Valencia Bestaat Niet

“The continent is too large to describe. It is a veritable ocean, a separate planet, a varied, immensely rich cosmos. Only with the greatest simplification, for the sake of convenience, can we say 'Africa'. In reality, except as a geographical appellation, Africa does not exist.” 

― Ryszard Kapuściński, The Cobra's Heart

Een van mijn gastheren en ik in "Ciudad de las Artes y las Ciencias",
de meest beroemde toeristische attractie in Valencia.
Dit gebouw werd een symbool van corruptie en geldschandalen. 

Ik vond deze anekdote op de eerste bladzijde in een boek in Gandia, een stadje nabij Valencia. Het was in het Spaans -niet mijn beste taal-, maar toch begreep ik elke letter. Eerder dan deze anekdote die ik op het internet terug vond, schreef Ryszard in zijn voorwoord dat dit boek niet over Afrika gaat, maar een compilatie is van reisverhalen, van zijn ervaringen en ontmoetingen met mensen die toevallig allemaal op dat stuk planeet wonen, tussen deze grenzen, in deze labels... van Afrika.

Twee dagen eerder was ik in Valencia aangekomen, ook met een koffer  vol stereotypen. Ik wist niet zoveel van Valencia, behalve dat er een strand was, een of ander beroemd monument dat een of ander museum voor kunst en wetenschappen was, en dat de paella daar ontstaan was. 

Het is heel gemakkelijk om deze stereotypen uit de doos te halen. Ja, ik heb paella gegeten. Mijn gastheer gaf me churros dat ik in mijn chocolade saus moest dopen. Bij de schattige grootouders kreeg ik een glas Horchata, een drank dat uit noten, water en suiker bestaat en op melk lijkt, een typische drank uit Valencia dat ontstaan is toen er veel moslims waren.  De grootouders bodem me ook fartons aan, de typische koekjes, op de binnenplaats van hun koddig huisje, waar grote bomma-onderbroeken aan de wasdraad drogen en waar je in de verte duiven hoort kirren. Daar, op de plastieken tuintafel, trof ik dit boek aan en las ik deze tekst.

Ik herken het onmiddellijk. 

Ik vind het alsmaar moeilijker om een reisverslag over een land of een stad te maken. Ik wil iets origineels schrijven, zonder in stereotypen te vervallen, maar bestaat deze plek dan wel? Onlangs merkte een kennis op dat in stereotypen een zekere waarheid zit. Zou Valencia bestaan als we alle paella, strand, feestjes, fartons en horchata zouden laten wegvallen. 

Misschien moet ik maar het voorbeeld van Ryszard volgen en gewoon een verhaal vertellen over wat mij in Valencia is gebeurd. Terwijl enkele vrienden van een van mijn twee gastheren paella aan het voorbereiden waren in een grote pan, praatten de andere gastheer en ik over reizen. Ik vertelde hem dat ik denk dat ik zo vaak reis, omdat ik op zoek ben naar iets, maar ik weet nog niet wat. Ik ben nog niet helemaal verzadigd met wat ik heb. Er ontbreekt iets. Hij zei dat zijn leven ook rond een zoektocht draait. Zelf speelt hij gitaar. 

"Ik zoek het perfecte lied."

Daarom heeft hij een lijst van boeken opgesteld, en pas als hij die allemaal gelezen heeft, weet hij dat hij het perfecte lied zal componeren. Hij weet dat het al over liefde zal gaan. 

Toen vatte de tafel vlam waarop ze paella aan het klaarmaken waren... 

The Mother of Haïti

Some years ago I met the talented photographer Betania Salvatore from Bariloche, Argentina, when I traveled in Guatemala. She came back from a project in Haïti and shared me this story:

An old mother used all her money to give her daughter a better life somewhere else. Every day she cried and prayed for her missing daughter. 
For years.
Betania heard from others that her daughter had died.
Nobody told the old mother. 

bron: http://500px.com/photo/36661544/untitled-by-betasalvatore
(c) Beta Salvatore, Haïti 2011

Tenho saudades de você

Yesterday, in Brasil, they celebrated the day of saudade. This feeling... is one of my favorite words ever. More than two years ago, a good friend sent me this word as Christmas present, when I was in Thailand, far away from her. This word still follows me everywhere, because as a woman who travels you always miss people and places, because you create more and more homes...  everywhere in the world. You cannot be together with someone forever, and that's what saudade means to me. 

