Magnolia Journal coming in 2009

Original works of literature still have a home at Her Circle in the form of Magnolia, a print journal of women’s literature coming in 2009. Submissions for volume one will open in Fall 2008.

Spring 2007

Still Life In The Art Room by Liesl Jobson

Ufudu is restless today, says a boy under his breath. He rinses a sable brush in a jar of water.

Ufudu indeed! grumble the scissors on the shelf. Silence matrics, says Miss Dube.

Yesterday the name given affectionately to the art teacher by her students suited her ponderous tread. Today she moves like a plover with jerky steps. She stops statue-like with her head cocked, as if listening to a half-heard sound. Go awaaay! The cry of a loerie outside startles her. She stalks to her desk rapidly.

She’s probably dieting, says a girl.

Ufudu needs a man, says another.

These children show no respect, murmurs a charcoal drawing stick.

Sikelela was the first to comment on the teacher’s obsessional doodles. Shortly after she had returned from compassionate leave he passed her desk and saw a page half filled with caricature turtles. When he left the class an hour later the page was almost completed. The next day a new one with identical figures had been started.

You really like tortoises, Ma’am, he had said.

Hmmm, she nodded, flipping the pad closed.

We should call you Mam fudu?

Hmmm, she nodded again.

Dalila did not point out that what she drew were turtles, not tortoises. There is no single word in Zulu for the former, only an extension that approximates: Ufudu-lwaso-lwandle or the tortoise-of-the-water. The name, which did not bother her particularly, stuck. Dalila was relieved that the boys and girls had noticed only her eccentric drawings and not the hollow yawning that had recently begun to emanate from the collection of empty jars under the sink. The youngsters also appeared not to have heard the rattling complaints of the palette boxes in the cabinet, the restless canvasses and the shuffling sketchboards.

Perhaps these sounds were lost against the scraping chairs and the grinding of the old-fashioned pencil sharpener on her desk. Maybe the stuffiness of polyester blazers worn too long without laundering dulled the children’s senses.

Each day for almost a year, while her students have worked, Dalila has doodled to pass the time: serried ranks of the ancient reptiles marching eastward toward an imaginary shoreline beyond the page.

Her compulsion had started a few days before Sikelela’s observation, when she presented an easy lesson to the class two weeks in a row.

Today we’re going to do the Take-a-line-for-a-walk exercise. Who knows which artists developed this style? Dalila spoke like she moved. Grief had dulled her speech. A girl with unruly dreads raised her hand before the teacher had finished asking the question.

Refiloe?

Klee, Ma am.

Good, Refiloe. Another artist?

Miro, answered Salmaan.

Yes, she said, switching on the overhead projector.

There are two ways of accomplishing this exercise. The first allows an abstract line to take shape freely. Allow it to curve, to zigzag, make corners, and so on, wandering all over the paper.

She demonstrated the technique. In contrast to her plodding diction, her hand whizzed over the screen.

Now shift the page until you see something that you recognise.

She swivelled the transparency around.

Perhaps an eye, a claw, a skeletal tree. Develop it. Add more pattern. With rapid gestures she filled in leaves like eyelashes, feathery bones, beaks. Keep going until the whole page is covered in detail.

It was the last time her hand moved swiftly, unselfconsciously for many months. The other way of performing this task requires planning to create a specific image. It is more controlled, a bigger challenge. She put another transparency on the overhead and drew the tail of a turtle, raised the hump, formed the head, the flippers and lower carapace. Without lifting her pen, she entered the shell cavity interweaving three rows of scutes. Lastly, she created a diminishing spiral to form the eye out of negative white space. Try a waterfall, a skyline or a garden. Whatever you do, keep your pen on the paper. Most of the class had already begun while she was talking. She had forgotten that they already knew and liked the exercise. She switched off the projector and put away her felt-tipped pens. She drew another turtle and another. On completing a row of turtles, Dalila wandered through the desks to check her students progress. She stopped a boy who was about to erase his work,

Keep going, Bhuti, she said over his shoulder. Pointing to an empty space on the next boy’s page she said, Keep it loose and free; don’t think too hard.

She returned to her doodles. The bell rang. The students gathered their pencils and sauntered out. After they had left, Dalila completed an entire sheet of inch-long turtles. She put the page in the bottom drawer of her desk, the first page of identical scribbles that would accumulate for a year, until thousands of the miniature beasts crawled around her desk, scraping their flippers, yearning for release. When she first heard them it sounded like the erratic slowing down of the overhead projector fan after being switched off. She opened the drawer and the noise stopped.

Today is the first anniversary of her mother’s passing.

No cartoons today, hisses a flat pencil.

Where are the turtles, Ufudu?taunts a coloured pencil.

Dalila drums her fingers on her desk. She chivvies the daydreaming Refiloe who stares out the window. She complains at Salmaan’s dithering. Ten minutes before the final bell, she hurries them along, Finish up, Bhuti, don’t start another colour.

Put your folio away. Now, she snaps. Have a nice weekend.

As the last one leaves, she flips over an empty bucket. Dalila reads the label stuck to the bottom. Powder Tempera: light green. The colour of hospital walls.

Residues of poster paint ingrained in the plastic release a faint odour of sour dust. She places it, upside down, in front of the window. Usually she constructs still life compositions on a plinth in the centre of the room. Today she needs a different perspective.

Dalila removes a faded kikoi from her tog bag. She holds it to her face and inhales deeply. Her mother brought it back from Nairobi, a few weeks before getting ill. Her open suitcase had released the fragrance of grassy plains, Kenyan shillings and Watamu Beach, where Dalila lived as a child.

She had walked beside the water holding her grandmother’s hand. They found a strange depression in the sand. Look, a green turtle nest, said Bibi. Turtles lay their eggs then leave them to hatch.

Does their mother not stay with them?Dalila asked.

No. The hatchlings must dash toward the surf before the gulls catch them. Only the lucky ones make it into the sea.

To search for their parents?asked Dalila.

To continue the cycle of survival.

Do they ever find them?

Turtles don’t really think that way, although they return here throughout their life.

Back to Watamu?

Yes. Eventually the females will lay their eggs right here when they are 40 years old.

They come back looking for their mothers and fathers, said the girl.

Hmmm. Bibi?

Green turtles live to be 90.

Bibi, what happens if the baby never finds her parents?Dalila tugged on her grandmother’s skirt.

Hmmm.

Dalila had already learned that when Bibi said, Hmmm in that mournful tone, the old woman had no reply. It served no point to ask again. There were many questions for which Bibi had no answers, including why Dalila’s parents were gone so long.

Bibi didn’t know where they were. Perhaps they attended a congress in Dar es Salaam or a conference in Botswana, or were sneaking in and out of South Africa. They never told her. It was safer not to know too much.

That night Dalila dreamed of the unfortunate turtles, hatched late, flopping in vain against the outgoing tide. They were almost at the shore when hungry gulls plucked them from the sand, their flippers swimming in midair. Dangled low over the water, the babies could see their parents. Then the gulls swooped to the beach where they cracked open the shells and gorged on the rich meat. Dalila woke sobbing for their futile struggle.

Bibi cradled her, rocking her back to sleep, crooning, Harambee, Harambee, tuimbe pamoja. Tujenge serikali. Harambee.
She sang slowly, in the key of blackness, of dark spirits. It sounded like a song for harvesting snakes. The next morning the news arrived that her father had opened a letter bomb in Lusaka.

Dalila pinches her nostrils and blows hard. Her ears pop. Her sinuses feel as if she has been weeping for a week. She wonders if she is becoming allergic to paint.

The theme of the lesson is identifying environmental and historical factors that influence visual artists.

Sikelela had brought an mbira, the traditional herd boy’s piano , Refiloe had brought a bunch of leggy strelitzias. Salmaan provided a flag for the backdrop and Diwali candles. They constructed an eclectic collection of paraphernalia for the project. An exhibition of the work is planned for the Heritage Day celebration and the president is scheduled to visit the school that his grandchildren attended.

Here we go again, sighs the bucket. Must we endure another plastic snake?mutters a thin yellow stripe woven into the kikoi.

