Wild Sovereign Development Site

Tag: culture shock

  • you my queen

    “Oh my queen,” said a man walking behind me in the dark African night, and we both walked on a little. There are streetlights intermittent every four hundred metres or so and I have missed this dark. It’s beguiling and mysterious. It’s sexy. Faces loom out of it and I know so few of them.

    “You, lady,” the same man said, and I turned. Me? His face was crumpled with disfigurement and he lifted his soft fingers bashfully when I waved. “Hello,” I said, and went on walking. “Oh,” he said, “oh yes, my lady.”

    You arrive at the stall and say, Good evening. Good evening, say all three stallholders, and ‘good evening’ has four syllables. Carrying my purchases I went past the wheel rim up on bricks which is filled with glowing coals, where a lady with her head wrapped in cloth deep fries bubbling plantain patties. I went past the hardware stall the size of a wardrobe where a cheerful man also sells homemade local toffee (sugar cane and coconut) bound in clotted ropes of plastic like tiny frankfurters. The toffee hangs looped among the pipe fittings and elbow joints strung like vast ceremonial necklaces on long lines. Everything glows, to me, as though this were the world I walked out of at twelve, leaving Java, and since then had sought the wardrobe door.

  • Ghanaity

    Had to change trains twice to get home and I was reading Cranford by Elizabeth Gaskell, great, familiar, female, underrated. On the second train I glanced up when somebody laughed and saw a short, beautiful African man gazing longingly at me.

    It was so startling. I hurried back to Cranford, the village where the old ladies are not nearly so old as they were in Miss Matty’s own youth. At the next station I looked up, focussing between the heads of people sitting back to back all down the left side of the cabin, and saw that he was still looking at me. His eyes were soft and fond as though I were terribly familiar. We smiled. I went back to my book.

    Someone got off, occasioning the usual genteel German shuffling whereby everybody shifts their knees to one side saying, Bitte, Danke, Entschuldigung. All of a sudden the man who had been gazing plumped into the vacated seat opposite, he slung his bag down on the floor and had altogether an air of decision.

    So I looked up and said, How are you? Good, he said, and you? Good, I said. Thank you. Then we all travelled along in a kind of noisy trainside silence for a while.

    What are you learning?

    O, it’s not really study, just rereading a book I have read so many times before. I turned the cover to show him.

    You have a very nice face, I told him, and he smiled. You, too. Thank you, I said. In fact he was beautiful, with a pointed cat like chin and slanting eyes and in the middle of his forehead he had an asterisk-shaped scar as though someone had shattered him with a mallet and then put him back together again.

    The moon, upstairs, was rounding white and only slightly eroded down one side like an aspirin in water. I hadn’t seen it yet but later it led me right home. The man said, My name is Maxwell. And so I stuck out my hand and said, Cathoel. We shook hands and I said, Are you new in Berlin?

    Three months. Ah, I said, welcome. He had lived four years in Italy. So I speak Italian. But no Dutch.

    Ah, I said, again. And then he began talking to me about Jesus. Jesus knows how many hairs you have on your head. He took hold of a lock of his hair and tugged it.

    Well, I said, that must be very comforting. I am getting off here. Good luck in Berlin!

    But as I was standing on the platform he appeared beside me, standing too close. Are you married? No, I said. Why not? It’s not my way. I stepped away a half pace and he stepped up close to me again, in my shadow. Can I ask you a question, I am not a bad man.

    Thanks, I said: I don’t want to marry you.

    Ok, he said. But can I give you my phone number, friends? Friends. I am lonely and it’s good to have a friend in Berlin. Berlin is big.

    The train pulled in and he said, ingeniously, I can get on the train with you. I can always ride back again after I give you my number. Oh, well, I said. Okay then. But I am going to be reading my book.

    We sat opposite a lady with a fiery head of hair and a warm wrinkled smile. She was holding up a magnifying glass on its stalk to read some tiny photostatted text closed printed across an A4 page. She listened to our conversation, smiling at me over the man’s head, and when he got off, as promised, at the next station and I folded his phone number and put it in my pocket I said, in German, He wanted to talk because he is lonely, I think.

