Fried, stewed, or escovitch?

It all started when I decided to go to the Post Office. I got there at two minutes before five, and lucked out by catching the tail end of a very long line. By the time I finally made it to the counter, it was close to 5:30pm. But I did not leave until nearing 5:45pm.

I would have left sooner but a woman who had apparently been waiting patiently outside of the queue chose that moment to act up. She was expecting a check, she said. She was waiting for the carrier (who had apparently already left for the day). She needed that check, she insisted. She would not be upset if her gas tank wasn’t already on E but inasmuch as it was, she needed her check. No one understood why she had stood there silently for so long. And no one realized that she was seething until she finally erupted.

Then she attacked me. She didn’t understand why they had served me and not her, since she had been in the line before me. In fact she was sure that I hadn’t even been in the line! I assured her calmly that I had been. In fact, I was literally the last person in line. She demanded that the woman attending to me stop what she was doing and go find out if her mail, which she had apparently put on hold while she was away on a trip, was now available. I left her there, still complaining.

I was no longer in the mood to prepare dinner. I decided to eat out. I turned on my trusty GPS and looked for restaurants in the area. When I happened upon one with Caribbean cuisine, I thought I had died and gone to heaven.

Bring! Bring! “Hello?”, a male voice responded in my ear, a question mark lifting the end, suggesting the possibility that the caller may not have really intended to reach his domain. “Hello?”

I got straight to the point. “Hello? Do you have fish on the menu?” I asked.

“Yes we have fish, but we don’t prepare it in advance. You have to order it and then we prepare it.”

So far so good. I asked what kind of fish he had. “Red Snapper and Tilapia”, he replied.

“I want the Red Snapper.“ I said. “How do you prepare it?”

“However you want”, he replied. “We could fry it or we could stew it.”

“Well, I don’t want fried so how about stew?” Stewed fish was a dish my grandmother often prepared. The way she did it, the fish slices were first fried in hot oil after being dusted with seasoned cornmeal. Then she stewed the slices in burnt sugar, tossing in a variety of chopped vegetables along the way. The resulting dish was consumed over a bed of white rice. I once asked her why it was called stewed fish when it was clearly both fried and stewed, and she told my mother to get better control of her children and stop them from asking her such foolish questions.

“You want brown gravy or regular gravy?” the man on the phone inquired. His accent was indeterminate. He could be Haitian or Jamaican. He could even be from Belize. I could not tell.

“I think just regular”, I responded. And then I made what turned out to be a fatal mistake. I asked him which island his chef was from.

“Oh, you looking for politics!” he responded scornfully. “Whatever you want to eat I could make.”

“You misunderstood me”, I protested. “I just wanted to know if he could make Jamaican-style fish.”

“Yes, I can see you just looking for politics. Well I don’t have time for politics!”

I proceeded to make things worse.

“You misunderstand me,” I said. “I just wanted to know if the chef could prepare escovitch fish. You only mentioned fried and stewed, so I didn’t know if he could prepare it Jamaican style.”

I barely got those words out. He started talking over me. “Well I is Jamaican and I told you we could prepare the fish however you want it. But you only looking for politics! I really not in the mood for no politics. And I have a setta people waiting here so hurry up and tell me what kind of fish you really want yes.” He sighed deeply.

“Well, why don’t you go ahead and take care of your people. Thank you sir”. I hung up, irritated. And still hungry.

The exchange helped me to realize how removed I have become from Caribbean exchanges. Three or four years ago, I would have known better than to mention the word “Jamaican” in the exchange. I would have asked him if he offered fried, stewed, escovitch, or a host of other preparation options. There are as many ways to prepare fish in the Caribbean as there are islands. But mentioning the island itself can raise the hackles of some sensitive individuals.

I also realized with fascination that the man knew that he could get away with offending me. His was no McDonald's-influenced style of conducting business. He was not going to give me a fake smile. If I pissed him off with my stupid question, he was going to let me know that he was pissed off. On Caribbean islands that do not depend on tourism for their primary income, such breathtaking honesty is typical. They serve tourists the way they serve themselves and each other -- with a level of candor that borders on rudeness. Actually no, it doesn’t border. It’s downright rude. Ask a stupid question and you will get a forthright, no-holds-barred answer letting you know that the question was foolish. Caribbean people are proud of the fact that they don’t water in their mouths, figuratively speaking.