Be quiet, says Dalila, sniffing. She will not tolerate the voices today. Like the matrics, they pay her little attention.

You should stick to porcelain dolls, says the bucket. You like their gingham frocks and lacy petticoats.

We haven’t seen dolly for a while, says a cerise stripe.

Dalila’s grandmother had always sewn her party dresses, western style, in pastel shades. Bibi made matching dresses for the dolls from the left-over fabric scraps.

Peering through her bifocals she formed delicate stitches. Then she would braid Dalila’s hair in satin ribbons of the same shade. Dalila tried to braid her dolls’ straight blonde hair.

White children’s hair doesn’t braid that way, said Bibi. She asked Bibi why porcelain never came in shades of brown or black.

Hmmm, said Bibi.

Dalila drapes the kikoi over the bucket. It has softened with washing. Once she could still smell traces of her mother’s scent in the cotton and a faint whiff of the crisp herbal beer her father had allowed her to sip when she sat on his knee for the last time.

No, Mandla, scolded her mother. He laughed at his daughter’s lip-smacking enjoyment, and then whisked the bottle away. Dalila tucks the cloth, which possesses only a clean laundry smell now, about the base of the bucket. She arranges the stripes to fall in zigzags.

After her father died her mother would walk along the beach with a kikoi wrapped around her thin hips. She had always been a round and comfortable figure. She stopped eating until clothes hung on her angular form. Her mother sat and stared into the horizon for hours, alone. Dalila would watch her from afar. The next breeding season, a record low number of eggs was documented by Turtlewatch Kenya.

Dalila’s mother’s grief had scared all the females away. They refused to lay.

There is a shushing sound in Dalila’s ears, like the sound of waves inside a seashell. She tries to depressurise her nasal chambers again, but there is no relief. The turtles in her drawer are scraping their flippers. She places the pot plant on top of the bucket. Sunlight reflects off the finely demarcated green and white leaves.

Dalila had taken a slip of the hen-and-chickens from her mother’s balcony garden when the flat was sold to cover the doctor’s bills. She left the cutting in a bottle of water. When it took root, she transplanted it into a large ukhamba, a traditional Zulu beer pot she bought at the Rosebank market. Those shocking shades will quite outdo me. The pot plant glares at the bold kikoi. My delicate stripes will be utterly lost.

Hen lady, chill your sphincter, says the bucket.

How uncouth, says the plant.

What a nerve! says Dalila clucking her tongue.

She runs her fingers over the elaborate patterns of the ukhamba. They are Iron Age motifs that have been incised into the dark clay. She wishes she had a banana frond to frame her composition, but Johannesburg’s winter frost burns the tropical plants. There were banana groves around Gogo’s kraal. Dalila has a vague recollection of visiting her paternal grandmother in Gingindlovu before her father fled into exile. Gogo tried to teach her how to twist sticky coils of clay over bunches of grass to make an ukhamba. Dalila must have been about six years old. She never saw her Gogo after that. Her cousin Zodwa terrified her with bedtime stories about green mambas.

As they walked on the muddy path to the long-drop toilet, Zodwa screamed, pointing into the grass beside Dalila’s feet, Snake! Be careful! The first time it happened Dalila wet her pants and ran, crying, back to her father. Zodwa disappeared, sniggering, into the long stalks of sugar cane, with the village girls. The second time, her father comforted her saying, Gogo has a mean stick. It will talk to that naughty Zodwa.

This morning as Dalila sipped her first cup of coffee an article in The Star grabbed her attention: GABORONE – The remains of Thami Mnyele were exhumed on Wednesday from Gaborone’s New Stands Cemetery for reburial at home. Mnyele, a gifted graphic artist, was one of twelve ANC cadres killed by the South African Defence Force in a cross-border raid on 14 June 1985. His artwork had been deliberately destroyed in the attack.

This soft-spoken gentleman with a passion for poetry and music will be buried in Tembisa after a memorial service at the Mehlareng Stadium. Dalila took the newspaper in shaking hands into her tiny garden to gather herself.

On the wooden bench beside the lemon tree, she stared at the shocking words that recalled her indebtedness to Thami Mnyele, the kind uncle she met once at Beitbridge.

She had just fled South Africa in a hot, gritty train with her father. They were both tired and thirsty from the long journey. Her father had an important meeting with a stranger who arrived with two cans of cold Coca-Cola. Her father gave her a pen and an empty envelope to keep her busy.

Draw me a picture of Mama, said Mandla.

Dalila stopped interrupting the men. She drew a tiny train snaking around the edge of the envelope. In the centre was a little house. Her mother waved from its window. She had remained behind to keep her father’s cover and to sell their few belongings. Uncle Thami noticed the girl’s picture, and reached into his briefcase.

He brought out a pad of paper and some pencil crayons. At the time she thought he was trying to keep her from disturbing them. But he had taken the drawings she offered him. He admired them, praised her, and remembered. A few weeks later, Uncle Thami sent her the gift of her first set of paints. She remembers the slip for the parcel arriving. She and Bibi stood in a queue at the post office. She had wanted to open the parcel there and then, beside the counter.

The post office clerk exchanged friendly words with her grandmother and gave Dalila a toffee. That was the time when brown paper still had a sweet rustle to it, when string and sealing wax bound promises of love, of hope. A package meant then that one had not been forgotten, after all.

A few weeks later her mother appeared unexpectedly and bled into the long drop. When Dalila went to relieve herself she saw clumps of blood that caught the sunlight that shone through the cracks in the tin roof. Dalila stared at the livery chunks in horror.

Dalila tried to understand the whispered fragments she overheard as she pretended to sleep.

Is this Mandla’s child?asked Bibi.

Dalila couldn’t see in the dark whether her mother nodded or shook her head.

Does he know?

He must not, said her mother.

How often?

Every night for two weeks.

And what else?

Her mother had only stifled sobs for an answer.

Is Mama very sick?asked the girl the following morning.

Don’t worry, said Bibi. Your mother will be alright. These are old screams your mother is passing. They will go. When a woman’s screams get stuck inside, her sisters have ways to set them free …

An old woman from the village rubbed her mother’s belly, pressed cool cloths against her forehead.

In the garden this morning, Dalila clutched the newspaper. The deep purple irises growing beneath the lemon tree reminded her that the previous winter she had been visiting her mother in hospital. That last day she took her mother a bunch of irises in a Heinz bottle. On the previous occasion when she had taken flowers, her mother’s favourite vase had been stolen. It had been a wedding present. Perhaps a cleaner or a nurse recognised the fine crystal. Nevertheless the flowers and the vase had disappeared. While driving to the Kenridge, she had sniffed the subtle fragrance, wondering whether it was real or imagined. It was so slight she doubted she could smell anything, yet the tomato sauce smell had vanished.

In the ward she wiped her mother’s face with a warm cloth, she brushed her thin grey hair. Her mother whispered in the oxygen mask. Dalila couldn’t hear.

Pardon, Mama, what was that?she asked, bent close to her mother’s mouth. Her breath was rapid. It smelled fruity.

You are a good girl; you are my blessing, said her mother.

Dalila picked a single stem with a bud, an unfurling bloom and a fully opened flower. She placed it in a twist of silver foil with a blob of moistened cotton wool. A sudden yearning to paint the filigree fronds of its yellow tongue pecks now at the inside of her heart. She remembers the tiny beak of a green turtle poking through the last egg at the bottom of the nest. An angry gull had hovered overhead as it struggled free. She chased the bird away.

She had urged the baby on. The gull swooped and dived above. Dalila shouted at it flapping her arms.

Hurry, little one. She faced her grandmother, Why, Bibi?Tears streamed down her face. Dalila wanted to pick it up, to carry it to the sea.

If you carry that baby, it cannot develop strong flippers for swimming. It will be too weak for the ocean.

It will never get there .… Dalila sobbed. She chased the gulls away, over and over again, until the tiny turtle slipped into the waves.

Beyond the curlicued wrought-iron school gates, a queue of children waits at the bus stop. Sikelela and Refiloe disappear into a rickety taxi headed for Soweto. A lemon rolls off the table. Dalila catches it.

