Jonathan Barnes

On January 2, 2006, an explosion at the mine in Sago, West Virginia trapped 13 miners underground for nearly two days. Randal McCloy was the only miner to emerge alive. Pittsburgh writer Jonathan Barnes covered the Sago Mine rescue for Reuters. Here is an essay he wrote about the experience. The original version appeared on his blog, Barnestormin.

“Tell all I see them on the other side.”
-Sago miner Martin Toler Jr., 51, in a farewell note

Thursday 1/5/06, about 9 p.m.

The first thing I noticed while traveling through the countryside outside Buckhannon to the mine was the smell of wood burning. Coupled with the chilly winter air and the cars parked all over the fields, a city-slick visitor might have made the mistake of thinking that the gathering was a jamboree in the hills, or maybe some huge family reunion. You could make the mistake, if not for the gnawing hum of emergency vehicles, the flashing police cars and the overhead lights flooding Sago Road.

I looked around for a campfire, and I realized that many of the old A-frame houses along Sago Road were belching smoke. I noticed the large, well-stocked wood sheds behind the homes. The smell of wood burning in city neighborhoods, while not rare, is never so pervasive as the smell of wood burning in this stretch of Upshur County coalfields.

At times, the gathering resembled a vigil for the trapped men. The unfolding story also marked this area as a place of dread, anticipation, and round-the-clock news.

TV journalists from Norway to New York queried mine officials in accented English. Outsiders of all shapes had descended on this otherwise humble backwater. The quiet countryside changed forever early on Monday morning, when an explosion at the mine rocked houses miles away.

* * *

Officials weren’t sure what caused the explosion, but they did not rule out a lightning strike. Hatfield said there was evidence of a blast but no indications of major damage to the mineshaft. In 2002, nine Pennsylvania coal miners were rescued in Somerset after a 77-hour ordeal in a flooded mine shaft 240 feet underground. And in 1968, an explosion at a mine in Farmington, West Virginia, caused 78 deaths.

Nine of the 13 trapped men at Sago had more than 30 years’ mining experience; the average for the group was 23 years.

“This is not a rookie crew underground,” said Eugene Kitts, a vice-president for International Coal Group, the mining company. “So we’re just trusting that their training and their mining instincts have kicked in immediately and they’ve taken every step possible to put themselves out of harm’s way.”

Hundreds of family and friends gathered at a nearby church where the Red Cross had set up operations. Strangely, the Sago Baptist Church was on a crossroad that intersects Sago Road, which is how you get up to Sago Mine. If you followed the road from the church across Sago Road, you’d end up at the mine entrance.

I wondered which came first, the mine or the church. I had a feeling it was the mine. The church was likely built after the mine, to minister to the needs of the people who worked there.

* * *
Through the first days of the rescue effort, International Coal Group officials held regular press briefings. They held them on Monday at 3 p.m., 5 p.m., 6 p.m., 8:30 p.m., 10:40 p.m., and around midnight. They continued to hold them regularly on Tuesday, at 1:30 a.m., 4:45 a.m., and on and on.

At a press conference at 10:40 p.m. Monday, International Coal Group Vice President Roger Nicholson said one of two rescue teams had progressed 4,800 feet into the mine, while the other team had not made it as far.

“We are going to change out the teams as they work” to keep the work going continuously, Nicholson said. Then he added a foreboding note: “The drilling hasn’t gone as well as we’d hoped.”

Though the drilling crews had arrived at the scene around 5 p.m., the drilling didn’t even begin until around 10:30 p.m., Nicholson said to the media, who were smashed together in a hot second-floor room near the mine’s coal tipple, a mile or so from the mine’s entrance road. He explained that miners carry a box with an oxygen mask and an hour’s supply of oxygen.

“We’ve had no contact with the miners since the incident this morning,” Nicholson said.

Kitts said the rescue crews were making good progress toward reaching the trapped men. He seemed cautiously optimistic about the fate of the miners. Somebody asked him about the training the miners had been given to make it through such a crisis.

“The training these miners have…They should get to a place where the air is good. That’s our hope, that they are in such an area,” Kitts said.

He noted that company officials believed the rescue crew at 4,800 feet was still a mile away from the trapped men. “We’re hopeful that the carbon monoxide detected this morning was a by-product of the explosion itself,” Kitts said. A bit later, he again qualified the slow progress that the rescuers were making: “They’re still proceeding by foot and working by hand.”

* * *
Around midnight, International Coal executives had a press briefing at the tipple. At that point, new media people still were coming in, and the second floor room by the tipple was getting hotter and more uncomfortable.

Nicholson told the media that a rescue crew was 7,800 feet into the mine. “At that level, we’re still seeing some good air quality readings and no obstructions,” he said. “We anticipate beginning to drill shortly.”

Some reporters questioned why the hole was not yet being drilled.
“You have to locate where the hole should be drilled, bulldoze out a level pad… The pad [initially] wasn’t large enough for the drill rig,” Kitts said.

Journalists asked once again whether rescuers had heard any communication from the miners, and how the trapped men would communicate if they could.

“If there is anything—the roof, a water line, the track… If they have access to that, they should be tapping,” Kitts said.

At the 4:45 a.m. press briefing on Tuesday, Kitts said the drilling had begun on the monitoring drill hole. “It’s going quite well and should be completed around 6 a.m.,” he said. “The drill will stop twenty feet above the mine roof…Mine rescue crews will be removed as a safety precaution. Then the drill will go into the mine, and at that point we’ll monitor the air quality” and put a camera into the mine.

Then it was time for the high-tech approach, as the company executives discussed the robot that was being inserted at 9,200 feet into the mine to investigate the situation. “The mine rescue teams made it 9,200 feet and they are stopping to evaluate” and allow the robot to do its work, Kitts said.

