Hapo, vipi? Hapo sawa. How is it there? Is it OK there? Yes! It’s quite alright. Great Swahili hip-hop, the early days. I met Professor Jay once at a talent show in Arusha, a bunch of teens packed into a community center, spitting rhymes. Outside, I sipped on a cold Kili with the other teaching artists, star-struck when Professor Jay came out and took a selfie with us. Years later, he became a hip-hop member of parliament. Poetry and politics, it clicks.
I taught theater classes to high school students for a summer in Tanzania. Even then, I wondered if arts education was not unlike missionary work, I arrived with such evangelical fervor for the fire lit by creativity, and justified my presence there by invitation. We ate our stews by candlelight, trekked to waterfalls at dawn, zig-zagged through the market in our strange bubbles of whiteness, met our students’ families on their coffee farms. What kind of messenger was I then in the early days of my delusions? I still don’t know.
“I find myself still softly searching for my delinquent palaces,” writes Emily Dickinson. Me too, sister, me too. Hapo, vipi? Hapo sawa. Such a catchy song. I would end up spending all kinds of time with students in Tanzania. No one ever tells you that a safari entails a great deal of time riding around on rugged roads in dust clouds of hot silence. Most of our time at Mikumi was spent protecting our picnic food from bold birds and their hell-bent kleptomania. They snatched our sandwiches right from our hands. Some of us tried to hide in the green jeeps but fled when it got too hot in the metal box.
I took my students on all kinds of field trips that left me tripping in the open fields of an inner sort—like that healing hospital near Mwera.
Deep in the forests inland from the main road, healers treat sick patients unresponsive to Western medicine—mute children, grief-stricken widows, women with a distant gaze and slack arms. Much of it felt like a performance, if I’m honest, for the wazungu. They’d take us into small huts and reveal their trays of herbal medicines, explaining each root and branch. They tied red scarves around our heads to ward off shetani.
One remedy: write a passage for the Koran on a piece of paper with black ink, then boil water and mix it with herbs. Dip the paper in the herbal tea, and drink it. Yes, drink the words, that’s the medicine.
I didn’t know what I believed. In Arusha, the kids loved Jesus. In Zanzibar, the kids loved Allah. In Skokie, the kids loved Moses. My father and mother hoped we’d worship prairies and also know the gist of Genesis. And so I studied my little heart out when I was a teenager and hoped God could tell I was attempting to make contact, through poetry and songs.
“Is God merely a synonym for gone?” That’s a question Christian Wiman poses in his essay on taking a trip to Tanzania with his father. A trip to visit missionaries. A trip in which he trips on faith and when he had it and how he lost it and what it felt like to find it again. Good question, Wiman. Hapo, vipi? Hapo sawa.
How is it over there in the inner fields of one’s own doubts? It’s OK over there. I have enough to eat and the big-picture view is splendid. Wow, this daily writing thing is a wild ride. I could keep on going but I may lose the plot and every time I mention the Mwera healers, I tend to sense a ripple in the universe.
Transit Slips, #24
I taught theater classes to high school students for a summer in Tanzania. Even then, I wondered if arts education was not unlike missionary work, I arrived with such evangelical fervor for the fire lit by creativity, and justified my presence there by invitation. We ate our stews by candlelight, trekked to waterfalls at dawn, zig-zagged through the market in our strange bubbles of whiteness, met our students’ families on their coffee farms. What kind of messenger was I then in the early days of my delusions? I still don’t know.
“I find myself still softly searching for my delinquent palaces,” writes Emily Dickinson. Me too, sister, me too. Hapo, vipi? Hapo sawa. Such a catchy song. I would end up spending all kinds of time with students in Tanzania. No one ever tells you that a safari entails a great deal of time riding around on rugged roads in dust clouds of hot silence. Most of our time at Mikumi was spent protecting our picnic food from bold birds and their hell-bent kleptomania. They snatched our sandwiches right from our hands. Some of us tried to hide in the green jeeps but fled when it got too hot in the metal box.
I took my students on all kinds of field trips that left me tripping in the open fields of an inner sort—like that healing hospital near Mwera.
Deep in the forests inland from the main road, healers treat sick patients unresponsive to Western medicine—mute children, grief-stricken widows, women with a distant gaze and slack arms. Much of it felt like a performance, if I’m honest, for the wazungu. They’d take us into small huts and reveal their trays of herbal medicines, explaining each root and branch. They tied red scarves around our heads to ward off shetani.
One remedy: write a passage for the Koran on a piece of paper with black ink, then boil water and mix it with herbs. Dip the paper in the herbal tea, and drink it. Yes, drink the words, that’s the medicine.
I didn’t know what I believed. In Arusha, the kids loved Jesus. In Zanzibar, the kids loved Allah. In Skokie, the kids loved Moses. My father and mother hoped we’d worship prairies and also know the gist of Genesis. And so I studied my little heart out when I was a teenager and hoped God could tell I was attempting to make contact, through poetry and songs.
“Is God merely a synonym for gone?” That’s a question Christian Wiman poses in his essay on taking a trip to Tanzania with his father. A trip to visit missionaries. A trip in which he trips on faith and when he had it and how he lost it and what it felt like to find it again. Good question, Wiman. Hapo, vipi? Hapo sawa.
How is it over there in the inner fields of one’s own doubts? It’s OK over there. I have enough to eat and the big-picture view is splendid. Wow, this daily writing thing is a wild ride. I could keep on going but I may lose the plot and every time I mention the Mwera healers, I tend to sense a ripple in the universe.
Transit Slips, #24
