Not Quite Paradise: An American Sojourn in Sri Lanka by Adele Barker

It takes a certain kind of woman to up and move from Arizona to a war-torn, wet country on the other side of the world. Such a woman is Adele Barker, who, in 2001, shortly after the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the United States, brings – drags? – her fifteen-year-old son Noah to Sri Lanka where she will spend the next year teaching Russian literature.

Barker and her son settle in a house at the edge of the jungle where they quickly realize that they are not alone. Along with many ants, the house is inhabited by rats and geckos, and frequently visited by monkeys, one of which steals the television antenna. Although Barker has been planning on doing the housekeeping herself, and resists anything that smacks of colonialism, she soon finds herself with a maid, a tuk-tuk driver, and a gardener. After all, these people are depending upon her for employment. Over the course of her stay, these people also become her friends.

The author never explains what initially attracted her to Sri Lanka. She spends a lot of time trying to sort out the conflict between the Muslim Tamil Tigers, revolutionaries who have pretty much taken over the north of the island, and the Buddhist Sinhalese. (Barker lives in primarily Buddhist Kandy, where there is a shrine housing the Buddha’s tooth.) She is also curiously remote about her personal life. Although she mentions the break-up of a friend’s marriage, she never writes about her own romantic entanglements. (Don’t expect Eat, Pray, Love in Sri Lanka here.) Also, as an expat mother myself, I was interested in her relationship with her son. How did she convince him to go to Sri Lanka? What was his school life like once he got there? Was he adopted? (She mentions that he is from Paraguay.) Does he have a father? Although she alludes to some problems that Noah is having at school, and to his boredom in a place with no TV or decent soccer pitch, she doesn’t go into great detail. Perhaps this is out of consideration for her son’s privacy, or an innate reserve, but I wanted to know more.

When Barker leaves at the end of the year, she vows to return one day to hear the northerners’ point of view on the civil war, but then something bigger happens – here, where most people had never heard the word “tsunami” before, a 30-foot wave crashes over the coast of Sri Lanka washing away tens of thousands of people. Barker returns to the country, this time without her son, who is now a college student, to check up on friends and survey the damage wrought on “the day when the sea came to the land.” She finds heartbreak and loss at every turn, but also resilience.

At one point, she admires a woman’s gold necklace:

“It was all we had left,” a young woman who looked to be pregnant said. “When the sea came to the land, many of us had our saris on. Do you know how to wrap a sari?” she asked me with laughing eyes.
“Don’t test me on it,” I replied, “but kind of. With help. With pins.”
They all laughed.
The one who was all smiles continued. “We lost our saris in the wave. The sea unwrapped them from us. When we came out of the sea, we were nearly naked. Some of us had slips on. Some of us had nothing. But we had our jewelry.”

Although Barker herself remains something of an enigma, her affection for the people and the country is never in doubt. And as one disaster supplants another in the public imagination, she presents a clear portrait of an island nation persevering in the face of challenges.

Suzanne Kamata

Author of Losing Kei (Leapfrog Press, 2008)
Editor of Love You to Pieces: Creative Writers on Raising a Child with Special Needs (Beacon Press, May 2008) and Call Me Okaasan: Adventures in Multicultural Mothering (Wyatt-Mackenzie Publishing, 2009)

The Best Women’s Travel Writing 2008 edited by Lucy McCauley

Travelers’ Tales, 2008
Review by Suzanne Kamata

The traveler’s tale my husband and I tell most often is about the time an arsonist set fire to our Vancouver hotel and I was rescued by hook and ladder. It was a small fire, no one was injured, and we got a story out of it that we would tell for years to come.

Likewise, many of the selections in The Best Women’s Travel Writing 2008, edited by Lucy McCauley, emerged from well-laid plans gone awry. For instance, in “Ski Patrol,” Anne Lamott learns a life lesson from falling out of the chair lift, whereas Laura Resau bonds with her Mexican date’s mother – after he stands her up – in “My Ex-Novio’s Mother.” Kira Coonley writes about the devastating tsunami that wrecked her vacation and changed her life in December 2004, while Kari Bodnarchuk’s contribution, “On the Dark Side,” tells of a kayaking trip in Patagonia that starts off with an overturned boat, and a friend in the water.

Adventure aside, many of these essays bring small, seemingly inconsequential moments to light. Christine Sarkis’ irresistibly titled selection, “ Dipping Girl, Flying Girl, Heart Attack,” is about a woman needing to empty her bladder while enjoying fondue. How she gets to the bathroom is basically the whole story. C. Lill Aherns (“A Simple System”) writes about stoking the coal stove early in the morning in her Korean apartment building.