    Her smile grew warmer. She reached into her pocket and handed me a card, much creased, printed in black and white. This is a church where people get together, she said, plenty of African people go there, he can make friends.

    It was evident neither of us were native speakers. Oh, I said, then I am glad. I will pass it on. I got out at my own stop and walked up the stairs into the night and the incomplete moon made me gasp. If you are Ghanaian and you come here over Italy, you cannot access refugee services because you have Italian papers. The trees on either side of my road have bloomed and lost their bloom and though the forbidding Germanic cold has now returned still it seemed to me something warmer, something Springlike was afoot, a pussyfoot, an affair of the filigree trees, afar.

  • the young man with a long way to go

    The young man in the place where we are staying is Moroccan and comes from the desert, which he describes to me as ‘sympa’, sympathetic, a kind place. As opposed to the hustle and throng of the medina where people greet us ‘welcome, welcome,’ and return smiles with great warmth and ease and employ the most genteelly probing sales techniques in (they say) the world.

    This young man is named ‘given by god,’ or ‘gifts of god,’ and we looked up his name in a list of the 99 names of Allah which, I only slowly realised as we were discussing these names with a nearby restauranteur, are perhaps not so much names as qualities. God the good, god the great, god the compassionate, god the wise. Similarly it dawns on me, belatedly, decades after the life on Java I so cherished as a child where we lived between three mosques and stayed indoors during the ferment of election week, that the prayers which play continuously in some hole-in-the-wall shops in the souk are not petitions, in the sense that I would understand prayers, in the sense I sometimes grope for in extremis and despair, longing in the depths of my pained heart to have someone to pray to; they seem perhaps more like resolves embedded in long and winding stories. And so they came upon a beautiful oasis. And there they could water their camels and have something to eat. And so god said to them…

    I am improvising, here. Who has any idea what god might be saying? not even the solemn Jehovahs Witnesses who came to my door with their beguiling brochures and then, when I grew just a little too interested, felt honour-bound to warn me away from the technicolor gloriosity of the illustrations. “This only… artist impression of heaven.”

    Ah – then. But god or, as I would put it, kindness, knowing, understanding, meaning, the connectivity of us with the world and with one another – a kind of exalted humanness, in fact – speaks to me in the trees and in the wind pouring through them; a sort of devotional prosperity I have dwelt in since childhood, when I used once to wander the markets in Jakarta and the coconut groves on the shore opposite Krakatau in a scintillated state of constant and ever-changing concentration.

    So, Gift of God has come to the city in the north, leaving his desert homelands behind, and he tells me he has been here in Fès only three months. He had a job in another pension but it was a bad place. He came to this house a week ago. Ah! I say, cupping his shoulder with my hand, from the side rather than from above because of the war between affection and a horror of condescension. Then you have been here only four days longer than us! Yes, he says, creasing his face in a serious, shy smile.

    This morning as I was lighting out across the courtyard with my books in my bag this young man approached me on his soft shoes. Would I like my breakfast now? I said, You know, thank you, but actually I think I might go into the adventure and just eat somewhere on the markets, today. Oh! he said, and dropped his head and an expression crossed his face that hurt me, as though I had hurt him.

    “It’s not because I don’t like the food! It’s just – I wake up and go, I’m in Morocco! And so I just have to go out and…” On the sunstricken square my lengthy sweetheart joined me where I was so deep in the book I was reading, a book about politics that I find difficult to understand, that when he crossed the sun and grasped me by the shoulder I started. Around us gentlemen of Morocco discussed – I imagine – politics, I imagine their talk is dry and knowing and cosmopolitan, world-weary, courteous, and wise, I hear words which are the names of countries and think, they are speaking of world events. The first morning I was almost too shy to sit down and had to approach the cafe, whose restful shelter I craved, by way of a huge loop up and around the street before I could cross the road at a tentative, oblique angle and ask the courtly waiter diffidently in my execrable French, excuse me? am I allowed to come in here? even as a female? I was the only woman in the cafe, almost the only woman in the square, and when I wanted to go downstairs to the bathroom they flew into a flurry of small-scale preparations and I was handed a door handle, by which to access the second stall – for women and for, I guess, tourists, as it has a Western toilet and sometimes even a roll of paper.

