But we’re all economists now, whether we like it or not.

I recently got a facial – OK, you can scoff, but I’d waited months to make the appointment, until a much-anticipated chunk’o’cash came my way.  I could have used a full-tilt vacation, but instead I went to see Lisa, a cool, rock-climbing esthetician.

I hadn’t seen Lisa in several years.  She always struck me as  tough-minded, but this time she seemed subdued.  She’s gone back to school to study to be a pharmacy tech, because as a self-employed woman over fifty (still drop dead gorgeous, of course) she can no longer afford to pay for health insurance.  As we chatted after the treatment, she talked about a friend who has backed off, and Lisa thinks it’s because of the “marginal” lives she and her boyfriend lead.

Marginal?  Lisa has owned her own home for years, and her boyfriend just graduated from a master’s program in landscape architecture.

The gap between the rich and the rest of us is an abstract concept but the small, shaming moments it creates are real and concrete.  I feel them, too.  As a working writer, I’ve always had financial ups and downs.  But now, because of the rising cost of living, tight credit, and flat pay, there are many things that I cannot do: buy a house, for instance, even though I’ve owned several.  Travel to New York – unless, maybe, I can crash on a friend’s couch.  Live in San Francisco.

Feel hopeful about the future.

We constantly see people with enviable lives, so why aren’t we among them?  Lisa’s  job keeps her in contact with the 1 percent of wealthy people in the U.S., and, as economist Robert Frank has told us, feeling rich or poor depends on your social context.  But the reality is that the lives of Lisa, and me, and many other people, have become circumscribed – and, quite frankly, frightening.  The legacy of our era may be the shame many of us feel as we drop precipitously from the middle class to genuine poverty.   Where will all that shame and fear lead us?  Political instability?  Violence?  Paul Krugman, our Nobel Prize-winning economist rock star, has suggested as much.

No wonder so many students are majoring in economics.  The number has been going up since the early 90s.  The most dramatic increase came after the economy nosedived: since 2007, the proportion of economics majors rose 18 percent, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.

We’re trying to figure out what hit us.  But is it naive to hope that, even in crass, materialistic America, we might return to a time when we can think about things other than money?  Maybe just a little?  Must I spend quite so many of my waking hours doing arithmetic in my head?

Welfare queen, I mutter to myself under my breath.  I’m putting off getting a crown and fixing my car, but I get a cheap thrill from spending $40 on Touche Eclat to cover the dark circles under my eyes from waking up in the middle of the night worrying that I’ll get cancer and my sketchy health insurance won’t cover my treatment.  Good quality makeup and recalling the reckless panache of Yves St. Laurent lets me feel, for a few seconds, the rush of unearned power and invulnerability that come with knowing that you are one of them.  The rich.

I ran across a quote from Bruce Chatwin explaining why he could no longer bear to sell art at Sotheby’s.  Why do such laudable sentiments seem dated, even to me?  I long to escape from my time, and sometimes, my own sensibility, which seems too firmly attached to the present circumstances.

But the art business had come to disgust him. Later he would remember with a shudder “the nervous anxiety of the bidder’s face as he or she waits to see if she can afford to take some desirable thing home to play with. Like old men in nightclubs deciding whether they can really afford to pay that much for a whore.”

you must believe in spring said bill evans, he wrote.  now i worry that spring and summer brings fires and winter is a break… got that cabin built and the mountains burnt and my sense of what an “escape” is has changed  but the illusion is still there….

It was a beautiful email, and even more beautiful is the recording of Bill Evans’ song You Must Believe in Spring.  I’d forgotten how odd and sensitive Evans’s music is, and the song reminded me that great art must contain not contradiction but paradox.  Thesis and antithesis.  The song is full of grief and loss, full of winter, yet it also has that flicking pulse of life, of spring, sometimes in the same note.

I’ve learned it in quotidian ways, and in romantic ones, how much better to grieve than to hang on.  I’ve learned it the hard way, too many times.

From what I know about him, Evans did, too.

In Carolyn Cooke’s recent novel, Daughters of the Revolution, Cooke has set the mark of her anger, along with her exquisite sentences, on the ultimate crucible of American male power: prep school. Given the sensitivity of the subject – still – perhaps it is not surprising that the book drew strong reactions from critical circles. In The San Francisco Chronicle, Susanna Sonnenberg literally ordered people to read Daughters of the Revolution, calling it “ferocious” and “astonishing.” Cooke, she wrote, “can reinvent the known with imagery so fine and excruciating it feels like a dare.”

But Jonathan Yardley of The Washington Post blasted Cooke’s novel, comparing it unfavorably to the 1964 Louis Auchincloss novel The Rector of Justin, and accusing Cooke of ham-fisted political correctness.  Without dismissing Yardley’s criticisms, it is worthwhile to note that he is the son of an Episcopal headmaster.  For Yardley, Cooke may not have hit the bulls-eye, but she clearly hit a nerve.

The novel’s inciting incident is an early 1960s boating accident that kills a young father while sparing his wealthy companion. The dead man’s daughter is the book’s sole first-person narrator and her life the tidal bore where the old order both embraces and resists the new.  Although the novel’s action spans decades, it never reaches beyond the geographic confines of New England and New York. Yet Daughters of the Revolution’s epiphanic ending calls down all the tragedy of the North and South. We recently spoke at her home in northern California.

***

The Rumpus: When I read your short story collection, The Bostons, I had a sensory hit of New England: the old floorboards, the smell of summer. But you’ve been living on the north coast of California for quite a while now. Is California culture where the novel’s surreal sensibility comes from?

Carolyn Cooke: I think Hawthorne is pretty surreal. Most New England writers are echoing a little bit of Hawthorne’s surrealism. Someone called my book an example of hysterical realism. He cited me along with Zadie Smith and some other writers I really respect.  It was a negative review, but great company.  I understand the impulse to not be a realist. I don’t think I am fundamentally a realist even though I’m interested in reality. I’m interested in texture, I’m interested in commentary, I’m interested in the meta story. I think realism can be tedious. I’ m not interested in writing it.

Rumpus: It’s laborious.

Cooke: I have a hard time having characters pour milk in their coffee. I’m pleased when people say that the book is not quite in a realist tradition.

Rumpus: In terms of place, Boston is the epicenter of the American class system, isn’t it? Louis Auchincloss and Ward Just, among others, were categorical in their descriptions of Boston.

Cooke: It used to be. That was one of the differences I noticed when I came to California. In New England, it was so hard to move beyond cultural assumptions that people made because you were black, or you were a woman, or you lived in a certain neighborhood or you were poor.

Rumpus: And you were poor.

Cooke: (hesitates) My mother and I were poor, yeah. She was a substitute teacher for most of my childhood. A single parent.

Rumpus: Where did you live?

Cooke: We lived in a number of places. We sometimes housesat for people. We lived in Newton, Massachusetts most of the time when I was very young. When I was 10 we moved to Bar Harbor, Maine. My mother’s father was a Swedish immigrant who built houses there. He built her a house based on a design she made in a home ec class in eighth grade. She still lives there. It’s a fabulous house. It has a tower. It’s very whimsical.

Rumpus: Daughters of the Revolution focuses on a specific period of time in a specific place, when New England prep schools were taking cautious steps toward integration and co-education.  Around the same time, Boston was in the throes of a violent controversy over school busing.  The violence in South Boston happened after your moved to Maine, wasn’t it?

Cooke: Yes, but I was aware of it. Initially I wanted to write a book about busing.

Rumpus: I can see how that idea morphed into Carole, the African-American girl who is admitted to the boys’ prep school by mistake.  It’s remarkable how much the discussion of school integration has changed, isn’t it?  We seem to have given up on integration in the schools.  Now we talk about identity, which is fine, but I wonder if the price we pay is further fragmentation of the polity, and perhaps misses the larger issue of inequality.  Class is certainly one of your major concerns.  Do you think an obsession with race can blind us to issues of class? Is there a vacuum in the arts and the national debate when it comes to class?

Cooke: I’m really disturbed by the increasing emphasis at elite schools and elsewhere on meritocracy. “Merit” means the kids whose parents are wealthy enough to get them the preparation they need to get into those schools. You look at the Ivy League colleges, which are so racially and ethnically diverse, and yet so filled with wealthy, privileged kids from all over the world. It’s also true at the California state schools, increasingly, as the tuition goes up. I’m fearful of a world that loves those who have merit and ignores those who don’t.

Rumpus: What’s the index of “merit”?

Cooke: Right, right. There’s a phenomenon of what my friend David Rothkopf calls the super class, and it’s international. This is who rules the world. They’re all colors and all creeds and it’s just as egalitarian as it could be, except they’re all the super people, the people who make the decisions, who run the corporations, who create the culture, who hold the money. The issue is no longer “Are people treated equally because of their background?” The issue is that most people aren’t treated equally and only a few people are.

Rumpus: The intensity of that comes through at the ending of your book. I was so angry after I finished that book, I was a total bitch for three days.

Cooke: Why, thank you! (laughs)

Rumpus: (laughs) The ending of the book, to me, was about global inequality. I don’t know if that was what you intended. This isn’t an historical book, it’s not a curiosity, it’s not limited to the 60s and 70s, or drawing a self-conscious parallel between an earlier time and ours. The surreal aspects of the book gave it a larger scope, I thought, without confusing the reader. Were you thinking about these larger kinds of inequality or was I projecting?

Cooke: We all have a different lens, or several lenses. You’ve spent a lot of time looking at the world through the lens of the environment and your life in Africa. How does the environment get affected in a poor country? A colonized country? I’ve always seen the world through the lens of class.

Rumpus: My lens also tends to be political. The political novel got a bad rap for a few years.  Political novels were considered automatically didactic or second-rate literature.  But I wonder if there’s a new urgency now, with two wars going on and economic hard times that wasn’t there before.  Perhaps Americans have realized that their personal power is circumscribed by historical circumstances, and that their lives can be changed by outside forces.  Are they looking beyond the suburban, minimalist cul de sac?

Cooke: Oh, yeah. I remember all these stories about men in some huge indescribable existential struggle. Just like anybody else, I read Philip Roth, and Updike, and Cheever, and Raymond Carver. Carver brought the class card to the table, but kind of relentlessly. And they’re very male, and they’re very much about their mortality, and the women are unreal. It’s such a breath of air that there are so many people telling weird, big stories from all around the world now.

Rumpus: A few of those guys wrote great sex scenes. Richard Ford. That guy could make it new. Yours are very good, too. How do you write about sex?  I find it incredibly difficult.

Cooke: I think it’s hard, too. With Daughters of the Revolution, I wanted to write a book that was partly about the sexual revolution, and I realized after a certain point that I had to write about sex. I wanted to explore the history of bad sex.

