SPEAKING PAPIAMENTU - on re-connecting to my native tongue

 It starts at Schiphol, the Amsterdam airport. Before that, I am still immersed in my life in Jerusalem, busy with family matters, demonstrating against the Israeli occupation, while under pressure to finish grant proposals for the Jerusalem feminist center where I work. I do not have time to connect emotionally to my trip, which still feels more like a yearly obligation to visit my elderly mother in Curaçao, when I would rather spend my precious vacation time trekking in Turkey or Nepal. 

 I usually have a few hours to kill, not enough to take the train into Amsterdam and visit friends, which I do on my return trip when I have almost twelve hours between planes. And so, I silently wander around the airport, feeling a little like a spy, as I do in Jerusalem when I hear Dutch tourists speaking on the street, not suspecting that I, who probably look like a local to them, would understand. Not identifying myself as a speaker of Dutch, I take in the talk, smiling to myself, my little secret.

 Here, in transit at the airport – a liminal space par excellence – I sometimes pretend to be a total stranger and address the salesperson in English. Perhaps that has more to do with the fact that I have not yet woken up my slumbering Dutch, or do not want to give away my unfamiliarity with the currency and other taken-for-granted facts of daily life in the Netherlands.

 Or perhaps it is my resistance to being taken for an “allochtoon” – that polite way they refer to the “not really Dutch,” who nevertheless hold Dutch citizenship – a category that groups together the mostly Moslem migrants and those of us, from the former Dutch colonies, blacks and whites alike. It is a label that had not yet been coined when my schoolteachers in Curaçao taught us to see Holland as our “mother country,” to sing Wilhelmus Van Nassauwe, the Dutch national anthem, on our queen’s birthday and to accept the Batavians, a Germanic tribe, as our ancestors. They say that when you count, you invariably give away your mother tongue – to this day I count not in Papiamentu, but in Dutch, so totally did I embrace the colonial language.

 I was four when I learned Dutch in kindergarten. I remember the feeling of utter embarrassment when everyone expected me to speak Dutch with my cousins whose father was Dutch, and I ran away crying. I was losing the secure ground that Papiamentu provided, having to jump into the deep waters of a foreign language without a life-vest before I knew how to swim.

 Very soon, however, I was speaking Dutch fluently, determined to excel in the language. I wanted to know it even better than the Dutch children whose parents came from Holland. I spoke Dutch with all my school friends, even though most of us spoke Papiamentu at home, including the handful of schoolmates from my own community, the Sephardic Jews who settled on the island in the seventeenth century, after fleeing the inquisition in Portugal and Spain. It is interesting to note that unlike many Jewish communities who adopt the dominant, more prestigious language of the country to which they migrate, the Sephardic-Portuguese Jews of Curaçao, who were among the earliest European settlers on the island, speak the local vernacular amongst themselves.

 In my elementary school days, the teachers forbade us to speak Papiamentu even in the schoolyard, claiming it was the only way to learn proper Dutch. And so, I read, wrote, and thought in Dutch – it became my first literary language, as Papiamentu was basically only a spoken language at that time. Now, in 2007, after forty-two years away from the Dutch speaking world, my Dutch gets rusty, until I find myself again surrounded by its sounds and it returns to me and becomes almost natural.

 I roam around the halls of the airport’s immense shopping center, not quite knowing what I am looking for.  It is rather busy at the camera counter – I realize it is not a place to come with all my questions about which new camera to buy, my first digital SLR, after getting excited with the results of my digital point and shoot. Up to now, I had refrained from following the footsteps of all the other photographers in my family and never took my photography seriously. All that changed when I realized that editing my digital photos could finally give me the control over my images that I sought.

 No, there was no point shopping here, I’d better look at cameras in Curaçao at a more relaxed pace, where the prices will certainly be lower. At least they used to be, when I was growing up and the island was still a duty-free paradise for American tourists, and my father owned a camera store, where he loved to explain to his customers how each camera worked.

 Suddenly I remember that once, in these huge avenues of shops designed to entice travelers on the move, there used to be a stand with fresh, raw herring. I do not see it anymore, even though this is still the season of the celebrated first herring catch – the end of June. It fills me with longing, even though “new” herring was not something we ate at my home, it is what the real Dutch loved. Raw herring is a taste I developed later, and yet, it is so very much a taste from that past, perhaps from my acquired Dutch identity, and I feel that eating herring now would prepare me for my return.