Gisteren vierden ze in Brazilië de dag van saudade. Dit gevoel is al jaren een van mijn favoriete woorden. Meer dan twee jaar geleden heeft een goede vriendin me dit woord als een kerstgeschenk gestuurd, wanneer ik in Thailand verbleef. Heel ver weg van mij. Dit woord volgt me nog steeds overal, omdat als een vrouw die veel reist je altijd mensen en plaatsen zal missen. Je kan nooit samen zijn met iemand, omdat je overal een thuis hebt. Dat is wat saudade voor mij betekent.

The Religion of Traveling, pt5: I am on a boat

When my friend and I were in Ein Gedi, an old travel buddy stopped  on his way to a music festival for a halfhour to meet and greet me. He introduced us to his friend, who invited us to stay at his boat in Jaffa, in the end of our trip. When they were gone, my friend and I were jumping and dancing as little children, so enthusiastic about the end of our trip. And even start singing this:

So, one week later, with salty lips from the Dead Sea region, and full of sand of the Jordan desert, we arrived in Jaffa, which is part of Tel-Aviv-Jaffa, and exists already for thousands of years. Tel Aviv is more designed for the newest generation of Jews, who came already back in the 19th century, after they have been expelled from their Holy Land for more than thousand of years. I don't say I support this migration; it is difficult to choose a side if both groups -muslims and Jews- have been living here, and have the roots of their history and culture here. Time and growing population merged the two cities together.  In the first day we explored Jaffa, and that evening my friend left Israel and me for her boyfriend's birthday party in Belgium, while I visited an old Israeli friend, who gave me a very interesting socio-geography excursion in Tel Aviv, and let me discover the different historic layers.

In the last evening I returned back to the boat, and was introduced to an old guy who proposed to do some night sailing. Unfortunately, the engine didn't work very well, so we had to return before sunrise. When that old man and I were sitting in the port, looking to the morning air, he told me he loved the ocean. "Every emotion leads me to the sea," he said. "When I am happy, or sad... I always feel running here." This old man lives and works on sea for many years, but he seemed a bit lonely.

I don't know if I would like living on a boat. At night, when everything is dark, the ocean seems dangerous. There is some power to steer a boat, like I did under the guidance of the old sailor, in the total darkness, and face all the emotions the ocean evoke, but there is not a total control. In the end emotions and other powers of Mother Ocean are more powerful than control and attempts for navigation.

When I left Israel after 2 weeks, I felt different. Not really sad. Not really happy. I faced many different beliefs, religions, and power of nature, like the earth and the water, but i the end I believe in the religion of traveling, where you meet people, get confronted with ideas, see the world, not via media, but with your on eyes, see stereotypes confirmed and also new stories... and that makes people grow. Religion is going back to the roots, going back naked, to be able to face the world and to grow... so for me meeting, traveling, exploring, being social... is the way of living.

"She Who Tells a Story"

“I was raised with people trying to tell me what to do and think,” said Newsha Tavakolian, who shoots for The New York Times from Iran. “Now I want those looking at my work to have their own opinions. I don’t want to enforce any ideas or views upon them. They are free.”

source of inspiration:  A Show of Strenght by Middle Eastern Women Photographers

"Don't forget this is Not for You (for Sahar Letfi)", 2011
exhibition in Boston,  August 27, 2013 - January 12, 2014

The phrase “She Who Tells a Story” comes from the word rawiya (...). But the exhibit doesn’t tell one story; it tells many. (...) Ms. Tavakolian said that while the exhibit cannot really not change anything about the current situation in Egypt or elsewhere in the region, what it could do is help “provide people with the opportunity to see some different perspectives from the region.”

Please, if you would have the opportunity to visit this exhibition, tell me about it, and if these women really challenge the stereotypes in their region, and tell the different stories, could frame the complex identities in their region. Dank u wel :). Let me now rewrite a short story, I wrote for a film project, but let it us put in another context... 
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White on Paper (retold)

