop near the edge of tall white cliffs, I captured him cutting a tiny design from sheet silver using a delicate wire saw, soldering the overlay to a silver base, and then soaking it in oxidizing solution.

He moved to a polishing wheel, and carefully buffed the blackened silver to shine again, and then hammered the design into a convex curve on an old wooden block.

He polished it one last time, and seeing that it was finished handed me the small pendant, a detailed Bighorn sheep symbolizing prosperity, as a gift.

Now, years later, I wear the wedding ring he offered to make when he heard I was marrying Wendy. He crafted two silver overlay snakes intertwined around the band on our matching rings. Snakes are said to carry prayers in Hopi tradition.

On a warm spring day Duane phoned, as he occasionally does, to tell us that a ceremonial Kachina Dance was scheduled. That weekend we drove from our home in Sedona up Oak Creek Canyon and through Flagstaff toward the small town of Luepp. From there we headed up Highway 2 until we reached the remote Hopi mesas nearly three hours later.

We found Bacavi, the village on Third Mesa holding the dance, and made our way into their crowded plaza under the baking, high desert sun.

A deep, steady, resonate drum filled the centuries-old plaza as kachina dancers rhythmically circled inside. The kachinas wore elemental pigments painted on bare skin, adorned in a variety of buffalo fur, deer horns, horsetail hair, leather, and feathers. Kachinas, I was told, represent different spiritual aspects of life in the very complex and secretive Hopi cosmology.

Sensing the connection this ceremonial dance brought to the village, I was struck with the reverence and friendliness of these descendants of the Ancient Ones. Between dances the kachinas generously included everyone. They brought out boxes of food and tossed apples, oranges, bananas and cookies to the kids, grandparents, uncles, sisters, and the rest of us watching.

I felt a depth of community that I yearn to feel in my own world.

Last July, Duane let us know about a Home Dance. On this occasion, more than sixty kachina dancers wore similar bold ochre and black stripes painted on their bare chests, arms, and legs with identical hand-woven white kilts, a turquoise-colored sash that held a dangling fox pelt, and a turtle shell rattle tied to one leg.

The sun backlit a tall orange or green parrot feather wavering on their head with downy feathers fluttering below like clouds in the breeze, and long horsetail hair falling like curtains of rain. With each haunting step, they chanted in guttural unison. The repetition created a powerful scene.

Between dances the kachinas presented young Hopi boys a small bow and arrows, and girls a hand-carved kachina doll tied to a tall, green cattail stalk visible above the crowd. Young maidens stood watching from a distance gathered in groups wearing hand-woven white dresses and traditional hair whorls.

Many of the moving prayers of these ceremonies ask for rain to water their corn in this dry land, and at the end of the hot day, we felt rain begin to magically sprinkle down. The gift of rain from the deep twilight sky could not be ignored; it came as their blessing. On the drive home, a steady rain fell watering their hidden cornfields.

It was early September when Duane invited us to come up to the Hopi mesas for a harvest and corn roast. Recognizing the intricate and sacred relationship Hopis have with corn, we felt honored, and eagerly said yes.

He had invited us to meet at his house, so he could take us to his field. At the top of Second Mesa, we took a long side road and just past a stone retaining wall turned again to descend the steep dirt driveway. Duane came out of his workshop and greeted us with a smile and warm hug of friendship.

We gave him gifts from our garden, tomatoes, basil, and mint picked fresh that morning. He had sandwiches ready, and we brought snacks for our day in the field. We loaded into his Silverado pickup, and towing his empty flatbed trailer down Highway 87, we soon turned onto a bumpy dirt road, and headed into the boonies he warned us.

Duane explained about the nearby clan fields, and that his field was further out on no-man’s land where he had found an uncultivated wash and cleared the brush. Today was a harvest for the corn he had planted months earlier. Bouncing onward toward more and more open space, we finally arrived.

He parked alongside his cornfield, and we carried our lunch walking between rows of diligently weeded soil that he tends alone. Duane’s crop grew tall, and held deep, healthy green in every leaf, radiating with vibrancy.

“We care for the plants like children,” he told us.

