Ethiopia and the Kaleidoscopic

I did what I could to clear away the day and catch up on this here blog today.  It’s an odd exercise to try to recreate a day that has slipped from yesterday to last week, and then beyond.  I’ll have notes from that day laid out in a document.  A meal I made.  A meal I ate.  “worked on the puzzle”, “fed the birds.”  Sometimes a meatball can be all you need to bring the breadth of a day back, Madeline-like.  Other times the phrases just mock you and catalyze nothing.  Remarkable that nearly all of it actually is up there.  You just need to cultivate access. 

The day before I’d finished off Claude McKay’s “Romance in Marsaille” which I greatly enjoyed.  It’s refreshing after spending so many fictive pages during the Harlem Renaissance reading in and around Lennox Avenue and One Hundred and Twenty Fifth Street to consider the African diaspora from the south of France or from Marakesh.  Buried in plain sight for nearly ninety years in the archives he donated his work to, I enjoyed it more than McKay’s “Home to Harlem.”  Lafala is a stowaway, caught and locked in the wash closet he nearly freezes to-death and when they reach New York they must amputate his feet, the feet that once had danced so well.  It’s New York though and he is persuaded to sue the shipping company, and the suit is successful.  He returns back to the Marsaille Quayside without his feet but as a newly-minted millionaire.  He reengages a remarkable cast of old lovers, odd friends.  Everyone schemes, no one is to be completely believed, and Lafala is nearly murdered, imprisoned and makes his way back to Africa, leaving everyone, even the remarkable Sudanese harlot Aslima, reluctantly behind. 

I gave it to my mom when she asked if she could borrow it after I’d described it.  I think I’ll send a copy to my sister as well for her birthday is approaching.  I immediately dove into yet another Claude McKay novel that was lost to history: “Amiable with Big Teeth” which is set in Harlem but concerns itself with Italian invasion of Ethiopia and the kaleidoscopic politics, and cross cutting cleavages of well-heeled Harlem, the ComIntern, Haile Selassie’s resistance and the long-gone uptown night clubs.

When you read, your mind is alight.  But when you read, you do not write.  And sometime this morning after enjoying the first thirty pages or so in the can, I put the book down, determined to write.  I won’t be at peace till I reckon with this backlog.  The rain fell.  I made some tacos for the wife and the little one.  Later in the day my older one came back from a weekend in Pennsylvania and I paid my stepdad, who is stuck in a physical rehabilitation center up the hill, a quick visit.  But otherwise, I kept to my writing.  At 9:00PM tonight there is a weekly call that signals the beginning of the Asia Monday morning.  Sunday becomes Monday, far too quickly.

Sunday, 7/12/20