Your roots smell off, says a stripe.

Too much water, replies a clump of leaves suspended over the edge of the ukhamba on a curling runner.

Dalila blows her nose. Through the window, she watches the learners climb aboard.

Isn’t school out?asks another stripe.

No peace unto the wicked … says a lemon.

Dalila had shown her mother the striated throat of the iris. The old woman lifted a frail arm to touch its indigo petal, and then removed her oxygen mask. Let me smell it one last time …

Dalila wanted to say, No! Not one last time. Let me take you to the Kirstenbosch gardens next holiday. She wanted to ask, Will you be my guardian angel?but they had never talked about death. She would have liked to say, I am 40, Mama, but I have laid no eggs …

Dalila had neither words nor tears. No question lingered in the folds of the hospital curtains. Not a tear fell onto the pale green linen. Dalila readjusted her mother’s mask in silence.

That evening she had tried to paint her mother’s hand holding hers, but all she had to show after empty hours was a blank sheet of paper. That night, and every day since then, her paint box remained still. Nothing else let up: the chatter of desks, the prattle of chairs, the mumbling of the classroom blinds. Even the kiln in the corner of the art room would sigh periodically. In her drawer the pile of turtles waved their flippers in agitation. But neither the pastels nor the oil paints made a murmur. The blues: pthalo, cerulean and sapphire all remained silent.

Ultramarine, turquoise and Virgin blue lay like miniature coffins in her paint box.

The flat and round sablette brushes lingered soundless; the sablines immobile.

Dalila unclasps the long string of pearls her mother wore and drapes them over the lemons.

Beats a plastic snake, I guess, says the yellow stripe.

Pearls, says a lemon in an irritable tone. Not very good quality.

Hush, says Dalila. The pearls slip and clatter on the tiled floor. Dalila picks them up and curls them around the base of a tomato sauce bottle containing the irises.

Why can’t we be juxtaposed against a simple urn?asks the plant, glaring at the shabby vase. Dalila chews a hangnail and rearranges a lemon. She plucks a blob of Prestik from her stationery drawer to fix the pearls in place. She removes a little package wrapped in paper towel from her tog bag. She places it, unopened, beside the composition. The pearls glint in the sunlight.

Dalila’s mother had pulled the plastic mask off and said, Take this away. No! Dalila tried to slip it back over her mother’s face. The mask came apart from the oxygen tube. The bottle on the wall bubbled loudly. The papery skin of her mother’s cheeks was greyish against her dark blue lips. Not yet …

Her mother turned away from the mask. I don’t want it any more. It’s killing me. Dalila opens the package, takes out the oxygen mask and sets it beside the largest lemon. The mask, which is shaped like a ghoulish nostril, has a faint green tinge to it. She tries to identify the exact sheen: copper resinate, viridian, verdigris, cobalt green. As she turns it in the light, she recalls the many-hued shells of the baby turtles.

What next?ask the pearls.

Who can tell?answers a stripe.

Very softly, the kikoi starts to hum, Harambee, harambee … Dalila’s ears are finally clear. A loerie in the tree outside her classroom window calls, Go awaaay.

Her mother had gasped, Take me home. I don’t want to die here. The old woman tried to get out of the bed.

Okay, Mama, said Dalila as she cradled her mother in her arms. With her free arm, she pressed the button that called the nurse. She wanted to ask her mother whether home meant Watamu Beach, or the little flat in Yeoville. She had no words to discuss the options.

I want to lie beside Mandla again. It’s been too long.

Shhh, Mama, shh, she stroked her mother’s hand.

Where will you bury me?

Watamu … she said to soothe her mother, to calm her down. Dalila still believed, even then, that there was a chance her mother would improve enough to be taken back to the village of her ancestors.

The hospital bills precluded that. Her mother lies in alien soil at Westpark Cemetery, where scraggly oleanders drop toxic pink blossoms onto her grave and the grass has been sparse all year long.

Dalila wipes the textured paper with a damp sponge. Her movement across the easel is swift and focused. She blends the underwash in a palette cup with a wide hake brush. At last there is silence in the room. She forms a streak of colour, and another. When she looks up again, the loerie is perched on a branch. Its crown fans out. The large grey bird lifts into the air and flies off. The only sound is the wind in the leaves.

About the Author

Liesl Jobson lives and works in South Africa.

Deliverance by Barbara Reese

I held it in my hand, gender unknown

The blood sticky and warm

Taking repose, inside the crease, of my lifeline,

The rusty brown, half-circle path course circling

Delicately, down and around my thumb

I stared mutely at the pad, meant to absorb,

Not cradle

The miniature purple skull and curve of a limb,

Barely discernable, like a sacrifice

The dull pain, in my lower back, receding,

Outside I could hear the muffled voices, of my husband and daughter, the trill and

timbre

Mingled with the subtle hum of the truck’s engine,

The vibration like, the rhythm of breathing

The sound as furtive and as fragile,

As the dust mote slide, down, the wormhole

Guided chinks of light that poked inside the edifice,

Of a lakeside retreat, I leaned forward,

Head down, in a clammy sweat, bereft

No toweling, no spare clothing,

No receptacle

To contain or conceal, the overly premature,

Not too immaculate, birth, of what would later

Be termed, inevitable

I imagined my 2 year old,

Wide-eyed, demanding

Her curious, pudgy hands, always reaching

For any bit or bundle, always expecting a surprise

The confines of the truck cab, too close, to hide,

Too, close, to protect,

I did not think, beyond, that thought,

I simply let go, careful not to look,

Too closely, I watched the swirl of water

Rise to receive, baptize,

And deliver,

And stepped outside

About the Author

Barbara Reese is a published poet and essayist. Finding solace, refuge, purpose, and direction in the written word, she looks forward to tapping into other creative forays, including photography and fiction. She considers it a profound pleasure to be recognized by other literary enthusiasts.

Layers by Adriana DiGennaro

It is midday and she reads on the bed. Her
curves are clothed, she lies on her stomach:
Copper strands strewn over a black blouse,
a line of purple shirt hem under the first,
next a gap between clothes layers—
a strip of skin, a narrow expanse
for kisses to stick to. Magenta
lace pantywaist, its scalloped
edge wrapped up in thick
denim stitched with pink
thread. The thread is the
same dusky rose of her lips.
Another woman’s universe has
condensed itself to a focus on this.
Such a nagging question: separate?
They hesitate, cannot remove the last
layer: the slim-bodied second, her other’s
limbs draped around that back, those hips

About the Author

A member of the Academy of American Poets, Adriana DiGennaro received her B.A. in literature and creative writing from Bennington College where she studied under Mark Wunderlich and Mark Poirier. Her first book of poetry, “Peripheral Vision,” was published in June 2001 by Writers Ink Press. Her second book, “Acts of Contrition,” will be published in Spring 2007 by Windstorm Creative. Ms. DiGennaro’s poetry has been featured in Red River Review, BigCityLit, PoetryBay, Merge, The Aurora Review, Poetz, Boston Literary Review, The Tipton Poetry Journal, Tryst, Ancient Heart (United Kingdom), Eclectica, City Writers Review, Poetry Midwest, Esopian, Adagio Verse Quarterly, Falling Star Magazine, Flutter, Wonder Writings, Long Island Quarterly, Triplopia, Clean Sheets, Sidereality, Southern Ocean Review (New Zealand), Perigee and The Improper Hamptonian. At just 17, she was on Red River Review’s 2001 list of nominees for a Pushcart Prize. Her work is also included in the following published anthologies: “The Light of City and Sea” (Street Press 2006), an anthology of Suffolk County poetry edited by Suffolk County Poet Laureate Daniel Thomas Moran; “Southshire Pepper-Pot: A Literary Feast With Culinary Refrains” edited by Cris DiMarco (Windstorm Creative, 2006): “In Our Own Words: A Generation Defining Itself” edited by Marlow Peerse Weaver (MWE Press, 2005), “Whispers of Inspiration: An Anthology of New American Poets” edited by Darlene and Steven Manchester (Sunpiper Press, September 2005); “Ancient Heart Magazine Poetry Anthology Vol. III” edited by Richard van der Draaij (Ancient Heart Press, 2005).

