Tests

[Longer writing experiments by members of our group – a new type of post that has begun to appear spontaneously — are blocking the flow of traffic in Marginalia. I’m not sure that they belong on this site at all, but am putting them here, for the moment.]

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Suzan Abrams
January 28, 2009 at 7:55 pm · Edit

Hi atf

I managed to locate a few passages that stretched on to the paragraphs I had shown you. I had written them out as narratives…small travel episodes and abandoned these writings later. I wanted at the time to keep a record of my experiences. The Zanzibar was somewhere towards the end. You don’t have to read it but this probably gives a closer feel to what I was trying to do at the time.

**********
“I lived once with an eccentric old Indian lady who first lured me to East Africa, pleading company. Her secret agenda was to have me help her with carrying her luggage of pickles and spices for her grandchildren. That was when I discovered the Tanzania and the Zanzibar.

On our first visit to the Mikumi Wildlife Park, we were duped. Mrs. Lewis’s son recommended a cheap travel guide. He brought his friend along. We left at 4am in the morning. The rover sped through hills and plains.

In the rover, Mrs. Lewis shared egg sandwiches and mineral water with her guide. She also complained about the terrible science of lipsticks. Dirty, filthy things, she spat. So ungodly, so wordly.

Finally, the bridge to the safari was broken. We saw nothing. Except that is, for a curious giraffe and a party of toffee-nosed zebras. The boys said it was not their fault. They cursed and sweared at councils and the government. They stuck their heads out of the rover and spat violently on the ground.

One kept watch over the other in case a lion came along and snapped off his friend’s head.

Finally, with a woebegone expression, they asked if we could go on to a waterfall for a swim. They swam for three hours straight.

I complained loudly. I was ready to cry. “What a useless safari,” I said. No animals, nothing. This is what happens when your son recommends cheap, cheap.”

Mrs. Lewis looked horrified. She raised her hands in prayer form. “Ayoh, please don’t tell my son that, he took so much trouble. Ayoh, my poor son, he did his best for us. He is such a good, kind and loving son. Assistant manager, due for promotion and earning so much money.

“You think it’s easy to go into a safari?” In this curious drama, she turned furious. “Once my son’s car broke down. He and his wife were stuck for 11 hours inside the park. No one knew. They were almost eaten up by lions. SOME MORE, YOU DARE TO DO THIS TO MY SON!”

Later, we stopped at a chalet for a quick wash. Mrs. Lewis pointed to the hills. Look at God’s beauty. All the mountains, all the hills…isn’ this a beautiful safari? Look at the monkeys, what nice animals…

The monkeys looked anything but nice. They eyed my packet of Twisties and threatened me with the prospect of a barbaric Genghiz Khan war.

A few years later, I returned to the same wildlife park. The hotel booked me a wonderful tour agency. We drove past the broken bridge. Of course, all the wildlife thought I was the biggest snoop around.

The hippos were not impressed with my binoculars. The wildbeest dared me to dive in their watering hole and then, I would get what for! The elephants preferred to keep their respectable distance amongst a clump of trees. Even the snobbish zebras embarked on their savannah coffee morning without me.

I asked my guide, Paul, about the broken bridge. I paid US$250 for my safari. Mrs. Lewis had paid just US$70. How he laughed. He said we had got ourselves a couple of con-men guides. Kind but cheats. After all, wasn’t it true that when you paid peanuts, you ended up with monkeys.

********

Mrs. Periammah Lewis’s son expressed concern that we saw no animals at the safari. He looked crestfallen at our plight. “Never mind, darling, you tried your level best,” his doting mother comforted.

“After all, God only gave you 2 eyes. How can you see whether the bridge hundreds of miles away is broken or not.”

Besides, one eye currently had a cyst in it due to a stalking African mosquito that had targetted a wrong landing. The buzzing pilot was said to have arrived on the late night flight from Botswana. Having just received its licence, the clumsy mosquito had crashed into Mrs. Lewis’s son’s right eye and died instantly. Its blood was never recovered.