Rumpus: That would be a great book title: The History of Bad Sex.  How do you do the research?

Carolyn Cooke, author of Daughters of the Revolution

Cooke: I did it very diligently, the way I do everything. (laughter) I had a certain amount of experience, which I brought to bear. I think it’s of service to the book, even if you’re not a realist. Because the way they look at sex changes over time. Your characters, I mean.

Rumpus: So the actress does a nude scene if it’s artistically merited. Makes sense. I do see a common ground in your novel, despite its brevity, with the large canvas novels you’re referring to.  What are you reading now?

Cooke: I’m reading nonfiction, because I’m interested in the intersection of sex and drugs and how drugs lubricated things in New England at a certain time. In fiction, I was just reading The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga and Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. There are such giant stories that people from Africa or India are telling. Adiga does such a great job at showing multiple facets of a country but also telling a Dostoevskian story about a criminal. It’s literary and character-based but also doing this hard work of illuminating culture and society, and looking into the present and the future.

In English, there haven’t been these giant stories that try to explain a nation, explain these huge historic events, at least recently. I think of young people coming up, and feeling there’s this huge obligation to tell stories that haven’t been told before. But in some sense that’s what every novel does. Every novel has a lens that grabs at you.

From Daughters of the Revolution

But I remember God’s house as if my life happened there, as if it were my house.  I sifted through the pennies and the rolls of Tums on his bureau, examined his artifacts: the shaving brush and bowl, the Zippo lighter, the red pencils and hand sharpeners in the drawers of his black India-rubber desk, the row of khaki pants and hanging shirts and crumbly wool jackets in his closet and, toward the back, an old blue coat made of cheap wool, serge, with brass buttons, obviously not a coat that he would ever wear – too small, too effeminate, too cheap.  I put this coat on and wore it everywhere, waiting for him to acknowledge my audacity.  One day he looked up and saw me finally.  “Ha! Hup!” he said, and that was all.  In the coat I felt most like myself – ironic, disguised, dangerous.  What girl of some ambition does not in her formative years wear a coat two sizes too large for her?  When Mei-Mei and I left God’s house, he gave me the coat to keep; at least I took it with me.

My husband shoots me a pissed-off look.

“You know, Zakin-Suleiman. Or Suleiman-Zakin.”

“We can talk about that later,” he mutters.

We are halfway down the jetway, waiting to find out whether we can get back on our flight to San Francisco. Minutes before, a flight attendant’s voice had come over the loudspeaker, asking my husband and another guy with a common Muslim name to get off the Delta flight scheduled to depart from JFK. This happened to be the 10th anniversary of 9/11. When I booked our tickets using frequent flier mileage, I barely made the connection. What can I say? I spent most of my career as an environmental writer. Hurricane Katrina looms larger for me than 9/11 in “American exceptionalism is dead” symbolism. An alternative theory was proposed by my then-therapist, who believed that people with intrusive mothers tend to zone out on large public events they can’t control.

Whatever. All I know is that what happened to us over the next few hours made me think that America was getting it right when it came to security. What alarms me is how little most Americans know about their own country’s foreign policy: America’s latest misadventure in Somalia, which nobody in the U.S. seems to know about, had a lot to do with why we almost missed our flight.

I wasn’t quite so Zen when we were asked to get off the plane. I shot out of my seat even faster than my beleaguered significant other. My husband is from Lamu Island, off the Kenyan coast, one of those hippie highway destinations, like Ibiza, frequented by ex-models, minor royalty and various Rolling Stones. I am from the Upper East Side of Manhattan. I do most things faster.

“Sorry! Common Muslim name,” I explained to the blond, tired-looking man in our row as I stepped over him.

“I’m Finnish,” he said, waving his hand, as if to say, we Scandinavians are too evolved for all your crazy American paranoia.

Needless to say, I had more bags than my husband, so he went on ahead while I wrestled with my laptop, shoulder bag and overstuffed carry-on. When I reached the waiting area near gate 26, I was relieved to see him seated across from a very large man with curly brown hair. At least they hadn’t whisked him into an interrogation room. The man, who wore a name tag that identified him as an immigration official, gestured that it was OK for me to sit down.

“Have you been out of the country recently?” he asked my husband.

“Yes.”

“When did you leave?”

I watched my husband struggle. It was a real DSK moment. Not because my husband wanted to lie, but because exact dates and times aren’t as important in Africa as they are here, except among the highly educated. Half the Africans I’ve met don’t know how old they are, much less the exact date they traveled somewhere.

“Early May,” I said. “He went back to take care of his kids.”

The rest of it pretty much went like that. The immigration guy asked questions. Sometimes one of us answered, sometimes the other. I found a way of inserting the fact that I was Jewish and originally from New York into the conversation. I also mentioned that I was a reporter. Not exactly marriage material for a devout Muslim, much less a card-carrying Islamic extremist.

All the agent wanted to know was whether my husband had been to Somalia recently or donated money to Somali organizations. My husband got a little huffy, which sent me into a panic. You had to know the back story to understand his reaction. The coastal region of Kenya, where my husband’s family has lived for about 800 years, is next door to Somalia. Kenyans tend to consider Somalis ratfuck crazy, not to mention heavily armed. Somali bandits have been coming over the border and causing various kinds of mayhem since the 1960s, when a commentator, no doubt a devoted listener of radio serials, coined the term “The Shifta Menace.” (Shifta is the word used in most of East Africa for bandit or rebel.) Somali bandits are blamed for any crime that hasn’t been solved yet, from poaching to the recent kidnapping of a British tourist.

The U.S. government’s attention to Somalia as a potential terrorist threat struck me as well placed. Few Americans even know that in late 2006, the United States supported Ethiopia’s invasion of Somalia.

The U.S. supported the Ethiopian invasion because of a perceived rightward tilt of the Islamic Courts Union, which ruled the country at the time. The Courts had provided Somalia’s first stable government in 16 years.  The courts had been relatively moderate, and some observers contend that U.S. pressure was partly to blame for the regime’s alliances with Islamic fundamentalists.

I’m dubious about that contention. But I agree with Aidan Hartley, a Kenyan-born journalist who has probably covered Somalia longer and better than any Western journalist. Hartley has warned of an anti-U.S. backlash. In Somalia, Hartley wrote, the U.S. may be “helping to transform a backwater tribal conflict into what could turn out to be the worst Islamist insurgency in the world after Iraq and Afghanistan.”

So far, Hartley’s words have proved to be prescient.  With the ouster of the Islamic Courts, Somalia became “Mad Max” land again, with key regions controlled by al Shabab, a fundamentalist group that announced in February it had aligned itself with Al-Qaida. Recently, al Shabab suspended aid programs organized by the U.N. and others, exacerbating the flood of refugees into Kenya.

At the same time, I understand why the U.S. was alarmed by the Islamic Courts, which offered refuge to terrorists. The invasion by Ethiopia, Somalia’s historical rival, gave U.S. bombers cover to go after Fazul Abdullah Mohammed, the al-Qaida operative called the “mastermind” behind the attacks on the U.S. embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam in 1998 and an Israeli-owned hotel in Mombasa, on the Kenyan coast, in 2002. The U.S. bombers fumbled, according to news reports, succeeding in killing approximately 70 sheep and pissing off a few nomads. But Fazul was killed in June, chalking up another hit for the Obama administration’s surprisingly steroidal counterterrorism effort. (If only the president could be so macho when he deals with Republicans.)

After I met my husband at a writers conference on Lamu, I realized that the notorious Fazul had not only spent time on the archipelago, but had married a local girl, a 15-year-old student at a madrassa where he taught under a pseudonym. I went back to the island, partly to see if my nascent romance was anything more than a holiday fling, and partly because I thought I should try to cover the story. I was tired of editors telling me that I was a good writer but the environment didn’t sell. So I tried to convince myself that I could write a story about Fazul, even though I considered both radical Islamists and George W. Bush delusional, testosterone-crazed morons who should be paying attention to their respective economies instead of engaging in pointless wars. I was more interested in Fazul’s wife, who had been picked up by Kenyan police, than Fazul himself.

I did a week or two of cursory reporting before heading up to the Laikipia Plateau to research an environmental story. I discovered that the woman detained by Kenyan authorities was actually Fazul’s first wife, not the local girl he had married, who had since divorced him. I also discovered that the Muslim women in Kenya were not necessarily eager to be liberated, or talk to the American media, even if one played the sisterhood card. Their sisters wore veils.

In the end, what I got was a personal rejection letter from David Remnick at The New Yorker. And I got married. Not such a bad deal.

Four years later, I find myself appalled that nobody in the U.S. media includes the fact of our involvement in the Ethiopian invasion when writing about the current  in Somalia. Increasingly, evidence shows that famines occur because of poor governance, not inadequate food, so our role in the country’s destabilization, which also unleashed the Somali pirates, deserves a mention, especially in light of the terrible suffering of the Somali people.

Our experience on 9/11 indicated that while the American people are oblivious to the role our policies may have played in the famine and destabilization of Somalia, our security forces aren’t. There are now an estimated 1 million Somali refugees in Kenya, many applying for — and getting — humanitarian visas that allow them to enter the U.S. Are there Somali refugees in the U.S. who have a grudge against their adopted country? No doubt. The U.N. now estimates that 750,000 people may die as a result of the famine.  Twenty-nine thousand children under the age of five have already died. This is a high price to pay for fighting al-Qaida, and Americans are not the ones paying it.

The two faces of America, one the benign visage of the Statue of Liberty, the other the aggrandizing militaristic empire, are hard to reconcile even if you grew up with them. Seeing my husband grapple with the enormous diversity of this country, the ethnicities, the politics, the class divisions and cultures, I can’t imagine that Somalis are any less baffled, not to mention frustrated. And humiliated.

As the agent’s questions wear on, my husband lapses into silence, letting me answer for him. I can see that the immigration guy is just doing his job, but the situation is terrifying and even I can hear my braying, nervous laugh.

Satisfied with our answers, the agent tells us that he’ll note that our marriage is “real,” which will help us later. (Later?) There’s just one thing: He is supposed to have a cop look through my husband’s suitcase, but it’s already been loaded onto the plane. He asks the airline people to hold the flight, promising them it will be only five minutes.

We follow the agent back to the jetway. Halfway down the corridor, he stops.

“Wait a minute,” he says. “You should wait here so … ”

“To save us embarrassment,” I say.

“You got it.” He smiles reassuringly. A minute or so later, he is back.

“They can’t find it,” he says. “But I’m afraid if they take it off now, it won’t make it back on the plane with you. Just go ahead and get on the plane.”

I look at him in amazement. Worried that the airline will lose our luggage, he is not going to bother to check it. We thank him and scurry onto the plane.