Tradition Bound by Naureen Amjad

The walls around me
They hover
Menacingly
Coming closer
From all sides
Joining hands
Together
They weigh me down
Constrict
Restrict
My every move.
Now
My remains
Lying in a sepulcher
Have learned to conform;
But the spirit
Crawls
On the walls
Looking for a leeway.

Beyond the wall

A leeway to go
Beyond the walls
Where
I can wear my dreams
And flaunt
All its colourful
Shocking
Nakedness;
Where
I can dance the waltz
With the wind
And
Watch
Not my every move
But the stars
Of regions unknown
And many worlds;
Where
I can hear
Not the harsh, angry whispers
Which resonate
In the hollowness
Of my frail feminity
But my own mantras
Which
Drawing on my strength
Become clearer
Louder;
Where
I can feel
Not the stinging stares
Which drool on my body
But the soft petals
Of love
Which caress my being;
Yes
The place
Where
I can live
A living life!

About the Author

Born and raised in Pakistan, Naureen Amjad has been working in the development sector for the last ten years, focusing her energies on various women’s issues. Currently she is hard at work bringing out a new magazine called ‘Citizen Wise’ which will aim to provide a source of continuing education on various concerns surrounding social and women’s issues. Naureen also writes freelance for newspapers on a number of issues offering a female perspective. Contact Naureen at naureen_amjad [at] yahoo.com

Encounters With Difference: Discovery Of Feminism In God’s Room by Sumana Roy

I wasn’t born a woman. I really wasn’t.

Unlike most parents in India then, my parents had wished, and perhaps prayed (my father was an atheist then, so, I really cannot be very sure!) that their first-born be a girl child. So my grandfather who was later to dream of the Lord Shiva, not the god himself but of the symbol which Hindus like my old grandfather worship, the dark phallus, the night before my brother would be born, had no dream of me, not of any goddess, not even of the local whore who often appeared in his dreams, or rather his nightmares, with a big jhata or broom in her hands, beating him all over, smashing his spectacles for not responding to her overtures. So, you could say that, in many ways, I was born without a dream. Soon after I was born, my brother followed me obediently into the world. This left my mother, very young, very inexperienced and always with very little time, confused; I can imagine her now, thirty years later, with a milk-bottle in her hands, feeding two quarrelling infants lying next to each other from the same bottle. My brother and I thus grew up sharing not only a surname and a milk-bottle, but many other things as well, tiny t-shirts and half pants, dolls and cricket bats, toy pistols and make-believe pressure cookers and gas ovens, and sometimes shared dreams as well, of being India’s first brother-sister combination of cricket commentators and football goalkeepers.

Looking back to a time before one was born is difficult; yet quite often we feel that we have been there, carried into that imaginary terrain in sonnets and sonatas, in conversations and photographs. I find myself like Polonius, hiding between the curtains, eavesdropping on my parents and grandparents. I wonder how difficult it must have been for my father to convince his father—that old East-Bengali patriarch in his small village, sitting amidst huge tumblers and iron woks, selling them always for a bargain to poor Bangladeshi refugees—to agree to his marriage with this fair, quiet girl, born to an English mother and a Bengali Brahmin father who had crossed the mythical seven seas and thirteen rivers to make a long journey to England to come back with an FRCS degree. Yet, when I look back to my early childhood, it is less a mist to me and more like living in someone else’s dream. I can see my father, then with a dark bushy moustache, and my mother, thin, fair, quiet, her hair screaming from her head up to her hips, exchanging white rajanigandha garlands and walking around the sacred fire seven times to solemnize their marriage. And like all children who ask their parents where babies come from, I still, even at thirty, feel shy, like all grown-up children do, to imagine how I happened to come into being.

How my mother’s stomach, always smooth to the touch, almost a tabula rasa to the imagination, could hold within its small space an abnormally big child like me, continued to amaze me long after I had read the biology books. My father, however, always a rightwing conservative, gave us different lessons: he would take us to the papaya trees in the backyard, show us the papayas, young and ripe, hanging from the mother papaya tree. He would then tell us how we too, my brother and I, fell off our mother’s body, once we had become as ripe as the yellow-orange papayas. In spite of the conservative background from which he came, used as he was to seeing women being treated no better than cattle in the back-shed, overhearing his mother wailing in the dark silence of the night after being beaten up by his father, seeing his eldest sister weighed in gold at the age of ten or twelve and married off to a man much older than her in some village in Bihar, the name of which made it sound like some hybrid Bengali sweet dish (Pakur), hearing about women disappearing from homes on the other side of the border only to see them reappear in a different form, in a different country, with red ribbons and cheap fake gold jewellery and red and purple shining saris on street corners, calling out to him when he was an adolescent. He had got married to a woman whose docility and shyness had attracted him to her; she, in spite of her education, had arrived into his life without any opinion. And yet such is the contradictory nature of life that he wanted his daughter to be like him, a strong and independent-spirited person, unlike all the women he had ever met in his life.

Now, sitting at my desk, as I look outside the window to the playfield where I spent all the childhood that I can remember, I can see why he arrived from office early, with a referee’s whistle at his lips gathering young boys on the way and pulled my brother and me out into the playground, teaching me the same tricks with the football as he taught my brother and the other boys. Often my mother would protest saying that no man would marry a girl with such sun burnt skin and no feminine grace but my father would not listen. Rather, he would scold my brother who as captain of the team would put me in the defense, fearing that I would be overpowered by boys of the other team. My father would shout from the sidelines, Ma ke midfield a dao (Put ma in the midfield ; he always called me ma, mother, as many Bengali parents do, as an address of affection).

I never felt like a girl. I did not know that I was any different from my brother; only on Sundays, when my father would lock my brother and me up in the bathroom, scrub our bodies of dirt and in doing so inevitably put soap into our eyes so that we came to dread these Sunday baths, did I realize that beneath the shorts and shirts both of us wore, only something between our legs made us different. Grammar books with the he-she-it classification and difference in school uniforms tried to legitimize and glorify this difference. But this did not really matter much to me: for a long time my father took us to the same barber where he made my brother and me sit on adjacent chairs. While the barber gave my father a haircut, my brother and I sat looking at ourselves and each other in the mirror, taking our tongues out for under the huge cloth that covered our bodies all that we could do was with our faces, like mime artists, but only failing to parody gender. And those reflected images in the mirror, with our bodies covered almost by that shroud-like cloth, and only our heads visible with identical haircuts did not make me or my brother feel any different from each other.

Yet things were changing inside us. My classmates who usually spent their time eating from their tiffin boxes instead of running around in the playground during lunch break started wearing small lumps beneath their school tunics. Gradually these lumps started getting bigger, much like our mothers. I was intimidated by these growths and terribly scared of them. In the prayer that my mother had taught us, I interpolated a line, God, please don t let my breasts grow To you I bend my head low. I had always been a very thin and religious child and God listened to my prayers. So long I had had my share of suspicion about the existence of God but now my faith in Him was reaffirmed. I had to spread word about this testimony of his existence. Stung by this missionary zeal, I wanted to tell my brother but desisted from doing so; I thought he wouldn’t understand. So I turned to the girl who came second in class, a blossoming beauty or so (the lingo I had started to use following the boys I played with!). After I had made a clean breast of my religious experience, she looked at me with an open mouth and her right hand on her breasts. She remained silent for some time. Then she spoke in an idiom which I could not follow. The only words I remember now, almost fifteen years later, were this: Stupid, if you really had to pray to God about your breasts, you should have said, God, please let my breasts grow, So that milk may soon flow . (This woman is a mother of two beautiful girls today and is in her third pregnancy now.)

But though God heard all the prayers that emanated from my breast, other things were happening in other regions. Hair started sprouting from under my arms; at first I was scared. I scrubbed soap on it with all my might but they were adamant. Then later that night, in the misty light of the night lamp, I investigated my brother’s underarms. And those few signs of some hairy weeds reassured me. But alas! Hair was growing in another region too. For no reason my father had stopped the ritual of the Sunday bath as well. So, I had no opportunity to reassure myself that mine wasn’t an isolated case. Yet, engrossed as I was with books, bats and balls, I had no time for reflecting on these issues.