At that point, it had been nearly a day since the explosion at the mine.

“There have been no reports of [roof] falls. The teams coming out said the mine is in good shape,” Kitts said.

Ben Hatfield, president of International Coal Group, said rescuers and investigators were clearly seeing signs that combustion had occurred. “It appears to have been an explosion of some sort,” he said.

Hatfield wore a desperate look, and we all saw it, as did millions of people watching on TV. Somebody asked him if the miners would have tried to get out of the mine if they were alive.

If they barricaded themselves in, they wouldn’t try to make their own way out, Hatfield said, adding that miners are taught to construct a ventilation barrier and maintain a safe environment. It was obvious that company officials still thought the mine could be very hazardous to rescuers.

“As desperately as we want to get them to safety, we can’t put more people in danger in the process,” Hatfield said.
“Is there anything you’d like to tell the viewers at home?” a TV reporter asked Hatfield.

The company president looked straight into the camera, a sad and pleading look on his face, and said: “Pray.”

* * *

Around 6:30 Tuesday morning, Hatfield looked more forlorn than the last time we’d seen him. He told reporters that at 5:38 a.m., the drill had penetrated the mine shaft. The drill crews pounded on the drill and listened for a response, and there was no response. A camera probe of the mine found no signs of life.

To me, and I am an optimist, it seemed that carbon monoxide levels in the mine might be far too high for anyone to survive.

“We are very discouraged,” Hatfield said. “We remain determined to continue the search as long as there’s hope.”

Daybreak brought light to the desperate scene at the mine’s entrance, but it brought no new rays of hope to the family and friends of the miners. Their circles of lawn chairs were mostly put away. They huddled together and comforted each other, talking lowly, lest a reporter should eavesdrop.

A couple of hours later, at 8:39 a.m., three state police cars drove up the road to the mine’s entrance. A couple of minutes later, two more police cars rolled up the road to the mine. It might’ve just been a shift change for the cops, but given the dread and waiting that hung in the air, any small change seemed like it might be significant.

In addition to the media, many people had flocked to the scene after hearing of the trapped miners. J. Michael Poole, vice-president of Bridgeville-based Union Drilling, helped with the rescue at Quecreek Mine in 2002, and came to Sago to offer help if it was needed.

“At this time, the type of drilling equipment we have is not needed,” Poole said. The company, which is an oil and drill contractor, had equipment waiting at its Buckhannon location. The company used its high-pressure air compression equipment at Quecreek.

Chris Hamilton, president of the West Virginia Coal Association, also came to lend a hand. “West Virginia’s a small community. We just wanted to give whatever help we could,” he said.

I asked if there was much possibility that the miners had breathable air to sustain them long enough to be rescued.

“It’s absolutely possible that there are some areas with the right living conditions. It’s highly possible that they barricaded themselves [in],” Hamilton said. “This is a mining operation that goes horizontally into the seam, versus a vertical shaft… It is highly possible that there could be surface fractures that could be a source of fresh air.”

Hamilton added a note of caution about trying to read too much into the situation. “This is a unique situation. We’re not sure what we’re dealing with here,” he said. “This is a real unique experience. We’ve not had a similar situation in 15 years.”

Since Monday night when I arrived at the scene, West Virginia state troopers had been running interference on Sago Road, keeping out people who didn’t belong there. But somehow or another, all sorts of extraneous folks had made it there.

Well-intentioned folks like a tall older gentleman I’ll simply call The Preacher (because of his look, carriage, and ever-present smile), made it in to offer help. The Preacher facilitated contact between reporters and state officials and all sorts of other folks. He pointed out Gov. Joe Manchin’s car as it was passing slowly by me, and I was able to shout a couple questions and get a couple of answers.

Nick Paglia, a miner with rescue experience from Stewartsville, Ohio, had been watching the coverage of the rescue attempt since he’d heard about it on Monday. He said he couldn’t stop thinking about the trapped miners.

“I prayed all night. I asked the Lord to give me the strength. I prayed constantly,” Paglia said. He’d come to the mine to offer his help, which those in charge of the rescue effort declined.

He didn’t look too hopeful, but he sounded hopeful.

“God can work miracles. Let’s hope this is one of them,” Paglia said.

* * *

At a 10:40 a.m. press briefing on Tuesday, Hatfield said that the second 6-inch diameter hole had made it 396 feet down by 6:50 a.m. The third small probe hole that was being drilled had made it down 160 feet by 10:30 a.m., he said, noting that rescue teams had made it 10,200 feet into the mine.

“There are no material changes in the gas level at this point,” Hatfield said. “We believe that we were being overly conservative early on.”

The lost crew of men is located somewhere between the 11,000 and 13,000 feet range, he noted.

“It is the sole focus of everyone in the command center to get those men out safely… It continues to be our belief that the [gas detected in the mine shaft] is a remnant of the explosion… Morale is high. We all continue to push forward as hard as we can. The families are clinging to every hope of survival.”

A while later I noticed that one of the family members of the trapped miners was surrounded by a pack of reporters. When the reporters cleared out, I asked him for a quick interview. A few other reporters tagged along to take notes on my interview for their stories.

Nick Helms, 25, actually smiled and stood tall as he answered my questions, just as I’d seen him do with the other reporters. He was gracious and kind and understanding as he talked about his father, Terry Helms, 50, the fire boss of the trapped crew.

“My dad’s a smart guy, he can build anything,” said Nick, a resident of Myrtle Beach, S.C. “He wouldn’t let me get into mining. He didn’t want me to bust my ass, and not be able to sleep.”

I told him I was sorry I had to pester him with questions.

“I understand, it’s your job and I respect that. And I appreciate that you respect my dad and his job,” he said.