Thousands spirals huddled together. Colors danced and mingled over the entire surface.  In this all, she wandered in this insane play of her mind, a young woman, her skin so brown as the heart of ancient trees, her hair as black as the lonely nights without the caress of the moon, and her eyes as dark as still, but deep waters. In this world she could be as free as she wanted. There were no limitations, no expectations... She could be everyone. She could be a queen. Yes, a beautiful, shining, colorful queen, without any scars, without any ropes, without any fear. An artist. In her hands, an old camera, the one she saw using a tourist, appears. In front of her, a corridor, blinding her eyes with a giant light, appeared, and she decided to meet the source of the light. Something in her mind said this would be a great frame for a movie, or a photograph: her feminine silhouette in the backlight.
There was a man waiting for her. He was not like the men in her village. He was tall, taller than any guy, and his skin was so white as the milk her grandmother's goats produced. He reminded her to this tourist of an Iceland, which visited her village some weeks ago, the same tourist with the same camera in her hands. In the memory he had given her only one glance, which freezed time. She didn't know this stranger. Her mother noticed the short interaction, and had her pulled away, from "this strange behavior". But... now she met him again, in his land of ice and snow. He was the opposite of everything what the desert around, in, under her village was promising her. This time she took pictures of him, expressing her feelings, expressing her desires, expressing who she really is...
until the dream ended.

In the real world, her hairs were covered by the rusari, when she walked through alleys which smell like goat piss and the other perfumes of poverty. Her father allows her to take pictures, which he sells in the capital as postcards to tourists. Her father says she has "an eye", not because he knows something about exposure, the golden mean... but the dodgy publisher for who he works, says it. Her father, who worked as tea maker for a publisher, who had found one day some pictures in his wallet. Nobody, in that company, wonder what the boss was looking for in this wallet. Money shuts mouths. He asked who took these pictures, and her father, who has a talent for knowing what people want to hear, said he took these pictures. Since then her father is tea maker, photographer and also, as second job outside the publisher, vendor of photographs he cannot sell to the paper. She knew this. She could work as photographer, in Iran, if she wanted, but not now... she is a clever girl. Her talent is to know what people don't want to hear. She tells herself she just waits for a moment, when everything will be ok, when her dreams full of colors, and the white papers of the books of her father's boss will mingle.

But this tourist changed everything...

He appeared more often in her dreams. She was almost afraid to fell asleep, because she didn't want to hear her family hear her moaning. 16 year old girls shouldn't have desires...   One morning, when her youngest sister and she were doing the dishes in a bucket outside, her sister confirmed her biggest fear. "Why are you making so weird noises? What do you dream about?"
"I dream about... camels... that I am a camel."
Her younger sister start laughing. "You're so weird."
Weird is better than naughty.
Still, anxious, she took her grandfather's camera, and went into the desert, to calm down there.
Landscapes, impressions...  got an eternal print, but couldn't brand away the image in her mind, of this tall, white man. She stopped, in the middle of nothing.
She raised her hands, and by both her thumb and forefinger of each hand, she made a frame, looking for a picture that would make her happy ... that would set her thoughts free ...
... and he appeared in the frame.
Her arms fell.
Stunned, she stared at the tourist. This is impossible. So... God still exists in this reality? It has to be... because only He could have brought him. This is a sign. These time the glance was longer, long enough to invite her to come. Slowly, she went to him, and although he didn't smile, she came closer and closer, and stopped one meter for him, impressed by his appearance. His eyes are so blue... as ice... She never had seen ice, only in the magazines her father brought home. What happens now? She wants to touch him, and then he also raises his hand, to touch her fingers, but exactly at the moment when her hand palm was going to feel his finger tops, he disappeared in a fata morgana. Afraid - fear for loosing it- she swirl around like a jinn. Where is he? Then she stopped, and understood something every woman one day will realise. Who do I really miss? 
She looked in the sun, not afraid to burn her eyes, and then tried to capture every color of this light with her camera. When her film roll was finished, she sighed. It was just all a dream...

Her father noticed that his daughter looked more sad than she usual was, but he didn't ask her why. Something in him wanted to ask her, hug her, take off this rusari from her head and kiss her black hairs, but there were other men, not so far from them, so he followed her via the door into his own small kingdom, where his queen carries the real scepter.

Three days later, her father faced two upset guys. One of them always developed his film rolls, the other was his boss. They did not understand the reason of the subject, lying on the table between them. The father was so chocked that his talent did not connect with his mouth. Possessed by anger, maybe fear, he took the pictures, and went home, to find his eldest daughter. She was cleaning the windows, and wanted to greet him with a smile, but the devil's laugh in his eye made her freeze. He pulled her inside, and threw the pictures in her face. "What is this?"
Trembling, confused, she took the pictures, and then she saw the most unbelievable. It is magic. 
Then a smile appeared, for a very first time on her dry lips, and she looked up.
"This is who I really am."
Her deepest desire was translated on white paper.
Her story of longing. Her identity. Her search for freedom...
Her dumb and forefinger did not hold pictures showing the sun, but showing him.
Her dreams, full of colors, really mingled with the white paper.
There was hope...
if there is magic in the world.