Big relief

I have turned in my thesis and am waiting for feedback from my advisor. The biggest part of writing should be done. It still needs a good bit of refinding, but I'm mostly done. Amazing. I'm kind of proud of myself. Please cheer ;o)

The little thesis-writer who could...

It's a mighty big hill and I've got a huge load of books to pull over there. But I'll make it. There'll be a party when I'm done--no doubt about it.

Deep, Dark NIGHT

I am reading Night by Elie Wiesel. And I know my feelings fall far short of what they should be, but today was quite an emotional roller coaster.

10 year ago, I was an exuberant German exchange student at South Meck high school in Charlotte, NC. I was looking for people to love--quite consciously actually. I love people easily and that's what I felt I'd come there for. A few people had already been added to my list: Marie from Hong Kong, Agnieszka from Poland, Nadine from Holland, Daniel from Mexico City, all my Gospel Choir friends (not one of them white)--and boy, did I love them. My heart seemed to have incredible proportions.

One day in the gym locker room, a girl I had noticed around came up to me. She was gorgeous--red, bouncy girls all the way to her waist, elegant, very defined facial features, deep, green eyes with hazel in them, hazel brows and lashes. Whenever I'd seen her, she's had a smile on her face, somebody to hug by her side. I'd wanted to meet her. So I was excited to see her approaching me. I smiled. She did not.

"You are German?" she asked.

"Yes." That had been the beginning for so many good conversations. After all that's what made me interesting there.

"I'm Jewish." Her expression ice cold. She whipped her curls around and strode off, dignified, beautiful.

I got dressed, left in a daze, was silent on the ride home with my hostmother. I crumbled at home. I had lost a potential friendship because my nation's honor was tarnished with so much blood, so many helpless cries, so many people looking the other way, so many exercising unrighteous dominion.

My great-grandfather was arrested by the Gestapo and tortured for three months because he printed anti-regime materials. He came home a few days before Christmas and lived two more weeks.

My grandmother buried two sons in three months.

My grandfather walked fifty miles to the hospital to pick up the corpse of his seven-day old son in a laundry soap box.

My mother had been on a treck between Ratibor, Silesia, and Western Germany three times by the time she was four and lost her only doll on that treck.

My great-aunt lost her home to bombings twice in a year.

My grandfather, a resident at the hospital, nursed a little orphaned boy that nobody would pay for back to health, moving into a storage room at the hospital to be able to take care of him when he was not on call.



My beautiful potential friend had uncles, grandparents, great-aunts and uncles who had been burned alive, shot and buried in mass graves, executed in front of their children, forced to dig their own graves, given numbers like cattle, dehumanized, hated, pushed, spat upon.

I grew up with stories tat made me sob. But if she read Night, was not she always wondering which one of her uncles who died in Auschwitz, Birkenau, Treblinka, Buna, Bergen-Belsen, Buchenwald, Dachau, Maidanek, Mauthausen, Sachsenhausen, Theresienstadt,... might have been the one who would have played horse with her? Which aunt she could have run to if there was trouble at home? Which grandparent would have given her her favorite nickname?

When I read Night, I grieve over the loss of that friendship and in my nightmarish fear of what my ancestors did, of my heritage, all the women and children selected to go straight to the furnace suddenly have her green eyes and radiant red hair, her finely featured face. She goes to the furnace where the chimneys emit smoke that smells of burnt flesh a million times. And it tears me to pieces. I grieve that she has grown up with those stories of hatred and that she necessarily associates them with me.


This morning, as I read Night on the train, the section where Sighet is "evacuated" to Auschwitz, MARTA broke down. We were asked to move all down to one single car. 80 to a cattle car, no food, no water, not nearly enough oxygen. Then we got pulled back to the station, very slowly. I cried. Really hard.

First succesful attack on Hitler

Madame Tussaud's just opened its doors in Berlin, complete with a wax figure of Hitler. A man showed his horror that Hitler would even be displayed by decapitating the statue. The museum defends itself that Hitler is, after all, part of history and should be displayed as such. But the German newspaper Spiegel has a point: Madame Tussaud's is typically geared towards light entertainment (in the German article). What do you think? Should the statue be replaced or eliminated from the exhibition?


Permanent link to the article in the New York Times.
Link to article in the English edition of Der Spiegel.

Intellectually in Love...

Virginia Woolf scholars are the most personable, mutually supportive, and amusing company for a nerd like me. I just returned from the International Virginia Woolf Conference in Denver, Colorado. It was wonderful and I miss the intellectual stimulation it brought with it. I miss the conversations, being surrounded by people who are eager to hear my ideas on Woolf's critical work, listening to other people's scholarly discoveries, and thus the motivation to work harder on my own to have something to contribute. Well, the motivation has fortunately stuck around. But it's harder to maintain when fending more or less for oneself. Now, I have an exceptionally supportive and wonderful team of thesis advisors. But I can't be in their offices every day or write them emails about every little idea. Being cooped up with these scholars for four days was quite amazing--we hardly spoke about anything and it was not pretentious at all. Everybody genuinely cared about their own and each other's studies. Anyway, enough gushing, I'm intellectually in love--with Woolf, with conferences, and with that extraordinary group of people I met.