Terry Helms had been a miner for 34 years, said Nick. Their Preston County family was tight-knit. When he heard the news, Nick said, he sped up from South Carolina, making it to the mine in 11 hours.

I asked Nick if he was religious, if he was a man of faith. “I have faith, I believe,” he said quietly.

There was a whole lot of preying by reporters, and praying by the hopeful, going on down at the mine. To many, prayer seemed the only hope left.

Late in the afternoon, around dinner, Gov. Manchin gave an impromptu press briefing to reporters standing in the middle of the road leading to Sago Baptist Church.

“We’re praying for that miracle, but odds are pretty much against us,” Gov. Manchin said.

A short time later, around 5:30 or 6 p.m., I learned from a contact that he had just overheard two family members of miners talking about how rescuers had found a body. I asked him who said it. He motioned slyly toward two men just twenty feet away from us who still were talking lowly together. The men were on the family and friends side of the police tape that state troopers had slung across the grass about thirty yards shy of the church.

* * *

Friday, 1/6/06, 8:57 a.m.

I was moved by the farewell note written by Martin Toler, Jr., because it reminded me of my dad. Maybe it’s the stress, but more likely it’s due to the fact that I lost my dad from an accident nine years ago, after he fell and hit his head.

When I saw that Toler had written the phrase “on the other side” in his farewell note, it struck a chord. I was fairly sure that he was using a phrase from an old gospel song. I was wrong, because the song is a bluegrass standard that many country people and city folks know. It has the ring of an old gospel, which I believe is intended.

I looked up the phrase online, and I found the lyrics to the song “The Other Side of Life,” by Alan O’Bryant:

Praise God, I feel like singing
I’m on the other side of life now.

All my days of sorrow
and tears for my loved ones,
I wish I could tell them the door that I feel.
Though my body is weary,
my soul is uplifted
my sins are forgiven and my Jesus is real.

Praise God I feel like singing
I’m on the other side of life now.

Though my eyes are dim,
I see heaven clearly.
Though my voice grows feeble, I sing just the same.
In my heart there’s a song
as I see the gates open
I’ll sing forever my joyous refrain.

Praise God I feel like singing
I’m on the other side of life now.
Praise God I feel like singing
I’m on the other side of life now.

My father was an evangelical Christian—a Bible-reading, Bible-quoting former country boy from Michigan. He liked to sing at the top of his lungs in the living-room, with his stereo blasting religious songs, country songs, all kinds of songs. He was a Gideon, one of those guys who passes out the little New Testament Bibles on college campuses.
He was a first-class holy roller, and he’d taken our family to many different churches while we twelve kids were growing up. Some of the churches that we visited were little white country churches where they sang those lovely old gospel songs. “The Other Side of Life” was his kind of tune.

Dad was a believer, always sure of his final destination, which he knew was through the Pearly Gates. I’m sure his spirit was belting out a song as he was heading there.

* * *

I was relieved from my post covering the rescue attempt just a few hours before the wrong good news came out. When I left the Sago Mine and headed home around 8 p.m. Tuesday, things looked bad for the trapped men. Family members and friends of the men looked more and more hopeless, and the faces of the mining executives also were telling a sad story. Time was against the trapped miners, and it seemed that it would be a miracle if any of the men came out alive.

In the end, miraculously, one of them did come out alive.

By Tuesday night some reporters thought company officials believed the miners were dead, and that they were trying to rescue them so the families would feel the company had done everything it could. Do the damage control, lower the lawsuits, that sort of thing. I didn’t know, and I didn’t care to think about it anymore, because I was pretty sure that at least some of the miners were dead.

As I walked down muddy Sago Road to leave that sad place, I passed a camera crew by the side of the road that was getting ready to interview Nick Helms. The crews’ lights shined brightly in Nick’s face. He stood a little straighter, squared his shoulders, and smiled.

OTHER PITTSBURGH WRITERS
In My Orchard
Hillary Masters

Hilary Masters

Originally published in the North American Review, this essay is now part of Masters’ collection “In Rooms of Memory,” (University of Nebraska Press, 2009)

My orchard here in Pittsburgh consists of two apple trees, a pear and a peach. These are small trees, developed in a nursery as dwarfs of the species and which I espaliered against the brick wall of my neighbor’s house, for to allow them to grow to their natural shape would make an impenetrable jungle.

The technique of this two-dimensional horticulture was practiced by the medieval gardener when the security of the walled manor came first and the cultivation of fresh fruit was secondary. The supple shoots and limbs of a young tree were trained to follow a trellis fixed against a surface so they grew flatly and the different designs of these arrangements are as various as were the imaginations of the growers.

For the peach trees—and I had two at the start—I chose a pattern much like the arms of a menorah, rigging the design with stout nylon cords threaded through eye-bolts screwed into the brick wall. Year after year, I carefully led the pliable limbs of the trees along these lines, tying them off at certain points and gently bending them to the left or to the right into the 90-degree turns that put them on a perpendicular course. For the apple and the pear trees I chose a pattern called vertical cordon and its name gives its description.

The trees dutifully followed directions and grew wonderfully and within a few years we enjoyed fresh peaches picked within feet of Mimosa Lane where the city’s garbage trucks rumble on early Thursday mornings. The apple and pear trees seemed hesitant to bear fruit but as I went about this modest, first harvest it amused me to think that I had reproduced a moment in this city backyard that had been shared by a medieval family hundreds of years before who, in turn, had regenerated this scrumptious import from the fabled orchards of Araby. One delicious bite of a peach connected me with that history and surely the trip was equal to the effect of that nibble of a cookie in that fin de siecle Paris drawing room.