These essays take the reader from Italy, to India, to Madagascar, Papua New Guinea, and El Salvador, among other destinations. While some detail interesting vacations, others do not fit the usual conventions of travel writing. Momena Sayed’s contribution, “Paradise – Lost,” for example, is a memoir of her life in her homeland Afghanistan during war-time, written while the author was a student at College of the Holy Cross in Massachusetts. In “A Life Together, Worlds Apart,” Tracy Slater, who is married to a Japanese man, writes of dividing her life between Osaka, where she lives part-time with her husband, and Boston, where she teaches literature and gender studies to the incarcerated through the Boston University Prison Education Program. And Marianne Rogoff’s trip to Portugal (“Alive in Lisbon”) takes her not to a resort, but to a hospital, where she has been invited to read from her book about her deceased infant daughter.

A disproportionate number of these writers have a connection to the Boston area, where editor McCauley lives, which makes me wonder about the selection process. What would have happened if she had cast her net a bit wider? Nevertheless, this is a solid collection featuring a wide range of travel experiences by both established and emerging writers – cheaper than a plane ticket, the next best thing to being there.

A Piece of Cake by Cupcake Brown

Crown Publishing Group, February 2006
Review by Vanessa Dora Murray

It Ain’t Over Till It’s Over!

Cupcake Brown, an attorney who worked at one of the 25th largest law firms in the nation, has traveled all over the country to deliver a motivational speech. “My goal is to hopefully inspire as many people as I can and to let them know that no matter what challenges they may face in life, they’re not alone—and any challenge can be overcome,” she says in one of her many interviews since the writing of her debut book, A Piece of Cake.

A Piece of Cake is an awe-inspiring coming-of-age epic account—written in first-person and Brown’s own vernacular—of hope and survival.

At age 11 Brown finds her mother dead in bed. She is tossed into a sadistic foster home and her life spirals down into a world of physical abuse, rape, drugs, prostitution, and gang banging. By age 13 she finds herself pregnant by one of her johns but lose the unborn baby when she is brutally beaten by her foster mother’s daughter. By her 15th birthday she is told by doctors that she’ll never walk again after she is shot in the back with a 12-gauge shotgun by rival gang members in South Central Los Angeles. She does walk again. But her addiction to crack grows out of control. She hates her life and wants to die so she tries to contract AIDS. By her mid twenties, she walks past a window after living behind a dumpster for days, “And saw my reflection. My eyes were sunk in my head. My lips were burned and scabbed from the crack pipe. You could see my ribs. I had seen death before on other people. But I’d never seen it on me,” recalls Brown. That day was the beginning of her spiral up. She entered a drug rehab, got rid of toxic friends, and without a high school diploma or GED, Brown graduated college magna cum laude. In 2001 at the age of 37 Brown graduated nearly top of her class from the University of San Francisco Law School. Brown has received a slew of scholastic awards including the University of San Francisco School of Law’s Judge Harold J. Haley Award for Exceptional Distinction in Scholarship, Character and Activities, the McAuliffe Honor Society, the National Law School Dean’s List, and the San Diego State University’s Donald Leiffer Outstanding Alumni Award for Distinguished Service.

A brutally straightforward memoir, A Piece of Cake will have readers sniffling throughout this 480 page heart-wrencher sprinkled with a modest amount of humor.

Poster Child by Emily Rapp

Technorati Tags: Books, disabilities, memoir, non-fiction, Reviews, women

Bad Karma: Confessions of a Reckless Traveler in Southeast Asia by Tamara Sheward

Academy Chicago Publishers, 2005
Review by Cheryl A Townsend

A travelogue of hilarious and sometimes perilous escapades for the adventurous woman

Tamara Sheward is an Aussie-born adventurer with a penchant for taking the road less traveled when vacationing. When she overhears a fellow Aussieman talk of his travels in remote areas of Asia, she immediately calls up Elissa, her backpacking travel partner. Tamara is between jobs and El is on summer vacation from teaching. It’s a must go and they do. Herein begins a vacation of perpetual “Bad Karma“ segues.

What follows is a lively recap of monk flashings in Udon Than, risky rent-a-heap planes, “Chicken innards on a stick“ kiosks, inane phrase book entries put to use in Bangkok, horrid disco bands in Laos, hitchhiked booze-running to Khe Sanh Hue, a boat-ride to total debauchery, cursing a family in Saigon, visiting a temple with Victor Hugo as one of their saints, getting stuck in a sniper tunnel in Viet Nam, and finally meeting up with their initiator in Cambodia.