Moreover, God was showing the first signs of betrayal of faith: two painful beetle-bite-like lumps appeared on my breasts and started affecting the way I slept. I was petrified. I would sleep on my face in spite of all the pain, hopeful that being pressed hard against the bed, the breasts would be unable to grow any further. The reason behind this was simple: none of the boys on the playfield had any visible growths on their chests below their jerseys. I knew, by instinct if not by logic, that I would not be allowed to play with them if my body became different from theirs. Yet I kept on trying in vain, beating these bumps with flat cakes of soap during my bath, the flat ends of toothbrushes, often even with plastic pencil-boxes.

At the same time, other routes and passages were being furrowed inside my body, always without my knowledge. (And perhaps it is these journeys which were to define the character of my life.)

I come from a religious family: my father, once an atheist, turned to God with a vengeance. He constructed a puja ghar ( a room for worship ) and, almost overnight, assembled an entourage of almost all the gods and goddesses of the Hindu pantheon in that room. (Quite ironically, that temple of a kind, due to lack of any space, was built next to the bathroom. So, quite conveniently, my father emerges freshly bathed out of the bathroom and enters straight into god’s room!) . My mother, ostracized by a large group in my father’s family for having half-Christian British blood flowing through her vessels, turned to worship to legitimize her claims of being a Hindu. So, when my brother and I were growing up, we had almost no sense of suspicion about the existence of God. It was, of course, difficult for us to imagine those stone and bell metal figures of the gods eating the prasad of nokuldana and batasha, those white sugar condensed concoctions which seem to have been manufactured in factories in Bengal only for the gods. They might not stay in our puja-ghar, my brother and I argued at night, but that’s because they have so many houses to visit. And we remained convinced.

Hindu rituals and custom declare a woman in her menstrual cycle impure. She is not allowed to enter god’s room for worship during those days. In more conservative families, she is not even allowed to enter the kitchen. She remains banished from prayer, from food that she would usually cook for her family and herself, and even from companionship for her husband is not supposed to share the bed with her during that time. Reflecting on those days of my ignorance, I can see how often I was asked by my mother to perform the day’s prayer; when I showed my displeasure in doing so, she would scold me or bribe me and inevitably invoke some readymade excuse. Due to my upbringing, however, I remained totally ignorant of these customs which punished a woman for her biological womanliness. And so it came to me by surprise, that frightening incident in the toilet.

On that Saturday in September, almost fifteen autumns back, I got up from the commode to find a few drops of blood on its edge. I wondered what these red drops might be for I could remember no injury on the playfield. I investigated my body but there were no bleeding spots anywhere. Suddenly fear got into me; I had been on an overdose of horror movies and suddenly imagined someone’s presence in the toilet. As soon as the thought entered my head, I screamed like I had never done. Ma came running; I knew it was her, from the sound of her footsteps, her right step always heavier than her left, the sound of motherly concern in her quick strides. Yet when she banged on the door, I was too scared to open the door.

Ma, there’s someone here someone I can’t see but someone who I know is here… I screamed. Ma, always gentle, always subtle yet dominating, even in her quarrels with my father, went on coaxing me, as she still does now, on mornings when I refuse to get up from bed, refuse to believe in daylight, in open windows and the smell of wet dust hanging outside my door, a little way away from my father’s garden. I opened the door, pulled Ma by the hand to witness that great spectacle of three drops of red on a beautiful blue commode. Pulled, my mother came, at first like an alibi, then a witness (for I could see the crease between her arched eyebrows), and then, suddenly she became the judge, putting her hands on the blue basin, almost calling for order , and then like those old-wigged judges in these old movies, but only without their hammer, she raised her hand, and before I could react, the sentence was on me. I stood there, near the commode, trapped in the accused’s box. The blood was mine, Ma said, over and over again, and each time I denied that, looking for another’s presence in that small room.

When I stopped crying, not because I was convinced but simply because there were no tears in me anymore, Ma said, Yes shona (as she has always called me; shona is gold in Bengali and is often used by Bengali parents to address their children, perhaps as a metaphor of how precious the children are), there is someone else here. It is someone you don’t know. This blood is yours they are proof of the girl who has died inside you. You are no longer a girl shona; you are now a woman , and so she went on saying, taking me by my hand, nursing me on how I should handle this blood from now on, for the rest of my life as a woman.

I was asked to bathe again. I had my bath and as always entered the adjacent room to offer my prayers, more out of an acquired habit and less out of devotion. My mother, who had gone to get me a fresh pair of clothes to wear, screamed, as if in horror. I, who had been talking to my chosen goddess, the goddess of learning, the beautiful Saraswati with a veena in her hand, about this new event in my life with my eyes closed, as I had been taught to speak to god, opened my eyes to see a horrified look on my mother’s face. I ran to hold her. What’s wrong, ma? I asked. After long moments of speechlessness, she told me, with tears in her eyes and a choking voice, how I had sinned in entering god’s room during my menstrual cycle. Then she went on mumbling incomprehensible prayers to various gods, asking them to forgive her daughter who had sinned in ignorance. She pulled out her precious bottle which contained the waters of the river Ganges, that all purifying solvent of all Hindu sins, and started sprinkling drops all over the room. I, who had been pulled out of the room, stood looking, ignorant of the sin I had committed, quizzical about whom my mother was trying to purify, the gods or her child.

Later that night, as my mother was putting on the mosquito net, her daily ritual of affection for her children whom she will not allow to grow up, I asked my mother whether my favorite goddess was a woman. Of course, the goddess Saraswati is a woman she said. Then doesn’t she have to go through the pain of the menstrual cycle as well, ma? I asked. So many years later I can imagine how disturbed my mother must have been with that question. Ma told me then of the Hindu ritual of the amaguchi, that annual event when goddesses menstruate, the only time in the year when temples are closed and red water or blood, whatever belief makes one believe, is seen to flow out of drains emerging out of the temples. Then why should the goddesses be allowed to stay in the temple when ordinary girls like you and me should be banished for no fault of ours? Why should our bodies be blamed when it is the gods who have made our bodies and whose bodies are like ours as well? I remember my mother vaguely, stroking my hair, trying to put me to sleep.

And so it was that I, a girl who had emerged through the blood of another woman into this world, had another baptism by blood. When I look back to almost half of a life lived, the last thirty years, this seems to me the defining moment of my womanhood, the birth of my feminism, my first negotiation with difference, my earliest fist-raising claim to humanhood, and the first sign of identification with an imposed profaned goddesshood of women.

About the Author

Sumana Roy teaches English at Darjeeling Government College, India. She is presently on research leave in Poland and Germany. Her short story ‘Award-winning Writer’ appears in 21 Under 40 (Zubaan, 2007), an anthology of young South Asian women writers. She is working on a collection of poems based on the themes of food and eating (a few of which are slated to be published in Biblio this summer) and her first novel.

Bird Women by Patty Somlo

We have come to this village high in the mountains in search of the bird women. It has taken us all day to get here from the city, climbing the wet mountain roads so slowly sometimes I feared the truck would give up and start rolling back down the hill. Bright green banana leaves cover these dark volcanic hills and tiny red tile roofed houses dot the landscape. Even if I don’t find what I’m looking for, I’m glad to be here. The air is filled with the aroma of wet dirt and cow dung. Fog sits just at the edge of the hills, waiting to descend. It is as if the fog were some god of protection, ready to fly down and cover the trees and houses and hills for the night, guarding against harm. My guide is an anthropology professor from the capital named Jorge Mendoza. The department has loaned him an old green truck that I fear has made one too many trips up this hill. We have stopped seven times today to fill the radiator with water, waiting for it to cool down long enough for us to continue our slow, steady climb.

Jorge has focused his studies on the people of this mountainous coffee-growing region. He has never seen the bird women but like me is sure that they exist. Our shared belief in the face of all scientific truths contradicting such an idea has made us instant friends.