So vanity as well as fruit has been cultivated as within a family when all seems going to plan and where offspring follow a determined course, making all the right turns. The child’s fruitful performance ennobles the progenitor—his wisdom and character are embellished as his agronomy is verified. I gave no credit to the peach for its deliciousness nor did I recognize its efforts growing through the mannered course I had laid out for my own gratification.

But something went wrong. One peach tree began to falter, losing leaves at the bottom of its trunk while the crop at the top became minimal. It resembled an injured athlete determined to complete the race and hobbling toward the finish on the strength of instinct only. The leaves became mottled by ugly growths that no nurseryman could identify or at least recommend a remedy for. Then the leaves fell, the limbs atrophied and the tree died.

Nor did the apple trees bear fruit though their blossoms were many and their leaves glossy and healthy looking. But the pear tree did produce fruit—one. This single pear hung in the center of the tree, and the heavy foliage of the apple trees on either side made a bower for its stunning appearance. I watched it take shape and color over a season as its first pip gradually swelled into the feminine form of its maturity. The cool greenness of its youth softened into a lemon yellow that deepened as the fruit grew larger. I feared a bird might peck at it or a prankish squirrel knock it from its limb but the pear continued to grow untouched and hung like a small lantern in the depths of its greenery. One day, as I lightly measured its sensuous curve, it came undone and fell into my hand.

The purity of its shape, the unblemished texture of its golden skin declared its perfection–it was genius and invention all in one. Too good to be eaten,  it reminded me of a rare vintage wine that should only be laid down and never opened yet growing more valuable with each passing year. But there was no way I could stay the inevitable rot that had already begun its course. I showed it to my wife and neighbors. I wanted to somehow send it to friends or even fly them in from different parts of the country to see this ultimate pear, and if any made fun of its singleness I would suggest that one perfect pear might be sufficient. The tree had bent all its efforts to produce this single, flawless specimen and what more could be asked of it. What a cruel destiny (as well as a handy metaphor) for excellence to be achieved only to be consumed in a moment. The fruit was sublime, sweet and juicy, and the tree has borne no more.

But on further reflection, the yen to seek metaphor put aside, it became clear why this single tree produced only this slight harvest for pear trees require cross pollination, and in my ignorance I had planted only one of them. From where had the pollen come to instigate this particular germination? None of my neighbors in the Central Northside have pear trees and we are many miles from suburban yards, too far for an errant bee to navigate. Something carried on the wind, perhaps—an immigrant gamete that landed by chance on my pear tree and flourished. The random coupling was the remarkable event.

Meanwhile, the stricken peach had succumbed, and as I dug up its dead root one spring morning the branches of the other four trees leaned forward as if bent in grief but, of course, it was the sun that drew them from their wall moorings. The power of its attraction had even pulled some of the eyebolts out from the masonry. Simultaneously, that morning sunlight also illuminated my folly, my ignorance and impatience with proper method for, without thinking, I had planted these trees against a wall with northern exposure. The sun only attended them fully in the late afternoon. Opposite, on the line I shared with my other neighbor, the sunlight was continuous from morning to night, but only a chain link fence marked this boundary. I could have erected wooden trellises there to support the trees but my imagination had been limited by the images of medieval walls and the romantic allusion of growing goodness within a sanctuary. I had ignored the sun’s compass, and it was a wonder that any fruit had appeared on these branches at all. The prodigious effort that had produced that single pear became even more remarkable, even heartbreaking.

Now, the remaining peach has been stricken with the same disease that took its companion, but the top branches—those most available to sunlight my dumbness has finally perceived—blossomed to produce a couple of dozen extraordinary fruit. This top-heavy bounty was meant to teach me a lesson, I think; a super-arboreal demonstration of what could have been done if I had only been sensitive to the tree’s needs. If I had not denied it sunlight.

Thus, my stewardship has been put in a bad light also. Within the urban confines of my backyard only my witless conceit has flourished. We know that out of mean environments, phenomenal progeny can occur but how that happens begets its own thicket of theories. Years ago, and in another life, I planted 5,000 conifers on a hillside in upstate New York. They were tiny fledglings of red and white pine and larch procured from the state conservation service, and it was very hot work. One daughter brought me glasses of water during the days of my labor and the other child helped me place the seedlings in the slits my spade made in the earth. I saw myself as Dr. Astrov in Chekhov’s “Uncle Vanya” creating and bequeathing this forest to future generations, and if I were to be known at all it would be for this pinewood in Columbia County—that recognition would be enough. How noble!

The summer heat made me dizzy though it could have been the vapors given off by my sweaty ego, but the trees took root and thrived. They grew to impressive size as the children also grew and went their different ways, as I also grew apart from that hillside. Later a blight struck the red pine and they withered, turned brown and today reportedly stand like dry sticks. The forest I had planned to leave for others has become a field of tinder.

My friend Jeffrey Schwartz, the anthropologist, has posited that we have descended from the tree-living orangutan and this ancestry may explain the special affinity we have for trees. It is an attraction not without some danger—a walk in the woods can refurbish the soul as well as threaten the body. The wilderness is important in our history and literature, as singular as a clump of cottonwoods rising above a lone prairie farmhouse. To be under a tree and feel its rough bark against our backs is to center ourselves in the universe.  We build tree houses and ravage forests and some of us attempt to make orchards in city backyards.

This spring one of the apple trees is bearing fruit. Its limbs are loaded with small green apples and their jolly shapes, their daily increase in weight, bring the tree’s limbs lower and lower, reaching out for more light. This pose of supplication may also pardon my careless husbandry.

OTHER PITTSBURGH WRITERS
The Other Side of the Pittsburgh Seam
Jonathan Barnes

Each issue we invite a widely published Pittsburgh author to contribute a work-in-progress or an excerpt from a new book, and to select an up-and-coming writer who deserves attention from our readers. This issue, celebrated author Hilary Masters has chosen emerging writer, Jonathan Barnes.