Now, Mrs. Lewis’s longsuffering son with a swollen red eye, instantly cheered up at his mother’s consolation.

Mrs. Lewis told her daughter, Helen in secret, that I had shown ingratitude and brought down the family name.

And that if they had ventured to cross the bridge, I may have got all of them killed by lions. All would have perished in a terrible tragedy.

If the Catholic church in Kuala Lumpur heard of this disaster, the reputation of her shiny new Proton car would be forever muddied. And her octegenarian girlfriends would no longer eat thosai at her shiny new house.

On the long way back home to Dar-el-Salaam, Mrs. Lewis snored loudly. Sometimes, she appeared to resemble the wildlife herself, as she resorted to panting and snorting.

She moved this way and that. Her bones creaked and cracked. Like dangling meat in a butcher’s window, ancient beefy flesh started to hang about her torso. Sweat trickled down her hairy cheeks like a brook about to confront a turbulent river. If they could only make it to the ocean of her vast wet belly…

Of course, the sweaty ‘brook’ would have to contend with a couple of witches’ warts first. The beads of sweat had the nasty task of having to avoid her hairs like a real stream would with troublesome twigs.

Mrs. Lewis smelt.

She did not believe in the humble deodorant. She swore it was the devil’s product. “God gave us a natural perfume scent. Better than roses. Better than honey, better then….” Mrs. Lewis smelt something bad. The two young guides covered their ears to her snores and grinned.

I looked out the window.

The plains and mountains appeared glorious in the slightly cold mist. The Masai dressed in colourful garb, walked about, dragging donkeys or balancing heavy pails on their head.

Sometimes we passed striking signboards in the middle of nowhere. Like a vision from heaven.

It had words that said, PRETTY POLLY’S INTERNET SERVICES, SCANNING/PRINTING SERVICES AVAILABLE. CONTACT OWNER IMMEDIATELY!

The billboard formed the roof of a small round Masai hut in the middle of wide open ground. In the mud hut was an old Masai witchdoctor. He squatted as if in meditation. He stared at our speeding Rover with suspicion.

Sometimes, there were other kinds of signboards. Lorries, and vans overflowing with hands, legs and torsos, would shoot past us like the wind. As the bus rumbled past, you could catch the crowing of chickens and other noisy poultry in the midst of the clutter.

Then the bus would scream out advertising like ELVIS PRESLEY PLAYING TOMORROW. HURRY FOR TICKETS. Or perhaps another one that read ROMEO LOVES JULIET. In the van, sat a dozen cleaning ladies that each looked like they were about 200 years old. All would grin at us, scouring the Rover for possible sweethearts.

Sometimes, you could see women fighting over their men on the road. A crowd would gather. Hair-pulling, wrestling and a lot of glue-eyed grinning from a nearby bottle shop.

Once a young Masai man fell in love with me. This would have been my fourth or fifth safari. His name was Akimbo but he discovered Jesus. So he changed his name to a famous one and called himself Alfonso Alberquerque. Alfonso was a very proud man with his spear and often asked me if I wanted to exchange love letters by email. Alfonso had secured himself a Yahoo mailbox.

Before I left Africa that fifth time, I handed Alfonso a little Malaysian souvenir. When I returned a few months later to Dar-el-Salaam, I discovered I had a fiance. Alfonso had told everyone, including his mother that we were about to be married. His uncle turned up with a small congregation to meet me, the prospective bride, at the usual seaside hotel where I always stayed.

Whatever made them think such a thing? Apparently, my agreement to Alfonso’s hand in marriage and my sign of undying devoted love had been the solemn handing over of a key chain souvenir. The keychain represented passionate moons to come.

*******
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Suzan Abrams
January 28, 2009 at 7:58 pm · Edit

Thanks Sean.

