July 6, 2020
Six years of turning, of an eternity of changes, not least in the past six months. The first half of 2020, as it turns out, is a pivotal time for world history.
Currently, I live in New Hampshire. My windows look out on a Norway maple, a sugar maple, a poplar, a willow, all towering over a wild cherry tree. It is the season of day lilies.
I am "sheltering-in-place," doing what I can to responsibly limit the spread of Covid-19. After three months of the confusion and tragedies spread by that pandemic, the horrors of racism, always simmering half hidden under the surface for centuries, boiled over again six weeks ago.
These scourges fill me with sorrow and doubt as their tentacles cloud what clarity of thought and generosity of spirit human beings have developed in so many cultural varieties down through the ages. Where have all the glimpses of beauty and inspirations of co-creation gone?
Walking between buildings in the town center the other day, I spied a patch of color half hidden under a flowering hosta plant. It was a hand-painted stone left by an anonymous and mischievous passer-by.
Indeed! These are times in which to keep moving. Ah, but I’d suggest that movement can be fueled by memories - puzzles from the past, solved and unsolved.
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It is in this light that I turn my attention back to my days in Papua New Guinea in 2014. In 2013, I had explored memories of my first trip in 1963 -- reminiscing about moments taken “Fifty years ago today” -- when I spent a year on the slopes of the Bismarck Mountains in what was then the Territory of New Guinea under Australian administration.
Now it is time to look back six years on glimpses of my 2014 trip with my daughter, Alvilda, and granddaughter, Shiva, to the nation of Papua New Guinea, independent since 1975. Though separated by fifty years, my trips to the second largest island on earth, located just north of Australia, took me to different worlds.
My blog tale left off on June 30, 2014. That was the day when Alvilda flew into Australia from Europe, bringing more equipment and Belgian chocolates!
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It was a day of new moon. We still had a lot to accomplish before our departure from Sydney to Port Moresby on July 7, 2014, and onward to Simbai Station, where, if it would not be raining, we would see the full moon rising.
Powerful sentence: the horrors of racism, simmering half hidden under the surface for centuries, boiled over again six weeks ago.
ReplyDeleteThese scourges fill me with sorrow and doubt as their tentacles cloud what clarity of thought and generosity of spirit human beings have developed in so many cultural varieties down through the ages." Interested in reading more about your thoughts re: how racism effected the indigenous peoples of NG in 1964 and then again in 2014.
Thank you for your comment, fabteacher! The first of several, I see, as I check back to polish my recent posts. About racism and its effects, my own ideas are only beginning to come into focus, but some of my anthropology colleagues have already been doing excellent thinking about it. I highly recommend Ira Bashkow's book "The Meaning of Whitemen: Race and Modernity in the Orokaiva Cultural World." (2006) On pp. 16 - 17 he discusses the "romantic egalitarian ideal of rapport" and concludes that "the ideal of rapport denies us a useful tool for understanding the real processes that perpetuate inequality and domination."
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