In My Orchard
Hilary Masters

The Other Side of the Pittsburgh Seam
Jonathan Barnes

Miloš Djurdjević
translated by Tomislav Kuzmanovi

Click here for the Croatian version
if you want to see it all it is here
filled to the very brim
nothing reflects nor
continues every thing
breaks in its membrane
porous are only the joints
windows glistening in
the late afternoon sun
in the rhythm of that same hawk’s
unhurried and uncatchable wings in the shades
of brown and ocher just like
the bricks on the porch a couple degrees
from the eaves slanted under the roof
to the left maybe to the right their
deep carved wrinkles
are someone’s signature
that was later erased
dried up and illegible
like the triangle of the white
flag with two red
stripes the crossroad
above the left knee
who will wake me up
the land and its scenery
are the same and unvoiced
take a look around yourself
their breathing is deep even-paced
like white and dark trees
that’s the sky snapping its fingers
rustling and shaking the bush following
the creases later on always
on the white fabric the body is
the steam of someone’s breath that
disappears in the split
of light but not the sun
prostrated on your right side
leaning against a low wall
with your head thrown back
you rub your eyes with both
hands although you know
you will never open them

Spava_i
ako _eli_ sve vidjeti tu je
ispunjeno do samog ruba
ni_ta se ne odra_ava niti
nastavlja svaka stvar
prelama se u svojoj opni
propusne su jedino spone
svjetlucanje prozora na
suncu kasnog popodneva
u intervalima usporenih
i neulovljivih krila onog
istog sokola u nijansi
sme_e i okera ba_ kao
cigle trijema par stupnjeva
od kosine greda pod krovom
lijevo ili desno njihove
su duboko usje_ene
bore ne_iji potpis
naknadno izbrisan
osu_en i ne_itljiv
poput trokuta bijele
zastave sa dvije crvene
pruge raskri_je
iznad lijevog koljena
tko _e me probuditi
zemlja i njezin krajolik
ostali su isti mu_aljivi
osvrni se oko sebe
di_u duboko ujedna_eno
kao i bijela i tamna stabla
to nebo pucketa prstima
_u_ti i trese grmlje prati
nabore naknadno uvijek
bijele tkanine tijelo je
para ne_ijeg daha koji
nestaje u procjepu
svjetlosti ali ne i sunca
zavaljen na desnom boku
naslonjen na niski zid
zaba_ene glave
s obje ruke trlja_ o_i
premda zna_ da ih
nikada ne_e_ otvoriti

OTHER VISITING WRITERS
A Sparrow Rubbed by a Flute
Soheil Najm

Mulligatawny Dreams
Meena Kandasamy

Meena Kandasam

anaconda. candy. cash. catamaran.
cheroot. coolie. corundum. curry.
ginger. mango. mulligatawny.
patchouli. poppadom. rice.
tatty. teak. vetiver.

i dream of an english
full of the words of my language.

an english in small letters
an english that shall tire a white man’s tongue
an english where small children practice with smooth round
pebbles in their mouth to the spell the right zha
an english where a pregnant woman is simply stomach-child-lady
an english where the magic of black eyes and brown bodies
replaces the glamour of eyes in dishwater blue shades and
the airbrush romance of pink white cherry blossom skins
an english where love means only the strange frenzy between a
man and his beloved, not between him and his car
an english without the privacy of its many rooms
an english with suffixes for respect
an english with more than thirty six words to call the sea
an english that doesn’t belittle brown or black men and women
an english of tasting with five fingers
an english of talking love with eyes alone

and i dream of an english

where men
of that spiky, crunchy tongue
buy flower-garlands of jasmine
to take home to their coy wives
for the silent demand of a night of wordless whispered love . . .

OTHER VISITING WRITERS
A Sparrow Rubbed by a Flute
Soheil Najm

Sleepers
Miloš Djurdjević

Written and translated by
Soheil Najm

It comes to me

That I may see what is unseen
In the pleasure of speech,
In the night step
And in the crawling of roses on myrtle.

It comes to me
That I may cross the sea of experience
To the sea of language,
Since the world is transforming the obsession
Into a song and the secret into a color.
This is my soul, approaching
The stranger’s fantasies,
Going far in abstracting the place
Going ahead in taming the time,
Passing with no hope of rescue
From the kings of drowning.

It comes to me
That I prefer the coming up against the leaving
When it is a mistake
To exaggerate in gleaming
And accept to walk
On stagnant water.

I may not do well in the art of living
And I may stumble by light,
Because love is dust that moves
And I have nothing but the invisible guarding me.

To expel my whims
I structured myself
On the extension of a flower
And stretched out my arm
To plant my happiness
On the pores of meaning,
Hey , meaning
What if the victorious sat
Inside an open pocket?
I am qualified to advise you
You who lives
In the navel of the ink
To single out a ray for death,
And I may advise oblivion
Not to escape
Unless the wind peels it
Or the waiting snips its
Shadow.
Visions emerge
From me
And never come back,
Colors emerge too,
Drinking their fog
And rise.
From me…
Surfaces perk on wide beds.