    The second morning I sat down in the blaring sun at a tiny table and was moved almost to tears when the man who had been sitting by me yesterday and whom I had greeted said, inclining his head, “Bonjour,” and even asked, “Ça va?”

    To have a courteous neighbour, who is reading the newspaper in Arabic and a battered paperback in English; to sit in the sun, after months in wintry Deutschland – it sends me down into a contentment that is very much like sleep.

    The young man in the pension, Gift of God, smiled his grave smile on our third night in Africa when we asked, where would be a good place to eat. He told us he had made a very small number of ‘connections’ in Fès, since he came here three months back alone, and his friend Mohammed runs a good place, very cheap, under the large tree which is a landmark as there are so few trees in the medina at all. “That young man has a long way to go,” says my companion as we cross the square. and for a few moments I am startled, before it clicks into place: that he will go far. We eat at his friend’s cafe, treated royally. We practice the gesture courteous Moroccans use, of a hand pressed level across the breastbone, touched to the heart, moved, thank you, I am sorry. Walking the medina I also use the fellow gesture which takes place a little lower, pressing across the tummy with my other hand, saying, “On a manger.” I hope this means, thank you, we have eaten, and use it to reply to the touts who hand laminated menus outside every restaurant (“We have wine!”) My German companion thinks the tummy is called the stummy, and recently revealed in conversation that to him this is because the stummy is the seat of all stamina. This makes sense. Stomach, stumina, stummy for short. Now I find out he is calling the guys who hawk the restaurants ‘shouts’, perhaps a better word than touts. Meanwhile in German, he says, I make ‘sweet’ childlike errors in a thicket, or fog, of laughably elaborate courtesy. Elaborate formality – to a German! that kingdom where a Keep Off the Grass sign will begin: Very honoured forest wanderers and forest wanderesses, please be advised…

    So on our first week in Fès we navigate our way with his terrible French and my awful French and the few paltry words of Arabic we have learned: principally ‘choukran’, thank you (hand across heart), and ‘la choukran,’ no, thank you, to which I’ve improvised a kind of Bollywood head-waggle of the hand.

    By the fourth night the influx of new sensations and sights have exhausted us and we go back a second time to the same restaurant. Mohammed greets us with cries of warmth and manifests a place to sit when almost every seat was full. He flaps the fancy tablecloth like a magician producing a bunny. I watch him do this over and over, I remember the rapid-fire thought processes and sly courtesies of hospitality work and comment, when he comes by to tip more bread into our basket, that it is like surfing. “Yes!” he says, jubilant, “exactly – like surfing.”

    This man has learnt all his English by listening to customers and he asks, what is the word in German for I will be awaiting you. Germans sometimes say to him, “Vielleicht später,” maybe later, when he offers a menu. We search among our words before lighting on Ich bin für Sie da, I am here for you, explaining this is “very gracious,” making gestures of graciousness like a king. “Ah!” he says, satisfied, Moroccan: “Ah! Yes! That – is most important.” He asks us to speak it into his phone so that he can learn it, and I take a photo of the two them with their sweet heads together, listening in on one departed French or Spanish or German tourist after another, speaking in all their different voices the phrases which comprise his vocubulary, each of them adding a drop to his store of hospitality.

    To my right, five Chinese students are spending the night with their phones. They are so absorbed that even when food arrives they ply their forks round it, scrolling onwards through the fascinating replacement world. A commotion of drums festers in the distance, around a corner in the narrow lane which is hung with handicrafts for sale. “Hand mad” says a sign above the racks of point-toed slippers. “Prix fixe.” I have seen tourists walking through the busy markets with expressionless faces shielded by devices set to continuously record, and I wonder how it must feel to be videoed a thousand times in a year by people who don’t seem to bother to even acknowledge one’s humanity. The students issue their drink orders (avocado juice, banana and orange juice, freshly pressed, with sugar and without) free from any thank yous or any please and Mohammed presses his palm across his heart as though it aches, saying in English, “Thank you, guys, I bring it right away, great, please, certainly.”