On the far side of the field we set down our things. Duane took off his shirt, and told me to take mine off and go wild. I shed my T-shirt, and let my skin feel the sun and wind as we began collecting sticks of driftwood for a fire.

As the woodpile grew, Wendy and I became more familiar with the land.

Lighting our fire the wet wood smoked and sputtered taking slowly to the flames. We added some dry tumbleweed and in a flash, bright orange flames erupted, the scent of our fire mixing with the aroma of tilled soil.

Duane began picking corn, and walking the rows he taught us to find husks with the silk drying to red-brown.

“Squeeze the end of the ear and if it feels full and tight within the husk its ripe,” he said.

With a quick wrist snap he harvested a ripe ear without damaging the mother plant and dropped the husk into the large cloth bag that I carried. We filled the bag until it bulged like Santa’s sack of toys, emptied it by the fire, and filled it again.

When we returned to the fiery bed of coals we began arranging the husks in a single layer over the coals. Smoke billowed into a cloud, flames popped out, quickly disappeared, and the smell of sweet corn roasting on the fire slowly filled the air. Wendy commented that the aroma was one of the best she’d ever smelled. Duane proudly smiled.

Broken clouds wallowed in and out across the sun, rain curtains bent to the horizon surrounding us as they had all day, moving in separate storms. Wind seemed to foretell an approaching downpour, yet the sky above our gathering remained friendly and calm.

We kept moving husks, rotating the uncooked side onto the heat using sticks for tongs, and the blanket of once-green corn seared to brown and black. When the corn was roasted to perfection we began pulling it off the fire to cool, bits of burnt husk floating away in the wind.

With his long black hair flowing over his shoulders, the sun shone down on a farmer familiar with shirtless days in the field, and he taught us the Hopi word naalöyö’ meaning four, explaining how many years he had planted in this wash. When a rainbow briefly appeared, he gave us the word for rainbow.

Duane finally pulled the blackened husk off a roasted corn and radiated with an inner sense of accomplishment as he chewed into the juicy, smoky-flavored, plump white kernels. We joined the feast, sitting on the ground next to the fire, all the elements present and in harmony. Soil and rain, sunshine and fire, and the ancient traditions passed down from father to son held their stories inside each bite.

What stayed with me during our conversation was his mentioning the need of a strong will to survive. Tending the land shows the will to survive, and giving back to the land shows reverence for life. Hopi people are survivors. Practice and continuity flow through their generations. Working in the field keeps knowledge alive.

Duane shared, “After my father’s stroke he can’t visit the fields, but I keep living our tradition of growing corn, with his respect for the land, and a good heart.”

He follows his father’s way and had planted beans to replenish the soil that the corn would deplete. He grows squash and melons in another field and the white, yellow, and blue corn he tends daily is full of life. He takes care of the land and it takes care of him. After our corn feast, Duane quietly left the fire, started his John Deere tractor, and spent the next hour digging out new weeds and brush.

When he finished the work he asked me to drive his truck until we got to firmer ground before loading the tractor. Watching him in the rearview mirror, I saw blue-gray rain curtains trailing him down the road from the east.

A dark cloud to the west hung to the ground where the bumpy dirt road was aiming. We got the tractor onto the trailer, and Duane climbed inside the truck with miraculous timing. A fierce rain caught us from both directions pelting the windshield, while purple lightning ripped into the ground below the mesas.

We cautiously reached the highway and climbed the mesa to Mishungovi where the streets of his village glistened like polished stones after the storm. Golden afternoon sunlight slowly emerged. The storm clouds moved silently across the expansive valley below his jewelry workshop. He parked and then, like another good omen, a bright rainbow floated down connecting sky and earth as rosy clouds passed under the rising moon.

We stood quietly in the glow of twilight. Our friend Duane handed us two bags of roasted corn to take home, to remember, savor, and share. Saying our good-byes, Wendy and I headed down the mesa steeped in fresh memories of rain and rainbows, earth and sky, corn and fire, clouds and the moon.