And so I did not have fish for dinner after all. Of course I could have humbled myself and ordered it anyway. And I know that the chef, who was clearly also answering the phone, would have prepared it with care. Because that too is Caribbean. Rudeness is no excuse for less than excellent cooking. The chef could live with me telling people that he had been an asshole, but telling them that he was a bad cook on top of that was not an option. But I am also American. And receiving poor service sets my blood boiling. I feel entitled to fake smiles, even in response to my stupid questions. I probably need to work on that.

(This entry first appeared at tennischick.net in January 2009)

Hidden Tiger, crouching whores

Not a black one in the bunch. Whores have been coming out of the woodwork like flies, all claiming to having been nailed by Tiger Woods. Some say he used a condom, others say he rode them bareback. All of them, including his wife, are white, with fairly unattractive faces and large breasts.

Not that I am calling Elin Nordegren a whore. But if you didn’t know who she was and had to pick her out of a line-up of Tiger’s whores, there’s no way you could tell which one was his wife. This is because Tiger Woods apparently has a type. And not a single one of his type is black.

Come to think of it, there isn’t a single Asian in the bunch either. And this is not because there are no Asian whores, but that no Asians have come forward to claim that they attracted Tiger’s lusty attentions. But who knows who else may be crouching in the corner?

The destruction of Tiger Woods is a cautionary tale at so many levels. I’ve written on my other blog about the lessons for sportsmen everywhere. I hope that Tiger’s famous friendship with Roger Federer doesn’t come back to bite Roger in the butt. I don’t know if I can handle tales of Federer getting his groove on among a bunch of whores at Tao.

But while he remains in hiding, Tiger’s has become a cautionary tale about stupidity, arrogance and narcissism. The kind of stupidity that is at least in part caused by being a talented but grossly undereducated individual. The kind of arrogance that often accompanies phenomenal sporting and financial success. The kind of narcissism that would allow you to believe that the world so completely revolves around you that nothing you do will ever come back to haunt you.

But these are cautionary tales for those observing the methodical destruction of Tiger. What lessons must Tiger take away for himself?

I believe that the fundamental lesson that Tiger needs to learn is that he is a black man. When Greg Norman cheated on his wife with Chris Evert (the wife of his best friend), the resulting scandal was explosive. After Norman married and separated from Evert, scandal magazines went ballistic. But Norman remained captain of his golfing team. He never went into hiding. His future in golf was never compromised. His endorsement deals have remained untouched.

In the meantime, Tiger remains hidden even as he is being savaged. And the more he hides the more his destruction seems complete. Some may argue that there is a difference between sleeping with a number of common whores and bedding/marrying/leaving the wife of your best friend. And they may even be right. But from where I sit, both acts represent the lack of a moral center. Both reflect the impact of stupidity, arrogance, and narcissism. But where Greg Norman has managed to survive, Tiger Woods is being methodically, systematically destroyed.

I hate invoking the race card. It especially irks me to invoke it on behalf of a moron who does not even identify with being black. When Tiger called himself "Cablinasian", it wasn’t a media ploy intended to make himself more marketable to white folk. He seemed to mean it.

But I believe that his complete destruction has a lot to do with his blackness. I'm not letting him off the hook. His judgment has been exceedingly poor. But right about now, his cadre of white big-breasted whores are dragging his ass right down into the gutter along with them. In America, the most successful black man can overnight be reduced to the same level as a white whore.

My hope for Tiger Woods is that out of the ashes of his complete destruction will come the recognition and acceptance of his blackness. Because the truth is that Tiger can’t cross over any longer. For the longest while he got away with it. He’s not the first black man to be allowed into the bosom of white acceptance. And he would still be there if it was still financially lucrative. But his rejection seems so utterly complete that he has no choice but to find a home within the only community that may accept and forgive him and help him find a path to redemption.

