W. S. Merwin – Anna Citrino—Poetry, Place, Pilgrimage

Hillsides of tea, Nurwara Eliya, Sri Lanka

W.S. Merwin, in his poem, “Drinking Tea in the Small Hours,” speaks of drinking green tea from Korea,
second pick from the foothills of summer
taste of distance and slight rustling of leaves
on old trees with names hard to remember
as I listen after heavy rain in the night
the taste is a hush from far away
at the very moment when I sip it

I read Merwin’s words, and recall my visit to the tea plantations in Nurwara Eliya, Sri Lanka in 1995–the green beauty of tea-covered hills, as well as the significant labor women extended day after day picking the tea, carrying on their backs the baskets weighted with tea leaves.

The world Merwin describes, however, is filled with calm. Sitting in morning’s quiet room, air thick with rain-scent, wind’s breath through ancient trees, he drinks in a distant world and season different from the one he inhabits. We, too, with the wide variety of vegetables and fruits available around the globe today likely taste worlds other than our own every day. From artichokes to zucchini, a majority of foods we eat have made a pilgrimage from great distances to become part of our lives. Even the common apple, often associated with American culture, actually has its origins in the Tian Shan mountains of Kazakhstan. Kazakhstan’s capital until 1997, Alma Ata, meant “full of apples.”

Working in my backyard garden watering and weeding recently, I wondered where did carrots, beans, kale, peas, and onion originate? What was their journey into our everyday lives? These foods have been with us for so long that we now think of them as part of our family’s weekly meal plan. It’s not just apples that have traveled great distances over time. The great bulk of our North American diets is from plants that came to us from elsewhere. Here are a few origins of common plants:

Artichoke: from North Africa and the central part of the Mediterranean.
Asparagus: North Africa, Europe, and Asia.
Beans: from Asia, Europe, and the Americas.
Beets: India, the Mediterranean and the Atlantic European Coast.
Broccoli: is believed to have originated in Sicily and arrived in the US via Italian immigrants.
Carrots: Afghanistan, Iran, Uzbekistan. (Purple carrots were on temple walls in Egypt 2,000 BC.)
Fava beans: ancient Israel, domesticated by Neolithic farmers.
Kale: eastern Mediterranean.
Lettuce: the Caucus.
Mangos: from the Hindo-Berma region over 5,000 years ago, reaching from eastern India and southern China across Southeast Asia.
Olive: Asia Minor.
Onion: North America, also Iran and west Pakistan, Central Asia.
Peas: native to Turkey and also the Middle East in the area around Iraq.
Spinach: Mediterranean.
Strawberries: Europe, Asia, North and South America.
Watermelon: southern Africa.

While dining on foods from our gardens and grocery stores, we taste the world. Foods family members frequently cook for us to eat create associations to what we call home, a place that feels familiar and known, yet we’re often eating foods that came to us through time from across the world and from cultures very different from our own. Vegetables and fruits we typically grow in our gardens or buy at our grocery stores have histories. Drinking a summer lemonade on my front porch, I’m not simply tasting lemons. I’m also tasting the product of the fruit’s transformations via its long journey from the lemon’s ancient ancestorial origins on the Indian subcontinent. Ancient citruses hybridized with citron, a wild citrus, and a bitter orange to form lemons, and made their way to China, later the Middle East and Turkey, then to Europe, before Christopher Columbus carried them to the island of Hispaniola in 1493. Lemons grow best in warm climates and India is currently the world’s top producer of lemons, followed by Mexico and China.

Science Daily reports that studies describe that eating 30 or more diverse types of vegetables, fruit, and grains each week significantly helps our physical and mental health. We learn from each other and benefit from the exchange of knowledge across cultures and time. Welcoming diversity into our lives enables us to thrive.

The fruits and vegetables that have entered our lives because of cultural exchange is but one example of how we all benefit from what has been shared through time across cultures. The compass was invented by Chinese, Scottish bacteriologist Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin. In Poland, Marie Curie discovered polonium and radium. Her experiments with these allow us to use x-rays today. Born in Hungary and naturalized as an Argentinian citizen László József Biró created the ballpoint pen. From a Mexican yam, Luis Miramontes of Mexico City derived norethisterone, the main ingredient used in birth control pills. Mary Anderson of New York City invented the windshield wiper and George Crum invented the potato chip. In South Africa Allan Cormack invented the CT scan machine. Mark Lidwill, an Australian doctor, and physicist Edgar Booth developed the first artificial pacemaker. Ajay Bhatt, born in Baroda, India, and his team invented the USB port. Our lives are changed and enhanced by the hands and minds of people from across time and cultures.