We had witnessed the living elements that Duane instills as powerful sacred symbols in his jewelry. Their meaning is still beyond our full knowing, yet in the generosity that Duane shows us, these gifts of participating, he offers a glimpse into a deeper understanding that we carry home.

Essay and art by Larry Lindahl.

The Shores of Sendai-Wan: From Shiogama to Matsushima

by KATHRYN M. LUCCHESE

On the northeastern coast of Honshu, Japan’s largest island, a bustling region lies centered on Sendai Wan (Sendai Bay). The bay forms a long, smooth curve, interrupted by the nearly enclosed Matsushima Wan and ending in an abrupt hook: the peninsula of Ojika Hanto, a last bastion of whaling in Japan. Beyond Ojika Hanto roll the broad Pacific swells, where wide variety of local sealife may be found, which still contributes to the best sushi in Japan. Tucked between Sendai-city, the regional and prefectural capital, and Ojika Hanto are two natural harbors: at the hither end of Ojika Hanto there is the fishy-smelling lagoon of Ishinomaki, and just north of Sendai is the ancient port of Shiogama, overlooking the southern reach of beautiful Matsushima Wan.

Shiogama is a town that salt built. Salt, of all the commodities useful to man, is one of the most ancient and pivotal. The saltiness of Shiogama’s history is mirrored in its kanji (modified Chinese ideographs), which make up the town’s name: . A close observation of the two characters shio “salt” and gama “kettle” reveals the second character embedded within the first. One can see in the second the radiating lines of the flame under the lidded pot (kettle), while in the first, these elements are more squared-up, with the lid askew to the left and the whole preceded by the character-radical meaning “earth” or “mineral,” together signifying “that mineral which is yielded by boiling in a kettle.” Shiogama’s name means “the kettle that renders the mineral rendered by a kettle,” or simply “salt-rendering kettle.”

The humid, often chilly climate of Tohoku (“East-North”-- the name for this northeastern part of the island of Honshu), prevents the making of salt through simple evaporation, as it is done in other areas of the world, but easy access to rich nearby forest reserves have made possible the rendering of salt through boiling seawater in clay or iron kettles set over charcoal fires on the beach. According to archaeology displays at the Tohoku History Museum in nearby Taga-jo, salt rendering has been practiced here since long before the coming of agriculture, along with the harvesting of abundant local shellfish, as evidenced by huge shell mounds found on the islands of Matsushima Wan.

Located on the heights overlooking a short, straight, east-west-running valley through which runs a robust stream, Shiogama-town dominates a narrow estuary opening onto Matsushima Wan. The valley floor is lined with shops selling not only the necessities of teapots, paper, and clothing, but also religious items for pilgrims who visit the hilltop Shinto shrines, the most ancient and important in the region. There are shops filled with local sake to offer to the gods (and man), as well as groceries stocked with local strawberries, rare (for Japan) celery, and endless other seasonal market-garden produce. The great Sendai daimyo (lord) Date Masamune himself commissioned one of the sake houses in the early 1600s, to provide for the needs of the gods of the shrine. This is Urakasumi, whose name is written in the “hairy” brushwork of manly monks and whose mon (family crest) is two crossed daikons. Shops along the short valley also sell many sizes of home-shrines for garden or house, presumably to the Shinto worshippers of the time-honored sacred hill-shrines.

One may arrive in Matsushima via the slow windings of a Sen-seki Line train from Sendai Station, but the traditional method is to cross the water from Shiogama on an excursion boat customized to look like a dragon. The boats pass sandstone islands with pale-yellow cliffs topped with pines, richly colored in red and green and sinuously graceful, and arrive at Matsushima town. There is Zuigan-ji, a Buddhist worship center built by Daimyo Date in the Momoyama style of the 17th century, accessed through a time-stained gate and dark allee of Cryptomeria trees and surrounded by mysterious, moss-hung caves for burial and contemplation. Godai-do, a tiny temple of the same period, stands on an island at the edge of the bay, which can be reached only by crossing two red bridges. The little windows of the temple are opened only once every thirty-three years to reveal within the scowling idols.