First do no harm

I’ve been trying to wrap my mind around the notion of a qualified psychiatrist finding a way a push past the ethical grounding of his training, ignoring the prime directive of his profession as it were, and killing 13 individuals while physically and psychologically injuring countless others. And he would have killed and injured many more had he not been stopped in his tracks.

And I will admit that I just don’t get it. I mean I understand what I have been reading and watching in the news. But I fundamentally do not understand how he could do it. How does a trained psychiatrist deliberately and intentionally cause harm? And I don’t just mean the harm that he caused to his fellow service members but the lasting damage that he has done to his profession. How will clients learn to feel safe again?

I am not privy to any private information regarding this psychiatrist. I have never met him. Indeed, I never even heard of him until these nefarious events. In photos, there is a nondescript quality to his face that makes it rather unmemorable. He is not the kind of guy I would have looked at twice if he had passed me on the street. But in a way, those are the same qualities that can help one succeed in this profession.

The more rasa your tabula, the more people are free to project onto you their fears and desires, their complexity and areas of irresolution. I have a friend who is a very good looking man. His physical beauty often gets in the way of doing his job as a psychologist. Some of his male and female patients fall in love with him and he is often having to reset boundaries and gently interpret transferences. It’s hard to imagine Nidal Hasan ever having that problem. Heck, dude couldn’t even buy a wife.

Yet I think that it is a long stretch to go from being a frustrated bachelor to becoming a serial killer. It’s an even longer stretch to go from being a trained healer granted the privilege of listening to your patients’ stories of trauma to becoming so traumatized yourself that you decide to kill a bunch of people. I’m sorry but that theory is just bullshit. Secondary trauma is not an explanation for the monstrosities he committed.

A psychiatrist suffering from secondary trauma may be an individual with compassion fatigue, yes. But do you know what people with compassion fatigue look like? They are weary, burnt-out, numb, unempathic. They don’t enjoy coming to work. And once at work, they’d rather go home. They seem bone-tired, distant, cheerless. They would have neither the energy nor the desire to hurt a fly.

Indeed, such individuals are more likely to leave the profession altogether, to go back to school and start a whole new career. And if Hasan was that burnt out, retraining would have been an option for him as well. The military may set up guidelines regarding how it can be done, but it does not block people from being what they want to be.

No I’m afraid that the explanation for this man’s behavior lies in his anger. Nay, in his rage. The kind of self-justified and self-righteous rage that made it OK to ignore the ethical tenets of his profession and cause harm to unsuspecting and unprepared others.

Last Sunday morning I purchased a treadmill. I had been eyeing a particular model for some time and it just got reduced by $200. Sweet! As I handed the cashier my credit card, he asked me “What kind of doctor are you?” and I found myself replying, “A psychologist. But I don’t go around shooting up people”. It’s going to be a long time before I lose the defensiveness I now feel.

The public routinely confuses the professions of psychology and psychiatry. And the truth is that most good psychologists are adept at tracking their clients' responses to medication while most good psychiatrists know how to do therapy. The fields are forever intertwined, mark one and you scar the other.

And yes, this is now about me, and about my personal feelings of betrayal that a trusted member of a shared profession allowed his soul to become so filled with rage, his mind to be so corrupted by hate, that he forgot all about the ethical mandate of the profession. First do no harm.

Movie review: “Good Hair”

Chris Rock is not a good interviewer. Basically he has a serious problem maintaining eye contact with his interviewees. The minute he asks his question, his eyes start sliding to the left or right, depending on where the camera is located. He comes across as not particularly interested in obtaining the person’s response to his question. The other person is just the straight guy whom Rock is using to set up his own punch line. And his eyes skitter to the left or right to make sure that the camera remains on him and that it catches him as he comes up with his funny riposte.

Rock’s inability to conduct a proper interview is one of the glaring weaknesses of his movie, “Good Hair”. There are many others. And yet I’d like folks to go out and see this movie because it is one that needed to be made and that has an interesting perspective to share. It’s really too bad that Chris Rock was the one who elected to embrace the challenge of taking on this material. This is a woman’s story, a Black woman’s to be specific. And I wish that a Black woman had stepped up to the challenge. I guess Oprah was too busy with “Precious”.

