Inside the Mystery Chamber, I was sitting with an old man, a man who knows the secrets of the Tradition. Outside, the rain was falling so strongly, that it echoed inside. I looked around me, then precisely at him. His eyes grew brighter as he uttered, “You might be wondering about the Tradition, it certainly goes back to Hermes-Enoch. I feel I have to inform you about it.
“It all started with Enoch or Anak, the Canaano-Phoenician seer at Mt. Hermon, in Loubnan. You may notice also that the name Hermes given to him by the Greeks comes from Hermon.
“Tradition says that Angels descended on Mt. Hermon, and taught that seer a great universal spiritual and occult doctrine. He, Enoch, accepted it and called it the Kabala, which means ‘accepting’.
“Enoch is Henoch, Phenoch, the Phoenix, symbolizing the secret cycle and Initiation. It is death, or the end of life’s cycle, and the resurrection from its ashes after three days into eternity. He is the first teacher-initiator, possessor of the true sacred hidden name, linking Humanity through an eternal concordance with the Father, God.” Read more of this article »
Yisroel Rosenburg was not the first student in Yeshiva to have non-Jewish magazines in the dormitory. That is an accomplishment so old that no one dares take responsibility for it. Nor was Yisroel the first Yeshiva student to start a secular magazine. That honor lies with a young Texan who was responsible for an issue of Rodeo USA. The Texan is learning in a kollel in Israel right now, and refuses to discuss his magazine out of embarrassment for his lasso days. Yisroel Rosenburg though was the first Yeshiva student to interview a famous hip-hop artist in his dormitory.
Friends of Yisroel’s father arranged a meeting between the now famous student, and the chart-topping hip-hop star, GJ57. It had been Yisroel’s aspiration for a number of years to be published in a music magazine, and he saw an in-depth exclusive interview with the nation’s hottest star as his ticket into an already overrun market. They met in his small 20ftx20ft dorm room, leaving the rapper√ɬ≠s entire posse outside to scare the students and flip out racy comments through the window to the seminary girls, walking by the building below.
“So,” Yisroel began, taking a deep breath and praying to G-d not to let him screw up. “What was your intention in writing this last album… how did you conceptualize it in the development?” Read more of this article »
Fisherman Reuven (1)
Jaffa is one of the oldest ports in the world, formed naturally by a protective string of rocks. For three thousand years it served as a small commercial port handling both goods and passengers. In the 1930’s, the British improved nature by building a breakwater, a modernization that extended the port’s use for a further decade. After the Second World War it fell into decline. By the 1960’s the sole remaining activity was fishing.
I always wanted to live by the sea. When I stumbled upon an abandoned ruin in the port, I resolved to make it into a home. This turned out to be much more difficult than I had imagined, but eventually the complicated and lengthy job was completed. That was a long time ago. I have been living ever since, here in the Port of Jaffa.
Standing at my study window I can throw a stone into the water. I am a spectator in a front row seat, of the sea and its moods, of the coming and going of boats and the activity on the quay. It is a never-ending performance, sometimes dramatic, sometimes comic, usually entertaining and during the winter storms, awe inspiring. The term ‘front row’ does not fully describe my vantage point. I live upstairs, and it would be better to say that I am in the centre of the front row of a dress circle. I look out from a perfect height. Had it been less, the view would have been obstructed, and had it been more, I would have been distanced from the scene, particularly from the immediate foreground where so much happens. Read more of this article »
Posted in Fiction, Israel, Mediterranean
[This is a fable written to portray the sad state of care giving that still exists in Kenya in relation to Down syndrome and other disabilities.]
At the labor ward that night, everyone was smiling. Twelve years had passed since the Wambaras’ marriage day and, because they had no offspring, gossip had been raging in the village that “Wambaras’ wife must be barren.” Despite all the disappointment and rumors, the Wambaras got along well. They maintained hope that their patience and love of God would bear fruits, as the local priest taught.
Finally, after much prayer, Mrs. Wambaras had conceived and the gift the Wambaras had long been waiting for finally arrived: a baby boy. As he left his mother, the baby delivered a strong first cry of arrival, an assertion of being granted existence without his consent. As the doctor took the baby for examination, Mr. Wambaras looked at his wife, and both smiled irresistibly.
In the examination room holding the 3.5 kg baby in his left hand, the doctor grimaced and muttered inaudibly. Something was amiss. The baby had flattened facial features including bridge of the nose, bulging almond-shaped eyes, malformed hands and feet, and the palms had a palmer crease that clearly indicated his condition. “This boy,” he declared, “is not a normal child.” Read more of this article »
When I was at school, we gained our gender images from two sources: Barbara Cartland romances and our history lessons about the Voortrekkers and The Great Trek. Barbara taught us that women were emaciated and helpless; history taught us they were solid and labouring. While Barbara’s Selina’s or Ianthe’s fainted and cried for help, the Afrikaner Hanna’s and Magda’s loaded guns and trekked bare foot over the Magalies Mountains. But both images had one thing in common: self-sacrifice. The men were dark and dashing or burly and religious, but they shot “the enemy” and they rescued the damsel or the nation, while the women prayed at home and willingly sacrificed.
