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For years Gerard Manley Hopkins' poem "Pied Beauty" has reminded me of Africa. Probably all of my readers are familiar with Hopkins, at least by name. He was a Jesuit priest at the turn of the 20th century whose breath taking poetic innovation earned him a place in poets' corner at Westminster Abbey. He is also my daughter Caroline's favorite poet, which is a nearly equivalent point in his favor.
The poem begins, "Glory be to God for dappled things--for skies of couple-colour as a branded cow, for rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim. . . " and finishes, "All things counter, original, spare, strange. . . He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change. Praise him."
It's dangerous to try to write anything thoughtful or deep after quoting even a line of a Hopkins poem. I've now overshadowed any phrases I could possibly turn out. But what I love about that poem is the praise to our Lord for the irregular and unreliable. That's Africa for sure.
Here's a microcosm of the kind of difference I'm thinking of between the U.S. and Africa. Let's say you want tomatoes in the U.S. You head to Walmart or Publix or your favorite grocery store. You walk through a door that automatically senses your presence and opens for you and your large rolling cart. You are met with gleaming spotless produce in giant well ordered piles. You can choose between roma tomatoes, grape tomatoes, cherry tomatoes, tomatoes on the vine, beefsteak tomatoes, yellow tomatoes, and maybe even some specialty tomato varieties (turns out there are hundreds). You can buy most of these either organic or, well, not organic. Every few minutes a tiny sprinkler system comes on to hydrate the vegetables. Some vegetables don't even need hydrating because they are packed for you on little styrofoam bases and covered with shrink wrap. They are firm and regular underneath the cellophane. (My favorite is the "stoplight" pepper packages that have a red, yellow, and green pepper arranged in a vertical row like a traffic light. I think it's cute but I never seem to use the yellow peppers.) The supermarket decor is bright, neat, and cheery. Tiny signs tell you exactly how much your potential purchase costs per ounce, and food labels tell you exactly how many grams of saturated fat, sugar, cholesterol, and dietary fiber you are getting in every serving of your breakfast cereal.
You go to buy tomatoes in Africa and you usually find them along the side of the dusty road either arranged on blankets on the ground or on a wooden stand. They are also in piles--of 4 or 5, 3 in a triangle on the bottom with 1 or 2 sitting on the top, which is how they are priced. They aren't pretty and perfect like American produce (you really notice the difference with the bananas). Your choice of varieties is: tomatoes. You bargain with the woman who owns the wooden kiosk or blanket if you're smart, and then you pay with a small bill otherwise she may have to get the neighboring shop owners to help her make change. When you get home because you're not sure exactly how sanitary the handling of the tomatoes was up to the point you got them, you soak them in bleach water for 20 minutes before using them.
I actually think there's something about the latter scenario that appeals even to Americans. It's at least a small part of the reason, I suppose, that Americans who can easily go to supermarkets nevertheless frequent farmers' markets. When produce is shrink wrapped it feels like there is a barrier between it and real life. Dappled, imperfect things can seem realer.
All of this leads me to a story of human pied beauty. It's on my mind because last week I paid a visit to this very beautiful individual in Nairobi. My friend Mary Kizito was my colleague and my head of department at Daystar University. Mary is a former Catholic nun who had a high position in the communication department of the Catholic Church at the time of Idi Amin's ascension to power in Uganda. Before long it because clear that any misstatement in the Catholic communications that she oversaw might led to her death; people of all sorts were disappearing on a daily basis in those years. Eventually she was indeed arrested, together with the Catholic archbishop, for a brief comment about Israel by a guest preacher on a Catholic radio program. (Those were the days after the raid on Entebbe). The archbishop and Mary were released after waiting for 9 hours in police custody for Amin to issue an order of execution. For whatever reason he changed his mind.
After Amin was deposed and Obote came to power Mary escaped an angry mob who were massacring members of her ethnic group by hiding under a mattress for 8 hours. For about two of those hours members of the vigilante group sat on the very mattress under which she lay, not daring to move, and discussed strategies for locating their victims. Through all of this Mary's high level job in the church took her out of the country on a regular basis. She could have easily defected but she chose to stay.
After Uganda lurched into peace, Mary obtained a masters degree in the U.S. and settled in to teach communication in Nairobi. In that capacity she mentored hundreds of students and many faculty members including me. All the while she used 40% of her small salary to support several nieces and nephews back in Uganda who had been orphaned, taking them from primary school through college and generally keeping much of her family in Uganda afloat. She also adopted a Kenyan student who had lost her mother. Mary's life was about as un-shrink wrapped as you can get.
Mary is now in the late stages of ovarian cancer, and at this moment as I write this I'm thinking of how deeply I marvel at her pied, counter, original, spare strange beauty.
Praise Him.
Wow!! Truly inspiring & humbling!!!
ReplyDeleteWow!! Truly inspiring & humbling!!!
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