My husband is embarrassed and I feel badly for him, but I also feel the same way I have felt ever since I returned from Africa. I feel safe. I am glad my husband is here, and I am impatient for the day when we can bring his sons to live in a place where they can grow up without worrying about malaria or periodic political upheaval.

Unlike so many of my liberal friends, I don’t discount the vehemence of anti-American feeling or the fragility of civil society. Certainly I worry that “the system” has the latitude to lock people away in places like Guantanamo Bay whether they are guilty or not, and I am disgusted that the American people have been drugged by a steady diet of celebrity journalism.  But as I remind my husband, during World War II, the U.S. herded Japanese-Americans into internment camps with no evidence they had any involvement with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. The immigration guy isn’t responsible for American foreign policy.  Inside the borders of our country, he was nice and respectful, which is more than you can say for government officials in Kenya. And in the end, we made it onto the plane.

But there was a weird coda: My best friend, who is renting us her mother’s apartment in San Francisco, told us that two FBI officers had showed up at her door the previous morning. Sensing that they weren’t on high alert, she joked around, telling them I was probably more of a troublemaker than my husband, an easygoing guy whose only political activism was agitating for payment for his fellow players on a soccer team nearly 20 years ago.

“I think they were just doing, what’s the word, due diligence,” she said.

I relay the story to my husband.

“The system works,” I say. “What do you think?”

He points out that the security agents should have questioned him after he went through the TSA checkpoint, which would have saved him the embarrassment of being pulled off the plane.

“It could work better,” he says.

Yeah, I think. And it could work a whole lot worse.

This essay first appeared in Truthdig.com

After whining unconvincingly about having a headache, my Kenyan husband explained why he didn’t want to go to my god-daughter’s dance performance at Lowell, a public high school in San Francisco.

“You remember when you went to a wedding?” he demanded.

I thought back to the Swahili wedding I attended on Lamu before we were married.  I was recovering from what I thought was flu but I realize now was probably an allergic reaction to the black mold creeping up the walls of our Shela flat.  Our physician (and part-time Swahili poet) Dr. Abdallah prescribed a one-two punch consisting of a fantabulous steroid and a knockoff Indian version of Zyrtec.  Blissfully uncongested, if woozy, I was helping Gabriel with dinner when I was nearly blasted out of the kitchen by Zanzibari music.  Think Sheherazade as a drag queen on meth in charge of a drum machine with the control stuck on reggaeton.

“It’s a wedding,” Gabriel said.  “You should check it out.”

“Ugh.  I hate weddings.”

He shrugged.  “It’s culture.”

“I’ll go if you come with me.”

Gabriel looked at me uncomprehendingly.  Then he laughed.

“I can’t,” he said.  “It’s only for women.”

“That doesn’t sound like much fun,” I told him.  “Who do you dance with?”

“The women dance together,” he said.

Indeed, your basic Swahili wedding is more Heloise and Abelard than Father of the Bride.  The bride and groom don’t get together until after the ceremony, at the bride’s parents’ house.  The “reception” consists of a men’s stick dance, followed by a bachelor party.  (The bachelor party features porn, since there are no strippers on the island, and as we now know from Osama’s stockpile, pornography doesn’t seem to violate the Koran.)

I had seen the stick dance the previous day.  It was a mock fight, limp-wristed by American standards.  Not that Swahili men can’t be macho, but their swaggering is usually related to dhow races, soccer, women, and clothing. (Pastel-colored cotton kikois, which are like sarongs, are favored, and so are expensive, near-bulletproof rainjackets shipped in from friends in Europe.  If you have sailed during rainy season on the coast, you understand.)

The actual ceremony takes place in the mosque, the boy’s club epicenter, no girls allowed.  The bride’s involvement in the official doings consists of signing a document attesting that she’s a virgin, no matter how patently untrue.

The big exception to male domination of the wedding is the women’s wedding party.  Gabriel’s mother has been a regular at these affairs for years, and he still grumbles about being left at home as a kid while she went off to weddings.  I can hardly blame her, since weddings are virtually the only time women leave the house except to shop.

I gave in to Gabriel’s urging, as I am wont to do, and stumbled in the direction of the Sheherazade disco.  Oh-so-tentatively, I opened the curtain that had been strung, It Happened One Night fashion, across the narrow alleyway leading to the courtyard where the women gathered.

Women, women, everywhere, women with their hair oiled and perfumed with jasmine, women wearing too much makeup, women swaying and clapping their hands.  Women on the sidelines, women seated, women in a conga line, eyes half-closed, women bumping and grinding as if they were fucking each other in the ass, women trancing out, all in front of a comically oversized brass bed mounted on a dais.  Is there a female version of “homoerotic”?  Half-cartoon, half-fairytale, the giant bed reminded me of the Princess and the Pea skit in the Carol Burnett show.

I noticed a British professor I’d met the previous day while walking on the beach.  She’d mentioned that her research involved dance and culture, or dance and gender or perhaps all three, I couldn’t quite remember. She was watching attentively from the sidelines.  Busily taking mental notes, no doubt.

The hipsway cadence quickened, gearing up to the big night.  I felt uncomfortable, but I was afraid people would notice if I left too soon, so I tried to keep it together.

Why can’t you be more like her? I berated myself, watching the professor who was clapping her hands in time to the music but maintained her evaluating gaze.  Observe.  Be neutral.

Whenever I tell myself this, I am about to have a major fight-or-flight response.  Zyrtec plus steroids, or plain old American anxiety, your guess is as good as mine.  All I know is that I fled.

Is there something about being confined in a “woman’s” role that makes me feel like Maya Angelou’s proverbial avian victim?  Lamu does this to me in a thousand small ways that I don’t notice until after I leave.  After flying home last July, I lived for a month in Manhattan while the U.S. government tried to determine if my laidback soccer jock husband was a terrorist.  I joined the luxurious Equinox club, mainly because it was within walking distance of the apartment that a lovely high school classmate had loaned me.  It was my turn to dance.

Clunk.  After matching my pace to the gliding goddesses of Senegal and slogging through sand in the ninety-degree sweat of Lamu, even the yoga classes in Manhattan seemed to move at warp speed.  I needed something to jump-start my metabolism so I forced myself through the most hard-core exercise routines I could find, in classes with names like Blast and Turbo.

Type A, anyone?  This was the Upper East Side, folks.  I watched, stunned, as a hugely pregnant woman jumped up and down so rabidly I wondered if her goal was to have a miscarriage.

I wasn’t pregnant so what was my excuse?  For two weeks, I swam in mud.  Then one day I felt it.  The rush.  The power.  The “I Am Woman” moment.  I crouched and leapt and reveled in the lightness of my limbs, with the funky funky girl music pounding in my ear.

Then I found myself thinking of a beautiful woman I know in Shela.  She is thirty-one and when she was fourteen her parents sold her to an old man.  A rich old man.  She rebelled and her parents locked her in her room until she relented.

There are worse stories in the world, and I have heard those, too.  But for some reason, this woman’s story made me unbearably sad.  Perhaps it was because she recited it so plainly, without complaint or outrage.  She told me that she understood why her parents did it.

But when she met her current husband, she put him off for several years, because she had no desire to be married again.

She needed to tell the story, needed a witness.  I thought of her as a magnificent animal with a docked tail. Housebroken.

Apart from a few bold girls who kick the ball on the beach before wandering off in embarrassment, women don’t play soccer on Lamu.  Instead, they worship at the Princess and the Pea Shrine of Sex.  Their arms and legs might as well be bound, like the feet of Chinese girls, and this is not only legitimized but required by the Muslim religion and the Swahili patriarchy.   Women on Lamu use their bodies for cooking and sex and childbirth.  They reinforce the bars of their cages with heinous Bollywood movies.

In America, the balance may have tipped too far in the other direction; in my case, there’s no doubt that I feel alienated from the archetypal female physical experiences of childbirth and, sometimes, even sex.  (But not often, and not for long.)

Still, living on Lamu has made me a supporter of Title IX, the federal legislation that ensures women’s sports receive funding equal to men’s.  The law isn’t perfect, but I’m glad it’s there.  Because who knows?  Perhaps girls’ soccer is softening these harsh dichotomies that have trapped women both here and there.

My gorgeous, effusive god-daughter has played soccer and studied ballet since she could walk.  At seventeen, she’s a choreographer and dancer.  The dances I saw at Lowell emphasized friendship and emotional support (to the great old Bill Withers song “Lean on Me”) and self-expression.  There were a few boys in the dance company, unembarrassed, though occasionally awkward, still learning to control their recently expanded bodies.

You are what you dance.

My husband should have gone to Tira’s performance, if only for the sake of her parents, who have been extraordinarily welcoming to him, as he struggles to adjust to America.  But I don’t feel like preaching today.  At first I thought he didn’t want to go because he thought it was, “a woman thing.”  (This is what he calls my marathon visits to the hair salon.)

When I woke up, I realized that it was something else.  Gabriel is on my turf now.  He’s hamstrung by unfamiliarity, frustrated and often humiliated by the strangeness of cold and fog and buses and the driver’s license he doesn’t yet have.  He’s been a good sport about volunteer coaching the North Beach Wild Parrots, a soccer team made up of eager fourteen-year-old girls.

He needed to say no, if only this once.  He needed to draw a boundary around himself, the way I had when I ran away from the whirling disco dervishes in their jasmine and lipstick.

As it turns out, there are things even American women don’t need to share with their men, at least not all the time.

Andry Rajoelin of Madagascar

“Sorry, Suzanne, but I can’t drive you to the airport. I would be too afraid to drive back alone at night,” my friend Marie-Chantal said.

I looked at her, doing a quick calculation in my head before realizing Marie-Chantal* wasn’t making an excuse; she was truly scared.

I had lived in Madagascar for three months in 2001, and, like many writers and artists before me, I left convinced that Madagascar was as close as one could come to Paradise. This was not only because the island’s landscape was phenomenally beautiful, filled with unique plants and animals that made the world’s fourth-largest island a biologist’s fantasy land. It was Madagascar’s culture that floored me. Describing the Malagasy concept of fihavanana as similar to the Golden Rule doesn’t do it justice. Wikipedia’s definition isn’t bad: “Fihavanana is a Malagasy word encompassing the Malagay concept of kinship, friendship, goodwill between beings, both physical and spiritual. The literal translation is difficult to capture, as the Malagasy culture applies the concept in unique ways. Its origin is havana, meaning kin.” But what makes Malagasy culture truly unique in the world is perhaps best described by the proverb “Ny Fihavanana no talohan’ny vola” which, loosely translated, means “the relationship is more important than the money.” It’s that sentiment, even rarer in the 21st century than endangered lemurs, that may be lost forever if Madagascar’s current political turmoil proceeds unchecked.