 I search for a shop that used to sell every possible variety of drop – salted licorice – yet not daring to ask for it, perhaps so as not to expose my weakness, my secret addiction or not admitting it to myself. I have a good spatial memory – I remember you had to walk through a drug store to get to it, and it is a long way from the main shopping center with the largest stores. I find the drugstore, but now there is a cosmetics counter in the back. The millions of foreigners who pass through this airport obviously do not have the taste for the salty and pungent licorice, a taste that you only acquire if you grow up in Dutch culture, and so it was not profitable to maintain a shop that specializes in salted licorice.

 Without quite making a conscious decision, I meander into the store where they sell Dutch delicacies – cheeses, fish, chocolates, biscuits. And there, on one of its shelves, I see a large box of salted licorice, which I buy immediately. I taste one, and as soon as it has melted in my mouth, I take another, and yet another. It is not that salted licorice reminds me, like the Proustian petite madeleine, of a lost childhood, rather, it reawakens my desire for more and more salted licorice. I can forget about licorice completely, go about my daily life in Jerusalem without knowledge or reminiscence of it, without even longing for it, in fact, I do not care much for sweets, and then, suddenly, as soon as I taste it again, I turn into a licorice addict. It is a lot easier not to eat it at all, than to eat it in moderation.

 I start to move towards the gate, still sneaking my fingers into the box of licorice that is now in my backpack, hidden from my own conscience, as I suppress the certain knowledge that soon I will develop a bellyache. There is a long line outside the closed hall where a second hand-luggage check is held before you can enter it – much like the flights to Israel – but it is not weaponry that is being sought here, but drugs.

 Most of the people in the line are Afro-Antilleans, seemingly living in Holland and going back to the islands for a family visit, sometimes accompanied by a Dutch spouse and children in all shades of skin color, wearing their best clothes. There is also an assortment of casually dressed Dutch tourists, mostly young couples out to spend their vacation in the tropics, invariably scuba diving at the magnificent coral reefs – something that I, as a native, never learned to do.

 I begin to hear Papiamentu, a word here and there, a mother calling to a child, snippets of a conversation. Somehow, I still feel a little like a foreigner, an outsider, an eavesdropper. But the reality of the past week, the tense work on the proposals is all gone, as if it never existed. Even my exasperation with the Israeli occupation of Palestine has left me, as if a heavy burden has been lifted from my back. I am relieved not to have to think about it, for I am essentially an introspective person who understood she must take a moral stand and become an activist, despite herself.

 Slowly, my mouth full of licorice, I start to get that familiar sensation that I recognize from my previous border-crossings in Amsterdam. I cannot give it a name, it is a sense of strangeness, of looking at myself from the outside, this licorice-eating woman who is standing in line with other speakers of her mother tongue, when she lives in an everyday reality where nobody really knows her Papiamentu-speaking-self, where she has absolutely no occasion to let it out. I realize I am a stranger to those closest to me, and how this part of me, the woman-who-speaks-Papiamentu, is unknown to them, cannot be known to them. 

 There is a song by a popular Israeli singer who immigrated from Buenos Aires, that speaks of living his life in Hebrew and that he will have no other language – yet in the depths of the night, he dreams in Spanish. I do not even dream in Papiamentu. This part of me is totally absent in my life in Israel, where I have nobody with whom to speak my language – as far as I know, I am the only Papiamentu speaking person in Jerusalem. And so, as soon as I return to Jerusalem, I stop living in Papiamentu. Nobody there knows that part of me.

 When I asked a friend what it felt like to live in a country where French, her mother tongue, is not spoken, she answered that language is a home you can take with you to any place. She has her French-speaking relatives and enjoys movies and books in French. For me, Papiamentu cannot possibly be a home away from home – without an expatriate community with whom to connect, when my mother tongue has less than 300,000 speakers and none of them can be found in my immediate vicinity and when the phone connection to that distant country that nobody else here calls, has been outrageously expensive until very recently.

 I cannot even find solace in writing my mother tongue, living in a Papiamentu world of my own – since Papiamentu, at least for me, is not a written language. Its orthography was only formalized after I left the island, and I still find it strange to read, with its strict phonetic spelling, so that words originating from Spanish or Dutch are written in totally unexpected ways. 

