Walking with Abel: Journeys with the Nomads of the African Savannah/Anna Badkhen

I had said, about this blog, that I would reduce my frequency. Posting just Mondays and Thursdays now (unless there was personal book news to share). Making more time for Time. Easing away from increasingly desperate sense that more was expected of me than I could ever adequately deliver.

But yesterday and today, reading Anna Badkhen's memoir, Walking with Abel, I realized that there will be some days, some books, that will require an interlocutory post.

I can no longer read everything I'm sent, write about everything I read, respond to every package that arrives on my stoop.

But I must write about books like Anna's.

I've written about Anna here before—the day I met her, in the living room of the home of the documentary photographer Lori Waselchuk. I have written of her Afghanistan narrative, The World is a Carpet. I have come to know her—only occasionally, but always meaningfully—in the time in between. We have discussed self-compassion. Bigotry. Chromites. New books due in August, about love. I was prepared, in other words, for Walking with Abel, her story of living with a family of Fulani cowboys and starwatchers as they move herds across the country of Mali in West Africa. The wisdom of the Fulani is earth wisdom. It is in the sand they cross, the rivers that rise, the frogs that sing, the constellations that guide, the nudge of a cow. It is in the stories they ask for, and the stories they share.

Into their wisdom came Anna.

Here, in the early pages, she tells us what she seeks:

To enter such a culture. Not an imperiled life nor a life enchanted but an altogether different method to life's meaning, a divergent sense of the world. To tap into a slower knowledge that could come only from taking a very, very long walk with a people who have been walking always. To join a walk that spans seasons, years, a history; to synchronize my own pace with a meter fine-tuned over millennia. For years I had wanted to learn from such immutable movement.

Anna's immersion is uncompromising. She sleeps beneath a tree on blue plastic tarp, her backpack at her head. She wakes, one day, to a goat standing on her knees. She bathes in rivers. She churns the buttermilk. She holds the babies. She learns (perhaps I should have started with this) that language. She finds breathtaking beauty in her hostess:

She had no front teeth left and the remaining teeth were rotted and brown. She was narrowboned and gracile and she wore her long gray hair in cornrows woven so that two thin braids ran down in front of either ear and the rest bunched at the back of her head. The tattoo that once had accentuated her whole mouth and blackened her gums had long faded except for an indigo shadow on her full lower lip.

This is Anna making room for astonishment in the world—Anna who is both a migrant and an immigrant, a former war reporter who is capable of seeing beauty and who ponders, out loud, in Abel, this: "Maybe a true writer of conscience was one who never put down a single word."

I am glad, we should all be glad, that Anna puts down her words (and her pale, evocative sketches of the homes she made on that swatch of earth). I am grateful that this book leans into memoir, yields Anna's own vulnerability as she tries to live in the aftermath of an ended love affair, that she uses both her heart and her eyes to see, that she writes, or seems to write, this book for the man who, in transient moments, made her happy, the man she carries forward, memories now, interludes, words. Who was he? Who were they? She tells us:

My beloved and I had been comrade voyagers before we became lovers, footloose storytellers who shared a supreme reverence for wordsmanship. We filled our notebooks with the beauty and the iniquity with which the world branded and buoyed us. We wished our stories to bring it to some accountability, some reckoning.

Anna, the world is better for your reckoning.

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Grace Before Dying/Lori Waselchuck: Reflections

By tomorrow afternoon I'll be walking the streets of New Orleans, a city I've long yearned to see. My dear friend Ruta Sepetys set her second novel, Out of the Easy, there. Katie, my student, has been living there this past year—absorbing the culture, bringing her compassionate heart to triage work, and lending her name to a leading character in the novel I finished first-drafting last week. And for a few important years, New Orleans was home to my new friend Lori Waselchuk, the award-winning documentary photographer and fellow Pew Fellow of whom I have written here and (in conjunction with the launch of Anna Badkhen's The World is a Carpet) here.

Today I dedicate this blog to Lori's deeply moving book, Grace Before Dying, a photographic essay inspired by the three years Lori spent documenting the hospice program at the Louisiana State Penitentiary. Lori was invited to do this work by the magazine Imagine Louisiana. She could not, after the assignment was done, imagine walking away. For within the walls of what was once the most notorious prison system in the world—cruel, overcrowded, filthy, murderous—Lori had met men caring for men in their final months. She had met double murderers with a gentle touch, coffin builders with loving hands, laborers waking early to sit in vigilance for their dying best friends, prisoners who had become expert quilters. The hospice program at this prison, also known as Angola, had gentled, and lifted, spirits. It had eased men—some of them locked up for life on drug possession charges—out of bitterness and toward love.

Lori documents the day to day in the hospice program with black and white photographs that are wide angled and intimate and exceptionally personal and true. She shows us the needle in the hands of the quilter, the name on the foot of a sock, a man's last moments, a procession of mourners. She shows us Lloyd Bone, "incarcerated at Angola in 1971 for murder" as he "guides the horse-drawn hearse carrying the body of George Alexander to Point Lookout II, Angola's cemetery" and the "procession of hospice volunteers and friends" as they "walk and sing behind the hearse."