The island nation’s not-so-slow dissolve began in March 2009, when the mayor of the capital city, a 34-year-old nightclub disc jockey and aristocrat named Andry Rajoelina, seized power in a coup after weeks of demonstrations that many observers believe were at least partially staged by factions within the country’s military.

Over the following year and a half, attempts to forge a power-sharing agreement between Rajoelina and the country’s elected president, Marc Ravalomanana, repeatedly failed after Rajoelina reneged. As the stalemate continued, foreign aid, which accounts for 70 percent of Madagascar’s budget, has withered, and economic growth begun during Ravalomanana’s presidency has stalled.

On Nov. 17, international news services reported that the Malagasy military, which had supported Rajoelina, was attempting a coup against him. A standoff between rival military factions lasted for nearly a week. Yesterday, the faction of the military that supports Rajoelina announced victory, ensuring that Rajoelina’s dictatorship will continue, at least until the next coup.

Before you shake your head, thinking that this is yet another story of African instability — all those acronyms, weird names, and a confusing plethora of dates — let’s get to the real story. That story is familiar, too, if you’ve seen Syriana or read a Frederick Forsyth novel, but it is more closely tied to the U.S., because it involves a chess game between the French and the Americans, who have been vying for influence in Madagascar for the past decade. The real losers, per usual, are the people in Madagascar, who have been plunged from their already painful poverty into suffering that is, for many of us, unimaginable.

Only a few years ago, things were quite different. The 34-year-old Rajoelina’s immediate predecessor, a self-made millionaire named Marc Ravalomanana, barreled into the presidency in 2002 as a reform candidate who looked to America rather than France as a model for Madagascar’s future. With the help of two African-American campaign managers, Ravalomanana waged a dynamic campaign against the country’s aging “president for life” Didier Ratsiraka. Ratsiraka, a canny septuagenarian, had started his political life as a radical, anti-French, anti-colonialist Marxist in the 1950s. But with the fall of the Berlin Wall, aid from the Communist world dried up and Ratsiraka increasingly turned to France for support. The results of the 2001 presidential contest between Ratsiraka and Marc Ravalomanana dragged on for months, resulting in thousands of deaths from starvation when road blockades halted the transport of food. Finally, the U.S. put pressure on the country’s leadership, and Ratsiraka bowed out.

At the time, it seemed necessary, or perhaps easier, to cast aside Ratsiraka’s calls for a runoff election, despite uncertainty about the integrity of the voting process. After decades of deepening poverty and escalating corruption, Marc Ravalomanana seemed to represent the country’s best chance to save itself. Young and handsome, a dynamic businessman who was also a Christian, Ravalomanana, like many in his generation, viewed America as a desirable alternative to France. The Malagasy people tend to view America as a more egalitarian country, without France’s entrenched racism, which is especially demeaning when directed at its former colonial subjects. On the advice of his American campaign managers, Ravalomanana encouraged his political supporters to call him “Marc” — a decision that alone was enough to signify that Ravalomanana was an agent of change.

For several years, Ravalomanana seemed to be delivering. Signs appeared that Madagascar, one of the poorest countries in the world, and one of the most culturally isolated, was, for good or ill, joining the global economy. An enormous titanium mine run by RTZ, the world’s largest mining conglomerate, opened in the southeastern part of the country, transforming the sleepy colonial city of Fort Dauphin. A Canadian mining company got approval for a $3.8 billion nickel and cobalt mine in the northeast. Streets were paved, and brand-new Toyota sedans and SUVs began to appear on the streets of the capital city of Antananarivo.

Despite the damage to the environment caused by these two mining projects, Ravalomanana was popular among conservation organizations. In 2003, at a World Parks Congress in Durban held by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, South Africa, Ravalomanana wowed the crowd by promising to more than triple the amount of protected land in Madagascar, from three percent to ten percent of the country’s land. In 2005, he began to make good on his pledge, adding more than 24,000 square acres to the national park system.

But people inside the country told a different story. Ravalomanana was becoming increasingly autocratic. Freedom of the press, never a hallmark of life in Madagascar, actually declined under Ravalomanana. In a minor but revealing move he insisted that the capital’s taxis, mainly 1960s-era Peugeots that had been painted in cheerful colors of scarlet, candy pink, turquoise and green, be repainted a uniform beige. He ordered 100 houses torn down because they were too ugly. It was as if Doug Tompkins, the notorious control freak who built the Esprit clothing empire with his wife Susie, had suddenly taken over a country.

There were more serious manifestations of Ravalomanana’s l’etat c’est moi stance. He refused to put his finances in a blind trust, and bought a $12 million Boeing 737 with public funds to be used as the presidential plane. In December 2008, Western donors cut back aid to the country, citing Ravalomanana’s refusal to disclose financial information.

Ravalomanana’s support within Madagascar eroded further when he agreed to lease nearly half the country’s arable land to the South Korean company Daewoo to grow corn and palm oil. The 99-year contract was estimated to create 45,000 jobs. But in a country that has long been listed among the world’s poorest, the idea that small farmers would lose the ability to produce their own crops was terrifying. Ravalomanana, like many African leaders faced with overwhelming poverty that threatens their popularity, seemed to be embracing an outmoded, neo-colonial approach of development at any price. When Ravalomanana threatened to cut funding for the military, another crucial constituency turned against him.

But according to a British journalist I spoke with in Antananarivo in January, as well as many other veteran observers of politics in the region, the real instigator of the coup was the French oil company Total. Madagascar is thought to contain 6 billion barrels of recoverable oil. In 2008, Total bought a 60 percent share in two of Madagascar’s major oilfields that are controlled by Madagascar Oil, a Houston-based company started in 2004 by a Canadian named Sam Malin.

“Sorry, Suzanne, but I can’t drive you to the airport. I would be too afraid to drive back alone at night,” my friend Marie-Chantal said.

I looked at her, doing a quick calculation in my head before realizing Marie-Chantal* wasn’t making an excuse; she was truly scared.

I had lived in Madagascar for three months in 2001, and, like many writers and artists before me, I left convinced that Madagascar was as close as one could come to Paradise. This was not only because the island’s landscape was phenomenally beautiful, filled with unique plants and animals that made the world’s fourth-largest island a biologist’s fantasy land. It was Madagascar’s culture that floored me. Describing the Malagasy concept of fihavanana as similar to the Golden Rule doesn’t do it justice. Wikipedia’s definition isn’t bad: “Fihavanana is a Malagasy word encompassing the Malagay concept of kinship, friendship, goodwill between beings, both physical and spiritual. The literal translation is difficult to capture, as the Malagasy culture applies the concept in unique ways. Its origin is havana, meaning kin.” But what makes Malagasy culture truly unique in the world is perhaps best described by the proverb “Ny Fihavanana no talohan’ny vola” which, loosely translated, means “the relationship is more important than the money.” It’s that sentiment, even rarer in the 21st century than endangered lemurs, that may be lost forever if Madagascar’s current political turmoil proceeds unchecked.

The island nation’s not-so-slow dissolve began in March 2009, when the mayor of the capital city, a 34-year-old nightclub disc jockey and aristocrat named Andry Rajoelina, seized power in a coup after weeks of demonstrations that many observers believe were at least partially staged by factions within the country’s military.

Over the following year and a half, attempts to forge a power-sharing agreement between Rajoelina and the country’s elected president, Marc Ravalomanana, repeatedly failed after Rajoelina reneged. As the stalemate continued, foreign aid, which accounts for 70 percent of Madagascar’s budget, has withered, and economic growth begun during Ravalomanana’s presidency has stalled.

On Nov. 17, international news services reported that the Malagasy military, which had supported Rajoelina, was attempting a coup against him. A standoff between rival military factions lasted for nearly a week. Yesterday, the faction of the military that supports Rajoelina announced victory, ensuring that Rajoelina’s dictatorship will continue, at least until the next coup.

Before you shake your head, thinking that this is yet another story of African instability — all those acronyms, weird names, and a confusing plethora of dates — let’s get to the real story. That story is familiar, too, if you’ve seen Syriana or read a Frederick Forsyth novel, but it is more closely tied to the U.S., because it involves a chess game between the French and the Americans, who have been vying for influence in Madagascar for the past decade. The real losers, per usual, are the people in Madagascar, who have been plunged from their already painful poverty into suffering that is, for many of us, unimaginable.

Only a few years ago, things were quite different. The 34-year-old Rajoelina’s immediate predecessor, a self-made millionaire named Marc Ravalomanana, barreled into the presidency in 2002 as a reform candidate who looked to America rather than France as a model for Madagascar’s future. With the help of two African-American campaign managers, Ravalomanana waged a dynamic campaign against the country’s aging “president for life” Didier Ratsiraka. Ratsiraka, a canny septuagenarian, had started his political life as a radical, anti-French, anti-colonialist Marxist in the 1950s. But with the fall of the Berlin Wall, aid from the Communist world dried up and Ratsiraka increasingly turned to France for support. The results of the 2001 presidential contest between Ratsiraka and Marc Ravalomanana dragged on for months, resulting in thousands of deaths from starvation when road blockades halted the transport of food. Finally, the U.S. put pressure on the country’s leadership, and Ratsiraka bowed out.

At the time, it seemed necessary, or perhaps easier, to cast aside Ratsiraka’s calls for a runoff election, despite uncertainty about the integrity of the voting process. After decades of deepening poverty and escalating corruption, Marc Ravalomanana seemed to represent the country’s best chance to save itself. Young and handsome, a dynamic businessman who was also a Christian, Ravalomanana, like many in his generation, viewed America as a desirable alternative to France. The Malagasy people tend to view America as a more egalitarian country, without France’s entrenched racism, which is especially demeaning when directed at its former colonial subjects. On the advice of his American campaign managers, Ravalomanana encouraged his political supporters to call him “Marc” — a decision that alone was enough to signify that Ravalomanana was an agent of change.

For several years, Ravalomanana seemed to be delivering. Signs appeared that Madagascar, one of the poorest countries in the world, and one of the most culturally isolated, was, for good or ill, joining the global economy. An enormous titanium mine run by RTZ, the world’s largest mining conglomerate, opened in the southeastern part of the country, transforming the sleepy colonial city of Fort Dauphin. A Canadian mining company got approval for a $3.8 billion nickel and cobalt mine in the northeast. Streets were paved, and brand-new Toyota sedans and SUVs began to appear on the streets of the capital city of Antananarivo.

Despite the damage to the environment caused by these two mining projects, Ravalomanana was popular among conservation organizations. In 2003, at a World Parks Congress in Durban held by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, South Africa, Ravalomanana wowed the crowd by promising to more than triple the amount of protected land in Madagascar, from three percent to ten percent of the country’s land. In 2005, he began to make good on his pledge, adding more than 24,000 square acres to the national park system.