Sidenote: I met some of the most brilliant scholars and had very relaxed conversations with them despite being extremely shy at the outset and feeling very unworthy to sit next to them in the lecture halls. They seemed to perceive me as an equal. Awesome.

El camino

I'm back. It took a mean and quite energetic stomach bug to slow down everything else I'm doing and make me write another post. I guess, I can thank it for that.

So, we spent one day driving to Texas, picked up Sergio's friend Raquel in San Antonio, spent the night, and then continued on over the border the next morning. Now the Mexican border isn't pretty. It was a bit frightening. As soon as you cross over, the differences are all too apparent--almost visible to caricature degrees in that strip along the fence. The lanes on the road aren't marked. Traffic lights are suggestions at best. Half the roads coming off the main road are made of dirt. Little kids, old people, and blind people are standing in the middle of the street begging, knocking on your windshields, selling stuff, and offering you services like cleaning your windshields. If you have a hard time resisting this kind of stuff, fly down there. It grates a little on anyone's nerves.

We tried to get out of the border region as quickly as possible and proceeded on South. Our first target was supposed to be Ciudad de Victoria. But as it was getting really dark, we were still far away and we were a little worried about what kinds of hotels we would find there. So we actually went many hours out of our way to drive to Tampico on the east coast which was only slightly closer than Victoria, but safer because we'd be staying with a friend: Ana. She used to live here and it was wonderful seeing her. She took us to a nice seafood place in town. We could smell the ocean all over town. Driving still felt like kamikaze. Ana's Mom is the sweetest lady. I had my first conversation with a Mexican who really could not have helped me out when I was missing a word. It was a good experience and bolstered my determination to show no fear regarding that during our trip. After all I was going to meet many, many of Sergio's relations (I actually had no clue at this point how many) and it wasn't going to look good if I just gave everyone silent, blank looks. Well, back to Tampico: Ana's house isn't big, but they gave Raquel and I a whole bedroom to ourselves, which was very generous. After all this driving, poor Sergio had to sleep on the floor. But I massaged until he fell asleep. I'm a good girlfriend. In the morning I almost flooded the back porch by accidentally turning the wrong knob in the shower. Oops!

Well, off we went again in the truck. It was starting to feel oddly like home. We drove through endless mountains and deserts. I had no idea Mexico was so mountainous! In the deserts there were far more cacti than I'd seen in my whole life put together and little call boxes, if you get stranded. Serious desert. You can dry out there. Well, we were inside an air-conditioned vehicle and for some reason gas was lasting us a lot longer than it had in the US, so we hardly had to stop. The first stop after Tampico was San Luis Potosi, a beautiful colonial town with gorgeous buildings in the center. Here are a few pictures, but they're taken out of the truck, so don't expect much. They might give you just a faint idea of how much there is to see. It's all beautiful and I was burning to get out.


But we couldn't leave the truck, because we had all our stuff in the back. So we just had lunch at a nice restaurant. I had my first pozole, which I loved. It's a soup. See, it looks somewhat like this:


We arrived in Irapuato, the town where Sergio was born, that night. We stayed with his aunt Rosi in Irapuato for most of our trip.

More in a couple of days. Stomach bug is jumping trampoline on my intestines. Stupid bug.

And to follow up a few pictures from the drive down

This is in New Orleans where we stopped for a lunch of gumbo. It was quite good ;o)





This is somewhere between Tampico and San Luis Potosi. Beautiful landscapes all over. I was quite enchanted with the land.




More pretty landscape. I apologize for the poor photo quality. Shots out the window while driving just don't turn out so well....

According to popular demand: MEXICO!!

Because I've been chastised for not blogging about Mexico still, even though I've been back for about two and a half months by now, I will do it now. But in pieces. Slowly.

For today: 10 Reasons why I love Mexico

~ these are in no particular order ~

• my favorite person in the world calls it home
  
• incredibly friendly people who love me when I speak Spanish or even just for smiling
• amazing colonial architecture
• cacti everywhere!
• mangos, papayas, mameys
• fruta con chile y lemon (yum!--fruit with lime and chile)
• beautiful, warm weather in January
• artesanias--little arts and crafts booths and markets that sell pottery, wooden crafts, etc.
• ferias--all the festivals around the year in all the little towns are so colorful, lively, and cheerful
• color--Mexicans paint their houses all colors, which makes cities at birdview adorable!