I had looked through Lori's photographs the very day she gave me this book. Today I sat and read her moving introduction, Lawrence N. Powell's essay on the prison's history, and every single caption. I read, too, Lori's acknowledgments in the back, where she writes, in part, "My words of appreciation come up short, so I will express my gratitude through living a life and producing work that emulates the humanity they show for each other."

I haven't known Lori Waselchuk long. But I've seen her throw a party for a friend, lift a friend's child to her hips, talk about the neighbors she loves in West Philadelphia. I've heard Lori talk, and I've seen Lori carry the good flame forward.

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The World Is a Carpet/Anna Badkhen: Reflections

This past Sunday, an entire community gathered in the home of the generous documentary photographer Lori Waselchuk (whom I wrote of here) to celebrate the release of Anna Badkhen's new book, The World Is a Carpet: Four Seasons in an Afghan Village. Cilantro humus, hot peppers, spiced cheese. Artists, intellectuals, neighbors (mostly one in the same). Children and old people like me. Two friends—Lori and Anna—whose friendship ripened in New Orleans in the days following the devastation of Katrina. It was a book party like few others. Lori's entire home was filled. When Anna stood on the stairs to read four pages of her story, Lori's pride in Anna's work was as moving as Anna's astonishing prose.

That kind of pride. That kind of love.

And the children were spellbound.

This is a book (exquisitely packaged with velvetish cover paper on the outside and Anna's own ink drawings within) that evokes an off-the-map village in Afghanistan called Oqa, its door-less homes and sand-roughened people. It's about a place where time doesn't matter but seasons do, where boys marry girls they are not ready for, where imperfection is celebrated as if a carpet's beauty mole. It's about a Russian-American journalist who finds her way not just to this village but into its very soul—into its weddings, its private conversations, its dreams. Over the course of four seasons a carpet will be made—its threads carted home, its weft and warp deliberated, its colors dropped into the dung on the makeshift floor or powdered with the dust of a broken roof. A carpet will be made and carted away, and maybe this very carpet lies now in your living room, and if it does, every knot contains a secret, and it is those secrets, or the intimations of those secrets, that Anna carries forward with her prose.

The book is a fugue—a composition of rare words, future imperfects, irregular verbs, remarkable histories, fragments of Rumi poems, small interludes of the personal I, discrete returns to the making of that carpet. It is tender where tender lives and terrible, too; the deliberate poisoning of a crane, for example, broke my heart, as did the opium doping of babies, and the stagnant arc of lives, and the joyless face of the young bride. Anna's primary companion is a man named Amanullah, whose dreams of being elsewhere are palpable, and sometimes comic, and sometimes not, for not having choices is hardly the thing we want for the people whom we love. The skies are gorgeous, Anna tells us. The sand composes itself into something almost unearthly. Laughter rises up from bare kitchens and from behind the dunes where the townspeople go to relieve themselves. And color. There is color her, in Oqa, and there is color in that rug.

A favorite scene, simply and magically told, concerns a bed brought to Oqa by old Baba Nazar, the only bed in the town. In winter it lives in Baba's room. But look what happens in other seasons:

In warm months the hunter and his son would drag the bed into the sun and anchor its uneven and hollow rusted legs on three clay bricks. Then the bed would become the village centerpiece, teh Oqa equivalent of a town square, or of a mosque. Men would lounge on it as they would on a takht and talk. They would gather around it to listen to newscasts on Baba Nazar's thirty-year-old transistor radio and discuss dispatches from the world beyond their desert, even beyond the serrated Hindu Kush and the Amu Darya. Children would hide under it, run around it in circles, chasing one another, and, when Baba Nazar was not looking and when no adults were sitting on it, bounce on the squeaky springs.

Anna Badkhen writes with transporting authority and poetic license. When she told me that her editor was Rebecca Saletan, I was not surprised. Becky publishes beautiful books.

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On finishing the first draft of a novel, and A.S. King, look what Kephart has

So about ten minutes ago, I finished the first full draft of a book that has been in my mind and heart for more than a year. A complex book that I had to fight to simplify. An unusual story that I had to make accessible. A tale involving massive research that I had to up the IQ to understand (I don't actually know how to up the old girl's IQ, but I tried). The book has to sit now, percolate, be still.

What does that mean for you, oh loyal and kind blog readers?

That means this very very very good news: I can return to my previously scheduled programming now and write more about the books I love to read. I've got a stack of books to read piled high. I've got A.S. King, Caroline Leavitt, Dani Shapiro, Patricia Engel, Alice McDermott, Jennie Nash, so many others looking at me. I'm going to get to work.

But first to a party in West Philadelphia to celebrate the release of Anna Badkhen's The World is a Carpet, which has been lavishly praised by William Langewiesche and Rory Stewart, among others.

I can't wait to be out in the world. To be. To learn from others.

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