Shiogama, though its houses are mostly commonplace, modern, and haphazardly placed, and its port functional rather than decorative, possesses the oldest and largest Shinto worship center in all Tohoku. Buddhist centers are broadly distributed across Japan, being the favorite religion of the elite through the ages, but with the return to power of the emperors at the dawn of modern Japan, Shintoism was dusted off and redecorated with nationalistic pride. One finds at the outer gate to Shiogama’s complex an official-looking gentleman in blue uniform, peaked hat and white gloves, overseeing decorum and greeting visitors. Along the street below the shrine, the valley stream has been channeled through a miniature granite riverbed; at the base of the straight stair, two sets of mechanical dolls perform inside their cupolas, twice a day.

On the hilltop rise three major shrines and a collection of lesser porticoes and outbuildings: a retreat center, an education building, and even a small stable-shrine for the local sacred horse. The horse is a tall, handsome chestnut with a wise eye and a white blaze, in residence on holy days to give fortunes for a slice of carrot, fed to him on a well-gnawed paddle. The three chief shrines house three gods: the earliest being the god of salt making, the next the god of fishing and childbirth (one deity dealing with two risky undertakings), and the latest-comer: the god of farming. This last has been given a large task with the expansive and highly productive paddy fields and market gardens in the Hirosegawa (Hirose River) and Kitakamigawa floodplains to the southeast and north of the town.

The gods of salt-making and fishing in particular are celebrated in a summertime festival of town-wide scope, their mikoshi (portable shrines) first making the rounds of the town streets (and they are prodigiously heavy in their gleaming black lacquer, golden strap-work and finials, and clusters of burnished steel mirrors) on the shoulders of white-garbed, white-hatted, straw-sandal-shod supporters. After the perambulations, the mikoshi are loaded onto two smaller garish pleasure boats, the one embellished as a dragon, the other a bird of phoenix type. Thus, the gods’ lustration encompasses both civic space and fishing grounds, blessing all the places of local endeavor with their presence. The spring festival again features the mikoshi (though they do not take to the boats), this time flanked by firemen in traditional garb, a thanksgiving for another winter passed without disastrous fire. During this March festival, white sprinkles of rough salt can be found all along the vertiginous two-hundred-odd steps that lead up the ridge to the gate of the chief shrine, salt made in kettles on the sacred ridge and flung in purifying handfuls over the mikoshi.

The straight stair is not the only path to the top of the sacred ridge. A more gradual ascent along a flight of steps and ramps at the lower, seaward end of the ridge provides a route for the elderly and leisurely pilgrims. Along this path, a set of meandering switchbacks toward the center of the ridge visits all the sacred springs of the hillside, giving a sense of being alone with pristine nature all the while traffic rushes by on Highway 3 below. But the straight stair at the highest, far-western end of the ridge, with its single landing between the lower and upper flights of uneven stone risers – the upper flight, at 132 steps is steeper and longer than the lower – is how the mikoshi descend, and how they reach the top again. It is a breath-taking, white-knuckle ascent even for the onlookers, but for the participants it comes at the end of a long, long day of hauling, and strength for the upward progress must come from beyond their last reserves, from deep sources of adrenaline and ecstasy.

While the salt and risky-endeavor gods’ shared precinct faces due south, the farmer-god’s precinct faces roughly east, for it is with sunrises and seasons, weathers and warmed soils that farmers are concerned: the great, repeating circle dance of the year. At the March festival sacred mimes are performed in this god’s honor on a diminutive, square outbuilding stage to the rhythm set by flute and drum. A solemn, bespectacled schoolgirl, dressed as a sacred horse, canters from corner to corner of the stage to bless all of Tohoku. The farmer in his comic mask then acts out all the work of a long day in the fields, from honing his mattock in the dewy morning to drinking the well-earned blessing of milky sake at its thirsty close, a dancing fan his only prop. All present are invited by the farmer to share in his sake and in the treats he throws to the crowd; strangers kindly beckoned forward by parishioners to partake and be all blessed by his labors.