In the spirit of sharing foods that reach back through time, I offer you this family recipe for pesto, together with its companion vignette. These are part of the electronic cookbook I made together with my husband Michael as a companion to my book A Space Between. Basil has been cultivated for at least 5,000 years and is native to India, though it is commonly associated with Italian food. Next time you taste basil, or perhaps a favorite fruit or vegetable of your own, may the flavor pique your curiosity about that food’s origin, how it traveled through time through the effort of many cultures and people you will never know, yet who made it possible for you to enjoy it. You might also choose to read A Space Between while sipping a glass of lemonade and a plate of fresh tomatoes, a fruit from the Americas that changed Italian cuisine.

HOMEMADE PESTO

lettuce basil
parmesan cheese
garlic
cashews
lettuce basil

As a child, Gianni liked to pick basil for Luisa when she asked because he knew it meant she’d be making pesto. With wire basket in hand while dodging the ducks in the backyard he’d search beneath the basil leaves where he’d sometimes find an iridescent green frog or spy a lizard he could pet with a strand of dry grass. After handing his mother his basket of basil, Gianni watched, as pestle in hand, his mother crushed the leaves in a slow, circular motion around the mortar’s rim. When she’d finished adding the ingredients for the pesto, his mother let Gianni wipe the mortar with his fingers and he’d lick the creamy green from his hand.

As a grown man, after Liza and the children left and he was living alone, Gianni preferred recipes using a blender, as he liked preparing simple foods, and he decided he should try making pesto.

Watching the ingredients swirl inside the blender and inhaling the bright aroma, he was carried back to the memory of his mother’s firm hands at the mortar and pestle. Turning the image over in his mind, he scraped the pesto into a bowl. He knew he couldn’t make pesto the way his mother did. Neither could he turn back time to the world he lived in before so many losses pressed against his heart. But he could make his own pesto his own way now, create a smooth paste of the ingredients.

Adding a bit more salt to the mix, he spread it over his pasta for dinner, sat at the table by his news clippings of missing children, and thought about his grandsons, Zenzo and Marcello—how he might need to grow a garden again and send them out into the yard searching for lizards and frogs.

Ingredients:

5 to 6 cups of basil (approximately two large bunches)
3/4 to 1 cup Parmigiano-Reggiano
½ to ¾ cups of your choice of either pine nuts, cashews, walnuts or a mixture
½ to ¾ cup olive oil depending on your preference of thinness
2 cloves garlic
¼ teaspoon salt or add more or less to taste

Directions:
Put the basil in a mixing bowl.
Add a cup of grated Parmigiano-Reggiano into the bowl.
Fill a food processor with basil and pulse it to finely chop it. Repeat. Put this into the bowl.
Using about a cup of nuts and two garlic cloves together until finely chopped. Put this into the bowl also.
Put everything back into the food processor and pulse to blend. Add salt to taste.
Drizzle in olive oil slowly to achieve desired consistency while the food processor is pulsing. Scrape down the sides of the food processor as necessary.
You can play with proportions of all ingredients for creamier or drier results and to balance flavors to your preference.

In America we read in the news of shootings, and Trump asks for the deportation of the nearly 11 million that are living in the US without permission. Last September, 17,000 Columbians fled Venezuela after 1,500 Columbians were deported from Venezuela. Syrians escaping their country as a result of the war have created the greatest migration since WWII. All this, and yet at Christmas we wish each other peace. At the start of the new year, even to strangers we often wish others happiness. Nevertheless, division lines between who is deemed as an insider and who is an outsider seem to be growing. Though it may seem that tensions are about race or religion, often times, if one digs deeper, however, the root of the tension is economic. Recent research in Germany, the Washington Post reports, that those who are economically disadvantaged are those who are more likely to be persuaded that race and religion are causes of fear. “According to polls, whites with a high school degree or less disproportionately favor Trump. These are the same people who have seen their economic opportunities decline the most in recent years. This group also disproportionately favors tough restrictions on immigration.”

In Morocco the country I recently visited, however, a different story is promoted by the people on the street. Tourism is important to Morocco’s economy. They depend on welcoming diversity, and across Morocco you hear Moroccans tell you a story of living in harmony with others. In Tangier a synagogue, mosque, and church are within visual sight of each other. In Fez, a man tells us “We sit in the cafe talking together, Jew and Muslim. The prayer call comes. We go off and pray, then come back and pick up the conversation. We are friends.” It’s true that the majority of Moroccans are Muslim, and that only 1% are other–Christian, Jewish or Baha’i. Even so, people in Morocco have an attitude of open hospitality.