These are my blue voices
And my gardens, wet with intimacy.
These are my rains
And my horse
Is kneeling down
Over the noise,
This is my time,
Time of azure skies
And the speed orbits.
As if
I wanted what he didn’t want,
I wanted my wing and my shadow,
I wanted the map of the lost soul
I wanted my breaking,
I wanted to sing
The eyes of the stars embracing me,
I wanted the propagation of wishes
And the tongues setting free
I wanted…
Tomorrow, in a morning like this

OTHER VISITING WRITERS
Sleepers
Miloš Djurdjević

Mulligatawny Dreams
Meena Kandasamy

Over the past 42 years, more than 1,000 writers from over 120 countries have attended the prestigious International Writing Program at the University of Iowa.  For the past three years, IWP and City of Asylum/Pittsburgh have partnered to feature international poets at COA/P’s annual Jazz Poetry concert. This year, three IWP writers performed  in Pittsburgh on September 12, 2009: Milo_ Djurdjevic, Croatia; Meena Kandasamy, India; and Soheil Najm, Iraq. All three have experienced censorship and persecution in their native lands for their poetry. Sampsonia Way inv ited them to share samples of their work.

A Sparrow Rubbed by a Flute
Soheil Najm

Sleepers
Miloš Djurdjević

Mulligatawny Dreams
Meena Kandasamy

Ilya Ilf and Evgeny Petrov
translated by Konstantin Gurevich and Helen Anderson

Synopsis
By E.J. Van Lanen, editor of Open Letter

The Golden Calf follows the adventures of Ostap Bender, the “grand strategist,” a con man on the make in the Soviet Union during the New Economic Policy (NEP) period. Bender is obsessed with getting one last big score—a few hundred thousand will do—and heading for Rio de Janeiro, where there are “a million and a half people, all of them wearing white pants, without exception.” 

When Bender hears the story of Alexandr Koreiko, an “undercover millionaire”—no Soviet citizen was allowed to openly hoard so much capital—the chase is on. Koreiko has made his millions by taking advantage of the widespread corruption and utter chaos of the NEP, all while serving quietly as an accountant at a government office and living on 46 rubles a month. He’s just waiting for the Soviet regime to collapse so he can make use of his stash, which he keeps hidden away in a suitcase.

Chapter 5, “The Underground Kingdom,” begins to explain how Koreiko came to acquire his millions

READ THE EXCERPT FROM ILYA ILF’S and EVGENY PETROV’S
The Golden Calf  published by Open Letter

CLICK HERE TO BUY A COPY OF The Golden Calf

Katherine Silver

I began translating literature when I was in my early twenties. After publishing several volumes, I stopped for a number of reasons, mostly related to the material conditions of needing to earn a living and raise my children, but also because I wasn’t finding literary works that called out to me to be pressed into English. My return to translation coincided with changes in my work and family life—a job in publishing, children in school—and the good fortune of finding a text I felt compelled to translate.

At first the language struck me: Could I make English do that particular thing the author was doing in Spanish? But something else crept in once I began to read more closely; the text was profoundly subversive. In fact, it was about the power of language to subvert, both the internal realm of the individual and the world at large. This was how I had come to see the project of literary translation itself, as an act of subversion, a means of stealthily offering up an alternative or sub-version of reality, if by “reality” we mean the particular way we see, paint, write, retell our experience of our selves and the world.

The novel in question was My Tender Matador, by the Chilean writer and performance artist, Pedro Lemebel.  It takes place in Santiago, Chile, in 1986, during the darkest days of the Pinochet dictatorship. The main character—much like the author himself—is an aging, effeminate homosexual man from the “humble” classes, a maricón. Throughout the novel he remains nameless but is referred to as La Loca, literally “the Madwoman.” In an interesting displacement of meaning and resonance between the two cultures, I translated this as “the Queen.” According to these “metaphors” in the respective languages, overtly feminine men in Spanish are primarily considered insane whereas in English they are considered regal. Castles and madhouses may have more in common than we might have thought.

Denoted as “she” when referring to herself, and “he” when viewed by others, the Queen falls in love with a young revolutionary, or “terrorist”—our naming reflects our point of view, our “version” of reality. Carlos befriends the Queen and asks her to let him store some boxes and meet with his “classmates” in her apartment. She is deliberately kept in the dark about the purpose of their meetings and the “explosive” contents of the boxes. But she is no fool, as she tells herself, and soon puts two and two together.

A macho Marxist if ever there was one, Carlos does not reciprocate the Queen’s feelings of lust and longing, but he does learn to appreciate her friendship. One evening, after the two share a bottle of pisco, he tells her the story of a brief homoerotic encounter he had as a boy. Even through her drunken haze, she feels oddly disturbed by his tale—not the what but the how:

“She wasn’t morally offended: she had thousands of stories that were much cruder where blood, semen, and shit had painted the canvas of long nights of lust. No, it wasn’t that, she thought, it’s the way men tell stories. The brutal way they talk about the urgency of sex, like bullfighters—Me first, I’ll stick it in you, I’ll split you in two, I’ll put it in, I’ll tear you to pieces—with no tact or delicacy.”

Carlos’s machista discourse contrasts sharply with the Queen’s, especially when referring to sex, sexuality, and love. The Queen, by the way, makes her rather meager living embroidering tablecloths and other linens, embroidering flowers and birds on the margins, and her language, the language of her narrative, is full of those same flowers and birds. It is there, on the margins, in that narrow space that poverty, repression, and violence have left for her to inhabit, that she—and Lemebel—manage to create beauty out of ugliness and despair. Thus she decorates her run-down apartment:

“. . . the only space the Queen had ever been able to call her own . . . adorning the walls like a wedding cake, populating the cornices with birds, fans, flowering vines, and lace mantillas she draped over the invisible piano.”

In one scene, she delivers her lovingly embroidered tablecloth to the home of a general, where she knows it will be used at the dinner celebrating the anniversary of the military coup that had overthrown Salvador Allende on September 11, 1973. She imagines:

“. . . red wine splashed on the table, seeped into the cloth, spread out into huge lots where her little birds drowned,” and: “Her sentimental sissy eyes watched as they turned her virginal tablecloth embroidered with so much love into a mayhem of murder and drool. Her seamstress sissy eyes saw the off-white linen turned into a violet-colored crime sheet, the drenched shroud of a nation where her angels and birds were drowning.”