But people inside the country told a different story. Ravalomanana was becoming increasingly autocratic. Freedom of the press, never a hallmark of life in Madagascar, actually declined under Ravalomanana. In a minor but revealing move he insisted that the capital’s taxis, mainly 1960s-era Peugeots that had been painted in cheerful colors of scarlet, candy pink, turquoise and green, be repainted a uniform beige. He ordered 100 houses torn down because they were too ugly. It was as if Doug Tompkins, the notorious control freak who built the Esprit clothing empire with his wife Susie, had suddenly taken over a country.

There were more serious manifestations of Ravalomanana’s l’etat c’est moi stance. He refused to put his finances in a blind trust, and bought a $12 million Boeing 737 with public funds to be used as the presidential plane. In December 2008, Western donors cut back aid to the country, citing Ravalomanana’s refusal to disclose financial information.

Ravalomanana’s support within Madagascar eroded further when he agreed to lease nearly half the country’s arable land to the South Korean company Daewoo to grow corn and palm oil. The 99-year contract was estimated to create 45,000 jobs. But in a country that has long been listed among the world’s poorest, the idea that small farmers would lose the ability to produce their own crops was terrifying. Ravalomanana, like many African leaders faced with overwhelming poverty that threatens their popularity, seemed to be embracing an outmoded, neo-colonial approach of development at any price. When Ravalomanana threatened to cut funding for the military, another crucial constituency turned against him.

But according to a British journalist I spoke with in Antananarivo in January, as well as many other veteran observers of politics in the region, the real instigator of the coup was the French oil company Total. Madagascar is thought to contain 6 billion barrels of recoverable oil. In 2008, Total bought a 60 percent share in two of Madagascar’s major oilfields that are controlled by Madagascar Oil, a Houston-based company started in 2004 by a Canadian named Sam Malin.

“Sorry, Suzanne, but I can’t drive you to the airport. I would be too afraid to drive back alone at night,” my friend Marie-Chantal said.

I looked at her, doing a quick calculation in my head before realizing Marie-Chantal* wasn’t making an excuse; she was truly scared.

I had lived in Madagascar for three months in 2001, and, like many writers and artists before me, I left convinced that Madagascar was as close as one could come to Paradise. This was not only because the island’s landscape was phenomenally beautiful, filled with unique plants and animals that made the world’s fourth-largest island a biologist’s fantasy land. It was Madagascar’s culture that floored me. Describing the Malagasy concept of fihavanana as similar to the Golden Rule doesn’t do it justice. Wikipedia’s definition isn’t bad: “Fihavanana is a Malagasy word encompassing the Malagay concept of kinship, friendship, goodwill between beings, both physical and spiritual. The literal translation is difficult to capture, as the Malagasy culture applies the concept in unique ways. Its origin is havana, meaning kin.” But what makes Malagasy culture truly unique in the world is perhaps best described by the proverb “Ny Fihavanana no talohan’ny vola” which, loosely translated, means “the relationship is more important than the money.” It’s that sentiment, even rarer in the 21st century than endangered lemurs, that may be lost forever if Madagascar’s current political turmoil proceeds unchecked.

The island nation’s not-so-slow dissolve began in March 2009, when the mayor of the capital city, a 34-year-old nightclub disc jockey and aristocrat named Andry Rajoelina, seized power in a coup after weeks of demonstrations that many observers believe were at least partially staged by factions within the country’s military.

Over the following year and a half, attempts to forge a power-sharing agreement between Rajoelina and the country’s elected president, Marc Ravalomanana, repeatedly failed after Rajoelina reneged. As the stalemate continued, foreign aid, which accounts for 70 percent of Madagascar’s budget, has withered, and economic growth begun during Ravalomanana’s presidency has stalled.

On Nov. 17, international news services reported that the Malagasy military, which had supported Rajoelina, was attempting a coup against him. A standoff between rival military factions lasted for nearly a week. Yesterday, the faction of the military that supports Rajoelina announced victory, ensuring that Rajoelina’s dictatorship will continue, at least until the next coup.

Before you shake your head, thinking that this is yet another story of African instability — all those acronyms, weird names, and a confusing plethora of dates — let’s get to the real story. That story is familiar, too, if you’ve seen Syriana or read a Frederick Forsyth novel, but it is more closely tied to the U.S., because it involves a chess game between the French and the Americans, who have been vying for influence in Madagascar for the past decade. The real losers, per usual, are the people in Madagascar, who have been plunged from their already painful poverty into suffering that is, for many of us, unimaginable.

Only a few years ago, things were quite different. The 34-year-old Rajoelina’s immediate predecessor, a self-made millionaire named Marc Ravalomanana, barreled into the presidency in 2002 as a reform candidate who looked to America rather than France as a model for Madagascar’s future. With the help of two African-American campaign managers, Ravalomanana waged a dynamic campaign against the country’s aging “president for life” Didier Ratsiraka. Ratsiraka, a canny septuagenarian, had started his political life as a radical, anti-French, anti-colonialist Marxist in the 1950s. But with the fall of the Berlin Wall, aid from the Communist world dried up and Ratsiraka increasingly turned to France for support. The results of the 2001 presidential contest between Ratsiraka and Marc Ravalomanana dragged on for months, resulting in thousands of deaths from starvation when road blockades halted the transport of food. Finally, the U.S. put pressure on the country’s leadership, and Ratsiraka bowed out.

At the time, it seemed necessary, or perhaps easier, to cast aside Ratsiraka’s calls for a runoff election, despite uncertainty about the integrity of the voting process. After decades of deepening poverty and escalating corruption, Marc Ravalomanana seemed to represent the country’s best chance to save itself. Young and handsome, a dynamic businessman who was also a Christian, Ravalomanana, like many in his generation, viewed America as a desirable alternative to France. The Malagasy people tend to view America as a more egalitarian country, without France’s entrenched racism, which is especially demeaning when directed at its former colonial subjects. On the advice of his American campaign managers, Ravalomanana encouraged his political supporters to call him “Marc” — a decision that alone was enough to signify that Ravalomanana was an agent of change.

For several years, Ravalomanana seemed to be delivering. Signs appeared that Madagascar, one of the poorest countries in the world, and one of the most culturally isolated, was, for good or ill, joining the global economy. An enormous titanium mine run by RTZ, the world’s largest mining conglomerate, opened in the southeastern part of the country, transforming the sleepy colonial city of Fort Dauphin. A Canadian mining company got approval for a $3.8 billion nickel and cobalt mine in the northeast. Streets were paved, and brand-new Toyota sedans and SUVs began to appear on the streets of the capital city of Antananarivo.

Despite the damage to the environment caused by these two mining projects, Ravalomanana was popular among conservation organizations. In 2003, at a World Parks Congress in Durban held by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, South Africa, Ravalomanana wowed the crowd by promising to more than triple the amount of protected land in Madagascar, from three percent to ten percent of the country’s land. In 2005, he began to make good on his pledge, adding more than 24,000 square acres to the national park system.

But people inside the country told a different story. Ravalomanana was becoming increasingly autocratic. Freedom of the press, never a hallmark of life in Madagascar, actually declined under Ravalomanana. In a minor but revealing move he insisted that the capital’s taxis, mainly 1960s-era Peugeots that had been painted in cheerful colors of scarlet, candy pink, turquoise and green, be repainted a uniform beige. He ordered 100 houses torn down because they were too ugly. It was as if Doug Tompkins, the notorious control freak who built the Esprit clothing empire with his wife Susie, had suddenly taken over a country.

There were more serious manifestations of Ravalomanana’s l’etat c’est moi stance. He refused to put his finances in a blind trust, and bought a $12 million Boeing 737 with public funds to be used as the presidential plane. In December 2008, Western donors cut back aid to the country, citing Ravalomanana’s refusal to disclose financial information.

Ravalomanana’s support within Madagascar eroded further when he agreed to lease nearly half the country’s arable land to the South Korean company Daewoo to grow corn and palm oil. The 99-year contract was estimated to create 45,000 jobs. But in a country that has long been listed among the world’s poorest, the idea that small farmers would lose the ability to produce their own crops was terrifying. Ravalomanana, like many African leaders faced with overwhelming poverty that threatens their popularity, seemed to be embracing an outmoded, neo-colonial approach of development at any price. When Ravalomanana threatened to cut funding for the military, another crucial constituency turned against him.

But according to a British journalist I spoke with in Antananarivo in January, as well as many other veteran observers of politics in the region, the real instigator of the coup was the French oil company Total. Madagascar is thought to contain 6 billion barrels of recoverable oil. In 2008, Total bought a 60 percent share in two of Madagascar’s major oilfields that are controlled by Madagascar Oil, a Houston-based company started in 2004 by a Canadian named Sam Malin.

A high-roller with a 13th-century castle in Scotland who is married to a former Bond girl, Malin describes himself as a geophysicist. He has invested in energy development, including coal, throughout the Indian Ocean region. Avana, another of his companies, also holds licenses for coal development in the Seychelles and uranium and natural gas fields in Madagascar. Malin has made a minor effort to portray himself as a green entrepreneur: Avana is planting jatropha to be used as biofuel and snapping up ecotourism properties in Madagascar, and a photo on Avana’s website shows a smiling Malin with a lemur on his shoulder.

Yet the type of oil sands development Madagascar Oil will be operating with Total is particularly damaging to the environment, resulting in two to four times the greenhouse gas emissions of ordinary oil development and causing wide swathes of land surrounding the oilfields to become unsuitable for farming. Malin appears to be unfazed by the country’s recent travails: on Nov. 8, Madagascar Oil, which has been reportedly been valued at $1 billion, announced its intention to field an initial public offering of its stock.

Another French company suspected of encouraging the coup is Areva, which promotes itself as a supplier of clean energy in the U.S. but is under fire from French human rights organizations for activities at its uranium mines in Niger. The company recently signed a deal to mine for uranium in the Congo, after its CEO accompanied French President Nicolas Sarkozy on a state visit to the DRC in 2009.

No smoking gun has been found linking Total or any other company to the military coup, but in the month that I spent both in the capital and in the provinces, Total’s involvement in the coup was talked about as if it were common knowledge. After a brief hiatus of American influence, the country once again seemed to be falling under French rule — colonialism in all but name.  The reversion seemed well underway when a Malagasy newspaper reported that the national airline was going to replace its aging Boeing aircraft with French-made Airbus jets.

Certainly France has been notoriously unwilling to let go of its former colonies, as a matter of both economics and amour propre. At times, French neo-colonialism has shaded into the absurd. Case in point: the French mercenary soldier Bob Denard’s repeated invasion of the Comoros Islands, where as de facto ruler in the 1970s, he converted to Islam, married half a dozen nubile Comorans, and spent his days on the beach at the main island’s luxury hotel.