 Feeling that Curaçao means nothing to those who have never lived there and who do not know my language, I do not dwell on my background – I do not talk about where I come from. I am not willing to play the role of an exotic bird from a little island in the Caribbean. On the other hand, I refuse to be thrown into better-known categories, such as “Argentinean”, sharing little with South Americans – other than their music and dance – as I learned Spanish only in sixth grade, and unlike English, it is still a foreign language to me.

 And so, rather than allowing myself to feel the loneliness, I let that part of me go – I have erased it. It is a part of me that I do not speak about, if I cannot speak from it. I do not even miss my Papiamentu-speaking-self when away from the island. I do not live with a sense of loss, longing for a vanished childhood, for a hidden identity, for my language as a home – just like, in my daily life, I can completely forget about the pleasures of eating salted licorice. Until recently, I did not realize that I have been paying a price for the erasure of such a central part of who I am. Rather than being a stranger to those around me, I was a stranger to myself.

 It is, perhaps, because I am not an exile that I do not feel that sense of loss – I have had the privilege to return to Curaçao almost every year since I have been living in Jerusalem. Or rather, I do not believe I deserve to indulge in a feeling of loneliness, after all, I left my native country voluntarily to study abroad, knowing, in advance, I would never return to live. I am not like the homeless, the displaced – the refugees who were forced to abandon their language.

 Perhaps I can speak of a sense of self-exile, as I did not find my place in the complex colonial society of the island, with its racial, class and gender segmentation and hierarchy, its strict internal borders, where everyone had their place, and knew it. I did not want to accept the place I was assigned, as a female member of a privileged class, whose movements across these internal borders, unlike those of the men of that class, were heavily restricted.

 At a young age, I became aware that each social group took for granted its own conception of the world, its own truth, which often was in contradiction to the others, and that kept them within their borders. And so, even when living on the island as a high school student, I had already learned to be an outsider – one who refused to see herself as embedded within the internal boundaries and tried to see beyond them.

 I was like the stranger, a concept developed by the sociologist Georg Simmel referring to someone who is both near and far, who is spatially inside a social group, yet at the same time, not quite a member of it - not committed to its norms, values, definitions of reality. It means being in liminal space between the groups, a position that frees you to take on a broader perspective, allowing you to be more “objective” (1). In other words, I was already a budding anthropologist, thriving on the threshold – the limen – between different ways of life.

 It is this adaptability as an outsider that prepared me to cross cultural and language borders without experiencing culture shock – to adopt English with utmost ease, even before I went to college in the USA, in the second half of the stormy sixties, finding myself again in the liminal spaces of critical thought and the struggle for social justice, together with other foreigners and students of color – a period that has consolidated my social consciousness.

 A year or so after graduating, I had no difficulty adapting to life in Jerusalem, becoming fluent in spoken Hebrew when I moved here with the Jewish American I met at the university in Boston and married, raising to children who have always insisted on speaking Hebrew with us.

 My life in Jerusalem revolves around spoken Hebrew, but also around English, which has gradually replaced Dutch as my literary language. In fact, it is the only language, in which I am able to write today. I never became proficient in written Hebrew and do not feel pressured to perfect it, another expression of my political ambivalence about living in Israel. I guess I take pleasure in being a perennial outsider.

 As I stand in line at the Amsterdam airport, catching a plane to Curaçao, I hear my mother tongue and smile at the people waiting to get on the plane, in acknowledgment that I understand. There is no sense of spying anymore; it is replaced by an eagerness to identify myself as a speaker of Papiamentu. I blend into those waiting to be checked, voicing my agreement, of course, in Papiamentu, that the waiting is taking much too long.

 Finally, on the plane, at my window seat, for which I always ask so I can see, and photograph, the island when we are landing, I realize I am shedding the layer of my everyday life in Jerusalem, like an overall, or rather a heavy spacesuit that cloaks my entire body and dictates my movement. It takes me a while to recognize that Papiamentu-speaking self that is crammed inside, the way I think, twinkle my eyes, dance the tumba in Papiamentu. I regain a visceral quality, not just a language – all those things that get lost in translation.

 An American friend, on hearing me switch to Papiamentu while on the phone with one of my cousins living in Boston, exclaimed in delight: “you become a totally different person when you speak Papiamentu!” It was a moment of deep recognition, of acknowledgement. She was the first person not from the island, who saw me, and her remark, like a paradigm leap, enabled me to see myself, and feel the person that I am, fully, with all my layers of language.