I remember my first hiding at school, and the first lesson: boys’ needs come first. I was in grade one and the teacher was telling us about our Afrikaner heroes. We watched a stirring slide show with a voice over about Wolraad Woltemade (technically Dutch, but no one was counting), who with his trusty horse risked his life to save umpteen people from a sinking ship and eventually perished in the waves in his attempt. I was interested in this heroism, albeit sorry for the horse that had no choice. Then Mrs. Van Der Merwe turned to us with gleaming eyes, “Now girls, here is something for you”. The plummy voice sorrowfully intoned the tale of Rachel de Beer, a young girl who saved her brother’s life. Apparently the two children got lost in the veldt one winter evening, and as night fell they stumbled freezing in the dark. They were found the next morning in an ant heap. Rachel had taken off all her clothes and given them to her brother. They first removed her frozen dead body from where it covered the hole of the anthill and then found her brother – alive. At the mention of the naked Rachel, I began to snigger uncomfortably. Naked people were never mentioned at home, certainly never at school! Mrs. V. turned, she pounced. I was hoisted across two desks and dragged to the front of the room. Her ruler rained blows on the back of my legs, my arms and finally shattered against my back, “You filthy brat, you’ll learn, you’ll learn!” she said, and I did. Read more of this article »
Posted in Fiction, South Africa
Her name was Yei Fomba, but she was commonly known as Dabuteh, a sobriquet from her father, a humorous man who was fond of calling his children by nicknames he gave them according to their character or temperament. As a little girl, she was known for her joyous disposition when her mother’s cooking pot used to be more than half-full of rice, and thus, the name, ‘Dabuteh’, meaning half a pot full. ‘Half a pot full’ was an indication that rice would be sufficient for everyone on a given day. But those were the only days, in the confines of her parents that she enjoyed childhood.
Dabuteh was born into a family of over forty children, of which nine were siblings from the same mother. But she called her father’s remaining seven wives ‘mother’ and they treated her as such without qualms. Her mother had lost a child at birth whose twin sister had also died of chickenpox two years later. Her mother had told her that her twin had called her in the heavens and that was that. Of her six siblings, a boy and five girls, five were sent to school to learn the white man’s language. Her eldest sister had married and had gone away to a distant land. She was the only one left to help her mother with domestic work and petty trading that helped pay school fees for her school-going siblings.
She lived in a town called Gbamendo, in a big compound situated along the main motor road leading to a prosperous trading town called Kwendu. At thirteen, she was ready for initiation into the Bondo Society. Most of her sisters were recent or old Bondo initiates, a ritual that marked their rite of passage into womanhood. Between ten and thirteen is the prime time for Bondo initiation. It was now her turn for the female circumcision ritual. Read more of this article »
Posted in Fiction, Sierra Leone
Go back to your original colors
Now, when you are onomatopoeia of cold faces
Gothic rakes didn’t in vain make orgies in castles
Diamonds in cupboard causing envy and
The angel on the black horse is one of them.
We are besieged by sea and reefs
Few cobwebs thrown at random
Like a silk dew of woods in the Ands
Where it’s dawning two times a day
In memories…
So little time floats through us
Canons of wisdom are left captivated
Behind the massive walls of Alexandria.
Inexorably, time becomes a charmed circle…
A black orchid is putting its petals together
In the garden of red roses of Damask. Read more of this article »
“That’s what happens to exiles; they are scattered to the four winds and then find it extremely difficult to get back together again.”
Isabel Allende
On July 7, 1980, I became the enemy of the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic and was sentenced to life imprisonment. On July 8, a part of my parents died. On Radio Free Europe they listened to my obituary, five years after their daughter Aga had died. It turned their world inside out. My parents believed I was dead for over forty hours. They were the longest hours in my Mamka’s life. When my cousin Tibo eventually informed them, that according to the latest reports on Radio Free Europe, I was alive, Mamka just cried.
On July 8, I stood before the mirror as if I were another person from the one I had been the previous morning. I experienced a rude awakening from the outside world, a dark liquid world. My first thought was, “What if I’m dead, but don’t know it?” Where did the nagging voices come from, prompting me with thoughts like ‘If only I had …’ and its evil twin, ‘How am I ever going to … ?’ Read more of this article »
Afraid to sleep lest the nightmare might begin again
Lulled by the magic show, called Ceasefire,
Put on by the chameleon government of SLORC, SPDC…
The calm before the storm is always the bad news for you little children of Burma who have lived in a shipwrecked state for too long.
Comforted by the mistaken notion
That it could never be too bad for us Burmese
Who could always get used to the hardships, deprivations, tortures and military domination
In my inescapable nightmares
Where all of you are forever in agony and we ourselves and everyone ceases to care.
From my vantage point of view I see the optimism of the free world slipping further and further out of reach
from the political chaos of Burma
Afraid to sleep lest the nightmare will come again
I saw the dead faces of the living generals of Rangoon
Under their tight brown masks hardly covering their vacant greedy minds
Inescapable bad dreams where so much blood had shed since they took power Read more of this article »
I have a confession to make. I love the Igbo language and I do have an ear for it, but sometimes I do get stuck in the course of a conversation. I usually know what it is I want to say but the delivery of the content becomes amateurish from time to time. My accent is flawed; I don’t have that Igbo drawl that separates the wheat from the tares. And to make matters worse I don’t have a vocabulary that covers some of the words. I have to smear my own mother tongue with words from a foreign vocabulary. Disgusting!
To those who can speak their local dialect with the fluid ease that makes the rest of us cower in disgrace, I say “please don’t weep for me yet. I am concerned enough to work on this deficiency.” And no, I am not about to blame my parents. I also do not regret not spending more of my formative years in eastern Nigeria. If anything, I am about to make a hullabaloo about this vernacular thing, if only for the sake of posterity: the countless Nigerians yet unborn.
Imagine it’s the year 2082. Nigeria is still in one piece (hopefully), but we find that there is an even bigger problem. Nigerians are speaking Queen’s English, French and hard core Pidgin in their homes and workplaces. In the high society weddings we find black men in tuxedos and large hipped beauties in spaghetti strap dresses and ball gowns. There are no ‘aso-ebis’, no caftans, no cliques rattling on excitably in Igbo, Yoruba and the likes. All we find are Hollywood clones: people who are trying to be the best at what they cannot even do. Read more of this article »