The Comoros are not far from Madagascar in the Indian Ocean, which the French have long regarded as their personal playground, the antidote to their rigid, stratified society. Gauguin aspired to travel to Madagascar, but settled for Tahiti, and Baudelaire’s poem “A Former Life,” which includes the well-known line, “luxe, calme et volupté,” — not to mention the poet’s image of being tended by a “naked, perfumed slave” — is based on his gap year travels around the region. French men show little compunction about taking advantage of the exchange rate, as it were, in a country where the sexual tourism industry dates back centuries. The French also left a legacy of haute cuisine.  When I visited in January, Marie-Chantal and I took an American couple we had met to one of the capital’s best restaurants. It is called, wittily, Kudeta — pronounced exactly the way you imagine.

While Madagascar’s recent unrest may have been encouraged by the 21st century version of French imperialism, the anarchy took on a life of its own as military officers began reaping the rewards of despotism. Since the coup, impoverished villagers have been paid $2.50 a day to illegally cut tropical hardwoods worth $4,000 to $5,000 a ton in Masoala and Marojejy national parks, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and the Mananara Biosphere Reserve. Profits from the illegal logging, estimated at $100 million, were reportedly being funneled to the country’s military leaders.

On March 16, the World Wildlife Fund called for a boycott of rosewood from Madagascar. “We have the potential for losing hundreds if not thousands of species. There are still new species being discovered: plants, birds, chameleons, lemurs, tortoises that we might not yet know about, that could be on the brink of extinction,” said Niall O’Connor of the World Wildlife Fund. O’Connor warned that Madagascar could become the next Haiti: a country mired in a downward spiral produced by the synergistic effects of dire poverty and environmental collapse.

Clearly, this is not solely the fault of outside forces. In the hopeful days of 2002, Marc Ravalomanana’s presidency seemed to promise a bright future for a country that, despite its poverty, prided itself on its unique culture. But Ravalomanana not only overreached; he was never in the club. For centuries Madagascar was a kingdom with a powerful aristocracy. It is no coincidence that Marc Ravalamonana was attracted to the American sphere of influence. He was an American-style success, a poor boy educated by Protestant missionaries who started a commercial empire by selling homemade yogurt off the back of his bicycle with the help of his wife. Even my friend Marie-Chantal, no fan of the current regime, complained that Marc spoke poor French and had crude manners.

But Marie-Chantal is equally unimpressed with Andry Rajoelina. She feels that his aristocratic background has given him a sense of entitlement far out of proportion to his abilities. Although grudgingly impressed with the canniness of veteran Didier Ratsiraka, now living quite well in France on the personal fortune he accumulated while president, Marie-Chantal has little respect for Madagascar’s political class in general, and despairs that the country’s educational system has not inculcated an understanding of democracy.

Yet Rajoelina’s coup, the first in Madagascar’s history, was immediately followed by counter-demonstrations attended by people who objected not so much to Rajoelina himself but to the method by which he took power. Despite this demonstration of commitment to the electoral process, Madagascar seems headed towards a free fall that will end either in anarchy or totalitarianism.

The worst-case scenario for Madagascar is that the military, which now seems to have turned on Andry Rajoelina, will run the country. In her most recent email, Marie-Chantal wrote that the military now seem to have allegiance to no one but themselves.

“These guys are all billionnaires (sic) now with all the money they got from rosewood traffic,” she wrote. “But you know, appetite comes with eating. Enough is never enough when you know that there are still a lot to be had and that your former friends continue to eat without you.”

The night I left Madagascar, I had a conversation with Marie-Chantal that made me realize how much will be lost if Madagascar continues on its present course. It was around ten o’clock, and we had been watching a movie in her den, killing time before I had to leave for the airport.

Marie-Chantal was telling me about the children whose school fees she is paying. Suddenly we were talking politics again, speculating about the country’s future.  Marie-Chantal looked at me in the way that someone does when they need you to pay attention. Her gaze was focused, almost severe, yet her eyes seemed unutterably sad. She reminded me about fihavanana, treating others as you wish to be treated, as a whole human being.

“That is what I think we are losing, Suzanne,” she told me. “That will never come back.”

I left her house for the airport shortly before midnight. I had never been afraid in Madagascar before. But I called her on my cell phone for reassurance as I endured a tooth-gritting journey with two men, one a taxi driver known to Marie-Chantal and her staff, the other a “guard,” whose diminutive stature and wooden nightstick failed to reassure as the rattletrap Peugeot taxi plied the deserted streets of the capital in the dark.

* To ensure Marie-Chantal’s security, I am not using her real name.

First published in The Huffington Post, Nov. 24, 2010

This year, my husband almost voted.

Not big news, you say.  But in its own way, it was.

When Gabe first told me that he had never voted in an election, I had the usual American good girl reaction: I was shocked.  “But it’s your civic duty!” I remember saying.

Then I learned more about Kenyan politics.

As a kid growing up in the U.S., the dignified mien of Jomo Kenyatta was the face of Kenya.  “That other guy” – Kenyatta’s successor, Daniel arap Moi – well, not so good.

As it turns out, pretty much all the politicians in Kenya are not so good, including Jomo Kenyatta, who oversaw the adoption of a constitution that, in effect, gave him control of every piece of land not specifically deeded to someone else.  Kenyatta seen his opportunities and he took ‘em, much like highly quotable Alexander Plunkett Greene of Tammany Hall.  Kenyatta handed out prime parcels to his supporters, and incidentally, his family.  It is, perhaps, not entirely coincidental that a hotel on one of Lamu’s more stunning beaches is part of the Heritage Hotels chain owned by the Kenyatta family.  Uhuru Kenyatta, Jomo’s son, whose name means “Freedom” is currently Kenya’s finance minister.  If I owned that primo piece of real estate (not to mention belonged to a family believed to own half a million acres and the Brookside Dairy) I’d feel pretty damn free myself.

On the Kenyan coast, this system has, of late, devolved into speculators paying off Ministry of Lands functionaries to rush through paperwork on sales before construction of the giganto new port drives prices up even further.  They sell the land to hoteliers, or wealthy foreigners who want to build vacation homes.  Even at today’s inflated prices, beachfront land in Kenya is a bargain, when you compare it to land in California, Florida, or the Cote d’Azur.  And the waiters work cheap.

So it is perhaps not so surprising that many observers feel conflicts over land lay at the heart of the near-civil war sparked by the presidential election of 2008.  The events of 2008 and their historical roots were best described by Richard Dowden in the Guardian and Binyavanga Wainaina in The New York Times.  After things settled down, in addition to instituting a power-sharing agreement, the country embarked on constitutional reform.  This included major reforms to the country’s land policy.

Kenya deserves credit for doing something considered politically impossible in the United States: changing its constitution to reflect the fact that history marches on.  If the U.S. didn’t contain so many fundamentalists who consider our constitution the equivalent of the word of God, we might change the way senators are elected.  Think about it!  We could have a functional 21^st century legislature, instead of a system that gives the same representation to 20 million people in New York and just over half a million in Alaska in the Senate – and the equivalent of veto power to every single senator.

We might learn something from Kenya, where the new constitution, which passed in August, evoked optimism that probably hasn’t been since independence.

One of major reforms instituted in tandem with the constitution is a new law that codifies the rights of indigenous people to land.  The new National Land Act, at the very least, creates hurdles for questionable land deals.

It’s unlikely that the culture of crooked land speculation will disappear from Kenya’s Ministry of Lands overnight, but people have been running scared.  Things are getting truly crazy on the coast – there is even buzz about degazetting the Dodori National Reserve to sell the land off to developers.

Dodori remains protected, for now, but there’s little doubt that corrupt land deals will continue.  Even if indigenous people gain rights to their traditional lands, many will be unable to resist the temptation to sell to the same inbred British colonialist scions they decry, not to mention the vulgar Italians and arrogant French.  (They hate the Americans for other reasons but not as many of us buy property in Kenya.)

And still.  And still.  The new constitution provides a platform for greater equality, and that is truly something.   Now maybe the Kenyan government can stop treating its own people like dogs.  Case in point: I spent my last day in Kenya in CID headquarters listening to a bureaucrat screaming at my husband in what appeared to be a deliberate effort to humiliate him in front of me.

My husband’s crime?  Essentially, applying for his certificate of good conduct in Mombasa instead of Nairobi. This yellow, rectangular piece of paper, eight inches wide and about five inches from top to bottom, functions as proof that he has never been arrested.  Kenyans need a certificate of good conduct to do many things: drive a taxi, work as a tour guide, and, in our case, apply for a visa to enter the United States.

Gabriel applied for his certificate of good conduct on Lamu in March.  Usually it takes three to four months for the certificates to arrive on the island, so nobody bothers you if you work without one.  In early June, we went to Mombasa with Gabe’s twin boys to get them passports and take a break from rainy season.  He applied again for his certificate of good conduct.  We naively thought that in Kenya’s second-largest city, things might move faster than if we waited for the certificates to arrive at our little backwater.

Why not make a family vacation of it?  Or so I thought.  I insisted on staying at one of the tacky “resort” hotels on the beach.  Having missed out on motherhood during the usual time frame, I am determined to embrace every Disney cliché.  To wit: I bought Gabriel’s boys, Jamil and Jamal, sippy cups when I arrived on Lamu in February.  Shopping on Lamu is limited, to put it mildly, so when I found the purple plastic cups in the store I couldn’t resist.  The boys are five-and-a-half, and, as I had uneasily suspected, too old for sippy cups.  The Montessori method is very much in play on Lamu, and children are quickly taught to take care of themselves.  The boys are accustomed to carefully but efficiently drinking from normal glasses. They found the sippy cups ingenious and liked the pictures of little boys wearing nerdy spectacles that were on their sides, but rather quickly abandoned them in favor of more rapid methods of liquid delivery.

Gabriel wanted to stay in the city.  We compromised, and stayed in the city for three hellish days during which the boys insisted on accompanying Gabriel to various government offices because they were afraid to miss anything in the big city.  As the days wore on, Gabriel grew increasingly cranky, while I took care of extending my visa in relative peace, even managing to avoid an attempt by a laconic male official to soak me for 2,000 shillings, about $26.50, for a fee that was almost certainly imaginary since the woman official I bonded with later accepted the stamp the officials on Lamu had given me for a mere 200 shillings, with no mention of an additional charge.