I do feel I’ve gatecrashed Wordy’s Marginalia terribly. It’s Des’s writings you’re all clamouring to read. But I just needed to give atf a better picture of things.
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anytimefrances
January 28, 2009 at 9:22 pm · Edit

hi susan
thanks for posting these two pieces. at first I thought it would make a good story but now see better what you’re doing. a lengthy narrative along the lines of a writer’s journal would provide you with the material to write in any form. I came across this doing a course with the ou on writing, about how a writer will use good material in several ways, play, short stories, novel and what have you. the material here is very interesting and you have a good observer viewpoint. i can see how it’s different from Des’s, whereas his tends towards a Ulysses like monologue you make your characters clearly distinctive, giving them each a personality and some colour; you make them all interesting. here i think you have the ability to gather the material, record it in a very readable way, and now it only needs knowing how you want to use it. it is lovely to read as it is. i have no experience in publishing, from any angle, but think if you wanted a publisher to take an interest in it you’d need to do some work on it to get it into a more writerly shape. for a publisher it would have to fit into a category. i’m not so familiar with travel writing that i’d know how it would compete with what’s available on the market, so i really can’t offer any help there. it really depends on yourself whether you want to write fiction/short stories or just do the travel writing. I’ve read some Lessing like this, Martha Quest, and found it a good read and the non fiction type would be Isaac Dinneson; i think they’d be two models for using this kind of material.

I think this experience, for example, is fine as traveller’s journal and would also make a brilliant funny short story,

“Before I left Africa that fifth time, I handed Alfonso a little Malaysian souvenir. When I returned a few months later to Dar-el-Salaam, I discovered I had a fiance. Alfonso had told everyone, including his mother that we were about to be married. His uncle turned up with a small congregation to meet me, the prospective bride, at the usual seaside hotel where I always stayed.”

i think it’s wonderfully comic no matter which way it would be treated and entertaining.

i really think you have a gift for observation and sympathy. I loved it really, and think wordy should feel privileged to have it here I may come back to it again and see if I can come up with some suggestions but it’s already quite well written. gather as much detail as you can, the names of plants, animals, people, places; the usual advice is to carry a notebook everywhere you go and for you it’s essential as you already have the narrative ability and observational talents. thanks for showing these to me. hope you will keep at it and keep posting here.
atf

EARLIER DRAFT OF THE SAME STORY
Submitted on 2009/01/28 at 11:30am

“The next day, Mrs. Periammah Lewis and I continued our travels into the Zanzibar.

We were accompanied by one Valentino Rudolph The Third. Valentino was a heavy barrelled Tanzanian, who acted as Mrs. Lewis’s son, Alagappan’s driver in Dar-El-Salaam. Overnight, he had received his promotion papers for self-proclaimed butler and high-alert bodyguard.

Of course, welcome and goodbye hugs were out of the question.

Pardon Valentino for being rude but he was so short that had he dared attempt an embrace into Mrs. Lewis’s Himalayan chest which possessed two shaky, unconquerable Everests (it was whispered that her long-dead husband had been frigid) he would have been forever suffocated and buried in burning flesh.

The Everests drooped from an ocean of fiery, frustrated wrinkles. He would have suffered a fracture to his his bulbous nose had his face hit the peaks.

What had to be urgently remembered was that the Tanzanian police prowled the city like leopards. Both would have been arrested for a supposedly lewd sexual act.

Please, I dare not say and can only plead that you visualise the tragedy that may have been!

What if they could not have been separated? They may have had to live like Siamese twins.

To this day, Mrs. Lewis’s Everests remain unconquered.

“Take Mummy, take him and go,” smiled Alagappan with relief. I suspected he wanted to get rid of us. Alaggapan was in a good mood. The swelling in his right eye had gone. The criminal Botswana born-n-bred mosquito, having escaped trial and extradiction rights, had been condemned to eternal damnation in the family dustbin. “Rot in hell,” shouted Mrs. Lewis.

I wondered that she didn’t give it a hug on her restless, scorching chest for a similiar effect.
******

It was a hot afternoon at 2. Mrs. Periammah Lewis, Valentino Rudolph the Third and I sat in a restaurant that resembled a thatched straw hut, close to the idyllic icing beach.

