This story is from the chapter, The Storykeeper, which is about the documentary film made by Erin Byrne and Rogier Van Beeck Calkoen.  René Psarolis was seven years old in 1944, in Nazi-occupied Paris, when a USAF B-17 bomber crashed in his neighborhood. What René ultimately did shows how we can take the stories that touch us and offer them to the world in a way that unleashes the power of the universe.

It turned out that she was a relative, a cousin of her reclusive uncle, an intellectual, obsessed with books, whom the Nazis had deported him to a concentration camp. A man of honour, he had been made the heir of his Jewish publisher when the latter’s firm had been ‘Aryanized’, but had neglected to reinstate the owner afterwards. This part of the legend surrounding the company had passed into oblivion however, leaving only his own tale of hardship.

Pregnant with my master who lies sweating in my cocoon
The details of rain when it wails on tired faces take me
To him. . . the distant one who is united with me
Broken as I am. . . Tired as I am. . . Lonely as I am

Since I’m demanding honesty from racists, I must confess that part of my Marechera question was projection. I’ve been selfish. I’ve been more grateful for the personal fury of changes that the Fallists churned up and mirrored inside me than for the actual movement itself. Even if I was as presumptuous as Brenda Marechera in her political metaphor, I don’t know if I’d call my leaving Joburg for Cape Town a personal exile. The only other way I can explain it is as a form of masochism.

I am sinking into a lake
So cold, it aches
Whatever I say People hold it against me and my brain
They expect me to say 
What they hear
And not something they can't hear. 

The dead writes on the dead’s body.
He inks the pilgrimage to find sanctuary
From that dull, dismissive, charcoal night
Toward the afternoons of extravagant delight…

Glacier Bay is surrounded on three sides by a horseshoe-shaped rim of high mountains: Glaciers still form on these mountains and flow slowly down to the new sea.  Nowhere else in the world are there so many tidewater glaciers.  Nowhere else are the glaciers in such rapid retreat.  A warming trend that started at the beginning of this century has made Glacier Bay a master of the ice.

The sound of the ocean, its roar, is the leitmotif of my childhood.
The ocean seethed like molten lead. It could disfigure your heart. In the sand, your feet became roots of water and of iodine, your bones accretions of silicon and salt.

In December of 1944, the German army attacked Allied troops in Bastogne, Belgium, igniting the Battle of the Bulge. My father was a paratrooper with the 82nd Airborne Division. I‘d always assumed he had killed people. He’d never talked about it, and I’d never asked him. I’d never had the nerve.

It was the ancient love for fire seared the hearts of the
first humans—In the middle of kindling they found
each other. Inside a cave was born
all sense of belonging.

The creases on the man’s forehead are shadowed in the firelight but the skin over his cheekbones is smooth, the color of caramel.  He begins to speak in the language of his own Berber tribe, sounds rolling up through his throat.  He punctuates the end of his sentences sharply and lifts his chin for emphasis.  When he leans forward on his cane, his cape flurries, then settles on his shoulders.

Spilling over the ranges near the coast, the sun sets the valley floor awash in gentle morning light. As though roused from slumber by a refreshing splash of cool water, the arid countryside comes alive with a thousand hues.

Spanish poet Federico García Lorca spoke of duende: “A mysterious power which everyone senses and no philosopher explains. There are neither maps nor exercises to help us find the duende. We only know that he burns the blood like a poultice of broken glass.”

The raft hits the first wave hard and straight. We break through that first crucible and power through the V of the second wave. Several 8-foot-high waves curl over our boat; then we hit a wall of whitewater as the bow rises.

I stood at midnight by railroad tracks on the island of Sri Lanka, looking at a sky full of stars. The moon was gone, the darkness so complete I could barely see the outlines of the surrounding forest. Above, pinpricks of light so filled the sky that I felt I could see in three dimensions, into the depth of the cosmos, layer upon layer of stars. A trickle of sweat meandered down my spine and I wondered if it was caused by the tropical heat or the awareness of my utter insignificance.

A Saga of Three Generations of Balkan Woman

Safety was unfortunately transitory. Yugoslavia fell apart in World War II, pulled back together for forty years, then tore itself up in bitter wars at the end of the 20th century. My grandparents and their descendants repeatedly lost everything because of the endless conflicts that just wouldn’t let go of their homelands.

To the old man with the gentle gaze in the corner of the souk in the medina of Fez, Morocco: May a drop of the love with which you serve your spiced coffee to strangers be returned, overflowing, to you.

A white crescent moon passes behind the long slope of Sultan Ahmet’s mosque, glazing ancient Istanbul with silver light. The medieval stone archway in the pine-bowered garden frames the six needle-shaped minarets and twenty-four blue tiled domes like a border in an illuminated manuscript.