I am happy to report, with I told you so smugness, that the beach hotel was a roaring success, as far as the boys were concern.  (Even better than the sippy cups.)  The hotel had a multitude of pools, which the boys could push each other into repeatedly, and a day care center with two attendants who did a great job of entertaining them when they had exhausted me.  (The day care girls were called “the animation team,” indicating that I may not be the only one whose idea of responsible child rearing is a liberal dose of Bambi and Pinocchio.  Both of which the boys love, btw.  Almost as much as they love Kiss Me Kate, which makes sense if you’ve seen that 1957 musical — it looks like a cartoon and the dancing is great.)

Gabriel expressed amazement that the hotel 1) had a day care center, and 2) that the boys liked it so much.  “Why didn’t you tell me?” he kept asking.  “I did,” I would reply.  Then he would point out that I didn’t mention the day care center specifically.

Whatever.  The trip ended up costing about a thousand dollars, a high price, as it turned out, since apparently the authorities in Mombasa paid no attention whatsoever to Gabe’s application.  Someone in the office, however, did evince interest in a bribe. Gabe missed most of the tacky but fun hotel experience because he was in the city having discussions with this alleged fixer, which infuriated me, since we were supposed to be having our pricey “family vacation.”  Every conversation turned out to be fruitless, since Gabe refused to give the employee any money until he produced the certificate.

Perhaps it was this fellow’s doing, but when Gabe returned to Mombasa three weeks later, there was still no police certificate.  A few days before I was scheduled to fly back to the U.S., Gabe took yet another bumpy, interminable bus ride to Mombasa.  He arrived on a Sunday night, optimistic that the certificate would greet him the following day.  Monday was the day the certificates arrive from CID headquarters in Nairobi, where they are printed and issued before filtering out to the provinces.

It had been approximately four months since Gabe applied for the certificate.  Our visa application had been delayed two months while we waited for it, since the visa for a husband requires the certificate at an earlier stage than the fiancé visa, and I hadn’t realized this.  I suppose it would be too easy for the U.S. to streamline visa applications, and institute some semblance of consistency and coherence.  But that’s another whinge.

On Monday, the “big boss” as Gabriel called him, was not in the Mombasa CID office.  Nobody else could open the packet.

I was reminded of the film Mountains of the Moon, by Bob Rafelson, which contained a rather unflattering portrait of a tribal chief whose power was so absolute it verged on the kinky.  Rafelson’s goal in making the film was to provide an accurate picture of the practices in the region at the time of Sir Richard Burton’s exploration of the Nile.  Somehow this came out looking even more racist that bwana movies of an earlier era, although Patrick Bergin rocked as Sir Richard Burton.

I also was reminded of one of my students, an actual princess from Benin (albeit one who watches MTV) who wrote an essay about feeling somewhat uncomfortable as her subjects prostrated themselves before her in a village of huts made of mud and blood.

Africa, they say, is more hierarchical than the U.S.  In-fucking-deed.

When the big man returned on Tuesday, he gave Gabe the depressing news that the certificate had not arrived.  Gabe was surprised.  He has loyalty to the coast and feels that these are his people.  I was not.

Gabriel, who hates traveling to Nairobi, got on the bus to meet me there.  He arrived around midnight, smoked a cigarette and collapsed.  The next day, we went to the CID headquarters. This is the Kenya Police Criminal Investigation Division.

Helen Mirren, or her Kenyan equivalent, was not in evidence.

Sadly.

As soon as we arrived, both Gabe and our friendly cab driver David, insisted that I make myself scarce.  They told me that if anyone saw a white person, they’d insist on a bribe.  Or, rather, a bigger bribe.  I trotted over to the police canteen and attempted to drink a cup of tea made mostly of hot, rancid-smelling milk.  Before the tea had cooled sufficiently to drink, my phone rang. It was Gabriel telling me to come to the parking lot.

It was too soon for good news.

An ex-boyfriend once called me the Little Stevedore because I walked so fast and purposefully, one of several questionable tics one acquires growing up in New York.  This habit gets more pronounced when I am hysterical. Gabe must have seen indignation in my stride, because he put up his hand.

“Calm down,” he said.

“What happened?”

“Calm down?  You promise?”

I nodded mutely. He wouldn’t tell me anything until I proved to him that I wasn’t going to get myself arrested for marching into police headquarters like a pissed off shopper on the Upper East Side.   He watched while I took a few breaths, smiled as if I actually did yoga instead of just wearing the cool Prana pants, and, once again, promised to behave myself.

Then he and David asked if I would go to talk to the police official.  I’m still not sure why they asked me.  They said it was because I was a woman, but I think they were being polite.  I think it was because I was a woman, an American, and, yes, white.

That was my take on it when the official growled a bit, but relented when I told him that I was leaving for the U.S. first thing in the morning and desperately needed this certificate to complete our application so I could send it to the U.S. authorities as soon as I arrived.

He told us to come back in the afternoon. Giving it to us on the spot no doubt would have diminished his authority.  Perish the thought.

This wasn’t bad news for David, who earned yet another fare, taking us to do some errands, and then returning us to the CID headquarters at the appointed hour of 3 in the afternoon.

Upon our return, the official, a middle-aged man with a large head and a dignified mien (like Jomo!) acted like he’d never seen us before and told us to come back the next day.

But, but….I reminded him of our situation, and he once again relented.  He sent us to wait in another room, in front of a high desk.  Soon others joined us.  Apparently we were on line to see the man inside the adjoining office. He was wiry and bald, with a chiseled face and dark-rimmed eyes.  Gabe’s paperwork was in his “In” box.  He took it out, scanned it, then waved it in the air.

“This says you applied on June 29.  Not June 3!  You’re lying!  Why are you lying?  Don’t lie to me!” he shouted.

I looked over at Gabe.  He wasn’t quite cowering.  Not quite.

I started talking.  Gabe gave me a look.  I shut up.

The guy berated us for a few more minutes, shouting, “It takes four days to get the certificate.  Four days!  That is the law.  That is the regulation.  We follow the regulation!”

Yeah, right.  If you apply in Nairobi instead of the provinces and kick some major bureaucrat ass.

Then he told us to get out of there, because the certificate was ready and we shouldn’t have been in his office, anyway.

We staggered out, picked up the certificate at the high desk where we probably should have been in the first place, and counted ourselves lucky.

And that story, kids, is why I don’t give my husband shit for failing to vote.  Gabriel’s grandmother, who died a little over a year ago, was head of the Lamu Women’s Political Caucus in the 1970s.  She had eight children by six different men, owned her own house, and ran a thriving business.

I respect her for all of that.

Since her heyday, Kenya has become perceived as one of the most corrupt countries in the world, ranked closely with Zimbabwe and Russia.  Transparency International has declared the Kenya Police the most corrupt institution in East Africa.

Just as an example, the Minister of Education recently published an editorial promoting 1) nuclear power and 2) training for medical technicians in cancer treatment (the connection apparently eluding him), and proposed dropping funding for the humanities and “soft” sciences.

A few weeks later, he was accused of being involved in a major land grab.

If it had been me, I would have voted for the new constitution.  But I understand why Gabe didn’t.  He’s waiting for a Kenyan politician to earn his respect.

That doesn’t mean lying and posturing for the benefit of a white woman from America in some unholy combination of chiefly bullying and colonial servility.

It does mean treating your own people with dignity.

And that hasn’t happened yet.

The long rains are ending in Kenya, and Shela village, the tiny outpost of Islamic fundamentalism and Eurotrash, is open for business.

Blinking like a naked mole rat in the sun, I awkwardly greet people I didn’t remember that I knew, often feeling surprisingly warm toward them.  Intimate conversations spring up like volunteer plants; unexpected and alive.

Before the rains, I had met a delicate-featured, very pretty Ugandan girl of twenty-seven who is living with a much older British man.  I’ll call her Honor (I’m terrible at creating pseudonyms because people’s actual names always seem inevitable to me once I know them, but let’s say Honor.  I have my reasons.)

People from Uganda are so different from Kenyans.  They have exquisite manners, good conversation, and approachability rather than aggressiveness.  Honor is no exception.  Today when I ran into her, we talked – really talked – for the first time.  She is opening a hair salon on the first floor of her lover’s house and she is excited, although he is insisting that she pay for all of her hairdressing equipment herself, which means she will use a basin and a dining room chair for now.

I wonder why he is not buying her professional equipment.  Perhaps he feels that she will have more of a stake in succeeding if she builds up her own capital.  As she explains, her eyes look mildly hurt, but she says it is fair enough.  His house is in a fashionable place, and there is not a single hairdresser here, so she should do well.

“I have a lot to do,” she said.  “I hope it will work here, and then maybe I can go to Nairobi.”

She has ambition, and responsibility: an eleven-year-old daughter who lives with her, and a mother to support in northern Uganda.

How do we end up talking about men?  Who knows?  That is what women do.  Oh, yes.  She mentions among her ambitions, “and I would like to get married – of course,” she says, shyly.

I look at her questioningly, wondering if she wants to marry her English lover, a man I’ll call Tom.

“It’s hard,” I say.  “Marriage in general is hard, I think.  If it works, it’s great.  But having your freedom can be great, too.”

Why do I find myself mouthing these horrible platitudes about marriage?   They may be true, but who cares?  I’m hardly an expert.  I have been married for less than two years, occasionally happy, but mostly desperately ambivalent.

Married people feel nostalgic for their freedom and single people think they will die of loneliness in their apartments, nobody will know, and the Alsatian will feast upon their bodies, pace Bridget Jones.  No wonder Facebook gives people the choice of listing their status as married, divorced, single, widowed, or “it’s complicated.”

Whatever one’s legal status, complicated is probably the most accurate. That’s especially true in relationships between Africans and Westerners, who must deal with “cultural differences” including diametrically opposed ways of dealing with both money and love, Freud’s Big Two when it comes to measuring happiness.

Recovering from my devolution into marital cliché, I ask her about Tom, her older British lover.  For some reason, I feel I can do this without offending her, and I am right.

“Oh, he’s married,” she says simply.

“To someone else?”

“Yes.  For a long time.  And they have three children.  But there isn’t love between them.  They’ve been…”  she makes a gesture of separation with her hands.  “At the same time, they are married.”

Honor is clear-eyed about the situation, a sign of maturity.

“So?”

“Tom has been very good to me.  He’s helped me.”

Right.  The attitude is one I’ve heard before: a Kenyan woman I met on a plane told me that my husband should appreciate the fact that I’m helping him establish himself in America and stay with me, and love me for it.  The idea of marriage as reciprocal obligation and survival aid is appalling to Westerners, particularly Americans.  But the American idea that romantic love and benefiting from one’s association with a lover (“using” them) are mutually exclusive, may, in fact, be wrong, or partly wrong.  I am beginning to see many relationships as monetized in one way or another, yet I remain doggedly, romantically, American, and so I reflexively ask:

“Do you love him?”

