Essay from The Literary Review

Camel's Milk: An Expatriate Book Proposal

David Applefield

We don’t live in countries anymore. We live between them—around them—in relationship to them. We live in response to what we know and in fear of the consequences of what we don’t.
          Our nationalities don’t make any real difference although we are judged often by the passports we hold. Our boundaries today are rapidly being re-drawn by languages we neither speak nor understand, the gestures and rituals we cannot decipher without causing insult or incidents, otherness and the resistance we have to it. Living in contexts we don’t own.
          From the comfort of our keyboards and screens, at the ease of our cable connections and satelite hook ups, we think we bathe in the utmost of internationalism, but are cruelly reminded of this illusion the first time a dark man draws a finger to his throat, the sight of a thousand flies dancing on the sex of a camel, the gesture of a ticket taker in Paris which makes you feel like an utter fool.
          Go ahead and order a Coke during Ramadan in Tunis. Talk to a hunter at election time in the rugged heartland of Malta. Hear how you win leukemia from gem-smugglers in Madagascar who turn quartz into saffires by blasting them with radiation. There are complex stories in the dailiness of the world and they need to be told and understood by writers who live them and can translate them into memorable meals.

          For the last 20 years I’ve been asking myself where I belong. Although I was born a second generation American in sooty New Jersey not far from the Statue of Liberty, Isaac Bashevis Singer once told me “your roots are in Elizabeth; you’ll never know the stetl.” I never wanted to know the stetl, but I did jump off a bus on the edge of Poronin in southern Poland and approached a priest in a long black coat who remembered my grandfather as a red head in the 4th grade. Recently, I took a taxi from Kiev to Zhitomir from where my paternal great-grandparents began their migration out of Europe in 1898. In the fields of Zhitomir today one finds apples, fields of apples, and lots of them. Apple fields abound. We talk about searching ones roots, but when you actually find them and they are at the base of a tree and they are inherent in your name, well, you don’t really cry, but your eyes well up with water. You can know the stetl. Self-knowledge is about taking a short trip. As one Philadelphia journalist recently told me, “the past today is no further than a departure gate at JFK.”

In the Honduran town of San Pedro de Sula, I gave one of the wooden clogs I wore that summer to a teenage boy who had no left foot. We both limped away strangely pleased in the silence of this odd, wordless exchange. In my adolescence in the days before the popularization of the item, I spotted something foreign, a condom, floating, bloated, in the brackish water of New York harbor as I watched the white Peugeot 504 that my parents had ordered bounce off the SS Michelangelo glaring like a new born with its yellow European headlights flashing and those French licence plates that shouted in red “foreignness.”
          Some details never leave your perturbed inner mind. Things and people and their stories. I drove a rented Fiat at dusk through the abandoned lanes between the barracks at Birkenau-Aushwitz with a man who’d been there fifty years earlier. I saved a goat on a cliff near the village of Paleochora on the southern edge of Crete and the villagers honored me with the obligatory ritual of twelve consecutive rounds of 80 proof raki. In Dakar a prostitute told me the story of being banished by her Shiite father because of Edgar, her six year old son, fathered by an Ivorian man whom she loved but who would not marry her. Souleyman, a Moslem in Nouakchott wept at the age of 42 when he met his first Jew. Since his Sephardic ancestors had been driven out of Morocco in 1780, he, a devout Moslem, had hiden his true and secret allegiance to the Hebrew god. A lad selling dyed batik fabric in the parched zoo grounds of Niamey, Niger, where Yellow Cake uranium is more common than cake, didn’t know how old he was, so I gave him my birthday, April 29, and we send cards to each other every year. Tom Kennedy and I stole breakfast from a Holiday Inn in Eindhoven, Holland early one morning years ago and we still don’t know what our little misdemeanor meant nor how to capture it in a shareable story. There was only one word that joined that Turkish shepherd and our world as my wife and children were stuck in a nearly-tragic mudslide in a rented Volkswagen in the chill of a mid-February dusk: traktor.
          The mythic presence of Mohammed Ali united me and a 49-year-old street thief with whom I scoured the worst slums of Oran, Algeria in search of a stolen backpack, whose contents included a scroll inscribed with the only copy of my family tree. I wandered along a beach littered with dead, diseased pigs at the edge of Cotonou, and communed with the body of Joseph Brodsky in the cemetery of Venice as the soul of Ezra Pound looked on. I negotiated the purchase of a gagged armadillo on a backroad in the Yucatan, liberated him at Chichen Itza, and baptised him Jack. A Japanese tourist and I sought the resting place of JoPoSoto in the Montparnasse cemetery in Paris. In Tours there is a reconstructed elephant called Fritz whose twisted history was driven by P. T. Barnum and the Third Reich. With my brother, a bag of Tootsie Rolls, a mad taxi driver, and a dangerous curfew, I survived a close call at gunpoint in the capital of Guinea, Conakry, thanks to Jesus and some quick thinking.

These are a few of the stories of being in the world today, of opening oneself to the ride of what’s really out there. Not a daredevil or provocateur, I simply set out to do my work in the context of places, people, and the cultures that drive them. While teaching a writing class on a Pershing missile site in between Stuttgart and Nurembourg, an embarrassed nco named Terrence couldn’t write about that cowardly time, armed to the gills, he turned and ran like a hero from an enemy soldier in the Korean dmz. I managed to stop a moving train in Frankfurt with sheer will and a strange pride. A wild roller-derby star from Santa Monica spent a strange evening with me in Prague on her way back from Tokyo, via Alabama, a lot of bad whiskey, and a visit to President Havel’s front door. Then there was the train to K-Town, and of course the first call-in radio show on Radio Laftia in the Malian desert town of Timbuktu.
          I live in a lot of places at once. You do too. For me, it’s Paris, it’s my kitchen table, it’s often in my ear when the wireless world creeps in from a bmw on a causeway in Tampa, Florida or a dusty office in Bamako or a backyard in suburban Boston. The places that we don’t understand, the places we think we understand, the places that flutter out of focus as we listen to the common lies of daily information. I’ve run out into the streets of my life and memory with a polka dotted butterfly net and I’m trapping stuff like crazy. The stuff in the net is not to be feared. It is the world today. You can go and talk to a shopkeeper in Baghdad and survive, or fall in love with his son or daughter. You can die from loving someone else. Outside of Guantanamo there is a gift shop which has something sweet for your mother. While walking through the Sahara toward Chinguetti, remember that behind the mud wall in the last town before the giant crater there is a small child holding an American flag a tourist gave her, looking with adoration at her one-eyed father who might have been a biologist or basketball star had the cards been dealt differently. A warm tumbler of camel’s milk silently waits on a bamboo table, ready to expand your virility and grace your early morning dreams with utopian grandeur.
          Raise that glass to our shared lip and cheer.