The restaurant had a curvy bar next to it. It was called The Tequila Kiss-Me-Quick Shack.

A song made up of powerful African drumbeats, blared loudly. Voluptous sweet young things holidaying from Europe, sat in dangerous bikinis on bar stools. They sipped potions with fancy names like You Are a Coconut Head.

Hopeful suitors with toothpaste grins clamoured the bar like an army of red ants. Palm trees swayed on the beach next to us as the wind blew lustily. Mrs. Lewis, reluctant to spend US$ 2 dollars on an orange crush, had dismissed Sharuk, our guide, for the day.

Earlier, Sharuk had taken us on a tour. I chose to take my photograph of Sharuk next to a stall selling plastic wildlife and Zanzibar spices, batteries and smuggled cigarettes.

An old man with a snowy snakish beard and wearing an Arabian Nights cap guarded his ramshackle stall. It was in shambles. He looked po-faced like a museum statue. He cheated tourists as often as he could.

On his parasol was a banner that advertised his stall. It spelt the words, Made-In-London in big, bright red letters. Everywhere on the legs of his rackety table was also painted the words, Made-In-London. The old man was surrounded by about 50 Made-In-London labels. It soon became clear that the old man himself looked like he could have been manufactured in London, back in the Dickensen era.

I thought that would be the ideal place to take a photograph of Sharuk. Sharuk exchanged a foreign dialect with the old man. We put on solemn expressions. The old man nodded his head but looked suspicious. First, we had to purchase something. I bought a few camera batteries.

Sharuk put his hand around the old man and grinned. Perhaps he too would look to the folks back home that he was a Made-In-London import. Sharuk’s ambition was to be a Hollywood actor.

Then Sharuk laughed. And I laughed. And then we laughed and laughed. Until I couldn’t take any more pictures. The old man’s face transformed itself into a vengeful volcano. Suddenly the dragon, he pummelled a fist threateningly and shouted at us. Sharouk said he screamed out unmentionables. “Time to get out of here,” shouted Sharuk. We didn’t take the risk of saying thank-you. Still laughing, we ran and ran.

Now, I felt wistful, like a young lady dining somewhere in the Carribbean. I wanted to get up and dance. A powerful romantic flavour lingered in The Tequila Kiss-Me-Quick shack. Other islands would continue to have that same aromatic feel as I found out, from visiting the South Seas.

I tasted a vanilla ice-cream called Tutti-Frutti. Mrs. Lewis never ate at any outside restaurant anywhere in the world for fear that the food would be contaminated. She only ever supped at respectable Indian thosai shops. Now she and Valentino had themselves cups of tea. Valentino tried not to look at Mrs. Lewis’s chest. Mrs. Lewis tried not to look at Valentino’s bulbous nose.

Suddenly, a tiny African boy riding a Vespa like the Grand Prix, scootered into the shack, gatecrashing the idyllic scene.

There were two other boys hollering on the Vespa with him. They had heard rumours that the police were coming. “POLICIA, POLICIA,” they shouted. “POLICIA!”

Of course, we knew nothing. The bartender looked nervous.
Waiters dropped their plates.
The hopeful suitors fled like cowards.
The girls looked surprised.
There was a lot of noise. The boys looked worried. What was their dark secret, I wondered.
“No need to be a busybody,” snorted Mrs. Lewis. A wildlife image immediately shot to mind.

The boys said they would help to guard the fort. They careened around. for warning signs. They heard sounds getting louder and louder but couldn’t see anything. They manouvered the Vespa into the bar one more time. “POLICIA, POLICA,” they shouted, vainly. They added honks and toots to heightens suspense.
It was too late.
Everyone shivered and waited.
No-one moved.
After what seemed an age, we heard the clopping of hoofs.
A puzzled farmer with a donkey on his cart ambled into The Tequila Kiss-Me-Quick shack.
It was a case of mistaken identity.The three African boys, on their Vespa, decided that a vanishing act would be smarter than an apology.
They fled.