Jorge is the son of a rich coffee grower who owns a vast portion of the land in a neighboring region to Actalan, where we have come. Jorge tells me that he first heard about the bird women from one of the family maids, when he was still a child. As a boy, he loved the story so much he asked the maid to tell it again and again. When he went to the university to study anthropology, Jorge heard the story anew.

The small tile roofed houses seem to grow out of the earth here. Or rather they appear to have sunk their roots into the ground. There is no electricity or running water. The people depend on the sun and moon for light. If ever there were to exist creatures half human and half animal, as the bird women are said to be, this would be the place to find them.

After arriving here and drinking coffee with our hosts, the Pravia family, Jorge and I go for a walk around the village, then climb the steep path up the volcanic mountain that rises like a dark wall just beyond the small cornfields surrounding the town. The region takes its name from this volcano, thought to be a spirit watching over the valley. No one is still alive who remembers the last time the volcano sputtered several quick puffs of smoke, then vomited fire and liquid lava down her sides and out over the fields and huts. But everyone knows this is possible. The people here simply say, “If she goes, we will lose everything,” and shrug.

The sky is turning a bright pink as we near the top of the volcano. Black birds stand out as stark shadows against the brilliant sky. Jorge circles his arm around my waist, as we stop to catch our breath and take in the sunset and the rose-tinted land below. Jorge pulls me toward him and kisses me. In this atmosphere of thin air, I am too lightheaded to resist.

When we return to the village, Doña Elena, the oldest member of the Pravia family and grandmother to all ten children, serves us sweetened cups of instant coffee before dropping her frail body into a wooden rocking chair. We sip our coffee in the dark room lit only by scattered kerosene lanterns. Doña Elena rocks back and forth. A few minutes later, she begins.

“My husband, Ernesto, was sick for a very long time. He could not work anymore in the fields. One day he got so weak, he could not even push himself out of bed. That afternoon when I came in to look at him, he was breathing so hard I could hear his lungs rattle. He asked me, ‘Elena, please help him go outside.’ Then he said, ‘I am going to die and I would like to see my fields and my village and my beautiful mountains before I go.’”

With help from her two sons, Doña Elena lifted her husband from his bed and set him on a small hill at the edge of the cornfield. From the hill, he could see the village below and above him the dark majesty of Mt. Actalan. When he was settled there, he asked to be left alone, with his mountain and the wide pastel sky.

That evening when they put the old man back to bed, he was thirsty and very, very tired. But his eyes sparkled like Doña Elena only remembered them shining when he was still a boy. He tried to talk, to tell her what he had seen, but his lips moved without sound. A few moments later he fell asleep.

The next morning he told Doña Elena, “I saw the bird women.”

He described the wings as multicolored and nearly fluorescent, like those of a parrot but even more startling. The faces, he said, were half bird, half woman. Don Ernesto couldn’t say exactly how the faces appeared. There were two of them, just as in the story Jorge loved so much as a boy. They were small in stature for women, yet large for birds.

The bird women stood on the ground near the dying man and sang the sweetest song Don Ernesto had ever heard. For the first time during his long illness, HE felt the pain leave him, suddenly, as if the fire in his lungs simply flew away. The song was sad too and HE cried, the tears falling down his cheeks, dampening his worn shirt. He didn’t understand the words of the song. They were in a language that sounded like nonsense to him. But the tune made him weep and the clear harmony of those perfect voices then made him smile.

When they finished the song, they stood silently next to Don Ernesto preening their feathers and searching the sky. At that moment, HE said he knew he would not live to see another sunset; that the bird women had come to guide him to the other side. He was no longer afraid to die, he told Doña Elena, because he understood that in death he too would become a beautiful bird.

That afternoon as Doña Elena sat by his bed and watched Don Ernesto sleep, she suddenly heard the flapping of wings just outside the window and a quick strong breeze passed through the room, knocking the kerosene lantern off the bedside table and tossing it to the floor. The next moment everything went silent and still. She looked at Don Ernesto’s face and saw that he was smiling in his sleep. She laid her hand softly over his heart to confirm that he was gone.

Jorge and I arise while it is still dark and cold. Here in the mountains, as soon as the sun disappears, a chill settles on the land. We splash our faces with freezing water from the bucket Jorge has filled from the well and set off with our flashlights in the pre-dawn dark.

We have been told that the best chance of seeing the bird women is at the top of the volcano, just after dawn. Though there is nothing to fear, the cold darkness makes me tremble, and I grab Jorge’s hand to calm myself down. He stops and turns to face me. “You are not afraid, are you?”

“A little,” I answer, my voice barely above a whisper.

“Do not be afraid,” he says, stroking my hair as if I were a small child. I don’t want to tell Jorge that I’m worried we may be tampering with death in some way. That maybe certain things should not be studied, spread out on the table and dissected like frogs. Maybe some things should be left for belief. I cannot tell Jorge that I fear seeing the bird women as much as I worry that they will never appear.

We have timed our trip this morning to ensure that the sky will still be dark when we reach the top of the volcano. We want to watch the day unfold from its inception as a thin band of light at the very edge of the horizon. We want to hear the roosters crow and listen for the soft sound of the morning birds singing. We want to be part of that marvelous awakening, for in this way, we believe, we will witness the magical creatures we have come hoping to see.

Not long after I made the decision to focus my research on the bird women, I decided to share the news with my colleague and friend, Andrea Dodd. Given her interest in the Indians of the Brazilian rainforest, I thought Andrea would recognize the important contribution to anthropology that research on the bird women could make.

“Did you say bird women?” Andrea said, running a hand through her thick, streaked blond hair. “Women who are half bird and half human?”

“Yes,” I said quietly, my shoulders rounding as I waited for what might come next.

“The women in this department are having a hard enough time being taken seriously. Felicia, what do you think they’re going to say about us now?” My office mate, Dr. Fisher, was kinder but no more enthusiastic about my research plan.

“Felicia,” he said, leaning down in his chair, as if the news about my study was so painful it had caused him to double over. “Felicia, you can’t study superstitions and be taken seriously.”

Dr. Fisher is a kind older man who moves slowly through the halls like a specter. He is one year away from retirement and trying hard not to think about how he will spend his days. As a young graduate student, Dr. Fisher made a name for himself with a pioneering study of the pygmy. The talk in the department is that the early promise Dr. Fisher showed never materialized in his later work. Some days I watch him walk down the hall, his shoulders rounded and curled like old ribbon, wearing the tan corduroy jacket that has become his trademark, toting his briefcase that looks too heavy for the old man to hold, and my eyes start to fill and I must force myself not to cry.

Dr. Fisher is always giving me advice on how to make my way through the labyrinthine maze of academia. Each time we have one of these conversations, I sit in silence, nodding my head. I can’t seem to keep the image of my older self, a female version of Dr. Fisher, from rising in my mind.

Jorge spreads the blanket he has brought from the truck over the cold ground. The light is just beginning to peak out from under the black curtain of darkness. It is as if tiny fingers of light were trying to lift this black blanket and hurl it down into the valley. Whoever said the countryside is quiet should sit here now and listen. A raucous symphony of animal sounds has commenced to greet the day.

Jorge holds my hand as we sit on the blanket, yoga-style. I feel as the ancients must have felt when waiting for the appearance of a sign. The sky has turned a ferocious shade of mauve touched with orange, and I let my breath out slowly in place of applause.

As the sky lightens, Jorge and I stand and separate, and we each walk around this spot looking in all directions. I am wondering now if to see the bird women a particular frame of mind is called for, as in meditation. At this moment my mind is cluttered with thoughts, not the least of which centers on Jorge. In all of our months of correspondence after I read his fine article on the origins of the bird women myth, I wondered what he would look like and how well we would get along. I don’t know how much of my feeling for him is real and how much is colored by the haunting beauty of this place and the excitement and mystery of our joint quest. Whatever is the case, I find myself wanting to touch him at every moment, to feel his breath on my neck and to watch his lips when he talks. Though the sunrise is splendid, our first morning in search of the bird women brings us no sight of the mythical creatures. When we are ready to begin our descent back down to the village, a question I haven’t asked Jorge crosses my mind.