 The flight is long, sometimes close to ten hours, or even more if there is a stopover on St. Maarten or Bonaire, two other Dutch islands in the Caribbean. I try to sleep and seldom watch the movie, while I make a concerted effort to wean myself, temporarily, from my licorice habit. I speak Dutch and Papiamentu on the plane with the flight attendants or the people are sitting next to me.

 If I flew a different airline or route, say via Madrid and Caracas, the transition to my Papiamentu-speaking-self would be delayed. Perhaps it would be more abrupt. Would I then have time to reflect on this sense of strangeness that overcomes me at the Amsterdam airport? Perhaps, I would immediately adopt my Papiamentu-speaking bearing from the moment I land, as if I had never been away. I would not have the chance to see myself from the side, as a woman I do not know in my ordinary life. I would not feel the pain and loneliness of not being able to share such a vivid part of myself.  I would not have come to writing this essay and realizing that this part of me is a stranger in my other life.

 Who is this woman who becomes again a speaker of Papiamentu, when standing in line at the Amsterdam airport? There, I reconnect with an inner core that I have denied myself all those years. There is a music of the language – juicy words like barbulète, kokolishi, warawara, maribomba – just their sounds make me dance, take me back to a childhood rich in fantasy and folktales.

 Yes, there is a sense of coming home when I speak Papiamentu – a mother tongue is, after all, a home, but not one I can take with me to places where there are no other speakers. It is a home in the sense that it makes me whole again, that fills me with the lifeforce of who I fully am.

 From the airplane, I finally catch a glimpse of the island below. My heart begins to somersault, as more and more of it becomes visible. Enthralled I begin to photograph. I have always loved to look down from airplanes, to see landscapes as gigantic, two-dimensional paintings. But most of all I love to look at Curaçao – seeing it not abstractly, but in its very physical manifestation – its large inner bays, shaped like fig-leaves; the waves splashing against the rocks of its rugged north coast, and its flat plain of dry, red sands along the sea near the airport. I already feel myself there as I identify all the bays where I have been, or the hills I have climbed with my brother Fred. From the air, I get ideas for new places to explore, and of course, to photograph.

 *

 And now, some years later, I realize that something is starting to happen to me when I photograph the island on my yearly visits to my mother. It is through my photography that I begin to look more closely at the island, becoming more and more connected. I discover that I can transcend the outsider stance that seems to be inherent in the act of taking pictures, meeting my subject on a deeper level without holding back, as I am thrown back into the realms of the senses, the psyche, history and memory.

 And the more I open myself to the island’s rhythms, sounds and textures through my lens, the harder it becomes to leave my language behind. To let the woman that I am on the island be erased.

 Back in Jerusalem, I continue to work with the photos – enhancing the digital images and uploading them to my photo-website, while also creating photobooks. In other words, I am no longer cutting myself off from the island.

 Sharing the images, I see that people really look, and I begin to realize that through my photographs, they can see a part of myself that I did not let them know before. I realize that with my photographs, I am speaking Papiamentu. That I am saying kokolishi, maribomba, warawara – and I am being understood.

 *****

 Notes:

 1. Georg Simmel, “The Stranger”, Kurt Wolff (Trans.) The Sociology of Georg Simmel. New York: Free Press, 1950, pp. 402 - 408.

the photographs in this post are from the exhibit I had at Gallery Landhuis Bloemhof, Curaçao in 2010

The Sea Inside

The Sea Inside

- thoughts on circumambulating the inner bay of Rif St. Marie

The flamingos stand undisturbed in the shallow waters of the inner bay, keeping a safe distance from the spot where the road nears the shore and tourists in cars and buses will stop to take pictures, later in the day. These bright pink, almost-orange birds have been photographed so much, and yet I too fall into the temptation of the multitudes as I zoom in on the strikingly colored birds, framed by the walls of the saltpans and contrasting against the dull gray waters and the dark, flat-topped hills that surround the bay. As I click away, it is not the end result I am concerned with, doubting I will ever show these flamingo pictures - but it is the act of taking the photograph, of seeing. Perhaps looking through the lens has become my way of plunging into the mood of the hike, wading into the landscape, in my mind’s eye. I follow the birds and their young near a saltpan-dam running perpendicular to the shore into the bay, two parallel lines of stone with the center submerged, that seem to disappear into the distance - a pathway to nowhere.