A dark silhouette looms ahead in the sea, floating a dozen feet high, undulating. As I coast toward it, I begin to see the creatures within—hundreds of shimmering silver graybar and yellow spottail grunts, moving en mass like an underwater planet. I swim into the cloud, engulfed in tails and beady eyes. Currents of fish stream above, below and beside me as I snicker bubbles out of my dive regulator. Jacques Cousteau called Baja’s Sea of Cortez “The World’s Aquarium.” In Cabo Pulmo, the aquarium is interactive.

José Luis keeps pulling us to the dance floor. He is vibrant, joyful, smart and funny, wrinkled around the eyes and missing a tooth or two. He looks older than 66, but he’s undeniably younger than his years—and at last, at last, so are we.

You were mumbling when I sidled up next to you along the river. Bodies shrouded in white cloth and draped in marigolds were dipped three times into the holy water, then cremated, thus releasing the individual’s spiritual essence from its physical form, and allowing it to be reborn.

As a young man, Paul Cézanne painted directly upon the walls of the oval-shaped salon in Jas de Bouffan, the house where he grew up in Aix-en-Provence, between tall windows, allegories of the four seasons, landscapes of Aix, to gain the attention of his father. This was written on my visit there, after a series of slides were projected upon the walls.

I put my head down and scribble into my notepad, hoping no one can tell that I’m rattled. As part of my story, I’m supposed to ride with Mariam and the team on the same highway where she was attacked. But after hearing about her assault, combined with the Taliban having launched their  spring offensive, I’m losing confidence.

We drove to Nyamata, the church where ten thousand Tutsi were murdered in the place they had gone to seek protection. The below-ground crypts were stacked top to bottom, end to end with bones. Upstairs, the clothes the victims were wearing were stacked limply on the pews. On the side of the church was a statue of Mary, looking helplessly down from her perch.

I have seen Ryoanji in spring, when the cherry trees bloomed, and in fall, when their branches were bare; in winter, when snow covered the moss, and in summer, when cicadas buzzed beyond the wall.  I have been there among giggling teenagers and gaping farmers, bemused Westerners and beatific monks.  By now it has become a part of me—and it still eludes me.

There are moments on our journeys when we meet a person—alive or long vanished from the earth—and time and distance morph, bringing characters of place and past close enough to look us in the eye, and touch us with fingers that pulse with life, as when I ‘met’ Paul Cézanne in Aix-en-Provence.

Nothing makes the sun come out quicker than a night full of tales, and I know you are waiting for it--just like we are. Perhaps it is now time to finally tell our story as we want, and as we lived together before, not as they tell it. Now, after everyone is gone, leaving us here with you, we can tell it.

Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee, blessed art thou amongst women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus, I would have loved to have a baby like the Virgin Mary who conceived him with the Holy Spirit, without carnal contact with a man…

“Only connect,” E.M. Forester famously advised novelists—and this is the governing principle of the International Writing Program, which brings the writers of the world to the University of Iowa for three-month residencies. In retrospect, the IWP, as it is known, was a natural outgrowth of the Writers’ Workshop, and yet at the time it seemed, in the words of its co-founder, Paul Engle, “the craziest idea” he had ever heard.

My father was a god, though he looked like any other old man. He had a thick white beard, and a bald head with tufts of hair above his ears. He had no wrinkles. His ribs showed. His gait was slow, shuffling.

It is so bitter that I have begun to ignore the darkness. The metaphor which has played the role of almost an eternity for my mortality. I cannot even see, rather sense, darkness anymore. It is just my breathing which has kept me bothering about gazillion useless yet valuable issues. I have shared this plenty of times before, not with you, not with anyone else but, with him that I don’t want to breathe anymore.

International Writing Program at University of Iowa

The down-home Iowa people I knew always thought proudly of Paul Engle and loved and considered him as the friendly, local farm boy from Cedar Rapids who had made good and had become a kind of legend in his own day, though not just anyone from there could say exactly what he had done other than become an outstanding and beloved American poet and true patriot.

In the dark political times I found the work and existence of the International Writing Program a speaking metaphor of resistance. While the US pulled itself out of UNESCO, IWP was celebrating international voices, poetry, music, film, art and literature. The idea of paying respect to the world literature is fascinating in itself but it becomes more meaningful when it has certain associations, connections and memories to offer. Hence, in my mind, whenever I try to relive my experience in Iowa as Fall Resident, I have bulk of memories to relish and share.

I’m youngest son, a poor man; nobody marries a poor man. But then, one Saturday I am fainting on the roadside and waking to see the fat lady’s servant Melli-ann holding a yellow umbrella over my head…

Remember that they met on a dance floor at the Sheraton, and how different they were, who could imagine that they would take the high road together for any length of time. It was by chance—like most of the significant events in our lives…

Today everybody can play the guitar, everybody can buy a gun.
We expect a better future from ourselves.
When I don't have a friend, I make a friend of attachment.
I turn my eyes to heaven and see a flock of vultures flying eastward.