“Good Hair” is at best a mockumentary. It makes fun of Black’s women’s search for hairstyles that are manageable. It laughs at women with nappy hair who spend thousands of dollars on weaves made from the hair of Indian women.

Along the way, we are treated to a trip to India. There the shorn hair of religious women (and girls) is swept up from the floors of dusty Hindu temples, sold to hair dealers, sewn into tracks by underpaid women working in sweat-shop conditions, and brought to America where it is sold to hair buyers, starting of course in Beverly Hills.

Some of the best moments in this movie are inadvertent. The hair buyer in Beverly Hills who lets slip that Viveca Foxx prefers Malaysian hair. The quiet pride of Mr. Dudley in his decision not to sell out to the large companies (such as Revlon) that belatedly recognized the huge amounts of profit to be made by catering to Black women. The confidence of the only White contestant in the B & B beauty show. (He lost to a man with less talent and more spectacle, urging one of his models to comment that the Atlanta competition had stopped being about hair).

And then there are moments that you see being set up a mile away. Sometimes they work, such as when a man in the barber shop announces that he handles making love to a Black woman by keeping his fingers out of her hair and on the titties. And then there are moments that fall flat, like Rock’s pornographic comment to an Indian man. It’s a moment that a less narcissistic director may have edited out of the movie. And I don’t know what to say about the pointless presence of Maya Angelou which sadly served no meaningful purpose in this film.

There are glaring omissions in this mockumentary. There is no dialogue about those women who choose not to wear weaves but go natural. There are no rastas. The one woman with an Afro is seen being attacked for wearing a natural style but does not get to respond. The influence and legacy of Madame C. J. Walker is not honored.

I read that Chris Rock got sued for making this movie. Apparently a woman named Regina Kimball developed a documentary titled, “My Nappy Roots: A Journey Through Black Hair-itage”, which she says that she showed to Rock in 2005. Check the Daily Mail for comparative clips from both documentaries. It will be interesting to see how this turns out.

At the end of the day, this conversation about Black hair is not new. The ideas behind this documentary are not ground-breaking.  This has been said many many times before. Rock says that he was inspired to make this movie when one of his daughters asked him why she doesn’t have good hair. If this is true, more power to him for being capable of more depth than the movie itself reflects. If it is a lie, shame on him for exploiting his own daughters to sell a ripped-off idea.

Faster than lightning

There are people who are born into their names. Their names seem to presage everything they will become, all that they will ever be. It’s like destiny, passed down from parent to child, the pull of its meaning growing stronger with each generation.

Usain Bolt was born to run. He was destined to be faster than lightning. And it is clear that this is in no way lost on him as he poses like a bolt of lightning after every race.

Bolt is the pride of the Caribbean. A son of Jamaica, yes, but the entire archipelago lays claim to the honor of knowing him. He has put them on the map, they say.

Caribbean peoples fret often about not being on the map. In views of the world, these little dots are often left out, erased, along with some of the smaller islands of the Pacific and the pieces of land surrounding Madagascar. So anything that puts them on the map, literally and figuratively, is cherished with pride. Conversely, anything that shames them in the eyes of the world is disparaged and quickly disowned.

Usain Bolt’s accomplishments have attracted much glory Jamaica and to the rest of the Caribbean archipelago. What makes his story compelling is the ordinariness of his upbringing. He could be any Caribbean child. His parents Jennifer and Wellesley Bolt could be any parents owning a shop in Sherwood Content, a village in Trelawny, Jamaica. He has a brother named Sadeeki, and a sister named Sherine. He met his girlfriend, Mizicann Evans, when they were 13 years old and attending a track meet; they started dating in 2004, long before he became the world famous bolt of lightning. All of this is as familiar as jerk chicken or escovitch fish. All of this smacks of everyday Caribbean life.

If you lived in North America, your coverage of the 2008 Olympics would have been dominated by the accomplishments of Michael Phelps. If you lived in the Caribbean, it would have been all Bolt, all of the time. One Olympics, two different worlds, two different heroes.