Fred and François are already ahead of me, engaged in a long discussion on computer mapping programs and GPS coordinates. On my previous visit to the island, I looked up my old classmate, François van der Hoeven and discovered our common affinity for mondi-walking – exploring the dense, thorny shrubbery of the Curaçao countryside. After I returned to my home in Jerusalem, he and my brother, Fred Mendes Chumaceiro, continued to go out weekly, scouting the mondi for archeological remains, acting as pathfinders for the local archeological association.

The “binnenwater” – Dutch for “inside-water” - is a very distinctive feature of Curaçao’s limestone coastline, fanning out like a lobed fig leaf with a very narrow stem connecting it to the sea. These lagoons, or inland seas, with their shallow waters, often bordered by the dense foliage of mangroves, offer a welcome refuge to aquatic birds. On the white salt flats in Jan Thiel I photographed pelicans, herons, flocks of flamingos, when my brother and I hiked around that bay a few years ago, and the long, red-legged “makamba” birds, referring to the Papiamentu epithet for the Dutch. The deeper binnenwater of Saint Anna Bay provides docking to large cargo ships and oil tankers and the island’s development owes much to this protected natural harbor, the Schottegat – literally the Sheltering Hole.

Millennia ago, the valleys of the inner bays were formed by rainwater flowing down the surrounding hills, carving a channel to drain into the sea. The direction of the flow is now reversed, with the sea entering the narrow passage to the sunken, empty valley, filling up this lacuna - from which the word lagoon derives.

As we walk in easterly direction, I photograph the muddy waters against the sun. There is a sense of dark luminescence, both foreboding and uplifting – as everything on this island seems to be one thing and its opposite. Likewise the inland sea is at the same time a sheltering bay to ships and birds, as well as a captured water that can be manipulated, dammed, drained, and that conveniently lends itself to the dumping of waste - sewage, asphalt, wrecked boats. If we turn its fig-leaf shape into land, making its negative space a positive one, the binnenwater would be a peninsula, literally, almost-an-island, and so the inner bay is almost-a-lake, if not for that narrow connection to the sea. The inland sea is both inside and outside – part of the land and part of the sea. Perhaps the reason I am so absorbed by the thought of encircling these inner bays, is that I too, a daughter of the island, having lived all my adult life away, am both and insider and outsider.

At the Hermanus saltpans Fred and François continue on a dirt road that hugs the shoreline, still involved in their discussion. Here I walk out on the half-submerged walls, with water on both sides of me, planning to rejoin them on a perpendicular dam, further out, that meets the shore in a bend of the bay. I am eager to find myself surrounded by the inland sea, to follow the walls into the far reaches of the bay, as if walking on water.

Since I started hiking seriously, around 1993, I have come to know there is nothing like long distance hiking to totally immerse myself into the landscape, in body and spirit. Hiking is immeasurably different from ‘seeing the sights’, going for a ride and stopping at picturesque places. Rather, it means to experience space over time, as a continuum, to flow with it as it changes, to move with its rhythms of open and closed, high and low, and the shifting light of the day.

At first, and for many years, I hiked without a camera – I had refrained from following the footsteps of all the other photographers in my family – my parents, grandfather and son - and in fact only started to photograph in the digital age.

Today, if I do not have my camera with me, I feel as if I am missing out on a vital dimension of the hike, one that I can experience only through the lens. With the camera it has become another kind of hike, as I search for a different reading of the landscape, focusing on the interstices that do not have a name, contemplating the colors and textures, so that I no longer recognize what I see. Through the act of framing, I am able to enter into enter into a magical world that I would hardly notice otherwise in a nature that is an uninterrupted and continuous whole. Indeed, hiking with the camera has becomes a hunt for hidden images, just like my brother and François scout the mondi for archeological remains.

As I walk on the saltpan walls, I am captivated by the living organisms that gently sway their tentacles in the muddy bottom of the bay. I get closer to these enigmatic creatures with my lens, wondering what they are – plant or animal. Later I learn they are jellyfish that turn themselves upside down, so that the algae, with which they live in symbiosis, can get the sunlight they need for photosynthesis. Cassiopeia is their name, after the mythological figure punished for boasting to the gods of her beauty. This is a knowledge I gained in retrospect that magnified numerous times my sense of wonder of looking under the surface.