I have seen Tom several times, a small, thin man in his sixties with skin cancer scars on his face.  The first time I saw him with Honor’s 11-year-old daughter at one of the shops, I felt alarmed, wondering if he was a pedophile.  While he’s not a pedophile, given Honor’s smooth, burnished skin, her intelligent, young eyes, and her vulnerability, he’s not far from it.  Of course, he is only one of half a dozen men I know who are in this situation, and as my African husband has pointed out, I am older and richer than he is, too.

“I do, but….” She gestures again, as if to say, this isn’t permanent.

Just then, her cell phone rings, one of those tunes that can be programmed to identify a specific caller.  Her face lights up with a happiness that can’t be faked, or bought.

“That’s him now,” she says, reaching for her phone.

“You love him,” I say teasingly.

And we laugh.

Love is, indeed, complicated.

When Hurricane Katrina hit, Jerry Falwell thundered that the wrath of God was punishing New Orleans for its sins.

As someone who witnessed God’s punishment first-hand while writing a book on Hurricane Katrina, not to mention as a card-carrying hedonist (although usually too tired these days) I asked Falwell to tell us who the bad guy is this time.  He hasn’t answered yet, but a number of my progressive friends (translation: “liberal” to you Sarah Palin types out there) blame the amorphous “us.”  Anyone who drives a car, takes a plane, uses a plastic bag.

Bullshit.  Typical left-wing masochism.  The BP oil spill isn’t my fault.  It isn’t your fault either (probably).  One simply cannot be a fully functioning member of U.S. society (or society almost anywhere else) and be carbon neutral, unless you’ve got oodles of cash to sequester carbon in Brazil or Cote d’Ivoire, but even then, your money is probably going straight into a kleptocrat’s pocket.

If it’s not our fault, whose is it?  The oil company’s?  Hardly.

A corporation is like a scorpion in the old story.  Do not be like the frog and believe the scorpion when it promises it will ferry you across the river without stinging you.  It is the scorpion’s nature to sting.  It is the corporation’s nature to adopt the strategy that will maximize profits without regard for other concerns.

Much as I love the place, I blame Louisiana.  Tip O’Neill’s maxim never goes out of date:  All politics are local.  In the U.S., whether oil companies get to drill offshore is largely determined by state politics.  Sure, Congress passes legislation on offshore drilling, but the nature of that legislation is often determined by battles at the state level. Example: Californians have successfully stopped oil drilling off their coast for decades, since the Santa Barbara oil spill.

Louisiana is the anti-California.  A few years ago, I drove down the meandering road to Grand Isle, the southernmost barrier island in Louisiana, where many reporters are now surveying the damage from the BP spill.  When I arrived at my cheap motel, I squinted at dark, hulking shapes on the margin of sea and sky.  I naively asked the motel manager what they were.  “They’re jobs,” she said.

Maybe, but not for fishermen.  Louisiana has given the oil industry every possible incentive, not just to drill for oil, but to damage the environment with impunity.  For more than a decade, the state has failed to hold oil companies accountable for the environmental damage they have caused to the wetlands south of New Orleans — wetlands already headed for destruction before the BP oil spill.  Just a reminder: the country’s third-largest wetlands have been disappearing at the rate of a football field an hour and one of the major causes is erosion caused by oil company canals used to transport oil from the Gulf of Mexico.  The Louisiana bayous are the cradle for a huge proportion of the nation’s shrimp and fish, and let’s not forget that Louisiana is a major flyway.

Has the state of Louisiana asked Big Oil to pay for restoring the wetlands?  Hardly.  The pathetically corrupt state of Louisiana even gives oil companies a huge tax break, impoverishing the state’s abysmal and desperately needy school system.  (A great strategy for ensuring that Louisiana doesn’t develop an affluent, educated middle class who might force the oil companies to clean up their act.)

Yet in Nigeria, where pollution from the oil industry is admittedly worse, people have been willing to risk their lives to stop the unregulated drilling, the devastating spills, the air pollution from refineries.  According to a 2006 report (quoted in a great article in The Guardian) by the World Wildlife Fund, the World Conservation Union and representatives from the Nigerian federal government and the Nigerian Conservation Foundation, up to 1.5 million tons of oil – 50 times the pollution unleashed in the Exxon Valdez tanker disaster in Alaska – has been spilled in the Niger Delta over the past half century. Last year Amnesty International calculated that the equivalent of at least 9 million barrels of oil was spilled and accused the oil companies of a human rights outrage.

What goes around, comes around.  I don’t say we should blame the people of Louisiana for the BP oil spill.  But we need to hold them responsible for pandering to the oil industry.  The pro-oil attitude in Louisiana is so pervasive that no political player who wants to be taken seriously dares to suggest that the oil companies should pay for their — yes, Jerry, I’m using the s word — sins.

Nobody’s perfect, but there’s always that shot at redemption.  Before we had a come to Jesus talk a few years ago my husband ate the meat of endangered sea turtles — this is a traditional food on his island and he was only dimly aware that they might be endangered.  I was surprised — no, shocked — that he actually stopped eating turtle after I explained the situation to him.

A few nights ago, as we walked home along the shoreline in the dark, I told him that my only real article of faith is that it is immoral to drive a species into extinction.  I can’t find a logical reason for this passionate belief, and wondered aloud if my conviction was merely the writer’s compulsive need to fix time, not to lose beauty, even the more pedestrian compulsion to simplyhave the information.

I don’t know, frankly.  All motives are suspect.  The only time I don’t question them is when I’m threading my kayak through the drowned roots of cypress trees and I’m startled by the sight of eagles.

This advice from Flaubert has been translated as: Be regular and orderly in your life like a bourgeois, so that you may be violent and original in your work.

I’m fonder of the punchier version that reads: One must live like a bourgeois but think like a demigod.

Either way, this has always struck me as good advice for writers. Certain kinds of writers.

Not my kind.

I have been bored before but never like this, living on a small island during the rainy season when it stubbornly refuses to rain.

Even my husband can’t stand it. This is a guy who revels in boredom, or wallows in it, depending on your point of view. He grew up here on Lamu, a small island off the coast of Kenya where there are no cars, only donkeys and fishing dhows. When he is out of his comfort zone, which means when he is in Tucson or Dakar, or basically anywhere but Kenya, unless he’s working long hours and going out to dinner a lot, he sits and stares and smoke cigarettes, not merely for hours, but for days at a time. Sometimes there might be a music video in the background. This behavior, as you can imagine, alarms me.

In the U.S., we call it depression. He calls it meditating. In the 1700s, a period I’ve researched for the novel I’m working on, slave traders called it “the lethargy” the near-catatonic state of captured Africans who were convinced they were going to die, possibly by being eaten by their captors.

Self-protection, I suppose. Not my style. When I’m out of my element, I do something else: I get hyper. When I can’t find half a dozen projects to take on, I resort to being a drama queen.

My husband and I have both figured this out. We have also decided that the price of being amused in this way is too high, so we have an unspoken pact to avoid fights.

I need something else to do. I must resort to actually working.

In my current painfully bored state, I am realizing how many writers, including myself, are prevented from writing, or writing more significant books, because we cannot tolerate boredom. I have very dear friends who either can’t finish their books or never attempt a major novel, because they are simply too “bright.” These people have the kind of darting minds that require constant stimulation.

I’ve grown weary of the American tendency to pathologize what is often merely eccentricity, but I don’t think anyone could argue with the supposition that the usual artistic maladies: narcissism, bipolar disorder, ADHD, and, more metaphysically, the archetypal desperation to outrun mortality, can act as both spurs and hindrances to art.

Narcissism may be the most productive disorder for artists: it requires no medication (and indeed, is incurable) and keeps the focus squarely on oneself. (Think John Updike, who writes with rueful self-knowledge about his narcissism in his later books, notably the underrated Until the End of Time.) Bipolar disorder, the classic diagnosis for artists, is both a blessing and a curse, as we know. Attention deficits, which may not be a disease but merely a genetic adaptation, according to the farmer vs. hunter theory I rather like, are similarly double-edged, but lack the drama of the manic-depressive.

Perhaps the trouble with many of us is that we are intelligent enough to impress certain people, but not of sufficient genius to finish writing a book like War and Peace, Disgrace, or The Infinite Jest in a reasonable amount of time. (I’m taking Infinite Jest on faith; I’ve never had the patience for DFW’s profuse language in anything longer than a magazine article, which probably tells you something about my brain chemistry.)

“I like the donkeys, too, but they wouldn’t be enough for me,” wrote one of my friends, a novelist, journalist, poet, and professor (you get the picture) in response to me rhapsodizing about life on Lamu this March, when the Peponi Hotel was still open and I could spend the day writing, and adjourn at sunset for drinks on the verandah.

Another superbly talented writer I know hasn’t finished her memoir because of men, houses, and the occasional drinkie poo. She’s currently in Istanbul. Can’t complain about that. Except I wonder if she’ll ever complete her book, which I loved and thought was a serious contribution to literature written by women, a stunningly beautiful amalgam of Bridget Jones, Rubyfruit Jungle, and Jane Eyre.

There is a reason these people are my friends. We amuse each other. We understand each other. We are alike, or at least like-minded.

Like an alcoholic who must fight the impulse to drink every day, I must fight the compulsion to do something else.

I walked on the beach today, cursing the high waves, but leaping into them to get my heart rate up. I thought about going somewhere else. In the water, I composed an email to my mother, who is seventy-eight and in the process of pissing away all her money. I thought about a memoir I might write someday about my parents, called The Villains. The title, of course, is ironic, referring to the necessity of holding one’s parents accountable, and the peril of blaming them.

I thought of the name for this blog entry. The Efficacy of Boredom.

Under normal circumstances, I cannot think of titles.

I realized that the day before, when I had walked on the beach too late in the afternoon, when the water was turbid and dirty and I hardly swam at all, I thought of a new ending for my novel.

Boredom is the price we pay for thinking better. Compared to Honore de Balzac, a florid, passionate, engaging writer who failed at half a dozen businesses (that’s his photograph above) and Emile Zola, who took on political battles as a journalist, Flaubert worked consistently on his fiction, never married, and spent most of his life suffering from syphilis and other venereal diseases, which he contracted from prostitutes.

He invented the modern novel.

Would I be able to do justice to the profound questions inherent in my novel if I weren’t taking five years to write it (and counting), long enough to get bored at times, unbearably bored, so bored I want to pick a fight with Gabriel, jump on a plane to Paris where George R. might let me stay at his apartment in the 16th, or, closer to home, at least for God’s sake take the 500-shilling Tawakal bus to Malindi to buy parmesan and prosciutto at the Italian supermarket?

Original. Violent.

I’m trying.