“Have you ever wondered,” I ask him, my hand on his arm, “why you are so interested in the bird women?”

Jorge looks at me and then rubs his dark unshaven cheeks and chin. “Yes, I have thought abut this. Many times. You see, people have accused me of being obsessed about the bird women. At first when I heard this, I became angry. Now I think they are right.

“One girlfriend of mine said to me, ‘Jorge, you are looking for the perfect woman but she doesn’t exist. Only imperfect women. Human women. So you have now this obsession with bird women. You can only love a fantasy woman, not a real woman.’”

“Do you think she was right?”

“I think maybe there is some truth in it. I did not think so at first.

“There is something else, though, that I can explain. I think this life that I wanted so much is not what I want at all. But I do not know what it is that I would have instead. I come here to this place and I feel alive. I am not alive in the city. The life here is very, very hard. I know that. The people would give anything if they could send their sons to the university to study and become professors or doctors or engineers. I do not want to romanticize this life, but the people have something that I have lost. It is something inside that all the books in the world can never replace. Maybe this is what I am looking for. Maybe this is what I will find if I ever get the chance to see the bird women.”

I put my arms around Jorge’s neck and pull him toward me. He wraps his body around mine and hugs me so hard I feel as if my body might crack in two. There is no need to tell Jorge that I am here as well to fill some empty place that grows bigger each year. I understand now why there is such ease between us, even though we are practically strangers.

Jorge loosens his arms and runs his fingers through my hair.

“I wonder if you, Felicia, are the bird woman I have come to see.”

Doña Alicia is the oldest woman in the village. No one knows her exact age. Her oldest son Pedro died two years ago, at the age of seventy-three. Even her great grandchildren have children.

Doña Alicia is so frail she almost disappears into the rocking chair she is sitting in when we step onto her porch. In this early evening light, her dark gray braids appear almost blue. The skin on her face is brown and lined with years of living. When she smiles, she displays a new baby’s naked pink gums. Doña Alicia waves us to sit on two of the empty rockers. When we are seated she looks at us long, with the boldness of a child. Then she turns away and the three of us rock in silence.

The only sound is the squeak the chairs make moving back and forth and the jittery cry of crickets somewhere nearby. In the ten years since I began studying the myths of these southern mountainous regions, I have come to accept the long stretch of silence before any conversation begins. It is as if in the silence we come to know each other a little before speaking.

As the oldest woman in the village, Doña Alicia is the repository of myth and history. Throughout her life she has passed the stories on to her children and grandchildren and even to her great grandchildren. Since we are here in search of the source, we want to hear the story from Doña Alicia herself.

“I was born here in Ocotal,” Doña Alicia says, her thin voice wavering like a violin string after the bow has passed heavily across it. “I cannot remember how long ago I was born but I know that I have lived a very long time. When you live a long time, you see many births and you see many people die. I will die soon, I think. I sometimes get too tired and so it seems that one day I will go to sleep and not wake up.”

Doña Alicia talks about her life as a girl in Ocotal and then grows silent. I see that her head has fallen to one side and a little forward. A few moments later I hear the quiet percussion of Doña Alicia snoring.

We visit Doña Alicia five days in a row before she finally tells us the story of the bird women.

“There was a woman, Clara, who had a very bad husband,” Doña Alicia says, leaning forward in her chair and speaking in a loud whisper. “This husband Dario liked his liquor too much and his women too.”

Doña Alicia shakes her head back and forth and gives us one of her toothless smiles.

“This man he was no good for anything. He would drink all night and sleep the whole day. Clara had to work in the field by herself. This man he wanted very much to have a son. But every time Clara lost the child, they say from working too hard in the fields. And Dario when he was drunk, he would beat her. Clara thought if she could have a son, maybe her husband would be happy again.” Doña Alicia stops for a moment and rubs her forehead, looking off into the distance. I fear she has forgotten the rest of the story or has grown too sleepy to go on. She looks down at her hands, as if searching for the rest of the story there, then takes a deep breath and continues.

“So what Clara decided to do was to have another woman carry the baby. She knew by this time that her body was no good. One night she asked her sister, Estela, to lay in the bed on the right side where Clara normally lay, pretending to be asleep when her Dario stumbled in the door. This night when Dario came home blinded by rum, he did not know that the body in the bed next to him had changed.

“They say there was something wrong with the twin girls born to Clara’s sister, Estela. They say the babies had human faces, but instead of round little arms, they had wings. Instead of soft little toes, they had feet like a rooster. And instead of smooth brown skin, they had feathers.”

Three days pass before Doña Alicia has the strength to tell us the rest. Three days in which the afternoon rains come down in wide sheets and turn the dirt pathways into rivers of mud. And after the rain, the sun returns to heat the dirt pools, causing them to steam.

“It was bad enough that Estela had a girl and not a boy,” Doña Alicia says, shaking her head. “It was bad enough that she had two girls. What good were two girls when Clara wanted to give her Dario a son? But there was something very wrong with these girls.”

Doña Alicia sits back in her chair and rocks. I look at her face and I can see that her mind is on something painful. She looks for a brief moment as if she might suddenly burst into tears.

“Then Estela did a terrible thing,” Doña Alicia tells us, shaking her head and lightly slapping the skin on her forehead with quick flicks of her fingers. “She took the baby girls up to the very top of the volcano and left them there to die.”

Doña Alicia stops and looks at me, as if silently urging me to respond to Estela’s terrible deed. I shake my head back and forth, mimicking the movement of Doña Alicia. I turn to Jorge and see that he is doing the same.

“But the babies did not die. They grew to be women, but not ordinary women. They grew to be bird women.

“The first person to see the bird women was the oldest man in the village, Don Fernando, the day before he died. After Estela heard Don Fernando’s story about the bird women, she walked up the volcano to find them. She was very frightened. She stayed at the top of the volcano for five days. No one knew what had happened to her. The men searched all around, but she was nowhere to be found. When she came back to the village, she would not tell anyone where she had been, except her sister Clara, and she made Clara promise never to repeat what she had heard. But Clara told her friend Maria Elena and Maria Elena told her mother Doña Liliana and Doña Liliana told her husband Don Alfonso and that is how we have come to hear the story.

“It was only on the fifth day that Estela saw the bird women. She was weak from hunger and thirst and thought she was going to die. There were moments when she lost her sight. Instead of seeing the green coffee leaves and the flowers covering the ground, she saw many faces. She did not know who the faces belonged to, but the eyes were big and afraid and she could hear the people crying. Later she knew that these were the faces of the dead.

“All of a sudden, instead of these faces there appeared two beautiful birds. She had never seen such birds before and felt happy, even though she was suffering. One of the birds began to talk and she knew that they were not ordinary birds, but the bird girls grown into beautiful bird women. The same creatures that had come from her very own body.

“‘Do not be sad anymore,’ one of the bird women told Estela. ‘Being the way we are, we could not have lived the life of girls and women in the village. We needed our freedom and this is what we have found at the top of the volcano. We live in a place of clear air where we have a view of everything that goes on in the world.’

“Then the bird woman leaned down and whispered in Estela’s right ear. ‘We are able to fly to the next life and come back again. We can visit the dead and lead the living to that place, so the journey will not be such a sad one.’

“‘Am I going to die?’ Estela asked, and the bird woman who had done all the talking said, ‘Yes and no.’ Estela did not know what this meant and asked her to explain. The bird woman said, ‘The Estela that you have been until now is dead. A new Estela will be born to take her place.’

“They say that after Estela got lost those five days on the volcano she was never the same. She was always smiling and singing. One day she said to her husband Esteban, ‘I do not want to live with you anymore.’ That afternoon, she took her five children and went to live somewhere near the top of the volcano, where she stayed the rest of her life.”

It is dark and silent this morning as Jorge and I slowly make our way up the side of the volcano. The sky is so black that the stars look like tiny silver eyes winking in the sky. One of the myths of this region says that the stars are all the moon’s children and that some of them were once babies who died when they were too small to walk. Tonight the moon is only a thin white sliver, holding the promise of filling her belly with light to give birth to a few more stars.