So much of Japan is mountainous, that flat land for rice paddies must be used wherever it lies, or made by hand with endless toil out of sloping land, the terraces walled in the same snug polygonal masonry, which serves as the base for castles. The kanji for the small bay just north of Shiogama’s estuary (transliterated on the map as Hamata) mean “Coast-Field” Bay, and at this point the coastal plain narrows to a corridor barely wide enough nowadays for two rail-lines and a highway to share. The drama of such narrow survival, especially in chilly Tohoku, seems to have linked farming with sacred drama of the jinja: is it so all over the earth? Did Greek drama rise from stories of man wresting life from the gods by the sweat of his brow? Did tragedy arise from the battle for the surplus, held by the great daimyo like Date and the rest? For surely in that mime of the farmer, one could feel the human drama entire.

The shallow waters and sandy coasts of the bays of Shiogama have yielded not only their tribute of salt and rice down the eons, but also a rich harvest of oysters and other shellfish, tunicates and vertebrates in great variety. Tall moorings of bamboo, sometimes seen resting in long, silver-grey bundles against the cliffs of the islands, stand planted in rows in broad tracts in the bay’s waters, like enormous rice-seedlings. To these are tethered long garlands of cockleshells, and to these garlands cling the fattened oysters of Matsushima. At the large fish-market of Shiogama, this wealth of seafood comes ashore, to be whisked down Teizan Canal to the port and kitchens of Sendai, and beyond. From the Bay, and from the broader Sendai Wan, and from the Pacific Ocean beyond the outer Oshika Peninsula of Sendai Wan where the whales swim, comes a collection of raw materials for the finest nigiri and sashimi in Japan, dishes that originated in Tohoku. Thus, if one were to find a local chef with best hand and eye and nose for sushi, one could also reasonably expect to find there the best sushi in the world.

As it happens, such a genius of sushi did exist in Shiogama: a wry little man who wielded his long, long, sharp knife as deftly as a sculptor, a sculptor that is, of wafer-thin daikon sheets and quivering slabs of abalone, shaping in his palm generous beds of rice with tiny pillows of bright-green wasabi, fresh-grated from the very wasabi roots decorating a dish of slow-moving abalone, placed on the counter. He reduced buttery sticks of tuna and salmon to diagonal inhabitants of the rice-beds. Bouquets of fish and cucumber went up the elevators to unseen diners above, hairy-crab soup, nigiri, and a sorbet of magnificent local strawberries, a closing conceit of the chef. According to some, he was Sushi Tetsu, the Iron Chef of Sushi, where “iron” means dedication, integrity, and a lack of compromise. The chef had built the slim, green, four-story restaurant named after him, not far from the Hon-Shiogama (Main Shiogama) railway station, situated solidly on the long traditions of Japanese tourism and the immemorial harvests of Shiogama’s land and waters.

At night, the streets close to traffic, and the sound of the shuffling straw sandals means the weary throng, who have taken it in turns to carry the heavy shrines all around the town, draw near. A brief time of rest at the stairs’ base, and the climb begins, slowly at first, but then they dance the mikoshi up the last stairs in a dizzy reeling from side to side, suggestive of spirit possession. Slender priests in jade-green robes, positioned at the half-way landing, play the drum, gong, and high-pitched gagaku drones to lend momentum, and each supporter not actually under the mikoshi pushes both hands against the shoulder blades of the man in front of him, in a double human chain up the stair. No doubt the men prevent, by their preponderating mass, the backward, down-slope movement of man and mikoshi, a disaster that would clearly signify a loss in the citizens of Shiogama.

The “salt kettle”of Japan concentrates any number of truths. The signs of the imminent in-breaking of the sacred into everyday landscapes are there for the reading: salt on the stairs, polygonal walls rising behind modern fire stations, everyday streets lined with sacred ropes, the sounds of shuffling feet. As long as their direct descendants live in Shiogama, the first inhabitants of Matsushima Wan could have predicted that oysters would grow fat in the shallow bay, that salt would be needed, and that it would be made at least once a year in the sacred kettle, and the gods would extend their blessings.

Essay and art by Kathryn M. Lucchese.

CONTENTS

Claiming Desiland

by AMNA I. AHMAD