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November 03, 2006
DAY OF THE DEAD, Dia de los Muertos, at the Words and Music Festival in New Orleans
Inspired by the discussions and participating in the Words and Music Festival in New Orleans, and especially by the altar exhibit at The Cabildo, I am dedicating this entry to my mother who passed on from this world six weeks ago. I was moved by the rites of celebration of death. It was an intense day in what is the first of programmes focusing on Mexican-American customs, literature and history.
When I told my mother in August this year that financing a trip to North America was possible out of my winning the Josephine Ulrick Award in fiction, the largest award that I know of for short fiction, in the world, she was so happy. I was a finalist in the Faulkner Awards for the Novel and without knowing what pleasures awaited in New Orleans, I chose what I thought any writer would want - experience. I had not moved very far at all from Melbourne in the last twenty years, writing, bringing up a family and being available as the emergency go-fer for my family business, something that I enjoyed a lot. Travel might be fun, I thought, but I could read about it. Besides, there was the Internet. I was comfortable.
My mother was no ordinary woman. She came from a dysfunctional Brahmin family and was disowned when she married my dad, because he had no caste status. When I was four, we left for Ghana in Africa. It was 1960 and the newly independent country needed teachers. My mother had a Masters in English Literature. In our new home in coastal Winneba, where the deer hunters ran past our house seasonally, dad taught science and just about anything else.
Today at the Words and Music Festival, I met a writer who had moved on from professional soccer back to writing and he had recently been in Ghana. One of his stories inspired his travels in the current issue of Doubletake. I was pleased to hear that this magazine has come back to life.
From the panelists on blogging, specialists in the Chicano / Latino e-onosphere to the wonderful reading by Anthony Zerbe of Cormac McCarthy's border trilogy and discussions of Miguel Cervantes' Don Quixote and Hollywood at a literary lunch-by Ron Shelton, to poetry readings and discussions on border politics by some wonderful speakers and finally, to a performance by a Mexican American rock band, well, I have been educated. As an aussie stay-at-home, I just had no idea. This I reiterated to another writer as we walked back to our hotel on Bourbon street... taking in the seamier side of the French Quarter.
When I decided to continue on my trip, I had been convinced that my mother would be quite pissed off had I returned to Melbourne over what she would have considered the small matter of her not being around so much. So I am glad that out of various conversations with my sister and with my husband, I continued on to New York. In the early days, I was still half-a-foot in America and the other on the next plane home and Susan Henderson set me straight on going to Boston to do a reading with Agni. Out of which I got to stay with some great writer friends Xujun Eberlein and Joan Wilking. None of it would have been possible without Carol Novack's couch either and I will be forever grateful for her initial urgings to come travelling in the first place.
So here I am in Post-Katrina New Orleans. Pia Ehrhardt and her wonderful husband took me around to show me the what is happening here, how people are responding to the problems of returning to New Orleans, how some have not come back and never will, the parts of the city like the French Quarter that were untouched by levee breaks. I am glad to be a witness to all of this. And I am also glad to be part of the momentum of the Words and Music festival which has resurrected itself for the first time since Katrina.
And to my mother who was the greatest traveller!
Posted by girija at November 3, 2006 03:57 PM
Comments
Wonderful, wonderful post, Girija.
Posted by: Katrina Denza | November 4, 2006 06:58 AM