23 March '08

There is a soldier in Heller’s Catch 22 who falls in love with a prostitute. The prostitute initially shuns him as he takes her to dinner, buys her presents, and pays her just to dine. She laughs at him when he dissuades her from sleeping with other men and humiliates him in front of his peers. The more desperately he pursues her, the more mocking she becomes. That is until, by some dint of coincidence—a forced night-in because of a bomb threat, perhaps—she gets a good night’s sleep.

As it turns out, the prostitute was simply tired. Not just tired but haggard and exhausted, somnolent to the extreme, weary from the rigours of war. After sleeping through the night and most of the day, the prostitute wakes and spies the smitten soldier next to her. In her refreshed state she falls in love, ceases prostituting herself and the two hold hands and walk towards the sunset (except that, in classic Hellerian fashion the soldier, a pilot, dies in a dog-fight the next day).

The reason I bring all this up is that the situation is—in some respects—similar to mine. For the last eight nights I have been awake and inebriated and for the last eight days I have, variously, navigated unforgiving US airports, participated in tedious conference workshops, and kept a car glued to the white line at the edge of the road as miles and miles tick over with the regularity of a metronome. Thus, I have sympathy for the prostitute’s plight. There is, after all, nothing in the world that glows with holy radiance when the eyes can barely remain open. And there is nothing that comes close to the raw, instinctive, physical appeal of peaceful and uninterrupted sleep when the one is tired.

It was a testing drive, for example, from Boston to Montreal in the morning after Saint Patrick’s Day. Absurdly, of the five grown men in the car, I was the only one qualified to drive. As the other four slept, their heads listing from one axis to the next as the camber of the road changed, I drove. As the other four sated their thirst and hunger with juice and fruit, I sipped noxious coffee and scoffed sugary bars in an effort to remain alert. As the others woke, refreshed and jocund, I scowled at them and complained. There were parts of the journey when, desperate for company, I broke suddenly or took a corner just harder than I needed to, so that the sleeping passengers would wake. It was in this manner that we tore from city to city in a car resembling the bizarre mutant child of a spaceship and a drunken wrestler. It was the same car, actually—complete with dents, jammed trunk and game speakers—that ferried me et al around Canada on the last trip.

Montreal was, this time around, grey and cold. The permanent snow that was powdery and light on my last visit was, like an acne-scarred face, pocked with the holes of raindrops. Footpaths and streets were covered in ice and dirty snow, gutters ran rivers of brown slush and detritus. When the skies weren’t beating down with frigid rain, gusts shook the road signs on the canyon streets. The city itself is flat, monochrome, industrial, soviet. The only discernable landmark is the incongruous Olympic tower, a throw-back to a discarded nineteen-seventies aesthetic.

Still, I am rather infatuated with Montreal. There are many—too many—pretty cities in the world. Cities where the streets form neat cross-work patterns, where building-lights glitter and reflect in some serene waterway, where everything works, where the weather is balmy, the people friendly, where historical sites proliferate. These cities get tiresome quickly. Once the tourist has taken a photo of the church and the mountain and the statue there is little left to do, and the sanitised, sterilised atmosphere takes hold. Montreal and New York are similar. In New York, for example, once you have seen the Statue of Liberty, climbed the Empire State Building and walked the Brooklyn Bridge there is little, ostensibly, left to do. The most rewarding experience in New York is distinct from all the obvious landmarks. Just walking in this city, just sitting on a bench is fulfilling. New York, like Montreal, has a depth that transcends superficial beauty. Both cities, perhaps because they are so ugly, are thriving in the arts, music and literature. Both cities reward time spent, time doing little, time in stasis.

A fitting contrast to the previous week, then, when on the largesse of the United States Department of State one-hundred and forty-three other Fulbrighters from seventy-or-so countries and I holed up in a four-star hotel in the New Mexican desert under a mountain that, at in the late evening, glowed incandescent from the collected light of the day. This is New Mexico between seasons, a place so dry and brittle that dust clouds take their place as the demented doppelgangers of clouds. If it weren’t so cold, every inhalation would be like sucking down the air from a furnace, every exhalation a re-enactment of a volcano’s eruption.

The conference itself was characterised by what conferences are usually characterised by— seminars, workshops, seedy attempts at networking—and is therefore uninteresting. What is perhaps more interesting is that which occurred on the final night. As context, the hotel we were staying is located on the reservation of the Santa Ana Pueblo. After Alaska, New Mexico is the state with the highest proportion of Native Americans. Indeed, reservations dot the state’s topography like freckles. Our hotel capitalised on this, lavishing the rooms and lobbies and restaurants and halls and bars with native memorabilia. That memorabilia was, however, the end of it. Although we were taken to the state’s capital to talk with legislators, although we were imbued with the history of the state and its geography, there was no further mention of the myriad tribes that reside in the area, no talk of colonisation, of the rich cultural diversity that is unique—in the entire North American continent—to New Mexico and perhaps a few other states.

This was all to change, it seemed, on the final night when, as I was told by some salivating student, a troupe of Native American dancers—referred to by organising committee, without a hint of irony, as ‘the native dancers’—was to entertain the dining Fulbrighters. The dancers, it seemed, were to provide the cultural experience we had all been lacking.

Like my friend and colleague who argues her point here, I felt deep disquiet as the dancers emerged and chanted, as the diners watched then grew impatient and returned to talking and eating, and finally as most of the one-hundred and forty-three other Fulbrighters from seventy-or-so countries gushingly rushed onto the stage to have their photos taken next to the dancers. The disquiet gave rise to predictable questions: why would the dancers reduce themselves to this? Why would they ‘reduce’ their—presumably sacred—dances to token entertainment?

Unlike my friend and colleague though, I cannot come to a firm position. After all, what right do I have to impose my notions of what should be culturally sacred? Who am I to question what is authentic? Who am I to tell someone they are being objectified? Who am I to object if someone chooses to perform whatever they choose to perform for money? What right do I have to tell someone what they should do—or not do—with the material aspects of their culture? The answer to these questions is, perhaps, more complex than a simple ‘no’. Decades of inequality and centuries (millennia?) of fascination with the exotic determine that it must be. Nonetheless, because of the questions above I find it difficult to condemn, without equivocation, that final night of the Fulbright conference. To do so, it seems, would be to reinforce the reduction in the dancers’ agency.

***

In what is perhaps the greatest achievement of these transmissions so far, I have been informed that the last one about Nick Cave and his impish posse was banned by the Chinese government. The protective and paternal arms of China’s censors extend, like the Great Wall, in a cool embrace around the country. Any news website that criticises—or even discusses—the government is blocked. Many websites, like that of CNN, are blocked arbitrarily. So it goes.

When I was last in China I woke one day to find that all the internet cafes in the country had been shut down by order of the central government. The reason, as the government’s spokesperson insisted, was that a fire had broken out in one of the many cafes in Beijing and thus all cafes, throughout the 9,596,960 square kilometres that constitute China needed to be ‘inspected’. Although there’s much to be desired in the rule of a tyrant, by god they’re efficient.