This inland sea, trapped in a system of dams, is no longer the same sea as the Caribbean outside the bay, tellingly called “laman afó”, the sea outside, in Papiamentu, but many organisms have developed adaptations to its high salinity and unique ecology, like flamingos, mangroves and the upside-down-jellyfish. Though not actively manipulated today, the structures still hold shallow waters and salt is deposited as the waters evaporate. But the salt I photographed on my previous walks around the saltpans of St. Marie, Cas Abou, and Jan Thiel, is no longer here – it has been dissolved by the heavy rains that flooded these low lying plains in the rainy period. I am disappointed, longing to get more shots of the intricate white forms, dripping like icing on a birthday cake and the whirls of sparkling crystals mixed with kernels of black sand and the minuscule crustaceans that color the flamingos pink.

Going through the old slides taken by my mother, I am touched to discover the ones that seek the abstract patterns of the salt, as if I am now echoing her pursuits, speaking the same language. Somehow the saltpans embody my photographic lineage more than any subject matter – starting with my mother’s father, Benjamin Gomes Cassseres, who captured the saltpans in impressive black and white photographs before the age of light meters; to my mother, Tita Mendes Chumaceiro in her slides; and my father, Frank Mendes Chumaceiro, who filmed laborers shoveling up the salt into wheelbarrows at Jan Thiel in the nineteen-fifties, when those saltpans were still being worked.

It is difficult to look at the saltpans without thinking of slavery. Even if they were still exploited after the emancipation, salt winning in the scorching heat of the sun surely depended on the hard labor of those who had limited choices of livelihood. History still weighs heavily in these regions, with three plantation houses around the St. Marie binnenwater – Hermanus, Jan Kock and Rif, each with its own grid of saltpans. To this day, the island’s slavery past still seems to arouse at once fascination, shame and awe. The writer Miriam Sluis, in Zoutrif, her book on Rif St. Marie, explores the impact of slavery on present day society, asking how this disgraceful history still affects the descendants of the slaves and their masters.

Just as I had hoped, my saltpan dam, though partially inundated at places, takes me safely back to the shore, and I continue with the others. When we approach the deeper parts of the bay, the water becomes a rich, dark green in the mid-morning light, reflecting the steep side of the Seru Largu across the bay above the entrance channel. I can already see that the rocks at the foot of the hill reach all the way down to the water, and ask myself how we will follow the shoreline there, but decide to cross that bridge when we get to it.

A little stone wall appears on our left, and we examine the lime burning oven which is in remarkable condition. My lens is drawn to the pieces of bright, orange roof tiles tucked into the dark construction of damp stones, crying out to be noticed. Along the rock wall there is a spring of fresh water – so improbable in this realm of salt. François tastes it to prove the point – and we enter a hidden world of upside-down-trees on the still waters that run shallow, bordered by a high, gray limestone cliff. Suddenly, I find myself entranced by the magical spell of this place, and with my camera I begin to see, creeping with my lens into every little  turn and bend of this watery space. I single out a spot of light, a meeting of leaf and water, an interplay of green mangrove leaves in the foreground, a dark rock with a rose patch, like a wound, in the background, and its reflection in the ‘underground’ – on and under the water surface.

As we reach the coast, we emerge from the leafy canopy beneath a sky now ominous with dark clouds. The stony shore, at this bend of the coastline, is not a safe and gentle beach, but receives the brunt of the easterly winds as it swerves out towards Cape St. Marie. Sticking out about the waves are the corroded remains of a pier that was apparently dumped here from the port at Bullenbaai, evoking a ship that ran aground in a storm.

A rusted pipe lies across the narrow entrance to the inner bay, broad enough to balance on top, so that we need not wet our feet in the crossing. I photograph the white skeleton of a decaying moray eel, its teeth and vertebrae sharply delineated against a carpet of succulents with crisscrossing orange-red stems. Across the bay, in the far distance, is the green silhouette of the Christoffel, rising above the hilly landscape, clearly the highest peak on the island.

It would have been difficult to follow the long entrance channel into the bay, as the rocks at the foot of Seru Largu come all the way down to the water, and we did not bring the proper shoes to venture on this wet route. Instead, we decide to continue along the seacoast and then make our way back across the saddle between two hilltops, to the inner bay.

We easily find the newly bulldozed road of the resort under construction that will soon transform this arid wilderness into the leisure grounds for the privileged from overseas, carrying globalization into the bay of St. Marie. As much as François has been actively opposing the uncontrolled development in wild nature and erasure of archeological sites, he is now glad to take advantage of those very problematic roads, so that we can gain time and continue our circumambulation of the bay.

