panoply of fruits vs. contested histories

As may be guessed from the title of this post, today was rather schizoid. in the morning, i got up with the dredging machines (or whatever the machines are that are making hellish rackets - they're damn annoying, that's what i know) and sprang out of bed, despite having little sleep because of the evening construction. white noise this is not. if i were to color this noise, i'd say it was chartreuse - or a chartreuse-puce blend, like an 80s tennis uniform. anyhow, so i woke up and there was the little baby of the house, who has this giant bulging barriga and is always rubbing it like a lecherous old man. she doesn't seem to like me very much, or perhaps she's just sniffing out the new girl like some territorial creature. lately she'll do this thing where she walks really really close to me, passing within about an inch of my chair, and yet pretends not to see me, like a snobby cat. anyhow, she's 'cheeky,' or caprichosa, to quote my roommates. so she and i were the only ones up this morning, and she kept running around with this little purse filled with cookies and pretending to offer them to me, whereupon i'd pretend to take them, and she'd snatch them back with a triumphant look on her face. already learning freud's work, this one. anyhow, i started growling at her as if i were a hungry monster, and she got scared, and i felt triumphant. now i know how elementary school bullies think.

after a while the others started waking up, and i accompanied the really cool and funny colombian woman, as well as the mother of the person from whom i'm renting the apartment, to this fruit and vegetable market that they'd been hinting about all week. i should mention that when i first moved in, i noticed that the place was overflowing with a fruit-and-vegetable cornucopia like you've never seen in your life. we're talking ten papayas, various pineapples and mangoes and mangosteens and maracujá and this fruit called tomate de árbol that tastes sort of like a cross between a kiwi and a raspberry. and there was more: beets, leeks, carrots that looked like machine guns, or testosterone treatments gone horribly wrong; pounds of potatoes and onions and lettuce, etc. so naturally i wondered about this, because the nearby supermarket's selection of national-industry foods like that is skimpy to say the least. [note: when i say national-industry foods, i'm referring to a certain rhetoric of protectionism and import-substitution involving stuff from the interior and provinces like chiriquí. there's a lot growing there, i must say. and panamanian stores often feature it like some sort of social realist trophy. this type of thing reaches ridiculous heights when, for example, someone tries to sell you an onion from peru as some sort of imported luxury, as happened to us today.] anyhow, so it turned out that everything in this cornucopia came from a wholesale fruit market, which sold to supermarkets and other city vendors.

i had seen the place before on my way to the canal zone archives, but i'd never been inside. it's in a really strange area that borders the zone at ancon around 4th of july avenue/avenue of the martyrs (the theatrical ex-border of US-Panama territory): essentially, you have these old-style former zonian houses up on the hill, including the former canal zone theatre guild, and flush against the borderline is an autoconstructed shanty town of these precarious houses on stilts. then there's a panama railroad station, which i guess was the historic pacific-side end point for the railroad and now serves mainly decorative and freight functions; and then the whole militarized and heavily-guarded engineering and security part of the canal zone, now the ACP (autoridad del canal de Panamá) and formerly the PCC (Panama Canal Company/Commission). anyhow, the market: it's this huge labyrinthine place, some kind of corrugated-iron take on the Benjaminian arcades, with vendors perched in hammocks on the upper level and piles of fruit and veg on the lower. there was a woman cradling a giant carrot in her arms, and she stopped to finger my friend's earring...and we sort of plowed through the chaos of men hauling sacks of oranges (something like a 20-pound sack for 4 dollars) and other such things. i spent about $10 and came away with enough beets and potatoes and mangoes and habichuelas and pixbae and etc. to feed an army. which brought about a certain amount of guilt, since i'm just one. but we were promising to compartir the goods, and i should also mention that several metric tonnes of yuca were involved in our transactions. and something sweet and orange called the sapote. anyhow, so after haggling for several hours about the price of tomatoes (my companions would suck their teeth disapprovingly if they heard 50 centavos too much, while i just stood there and smiled), we got back to the apartment to find out that there was no water; a main had exploded during the construction. this made everyone sigh and look somewhat put out, and the water didn't come on until later that night. i should mention that the only kind of water in panama is cold water, since there's really no need for hot, and so i was bracing myself for my daily blast of freezing water, and i turned on the faucet, and nothing splattered me in the face. weird. it was sort of like the reverse of recoil. anyhow, nods to Soyini. water rights certainly are a big fucking deal.