I was remarking to a friend recently that Michael Phelps’ handlers seem to be having a heck of a time holding on to the image of him needed to sell the products to which he has been linked. First there were the widely circulated pictures of him smoking a bong. Then there were his alliances with various skanks who did not hesitate to come forward and claim familiarity with his nether regions. Even disgraced Ms. California, Carrie Prejean, claimed a piece of him. Then he got into an accident for which he was not culpable, but during which it was discovered that he was reportedly driving with an expired license and had been drinking. The veneer is peeling fast.

Bolt on the other hand, has remained every publicist’s dream. There have been no scandals. He has not brought shame to his mother. He has simply gone about the business of breaking new world records. But being a Black man from the Caribbean, he will attract nothing even close to Michael Phelps’ endorsement deals, no matter how many world records continue to tumble under his agile feet.

Bolt has credited his record-breaking performances at the recent World Championships to improvements in his starting times. He now gets out of the blocks with lightning speed. The only thing he seems to need to work on his ending -- many are frustrated by his tendency to look back to see where his competition is. They say that this takes a smidgen off his ending time. This may be true. I personally don’t care. Let Bolt run his race, I say. And if checking to make sure that he has left his competition in the dust is his way of closing out a performance, so be it. After all, he keeps winning.

Appreciating Alice

Some time ago, I set myself the goal of reading every single word written by Canadian author Alice Munro. Trust me, it’s a wonderful assignment. I just got through reading “Open Secrets”. That this collection of stories first appeared in 1995 but is only now coming to my attention is not the fault of this amazing writer. There is just so much Munro to appreciate.

I first ran across Alice Munro’s writings many many years ago. I can’t even remember the stories I read then. I remember only that I was deeply impressed and emotionally moved. Then, some time later, during a period when I lived on a small island, I joined a book club of women who were themselves the former wives of ambassadors and consulate generals. It was a fascinating period of my life, one that I wish I could write about, if only I had half the talent of Alice Munro. These older woman had a fondness for British writers, possibly because in their youth Britain had represented everything to which they had aspired. I introduced them to Alice Munro. The moment was magical.


I thought of these women when I watched the movie, ‘Away From Her’. The screenplay of this movie was adapted from an Alice Munro story titled ‘The Bear Came Over the Mountain’. In the movie, the Julie Christie character slides into dementia and loses memory of the husband who betrayed her in marriage, even as she slips backward into an earlier love for a young man she met during her teenage years and whom she reencounters in the nursing home. It is a phenomenal movie that examines the aging process at a time when Alice Munro herself seems to be acknowledging that she is no longer young.

Alice Munro recently turned 78. In 2006, when she published ‘The View from Castle Rock’, she intimated that that would be her last collection of stories. I am happy that she has since changed her mind. I would give anything to become her student, a novice writer learning from the best.

I can think of few other writers who so perfectly capture the world of girls and women. Here is one example of Munro’s perspicacity regarding the unthinking intrepidity of teenage girls [from the title story in ‘Open Secrets’]: “There are times when girls are inspired, when they want the risks to go on and on. They want to be heroines, regardless. They want to take a joke beyond where anybody has ever taken it before. To be careless, dauntless, to create havoc -- that was the lost hope of girls”. Which teenage girl has not felt such moments of daring?

Munro becomes equally astute in her description of older women jaded by the experience of marriage. Here is a group of women bonding over their pain (‘The Jack Randa Hotel’): “Stories were told about men, usually about men who left. Betrayals so horrific -- yet so trite -- that you could only rock with laughter when you heard them. Men made fatuous speeches…They were fiendish and childish. What could you do but give up on them? In all honor, in pride, and for your protection?”

“Open Secrets” is a phenomenal collection of stories. These stories are long, but you need to read every word to capture the nuances of the many secrets that the writer examines. Like the adult woman who returns to the scene of her secret childhood sexual abuse and vandalizes the home of the perpetrator. Or the man who expects to die at war, and starts a secret correspondence with a librarian while privately engaged to another woman, only to later secretly steal books from the library so that he can gaze upon his beloved. Or the woman who follows her husband to another country and entices him into a secret correspondence while pretending to be another woman.