    The clatter of drums is coming nearer and I am craning to see past the French family who have stationed themselves in the passage to wait for a table. Two men, gaily dressed in such bright robes and complex festoonments my eye cannot grasp them, holding up their tiny drums, the skin of the drum painted with henna, stamping their soft leather boots and singing splendidly – I ask if I can take their photo and the taller says, “Foto!” and they both fall to attention, and then he puts his cupped hand out and I realise I have no coins. Mohammed is passing with a clutch of creamy avocado juices from the stall across the way. On his way back I put out my hand. “Est-ce que vous pouvoir me louer un peau de l’argent pour les musics?” This doesn’t exactly mean, Can you please lend me some silver to give to the musicians? but it’s the closest I can get.

    Sure, he says, without pause, digging in his pocket and showing me the coins. He selects for me and presses them into my palm: three, four dirham is plenty.

    At the end of the meal we want to pay and I say, “Plus the four dirham,” and Mohammed looks puzzled. “You lent it to me, for the musicians,” I say.

    “Ahh!” He shakes my hand, pressing his heart. “My friend.” “Thank you so much,” I say, “We love it here, we love your restaurant,” and behind us the French family jostles forward, scenting seats at last, and we say goodbye to the other Chinese students on our other side who have been telling us they woke up this morning in tents in the Sahara and could see the ‘galaxy’ but it was spoilt rather because there was ‘no service’.

    “You went on a self-catered tour?” I said.

    “No service,” the good-looking leader repeated, jabbing his finger at the sky. We walk away, tired in the stummy and thinking as we come home how extremely gentlemanly, how classy it is of Mohammed to have lent me the money for the buskers and then to have instantly forgotten the debt. Morocco seems to me so complex and inspired, I have the feeling of a rich, fine intricacy, am rejoiced to see how gently and tenderly anyone with a disability is handed up the stairs or into vehicles, I see the brutality, I feel my heart aching with the real inevitable charge of life that in ‘our kindergarten countries’ as my Berlin companion has called them this week is simply absent, or at least invisible, and when we are not afforded the luxe protection we experience as our right, we sometimes grumble at god, who has not given enough, whom we can call on with praise for sparing the floods our children, as though this were not an insult to the humanity of all the other children swept and drowned, as though the Acts of God excepted in the fine print of every insurance policy were not just and not our desserts, but rather an interruption to the service we expect, and for which we would pay nothing but our words.

  • a rise in Berlin

    Went for a long wander in the forest with a local acquaintance to guide me. We climbed Berlin’s highest peak, which sounds more dramatic than it is. The lake is called Muggelsee and I had to use actions rather than words to explain what is a muggins, or muggles, in English: the kind of affectionate puzzlement you might feel while rubbing someone’s whole face with the palm of your hand. We stopped among some very tall birch trees and they were tinkling & tingling with tiny tiny sound. Very far up there was a hole, in the bole of the trunk. My companion pointed. “In that hole,” he said. “Bird kids.”

    ~ Four years ago today, I was shown a slight rise in flat as an omelette Berlin. I fell in love with a man who loves birds and since then we’ve been working it out. There is a German word for the displaced denizens of the East who feel a painful craving for the lost Ost: they combine it with ‘nostalgia’ to reach Ostalgie.

  • New York meets Berlin

    It’s 3am now in New York but when we landed in Berlin, it was 7 o’clock on a sunny Sunday morning. It is colder. I am tired. My first time arriving in Berlin from the States and the subway, the U Bahn, seems immediately different. People are different and I can’t put my finger on it. “Thinner,” he says, and I gasp. He is right. They do not seem to be eating themselves to death. They are playful with one another, with strangers, in a way that seems to me to take a different kind of things seriously. They chatter and laugh, fall asleep, excuse themselves to one another as they pass. There is a different kind of facial expression, something hard to quantify. There are many many fewer really giant large people. They seem, I don’t know if it’s more alive or simply more awake. I do not cherish myself making these observations but in between the long spells of sleeping sickness on the swaying bus and the whispering silky smooth train I keep noticing. The train platform is not a kind of caged forest. It feels spacious and light. I didn’t expect to feel this way. There is a lot less staring into phones. People look to me fresh somehow. They seem grimmer and less disheartened.