Tamara writes with a jovial style one could easily envision conversed over drinks at a local tavern, especially as most of the adventures were centered around imbibing. Her camaraderie and bawdiness reminds me of the acidic wit of Dorothy Parker while still getting the vital points across. Picturesque and anthropologically intriguing, this is how all travel books should be penned. Tamara is a risk-taking, intent on annoying, penny-pinching trailblazer for the rest of us cruise ship wimps. While I doubt I’ll have the guts to go her route, I assuredly applaud her audacity for making her own history so appealing.

Tamara has a travel journal website.

Case Walking: An Aids Case Manager Wails Her Blues by Julene Tripp Weaver

Finishing Line Press, 2007
Review by GA. A. Banks-Martin

The True Portrait of AIDS

Julene Tripp Weaver first studied Creative writing at City University of New York before moving to Seattle where she received her Masters in Applied Behavioral Science from The Leadership Institute of Settle. Since that time she has become a passionate practitioner of Continuum, a movement whose central tenet teaches we are a whole connected to everything in the world transcending time, space and condition. She applies this teaching to her work as an HIV/AIDS case manager, and it is evident in her collection of poems, Case Walking: An AIDS Case Manger Wails Her Blues, a unique book where individuals confront death while reminding us that people with HIV/AIDS are just as much a part of humanity as those suffering the effects of any other condition.

To most people the typical AIDS suffer is excessively thin, homosexual, intravenous drug user, and or a prostitute, their humanity and life details are dismissed. Television may allow us to see a sick man, check into the hospital but almost never tells us that no one visits him, no one sends cards, and no one brings him a Christmas tree. We never know he expected to get better, that he passed away with only a picture of himself when he was a beautiful women, or that his name was Rick.

Weekly news magazines do well with teaching us that expecting mothers can pass HIV/AIDS on to both their unborn and infant children but lately it seems such cases occur mostly in Africa. Rarely has a reporter told the story of Barb and Dori, we are introduced during a party, Barb sings, shows baby pictures of daughter, declares that the now, nearly, 20 year old is beautiful despite having cut off her pony tails, despite her being short, despite her positive HIV status but what is truly beautiful is that Barb takes full responsibility / for this child she bore/ with HIV.

Case Walking: An Aids Case Manager Wails Her Blues is populated by those whom we expect to find: homeless people, people addicted to illegal injectables, and a broken system, but what makes the collection remarkable is that without making excuses for behavior; without making religious or moral condemnations, Julene Tripp Weaver shows us the intimate details of her clients lives, making them everyday people who share the emotions, dreams and desires common to all. It is difficult to read How often Do You Change Your sheets, which focuses on a heroin addict who can’t find housing due to his criminal record but says he will change his sheets every day/once he has an apartment simply because there is nothing/like getting into bed between clean sheets, and be unable relate to his desire for a place of his own, an a clean bed to sleep upon.

Strange Big Moon, The Japan and India Journals: 1960-1964 by Joanne Kyger

North Atlantic Books, Berkeley
c.2000

Anne Waldman’s introduction to Strange Big Moon describes Joann Kyger’s journal, part travelogue, part poetic and personal introspection, as a “surprisingly, surreptitiously, feminist tract as well.” Living and writing as she did, however, with and among the greatest male writers of both the San Francisco Renaissance and the Beat movement, Kyger’s exertion of such a strong yet subtle female presence becomes a clear necessity in her pursuit of a poetic voice. Newly married to poet Gary Snyder and relocated to Kyoto in January of 1960 (when her journal begins), Kyger is almost immediately struggling to retain her sense of voice and self. The snatches and fragments of poetry found throughout the journals, however, bear little of the insecurity exposed here; rather, they are the foundations upon which Kyger, upon her return from Japan, would later complete and publish a seminal collection, The Tapestry and the Web. Adopting an approach similar to that of her San Francisco Renaissance predecessors Robert Duncan and Jack Spicer, Kyger draws upon history and myth in an imaginative remembrance of women before her—women who lend Kyger the experience to maintain control of art and domesticity alike. Kyger becomes preoccupied with the power of weaving (a historically female occupation), and echoes of the above excerpt resound in Tapestry’s re-writing of Penelope and the Odysseus myth. Returning to Walden’s assessment of Kyger’s “surreptitious” feminism, it is fascinating to watch it shine forth as, with passing years, young Joanne develops a foothold in her own domestic experience with Gary Snyder and simultaneously redefines her male predecessors’ poetic ideologies to plant and justify incredibly powerful women at the heart of lyric history.