that afternoon, i had committed myself to attending the weekly meeting of SAMAAP, la Sociedad de Amigos del Museo Afro-Antillano de Panamá (Society of Friends of the Afro-Antillean Museum of Panamá). i got to the museum's archival space, where the meeting was held, and felt sort of shy and new and all that, but then i reminded myself that i can actually hold my own in a variety of settings, and experience has borne this out, and so i sort of forgot my initial hesitancy. i introduced myself to half the members and then settled in to wait. the meeting room was packed within fifteen minutes, many members of the west indian panamanian community having arrived. they were socializing and clearly enjoying themselves, so i kept apart at first. there were a number of guests: two so-called female "latin-panamanian" (white panamanian? non-west indian (although this can't be known for sure)? the whole classification thing really gets sticky in panama) documentarians who were making a film about the canal, as well as a 6-year-old girl named celestina and a man who sold books to schools in panama and was trying to get the Sociedad to buy this silly-looking encyclopedic dictionary. anyhow, so i started talking to the documentarians, and at first i was really enthused, thinking that we'd hit it off (because they were making a film about the lives of west indian workers, and i was writing a dissertation about performances of memory and history of the panama canal, specifically of the west indian labor migration), but they actually turned out to be quite snobby and weird. well, i should differentiate: one of them, who had darker skin and looked slightly indígena, was pretty nice, but the other one, a statuesque and attractive and very pale lady in very hip clothes and with black-painted nails, kept scowling at me. at one point she asked me where i went to school, and i told her, and she shot back with "my son goes to notre dame," and i said, "notre dame is a good school," to sort of appease her and engage in some brinksmanship, and she said, "so is northwestern" with this tone that i can only describe as begrudging and incensed. anyhow, i tried to be nice: i told them that it was great that they were filmmakers, as i felt that there were too few women actually making films, and they looked at me like i was some crazy feminist. which i am, but still. so right away i was suspicious, as they hugged their knees in folding chairs off to the side of the assembled group. there was something weird about them.

and it got weirder: they had a sales pitch involving their documentary, called "Diarios del Canal," which was supposed to help viewers to visualize the stories of the West Indian, Panamanian, Spanish, and other workers who came to the canal for work. The West Indian part was what they stressed at this meeting, but i got the sense (for reasons that will emerge later) that they were sort of trying to bring forth everyone's stories. which can be fine, of course - i'll tip my hat to 'fair and balanced' - but was somewhat inappropriate when facing a roomful of people who were highly invested in specific narratives.

but i'll concede that they had done their homework. they'd been to the library of congress, where they'd examined some of the original hand-written letters of west indian workers who had answered a call for memoirs by the Isthmian Historical Society in 1963 or so. at this time, the IHS received hundreds of letters from men all over the caribbean, latin america, and other places, and they chose three winning entries but transcribed all letters into a printed book, of which the museo afro-antillano has one copy. what the lady documentarians wanted to do was to reenact some scenes of the canal construction (the 'heightened moments,' in places like contractor's hill and gold hill) and have actors narrate the texts. they also wanted to do oral histories, and when the mean, skinny one said the phrase 'oral history' her eyes lit up with a certain gleam that i found sort of repugnant and that, i admit, made me uncomfortable because it made me wonder whether i also came off this way: white, wealthy, privileged, ambitious, and sort of unreflexively awful. i noticed that some of the older west indian panamanian women were beginning to have a sort of toxic reaction to these younger "white" career-women and their businessy presentation, complete with powerpoint and resumés projected onto the wall where a dedicatory poem about the overlooked west indian workers usually stood. not only was this poem taken down for the presentation, but half of the wall contained the portraits of all of the presidents of SAMAAP up to the current one, Sr. Enrique Sanchez, and so the whole thing was superimposed on these images. anyhow, it made me feel somewhat ill at ease. also, the documentary-makers kept mentioning that they had a grant from spain to make the film, and they passed around some ridiculously slick and high-cost production materials, one of which showed some "canal workers" (actually actors with glossy nectarine lips) who seemed to be wearing american apparel clothes, down to their jaunty little bowties and decoratively smudged shirts.

at several points, the themes became contentious. in the first instance, one of the "white" women requested that the meeting be conducted at least partially in spanish, and an older outspoken lady yelled, "No, we will speak English here!" This made the president pound his gavel, as clusters of the members started bickering with each other about the history of language issues and their attendant ideological battles. the board concluded that the meeting would be conducted bilingually, but there were murmurs of dissent. later, the mean-skinny woman said something about the many workers who came to the panama canal, and one lady (maybe the same one) protested that the west indian workers constituted the bulk of the labor force and basically built the canal. then the mean-skinny lady shot back that spain had reportedly sent greater numbers of workers in the early days than had the west indies, and then half the people in the room jumped to their feet and started delivering (or, rather, yelling) statistics about how there were already thousands of west indians in panama from the french canal, banana plantation, and early railroad days, and how the west indians were not counted as meticulously as the spanish were, and so on. which is all true. the mean-skinny woman really looked like she'd had about enough of this, and she started yelling back, but then the president banged his gavel and the place quieted down. i don't think i've ever actually seen a gavel used as more than a formality, but that thing definitely proved its worth.