  • belovedly

    Oh, Germany. Sometimes I am just so grateful to you! I came three years ago, for a week, with a suitcase of summer clothes. Stayed on and stayed. Met a man. Made some friends. Found a Kiez, a barrio, a neighbourhood. Now I am back and the dense sweet piercing chill of this supposedly Spring evening has lifted and carried me when I most needed the lifting, I needed the carry.

    Here’s what happened to me today. I kept running aground. Couldn’t work out why and there were things I was itching to do. Eventually I figured out: it was because I was in pain. This happens irregularly, more often than you’d like. It’s character building. I rang the osteopath, who is in the next street, and she was available within hours. So I just went to bed to wait. Reading my book. Third book this week, not a bad one. I like this osteo and she treats me, after three or four visits, familiarly, friendshippy: Lass dich mal wieder sehen, she sang out a month ago when I last left. Let yourself be seen, come back again. She reminds me of the Melbourne friend of my mother and I thought of her as motherly, underwinging, kind.

    This time seemed to bring earlier events up to a clearer pitch. She wanted me to lie on my back shirtless, was reluctant to hand over a towel. She let her hands dig into my shoulders and then brought her face rather close to mine, breathing deeply in. For long moments we lay and stood like this and naked high in the sky as the blue faded to black I let my mind wash off into its meditative dream: life is deep and long, worlds are a forest, there is nothing I can change here but I bring my attention to bear on this shipwrecked beach, breathing. I surpassed it all with calm. When I got home I felt wrung out and bleakly alone. It is difficult working out how to say in German, you are too near, I want to be covered.

    When I say home, I mean my hotel room. Two months ago my honey and I had a fight, it was 4am and we simply couldn’t bear it any more, and since then I have been living in an hotel and we find ourselves gradually so much more comfy and at ease. The reason for our fight was: two of us, plus one medium-sized dog, living in one room for months on end wore us down. We are both loners and creative types, used to the silence. We tried alternating headphones, I tried writing on the floor of the tiny bathroom and in cafes. It was snowing outside and no one could simply go out for a walk and lose themselves in the greenery. What greenery. Anyway I came home to my hotel, which is quiet and sedate and very old-fashioned; they let me stay here for cheap because they like writers. I was hungry; it was midnight; surely everything would be closed. I wrapped myself again and set out across the square. This bar I like was open, glowing with the hum. Serious German conversation at all tables. The one table in the window, where the cat sleeps, empty for me. I ordered onion soup from the menu open “til one hour early”, which means, til one o’clock in the morning. I ordered a beer. I let the stumbling crank and rumble of benign Germanness wash me all round. I watched the bar cat, sleeping in the hammock of herself. Her name is Zappa. Two gentlemen next to me had the chess board out, but it took them a long while to get down to playing. Something they were discussing took up all of their attention the way a paper towel blots milk. I love listening to German men talking over beers with their friends. There’s so little machismo. Their voices are often deep but they are excited by the ideas, by the shared experience, they converse. The cook, who has biker boots and a long skinny plait, came out carrying my onion soup and a basket of four different kinds of bread. I took my book out and just stared at it. The words printed on the pages were stars and I let them carry me, they were carpets, dancing on the orange horizon where one never meets oneself, where everything is wild, where languages are ribbons not unlike long-eared underwater plants writhing in the salt and combing themselves back and back and back, illustrious, clean. I sat there until the detritus of my day had sanded out of my bathers and then the warm oil of it lit me all the way home and I will carry this into my sleep, a moreish story.

  • an apple tree with one of its seeds

    So cold and empty at the heart today. I feel all the little threads connecting me to everyday life in the usual world – the usual world of Brisbane, that I grew so painfully and slowly reattached to after some 13 years away – have been cut, or burnt off and I am gliding in tiny jerks across an endless sky of winter, white sky, moored in this tiny white room, which sits five floors up and blank-eyed with windows, looking out on all the whiteness as though they were just another wall. I went for an early morning walk with a man and his dog, I chatted for over an hour with a friend who makes music in New York, the day started out clean and entire and I had been thinking how the jetlag was passing off and the climate shock was gone. But today was overcastled, grimy, grey, people walking stoopingly. My old winter boots that I’d left behind so gladly in Berlin when we flew south had little leaks in their soles which I had forgotten, the streets seemed to me endlessly stony and the only green things have cast off their veil of leaves and stand trembling naked, black and greasy with rain. By the side of the canal we found a giant apple tree leafless and bare studded with large red apples gleaming slightly, like lamps. A couple of apples had fallen from its black branches but they had not fallen very far. Apples don’t. The flights of stairs home seemed endless and I peeled off my shoddy boots and climbed back onto the island of bed, white bed in a white room adrift in a white sky, and lay disconsolately fingering my hair, feeling its wiry wintry dryness, fingertips stumbling over the wretched knots like berries in the snow.