This is our last trip to the top of the volcano before we leave Ocotal and drive down out of these dark mountains back to the city. In the month that we have been here, we have heard countless stories of the bird women. Each day we see many species of birds. But though we have climbed the volcano a good dozen times, we have yet to meet the bird women we have come hoping to find. Last night before we fell asleep on the thin straw mats the Pravias kindly provided us, Jorge whispered, “I think you should come down here and live with me.”

I felt my face grow warm and my mouth suddenly became dry.

“Why do you say that?” I whispered back.

I heard the steady breathing of all thirteen members of the Pravia family as I waited for an answer from Jorge. I heard myself swallow several times and the straw mat made a crunching sound as Jorge turned. I felt his hand blindly search through the dark for my hand. I listened to the steady rhythm of his breath for hours before I finally drifted off to sleep.

Jorge has not said another word about my living with him. Almost since our arrival here in Ocotal, I have been preparing myself to leave. I knew since the first moment we came to this small village sheltered by the shadowy arms of the volcano that when the time came, I would not want to go. But several days into our stay, I felt something happen between me and Jorge. In the days and nights that he and I have spent together, we have been floating in some warm sea, rising from time to time to take in air. We have reached for one another’s hands when walking or just before sleep, like children or old lovers.

We are both silent this morning as we make our way up the volcano. There is no need for words, as I’m sure we are both thinking the same thoughts. When the words finally thicken the air, I fear the tears will dampen my cheeks like afternoon rain.

We set the blanket down just at the edge of the precipice. One false step here in the dark could send me hurtling down to the valley below. The thought of dying in this place does not frighten me. I am only afraid when I think of dying at home, some incurable disease eating away inside me.

The rooster crows this morning long before the first hint of light splits the horizon line. What a noble job, I think, to be the one assigned to sing out the start of another day. That is, I suppose, why the rooster is such a proud bird, strutting around the dirt yard for the admiration of all the chickens. Once the rooster has finished his percussive yodeling, the other animals awaken and join in, filling up the silence vacated just moments before by the thick gray spirits of the night.

In these mountains, it is believed that in the first moments after midnight, when the living are all safely asleep in their beds, the spirits of the dead come out and roam the earth. What releases the dead are the dreams of the living. The people here say that they are often visited by loved ones long since dead in their dreams. The people fear sleep because they know that is the time when the dead can decide to take them away from this life.

I watch the sky paint its marvelous morning canvas today, knowing this will be the last time I witness it. The beauty is so breathtaking I feel as if my body has suddenly filled with air. I turn to Jorge and rest my hand lightly on his arm.

“You may be right,” I say, a little out of breath.

“About what?”

“I may be the bird woman you have come to find.” Jorge looks at me in silence, trying to discern the meaning of what I’ve just said.

“Right now I feel as if I could fly,” I say and flap my arms in preparation for imminent takeoff.

This morning we stay at the top of the volcano long after sunrise. Neither of us wants to say the words that will signal the disappointing end to our quest. I have sharpened my senses to a fine point this morning by listening to my breath. Exhaling loud and slow until there is not an ounce of air left, then inhaling, following the breath in my mind on its journey down to the abdomen, then back up and out again.

Today, the singing of the birds is what I most notice. There are birds that hold their notes long and there are others with nervous twitters providing a steady percussion for the melodious songs of their neighbors. I am wondering how the bird women would sound and whether I might be able to hear them if I listened hard enough.

“It does not really matter,” Jorge says, the sun having warmed the skin on our bare necks.

“What doesn’t matter?”

“That we have not seen them. I do not need to see them to believe that they exist.”

“I don’t either,” I say, and wrap my long soft wings around Jorge and begin to sing.

About the Author

“Bird Women” was inspired by the people and landscapes of Nicaragua, where Somlo lived on and off during the 1980s. The manuscript of a book she wrote about Nicaragua, Painting Without Brushes: Art and Culture in the New Nicaragua, is contained in the Lucy R. Lippard papers, housed in the Smithsonian Archives of American Art. Her short story, “Found in Nicaragua,” was a finalist in the 2004 Tom Howard Short Story Contest. Somlo’s work has been published in numerous literary journals, newspapers and magazines, and in the anthologies, Voices from the Couch, VoiceCatcher 2006 and Bombshells: War Stories and Poetry by Women on the Homefront. Her short story, “Mountain Tapestry,” is forthcoming in the anthology, Rainmakers Prayers. Somlo received an M.A. in English (Concentration in Creative Writing) from San Francisco State University. She lives in Portland, Oregon.

To Say Mirror Is Only Half The Story by Loren Kleinman

Cut me up and put me back together as another body. Take the thumbs
and poke out the eyes. Sew the heart into the pelvic cradle, staple the stomach.

Break lights are contagious, and there are so many roads.
My pace resembles litter-ridden potholes, backed up gutters.

The crayfish rebuilds their shells over and over again. I am full of jealousy.
I wish I had the time to yield something. Break from the instant into their wandering.

I read an article about a seventeen-year-old kid who was shot in the head.
I thought about the imprint of the bullet in the brain: the crack and shatter
of sound, the incoherent stasis, the commitment.

Lately it s been hard to find the time to just be around. I am still
trying to learn how to be in one place without really being there.

The night before a car hit my grandmother, she said
she had a dream about her parents. They told her there was no time.

I went for a walk an hour ago, and saw a dog taking a piss
on a tree. I wish I got there first. I am always biding my time.

My friend tells me my lover s been, so close to leaving and
you don t even know it yet. I am just distracted by possibility.

Words are always coming into my head. Their vanity teases me.
They think they are so important, but I accept their plea, a conscious gift.

I wanted to give birth to Jesus. I should ve built the ark, had the knowing
of Ezekiel. I want the attention, don t matter from who, whoever is listening.

Every once in a while I enjoy imperfection: a two-tailed salamander,
Siamese twins, a wobbly chair, incorrect page numbering.

There is no evidence of a journey, only proof of failure. Disappointing
results for cures, unknown data, bleeding sores, bombed cities, an occasional laugh.

I lift my legs to get out of bed. In the dark I grope my way to the bathroom.
I wish I didn t have to get up, just move outside myself.

I remember seeing my father naked. I thought about the genitals pushing
into my mother. The white chariot invading Troy.

I am not special. I am no better than the bum outside. I go
to the world every day cataloging the depressed chromosomes.

I notice my hands, the way they open the window at night,
feel the contortions of your face at the start of another cold morning.

About the Author

Loren Kleinman’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Nimrod, Journal of New Jersey Poets, Resurgence as well as many others journals and anthologies. Kleinman has performed at the Bowery Poetry Club, the Nuyorican Poets Café, the KGB Poetry Series, Raise the Red Tent Project, and more. She is the recipient of the Spire Press Poetry Prize and is a 2000 and 2003 Pushcart Prize Nominee. Kleinman was also a Nimrod/Hardman Pablo Neruda Poetry Prize Finalist for 2004.

Origami Birds by Shannon K. Winston

I tiptoe over clothes scattered across the floor.
It is noon and the room is dark.
The shutters are closed,
holding in damp air, shutting out
light that persists and falls
in bars around your bed.

Seeing you curled on sheets,
your back towards me
and pressed (almost clinging)
to the wall, I worry
you are cold.

Your knees bend inwards
towards your chest,
folded neat and small like origami,
the birds we used to make
in reds, yellows, blues.

Bruises spread over your thighs
as you inched along
the platform to greet me.
Suitcases beat against your sides.
Dark lines curved in half-circles
under your eyes. You smiled tiredly,
boasting “I made it.”

Now, blanket in hand,
I bend over you anxious
to see you back scaling walls and trekking
over mountain ridges.

The straps of your nightgown
have fallen around your arms.
Your shoulder blades rise upwards,
two cracked wings.

I want to go to the window
and declare: these are not wings.
Not broken, but fighting.
Like smooth triangles, shaped arrowheads.

About the Author

Shannon Winston is currently finishing her MA at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in the Program in Comparative and World Literature. She specializes in 19th-20th Century Mediterranean literature from France, Italy, and the Maghreb. She has been published in Reed Magazine and she has a forthcoming publication in Two Review.

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