On our way down, I stop, suddenly, to capture the thin hilu di diabel, “devil’s threads,” that are almost strangling the dark green shrubs. The amazing thing is that they are not yellow here, but flaming orange. I wonder if orange is indeed a preference of nature in these dry regions, or is it is precisely this color that I notice among many others, as it stands out against the dull hues of the dry landscape?

When the bay finally appears in front of us, we have already been walking for more than four hours, and take a welcome lunch break by its shores. Here is the first sign from the old Rif plantation, a v-shaped wall along the shore, made of rough coral stones heaped on top of each other – what often is called a ‘slave wall’ on the island, but which François insists on calling by its more descriptive name in Dutch, stapelmuur, a piled-stone wall.

After our rest, we continue into the old Rif plantation grounds, and Fred and François show me the indigo basins and a cylindrical grave they have found on previous scouting trips. We walk along the shore for a while, crossing the valley where indigo was cultivated as the path climbs toward an old slave house, its overgrown and crumbling walls, baring a construction of mud-covered woven sticks.

Finally, on top of the hill, we reach the Rif plantation house, which is in an advanced state of disintegration - its walls are cracked, eaten by saltpeter, and debris is scattered all over the floors. Its doors and windows have been stripped, as well as its formerly tiled roofs, leaving only a skeleton of wooden beams against the blue cloudless sky. This is a paradise for my camera – each frame an abstract painting - of walls with patches of mold and saltpeter, jagged cracks, peeling remnants of paint and shadows cast by the crosshatch of beams.    

I capture the maze of rooms upon rooms, leading to some other dark spaces beyond, the sunken cement bathtub, the old kitchen with its bright red walls. Then I see the wooden steps leading up to the attic, strewn with shards of orange roof tiles. I cannot resist the urge to climb to the attic, to follow my childhood curiosity for secrets hidden under the beams, despite my fears that the rotten steps and floorboards will give in with my weight. In the trance of photography and memory, I forget all the threats.  

The saltpans that I photographed here several years earlier and to which I was eager to return, are now flooded over, and anyway we must hurry back as the day is drawing short. In the distance, in the dull green hills, I start to see the white painted landhuis of Jan Kock. Below, in the grey, muddy waters, is a white heron, which I capture in the same shot. This is where we started, we have walked around the entire inner bay – which is what I had asked my brother and François to do. It was not enough for me to walk along parts of the shores – I attributed great importance to going completely around – circumambulating the inner bay.

Circumambulation in religious rites entails walking around a shrine or sacred mountain – as in the Tibetan Buddhist rituals I encountered while trekking around the Anapurna Massif in Nepal. Similar to the Buddhist shrines that are not entered or the 8000-meter mountains that cannot easily be traversed, here too, I cannot tread upon the water of the inner bay, I cannot make shortcuts – I must go all around. Once I start on the journey, I have to bring it to an end.

It is not only the sense of satisfaction in achieving what I set out to do, which I experience at the end of almost all walks. There is a sense of completeness, wholeness, in circumambulation, that reverberates deeper, in the spirit - a feeling of return, having become enriched in the journey, a homecoming.

And so, in circumambulating the inner bay of Rif St. Marie, I realize I am echoing my yearly return to the island of my birth - rounding my own, persnal circle, coming home. And, perhaps, on another level, it signifies the return to my photographic roots, connecting me to a long lineage of photographers.

***

MONDI OF THE MIND - hiking in the hills of Curaçao

MONDI of the MIND

The tree which moves some to tears is, in the eyes of others, only a green thing that stands in the way 

William Blake

The mondi in Curaçao is a dense, thorny mantle of shrubbery that covers the arid hills of the island, overgrown with ensnaring lianas, varieties of cacti and prickly acacias and the poisonous bringa mosa, and interspersed with small, hardy trees that can survive in the long periods of drought. It is a dry wilderness that is hard to penetrate - in no way, a woodland of lush, green trees. Only on the highest hills, where the air is more humid and cooler, an occasional orchid blooms.

Why would anyone want to wander into such a dense, thorny wilderness? After speaking enthusiastically about my latest adventure in the mondi, a friend remarked “what is the point of cutting a trail down an overgrown gully, then clambering up a steep, gravelly slope just to get back to the same place where you started?” adding, “when I go for a walk, I like to have a clear goal, a beautiful place I want to reach. But just to go down a rooi and up again? If you have seen one mondi, you have seen them all.”