But the title story of this collection is the most disturbing. I don’t want to spoil it for you. Suffice it to say that Munro adroitly captures the notion of hiding in plain sight. She documents the obscenity of a crime so horrendous that the perpetrators mask it with an unseemly display. It is an open secret that Alice Munro is one of the best writers of our time.

Audio interview of Alice Munro talking about "Open Secrets".

Has Winehouse overstayed her welcome?

A number of Caribbean islands depend on tourism for much of their income. I personally find this to be unfortunate as I have always viewed tourism as something that should be optional, not required.

The advantage to tourism being optional is that it allows the host island to maintain much of its dignity as visitors are treated the same as locals. Take New York City for example. Much of its charm is that service remains as hostile or as welcoming regardless of whether one is covered in a hijab or as unclothed as the latest Hollywood starlet.

But there are times when tourists can be downright annoying. Mainly this occurs when they do things in the host country that they would never do in their own. You see this routinely during Spring Break when some young women seize the chance to get their breasts photographed -- only to regret this when they show up in the latest “Girls Gone Wild” video. Of course in an era when issuing a sex tape has become the fast track to fame, this is fast losing its cachet.

And then there are visitors like Amy Winehouse who prolong a visit to the point that borders on residency. I don’t know if you have ever had a visitor that stayed too long. As much as you may have loved the person, at some point you start wanting them to be gone. You want your house back. You wish to return to your routine. But if the person is paying you to stay in your house, then it becomes impossible to ask them to leave.

At some point, such relationships can become parasitic, not in the unidirectional sense of one leaching off the other, but in the sense that both host and guest may be benefiting from the relationship, even if the one would still like to see the other gone. This is my view of Amy Winehouse and St. Lucia. There is no doubt that Amy Winehouse is paying top dollar for the many services she may be receiving in St. Lucia. As a tourist, she may be paying twice the price that locals pay for some items. There is no doubt that she may be financially enriching the hotel in which she is residing. But, as they say in the Caribbean, what St. Lucia may be gaining on the swing, it may be fast losing on the roundabout. Who wants to visit an island polluted with the likes of Amy Winehouse?

This is not to say that I do not feel tremendous empathy for this troubled young woman despite having seen video evidence of her racist rantings. Because she has always had a band that consisted principally of Black musicians, and because she is the goddaughter of a young Black girl, I have always assumed that her racist comments were the result of poly drug addictions acting on a feeble mind in the context of negative interpersonal influence.

When her marital problems became the stuff of tabloid fodder, I understood her desire to escape the crappy influences in her life. But what she did not seem to understand -- what many substance-dependent individuals fail to grasp -- is that leaving the situation does not solve the problem. Sure it is possible to block some of the cues that trigger self-destructive behavior. But transplanting oneself to a new situation will inevitably result in the finding of new triggers for acting out inappropriately.

And so we were treated recently to the sight of Amy Winehouse sucking her thumb while a group of Black girls stared at her incredulously (photo above courtesy dlisted.com). No self-respecting St. Lucian child would be caught sucking her thumb in public beyond age three. And no self-respecting St. Lucian woman would be seen in public wearing the kinds of scanty outfits that Amy insists on sporting despite seeming grossly unattractive in them.

Amy Winehouse has become a public spectacle. She is the crazy Brit drug addict seen by some as a blight on the island. At least this is what former governor-general Jeff Fedee seems to believe. In a column he recently wrote for the St. Lucia Star, he offers a no-holds barred description of Winehouse’s recent appearance at the St. Lucia jazz Festival: “…a stomach churning experience to witness a reptilian looking character with a skeleton frame, staggering onto the stage, barely fitting into what appeared to be a size zero dress, cut just above an unsightly crotch…” And there's more in that vein.

Fedee is not alone in wanting Winehouse gone. Really, she has overstayed her welcome. Are there no rehab programs in all of Great Britain that will take her? I forget, she has already said No, No, No.