While walking around the area of Fez where the majority of Jews once lived before the sate of Israel was created and most moved to Israel, I saw an old man sitting on the street having difficulty getting up. A person near him saw his difficulty and came over to help him. To sit on the street is not an uncommon thing in Morocco. Many people do it in Morocco in order to take in the sun as well as to sell things. Some sit on the street because they are poor. To notice someone’s difficulty to stand demonstrates an awareness of others, and a sense of community. This wasn’t a singular act. Later that day, I also noticed an older man walking up a side street with a cane. His outer cape was slipping from his shoulder and the man walking up behind the older man noticed this, and stopped to lift the robe to the old man’s shoulders, then continued on his way as if helping the other were commonplace, the most natural thing in the world. Again, here I saw an awareness of others demonstrated in simple acts. On several occasions and by different people I was told that people who live near each other help one another. They share their lives with each other and are like family. They aren’t people who happen to live near each other. They communicate.

Even in the Fez medina–the winding open air market, one of the most known souqs in the world, and full of pedestrian traffic, a beggar woman looked at me kindly with a wide, open smile when I greeted her saying “Assalamu ‘alaykum.” Again, at the Moulay Idriss tomb, three women sitting on mats leaning against the wall greeted me with smiles much wider and longer than simple politeness when I said “Sabah al-khair.” At breakfast in the guesthouse where we stayed in Fez, the woman serving us breakfast went about her work with joy in her movements and her voice. It was clear her work wasn’t merely her job; it was her way to give happiness to others. The French woman at the table across from us said something, and the woman serving us food leaned over to hug her and say something to her in a cheerful voice, then went on with her work. In Bhalil, a Berber village outside of Fez, a woman invited us in to see her cave house when she saw my husband and I walking by. She was hanging her laundry out and happened to see us, and wanted us to visit. In Ait Bin Haddou a shop owner invited us to share his lunch, later insisting we return to share tea.

Not all encounters in Morocco were like this. On the streets there is the hustle bustle of business, and children wrestling with each other and running around in active play as they walk to and from school–people are involved in their own lives and worlds, as they would be anywhere. It’s also true that crime in Morocco has risen over recent years, according to the Numbeo web site as well as the Knoema website. Crime statistics are not like what you notice in the US, however, where according to BBC there were 353 mass killings in 2015,62 shootings at schools,12,223 people killed in gun incidents, and 24,722 people were injured in gun incidents. Flight attendant Rose Hamid stands up in silent protest when, according to CNN Trump “suggested that Syrian refugees fleeing war in Syria were affiliated with ISIS.” She is booed and shouted at to get out, according to the article. In contrast, when visiting Morocco, non muslims are welcomed and shown hospitality, a quality often ignored by the media, but found throughout this dominantly Muslim country. Why is it that Moroccans recognize the stranger and honor him or her and in America, we are afraid of the stranger? When in Ait Bin Haddou, one man told me “To visit a country is not only to see, it is to learn something about the culture.” Maybe the person greeting you as you walk by wants to sell you something from his shop, but he also wants to sit with you and get to know some of your story. It seems we could learn from the Moroccan’s approach to things.

As Barry Lopez writes, ““Everything is held together with stories. That is all that is holding us together, stories and compassion.” Maybe we need to become hospitable to our own selves and the the things we don’t understand, our questions and struggles–to the stranger inside us. Maybe conversations with the other–with those we are afraid of–would better help us understand not only their own story but our own. Lopez writes, “Conversations are efforts toward good relations. They are an elementary form of reciprocity. They are the exercise of our love for each other. They are the enemies of our loneliness, our doubt, our anxiety, our tendencies to abdicate. To continue to be in good conversation over our enormous and terrifying problems is to be calling out to each other in the night. If we attend with imagination and devotion to our conversations, we will find what we need; and someone among us will act—it does not matter whom—and we will survive.” If we can’t travel to foreign countries and immerse ourselves in another way of seeing and being, we can read novels by writers from or about other cultures. We can view documentaries. It is still possible to expand our understanding through others’ stories.

W. S. Merwin in his poem, “To the New Year,” writes,

so this is the sound of you
here and now whether or not
anyone hears it this is
where we have come with our age
our knowledge such as it is
and our hopes such as they are
invisible before us
untouched and still possible

The US Bill of Rights supports the right to diverse voices. We can recognize the strength in that diversity and honor it. Living together as citizens of a country is a kind of marriage. The German poet, Rilke, speaking of marriage said, “…once the realization is accepted that even between the closest people infinite distances exist, a marvelous living side-by-side can grow up for them, if they succeed in loving the expanse between them, which gives them the possibility of always seeing each other as a whole and before an immense sky.” As we come closer to hear each other’s stories, we will see and hear another world. Look and look again. You will see more. When we listen closely, we will understand better.

Tag: W. S. Merwin

Savoring the Intersection of Worlds

Welcoming the Strangers