Her language is a feminized baroque, a deliberate and radical subversion of the rigid strata of gender identification and hierarchy. In this way, the dominant paradigm, the hierarchy of power, becomes relative, rather than absolute. By identifying righteously with the subordinated feminine, the character—and the author—elevate it.

This sounds oddly like the translation project itself: the act of subversion through the insertion of a foreign object into an otherwise complacent, coherent belief system. Lemebel and his Mad Queen, and the literary translator, offer alternative versions, sub-versions, from sub-ordinate worlds, which irremediably and joyfully, undermine the dominant one in circulation.

On May 1991, I returned to El Salvador after ten years of exile in Mexico. By that time, the negotiations between the government and the guerrillas were progressing, thanks to the mediation of the United Nations. Even though there was a sense in the capital city that the civil war was in its death rattle, my sleep was broken almost nightly by bomb explosions, bursts of gun fighting in the streets and the whirr of helicopters. Finally, seven months later, on January 1992, the Salvadorian government and the guerrillas signed the Peace Accords in Mexico City that put an end to eleven years of civil war.

I had gone back to El Salvador with ideals: I wanted to take part, as a journalist, in the transition toward democracy and to launch a new culture of peace and creativity. I was one of a group of intellectuals who came from the political left, but we were no longer militants. We wanted to think critically and independently about our history and our culture; we wanted to support the efforts to end the polarization and the radical ideologies of both parties that had been engaged in the war.

So we founded a monthly magazine and a weekly newspaper as the instruments for our contribution. I became the editor-in-chief of the newspaper. At the beginning, we were very enthusiastic, but soon we discovered hidden traps in the transition. In addition, neither side that had engaged in the war liked our work. After a couple years, we couldn’t go on with the newspaper. We suffered from political and financial asphyxiation.

What were the traps that we discovered in the new democratic system? First of all, the peace negotiation created new political elites and institutions, but almost nothing else. Structural economic, social and cultural changes were not on the agenda. The political assassinations had stopped, but violence found soon new ways of expression.

After the failure of our independent media projects, I quit journalism and started to write novels that dealt with the post-war situation in Central America. Some critics and academics said that my books belonged to a new trend called “literature of violence” and to an “aesthetic of cynicism and disillusion.”  Perhaps this was to emphasize how my work differed from prior literature which defined itself by the polarity between revolution and counterrevolution, under the influence of the Marxist Cuban revolution.  In the new fiction, there were neither political good guys nor political bad guys; there was neither an “ethics” nor an ideology to define whose violence was positive and whose was negative.  There was only violence, corruption and lack of illusions.

In that context, I published a short novel called Revulsion/Thomas Bernhard in San Salvador, which was a stylistic imitation of the Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard—his style gave me license to criticize Salvadoran politics and culture with acid humor. Soon, I received anonymous death threats and decided to leave the country.

Once again in exile, I started to work on a novel with a character through whom I wanted to penetrate the mentality of violence. He was a sergeant of a special battalion of the Salvadoran army who, after the demobilization of his unit, continued to do what he had learned to do in the army: fight and kill. But now there was no enemy, so organized crime became his new path. I created this fiction character, of course, based on all the information I had gathered as a journalist in post-war San Salvador. The book, El arma en el hombre (Weapon in Man), gave me the opportunity to portray one of the fundamental problems of the democratic transition in my country: the recycling of violence from political violence to criminal violence.

One of the reasons for this phenomenon was the difficulty that young people, trained to become ferocious machines of war, faced in returning to civil life. Not only was there a lack of policies and incentives to smooth such a transition, but the young people also suffered deep psychological and emotional damage. This phenomenon is quite common in societies that have just emerged from civil wars or intensive armed conflicts, as in Guatemala and South Africa. In the case of El Salvador, the situation is dramatic: the daily rate of criminal killing is as high now as it was during the civil war.

My novel also portrayed the relationship between organized crime and powerful political and corporate groups, a symbiosis that is the core of the corruption that affects state institutions in many Latin American countries. For the reader of my book, it was obvious that in the post-civil war period, the ranks of organized crime were filled with people who had been enemies during the war.

El arma en el hombre was, of course, part of a broad literary current that flourished at the same time in Colombia, Mexico and Brazil: the novel of sicarios, of ex-policemen transformed into paid killers, of narco-traffic gunmen, of ex-soldiers recycled as mercenaries. La virgen de los sicarios by Fernando Vallejo and Rosario Tijeras by Jorge Franco in Colombia, Un asesino solitario by Elmer Mendoza in Mexico, and the entire work of Rubem Fonseca in Brazil, are examples of fiction that show this extreme culture of violence in Latin America.

What I didn’t imagine when I wrote my book was that the violent behavior of the main character, which some readers regarded as exaggerated, would be exceeded by the actual levels of violence that took place in the same Latin American countries just a few years afterwards. I’ll give you an actual example: In the first months of 2007, three Salvadoran Congressman who belonged to the rightist ruling party were kidnapped in Guatemala by a death squad of the Guatemalan police. The Congressman were tortured and killed, and their bodies were burned to ashes. Soon, four Guatemalan officers were arrested, but 24 hours after they were placed in a high security prison, another death squad burst into the prison and beheaded the four of them. All these crimes took place in the middle of a confrontation between cartels of narco-traffickers connected to the Guatemalan police and the Salvadoran ruling party. Talking about these events with the Guatemalan fiction writer Rodrigo Rey Rosa, we agreed that our imaginations were not able to fly high enough to conceive such a plot for a novel. Reality went beyond our fiction.