  • you are like a fresh cranberry

    God, I am so in love right now. Partly because of food and partly because of language.

    We decided I needed to really touch down in Germany, not to be always looking back over my shoulder at sunstruck Queensland. We went for a long walk, through the marshy parks where the back of every sign has stickers and the benches are scribbled over and the leaves already bearing along their spines the shadow of ice that feathered into them in the long night. We went out for breakfast, late enough that it could be called lunch. My partner had tagliatelle but I had a big plate of Deutschness: ragout of wild venison, which I had never tried before, and bread dumplings, which I adore. And dazu einen kleinen Schnapps. To get the heart started.

    They pack down good German bread into a kind of loaf and slice it, and sop it in gravy. It’s so good. Venison it turns out tastes not unlike kangaroo. My second schnapps set everything on fire, the flavours, the light, the two men talking in English at another table, the awful U2 covers, the scenery almost sunlit outside. My plate was decorated with a fan of fresh sliced pear and a few bright red berries. I tasted these, liking their tartness. They have a tough, wrinkling red skin. I said, surprised, “I’ve never eaten a fresh cranberry before, in all my life.” My companion stroked the crook of his finger down the side of my face. “You are like a fresh cranberry,” he said.

    Then, gazing out the big picture windows as I ran my finger round the edge of my white plate and licked off the last of the sauce, he said, musingly, “You know, I can see really why you have such a big culture shock. People here are kind of sloppy. They look poor. They look a bit desperate. Whereas in Brisbane, really everyone is so very well-broomed.” I smiled at my polished white plate. Then we came home across the tiled streets that have been swept clean of their autumbled leaves and when we reached our minute apartment I said, You build the rest of the bed. I’ll just write.

  • when nothing really mattress

    Being back has been all too much. My body is toiling through an endless misery of sudden change and dark culture shock. And it feels like during the four days I have been travelling underwater, through endless airports and then a change of climate, into dark short days and misty frozen nights, the Western world has caught fire at both ends – America seems to have exploded in all of its underlying injustices and Australia has now from what I can gather officially turned its back on the Refugee Convention of which we were originally one of the instigators. Berlin is overwhelming and dirty and livid with struggle and grime. The two of us have been sleeping, incessantly, on a narrow mattress which requires everybody to sleep on their sides and all turn at once. At intervals we get up and stumble about in the cold, following the dog whose yipping almost split my ears when we first picked him up. My partner got on eBay and looked up mattresses. He has bought a decent, little-used bed for a price we can afford. The guy is about to go away for the week up to Cologne. Oh god, seven more nights balanced on our sides. “Well,” said the mattress owner, “why don’t I leave the key to my apartment down in the garden house and you can pick it up and come take the mattress away.” “Okay…” “Just take the mattress,” he said cheerfully, “try not to take any of the other stuff.” Some people really rock.

  • daintily, handily

    daintily, handily

    All the noisiness of sun. To a German, the crashing in the bamboo at 3am sounds like a housebreaker festooned with plastic bags. How could a little possum make so much noise? Why must the birds all shriek? When you lift a painting off the wall, exposing a transparent lizard, who exposes his heart lungs and liver to the world but will dart away into hiding when his cover’s lifted, that’s a shock. A person with no fear of local pushers, addicts, drunken punk louts, untethered giant dogs and bad buskers can be remarkably unsettled by the rustling and crashing that midnight brings when it’s hot tagsüber. “During the day,” I say, “everyone’s sleeping. Then at night when it cools down, they all come out to live their lives.” Handily our small grey cat has arranged herself across his extended hand to illustrate this point. She yawns her pink yawn.