so that was it for the documentarians. after that, they got quiet, giving a couple of final, whimpering, salutatory speeches about how west indians were extremely important to the history of the canal and they hadn't meant to offend anyone and they recognized the important important importance of these laborers and blah blah blah. their goal was to ask the members of SAMAAP to connect them with people with whom they could do oral histories (kind of like my goal! shudder - research as exploitation. i can see it now. this would never have happened if i had stuck to the dead trees and people of the archives), and the president diplomatically said that they'd be happy to be of service, but everyone else seemed decided that they were interlopers and gave them a pronounced collective stink-eye. i myself wavered about them, not wanting to judge someone who could basically be a reflection of my own motives, but i wondered about the provenance of their interest and all that, which was never really explained. then, toward the end of the meeting, the president announced the very recent death of a member of the community, ms. ada thomas, aged 109. the mean-skinny woman immediately said, "i know! we called her to do the interview yesterday, but she wasn't able to stand, and so it was too late..." at this she licked her lips and looked decidedly like a vampire, at least in my paranoid imagination. blah! what kind of asshole tries to get an interview with someone on her deathbed? that just seems really abusive to me. anyhow, the movie women shuffled out soon after that, having said their piece.

so then the very panamanian-looking (by which i mean something that's hard to explain, so i'll just leave it at that) man stood up and gave his spiel about selling the encyclopedic dictionary to the organization to give as a prize to the winning school of this year's "Conozca su Canal/Know Your Canal" contest. (And thank you, A., for rendering me basically incapable of writing that phrase without thinking of certain images and wiggly arm-movements.) the president again said "that's very interesting" in a diplomatic way, and the idea of buying a bound encyclopedia for a school - rather than, say, a computer with internet access - struck me as so futile and sad that, once again, i squirmed around in my seat, feeling ill at ease. i wanted to suggest that the prize be a computer, since these books were very expensive and seemed like a drop in the bucket, but i didn't know if this would be offensive to some members present at the meeting, who would be satisfied with the idea of an encyclopedia (but what about the information getting dated! i yelled in my head, feeling like a petulant librarian. and what about wikipedia! and open source, and google scholar! and then i sort of shut myself up), so i mumbled it to the older, elegant professor who was seated next to me with her husband. the couple seemed to be of west indian descent and knew some people in Northwestern's Af-Am department, like Darlene Clark Hine, rather well. The woman was writing a book about the separation of West Indian families during canal construction, and she'd already written a book about children and slavery. anyhow, here she is. as someone who likes the company of profs, i immediately started chatting with her about the archives and some of the discourses on children that i'd encountered in this research. so that was really good.

anyhow, the meeting continued, and we learned that the president's daughter was exhibiting her art in vienna, and the museum itself was infested with rats, and other such things. first, the organization talked at length about the planning process for the week-long commemoration efforts happening in about a month; i'm going to be participating all week with the setup of the various dances and ceremonies, thanks to Melva, who has been so generous. seriously. she's great. anyhow, one of the activities is a ceremonial launch into the canal with schoolchildren and flower petals and a chorus and pastor, touring the historic west indian neighborhoods and sites of import along the zone, and then disembarking somewhere for some finalizing ritual. this is sort of the apex of the week, and i'm pretty excited to come along and, i don't know, hold the pastor's train or massage his feet between stints or something. then the president asked for 'sociales' and 'asuntos varios' and the like, and there were a lot of social things going on, like a play by west indian children about famous people of african descent that somehow got the children invited to breakfast at the Panamanian Supreme Court, because the actor playing one of the judges happened to be wearing the same outfit that the judge had on that day. also, melva went to see the new 13 million-dollar mormon temple in corozal and reported that it was wacky and needed to be seen, if only for the insane "lujo" of its mythological murals. my spanish was behaving today, and i was absorbing quite a bit of it. transparency! such a laudable thing.

after people started leaving, i stayed behind and got into a conversation with three really interesting people, and i learned that there are 28 black rights organizations in Panama right now, and that every May (Panama's black history month) these leaders organize a forum on race and ethnicity. i also learned - and i would really like to follow up on this information with an interview - that the civil rights movement in panama was positively and consciously modeled on that in the US, with an afro-panamanian leader, Cirilo McSween, working alongside MLK and others. moreover, panamanian black nationalism was modeled on the US, since the canal zone was basically a congealed microcosm of all the racism that the US could possibly muster. anyhow, a lot of theories of mine were confirmed, which is always good (though again - was i like those snide documentarians? was i overconfident? bombastic? too weird? all these things were dogging me, albeit in a gentle way, as i danced around the questions that i had listed virtually on the legal pad in my brain). i also learned about another afro-panamanian playwright, carlos russell, who has also written a lot of political essays. the new york connection was palpable: many in the room had arrived from brooklyn for their summer vacations. i learned that roman foster was really the one to talk to about canal history. and i made a date to cook all of these vegetables that i had bought with two of the ladies, and to design an ESL performance workshop for use in Panama's normal school in Santiago, and to someday ride a chiva parrandera, as colombianos and the hipper tourist set do, with this regal nigerian-panamanian woman and her friends. so it was a pretty good evening, and i realized once again how much i like panama, and how fascinating this place is. if the air is thick with pollution and the ground is leaching slippery red quicksand between cracked sidewalks, and if cabdrivers simultaneously hit on and overcharge me, i still think this is an excellent place. i love how panama doesn't fit neatly into any sector of "area studies" or what have you: it's a mess in so many ways, and much better for it, i think. and i'm sort of suspicious of any place boasting an extremely healthy quality of life anyway. oh, to live in a place without seatbelt laws and bourgeois children's clothing stores! it's refreshing.