This is the new situation that some Latin American writers have to deal with: the criminal realities that affect our societies are of such a dimension that our fiction can pale and seem conservative in the face of everyday life. A novel that in a European country could be regarded as cruel and dark, in Mexico, Colombia or El Salvador would seem to be light compared with what we read every day in the newspaper or what we learn in the streets.

I would like to mention another example: the wave of decapitations in Mexico. In 2007, the fighting between the drug cartels and the authorities reached the level of an irregular war, with groups of around 50 gunmen, very well equipped with rifles and grenade launchers, attacking the army and police garrisons. As part of that undeclared war, the narco-traffickers beheaded confidants or secret agents of the authorities, leaving the bodies in one place and throwing the heads with a threatening message into the entrance of the garrisons. (This happened in Acapulco, Tabasco and Veracruz, among other cities). “The corpse is the message,” explained an expert in an interview. Can there be a more chilling and explicit message than being sent the head of an acquaintance?

To my knowledge, no Mexican novelist has dealt yet with this delirious phenomenon of violence in his fiction. Perhaps it is too soon; time in literature has its own pace and experiences must age. Or perhaps the fiction writer looks for his own path, refusing to copy the coarseness of reality, preferring a lateral approach, instead of the easy macabre surprise.

Once I faced this kind of situation. I was writing a chapter of a novel set inside a prison in western El Salvador. In the scene, a boss had been killed in the heat of an uprising. A rival group of prisoners were playing soccer with his head. Eventually, I decided to delete the scene. I thought that I should avoid the temptation of trying to impress the reader with scenes of extreme cruelty.

I must confess that I never liked the concept of “literature of violence.” It is a dubious category. Western literature has been a literature of violence since its origins and it has been a literature of violence in its summit –a poet of my country said that in a Shakespearean drama there is as much blood as there is in an Aztec sacrifice.

The Latin American novel too, through the 19th and 20th Centuries, has often dealt with the problem of violence, representing a world in which crime and torture appear repeatedly as a constant expression of despotic political power. Consider the novels about dictators: from El señor presidente (The President) by Miguel Angel Asturias, through Yo el Supremo (I, the Supreme) de Augusto Roa Bastos to La fiesta del chivo (The Feast of the Goat) by Mario Vargas Llosa. From this literature we learn of a kind of violence organized around the struggle for control of state power, around the confrontation between a military dictatorship and those that wanted social change and justice. This rationalization of violence has been surpassed in the last two decades in Latin America. It seems that with the new wave of violence we face the “democratization” of crime, the absurdity of slaughter, the loss of standards.

This new violence has been founded on at least three main elements: the privatization of public security; a huge concentration of wealth in few hands and the corresponding increase in poverty; and the growth of narco-traffic with its enormous power for corrupting men, institutions, and, above all, the police, the military and the judicial system. In such a climate, security has become a privilege and big business; small armies controlled by the drug lords, or associated with political and corporate leaders, impose their own law in large areas of Brazil, Colombia, Central America and Mexico. There is a dangerous breakdown of entire social groups. Even a guerrilla leftist organization that was supposed to fight for a better society is now dealing in drugs. It seems that at the beginning of this new century that we have come into Tierra de nadie (No Man’s Land), to borrow the title of Juan Carlos Onetti’s novel, a land where life is worth nothing. A land where everyone can get rid of his neighbor by his own hand or by paying a small sum for someone else to do it; a land where legality is a bad joke and the rule of law is empty words in politicians’ mouths.

A recent novel by the Colombian writer Evelio Rosero, called Los ejércitos (The Armies), give us an excellent portrait of this violence, without the former references to dictatorship, revolution, social order or searching for justice. The narrator, an old retired school teacher, tells of his daily life in a small town that is frequently overrun by three warring armies who use the same tactics against the population: kidnapping, killing and slaughter. The old teacher gives us no information about what distinguishes each army, except their crimes. To be a civilian is to be a helpless victim of the armies’ cruelty and impunity. This is a disturbing novel about abandonment and humiliation, about the lack of ideologies of this new organized violence that only looks for plunder. If the old and retired coronel Buendia was starving while waiting for his check in García Márquez’ El coronel no tiene quien le escriba (No One Writes to the Colonel), the old and retired teacher in Resero’s novel is just waiting for one of the armies to kill him.

There are a few other examples of this new pattern of violence in contemporary fiction. It is impressive the way in which the Chilean novelist Roberto Bolaño was able to bring into his monumental, posthumous novel titled 2666 one of the most frightful cases of violence of these times: the systematic rape, torture and killing of young maquila worker women in the border Mexican city of Ciudad Juarez. This case shows the disastrous collapse of judicial institutions in many Latin American countries; the sinister complicity between police departments, depraved tycoons and politicians; and the absurd slaughter of a helpless sector of population that was not involved in any political conflict. With his genius as a narrator, Bolaño could efficiently handle a topic in fiction that belongs more to the realms of investigative journalism or testimony.

I started this text with the remembrance of my returning to El Salvador at the end of the civil war, hoping that as a journalist I could contribute to the building of a democratic culture of peace—that as a professional who researched and presented our social reality to the public, I could help transform Salvadoran society. I also said that I was defeated in my projects, that I quit journalism and put all my energy into the writing of fiction. Paradoxically, it was because of a fictional book that I had to go again into exile.

Now, a decade later, in spite of the so-called “democracy,” I verify with perplexity that the violence is only wearing new clothes; it is still the master of men and society. And what’s worse, I discovered that violence is spreading very fast into other Latin American countries that used to be quite peaceful and stable in the past.  It is now safe to say that violence and poverty are the main plagues affecting the Latin American population.

Reality has become bloodthirsty; fiction trails behind

Click here to read Horacio’s bio.