Yet I, and my companions on this challenging hike at Seru Bientu in the Christoffel Park, are exhilarated. They are the “speurneuzen” – perhaps best translated from the Dutch as the “archeology and nature sleuths” – whose official name is “The Curaçao Archaeological Exploration Group.” Every Thursday morning, these not so young men and women set out to comb the mondi for archeological and historical remains, rare plants and animals, and to document their exploratory trips with photographs, maps and written reports that enable other experts – archeologists, geologist, biologists – to carry on further research. The group came about in 2008, when, on my yearly visit to the island, I introduced my brother Fred, with whom I always loved to explore the mondi, to my former classmate François, who was equally passionate about the mondi. Soon they were joined by other mondi-lovers and set out to explore Curaçao’s landscape, basing their search for archeological remains on old, historic maps. 

Ser’i Bientu – Hill of the Wind - is itself an extraordinary place with an aura of its own. Here the Curaçao trade winds are at their strongest, bending and contorting trees, making them dance, while the ground is covered by the distinctive orange tinted rocks of the Kenepa formation. On this hill, the higher peak of the Ser’i Bientu ridge, we stand above the dark blue sea with its turquoise bays on the island’s south coast, and behind us rises the highest peak of the island, the Christoffel, and its surrounding hills, all covered by dense mondi. But the most striking feature of Ser’i Bientu are the sabal palms with their smooth, bulbous trunks and waving crowns, that grow nowhere else on the island. It is like entering an enchanted world.

We start our hike by sliding down a slope on the western side of the Ser’i Bientu ridge, overlooking the bright yellow Kenepa plantation that stands out against the dusty green of the mondi below. Yes, we have to slide down, as the hill is so steep and gravelly with hardly any trees to hold onto, so that it is hard to keep your balance while standing upright. It is here that we find a lone white orchid in bloom.

 As we reach the rooi, the gully between two hills, we enter the mondi será – the ‘closed’ mondi – that here is especially overgrown. At this point Carel, who has fallen behind while busily photographing plants and birds, decides to return to the top, with Eliane joining him for company. While waiting for us, they delight in the opportunity to savor the magic of Ser’i Bientu.  

Now we have to make our way through the vines and topple infrou cacti, progressing slowly, in the hope of reaching a more open path, perhaps one made by the deer that can be found only on the hills of the Christoffel park. After an hour and a half in this dense shrubbery, with no wind and only the occasional blue of the sea peeking through the tangled lianas, we realize we won’t be able to reach the end of the rooi and decide to go up a hill that looks less densely grown that should take us back to the Ser’i Bientu ridge.

It is again a similar gravelly scree slope, but this time much steeper than the one we slid down on, and it seems to end at high cliffs of the Kenepa formation. Fred and Hettie and later Gerlof make it to the cliffs somehow, but I search for another way up where I can see the sky ahead of me, so that I won’t have to climb those cliffs that look crumbly to me. I feel assured, with Ben behind me, as he overheard that I do not like being the last one up and risk being left behind.

I hold on to sparse trees and bushes, so not to slip back down the steep hill, carefully avoiding the infrou cacti, and hoping the next bush I grab blindly, will not be a poisonous bringa mosa. But I no longer care, my adrenaline takes over. Only when Ben and I are almost there, does my exhaustion reach a peak. I drink all the water I have, eat my rescue candy for energy, and somehow make it to the top of this outcrop of the Ser’i Bientu ridge. Tired, but with a joyful sense of accomplishment, I re-surface from the closed world of the mondi into the open air, where sabal palms wave in the wind and a striking large orange rock stands out against the blue of the sea.

Why did we go down the rooi, on Ser’i Bientu, even though it did not take us anywhere? The speurneuzen would say, to see what we could find – perhaps signs of phosphate mining such as found in the nearby hills; a blooming orchid; unusual trees or birds. Or to know where the rooi is going, to see how far down we can get, if it is possible to reach the road to Kenepa, to understand the lay of the land. Because we have not been there before – or simply, “because it is there” – to paraphrase the proverbial answer attributed to Mallory, when asked why he wanted to climb Mt Everest.

There is the sense of exploration of the unknown, of adventure in the wilderness. But how much wilderness can there really be on such a small, narrow island that is less than 70 kilometers long and at the most 16 km wide? Can you really get lost in the mondi? Is it possible there are places where no other human being has been?

It is interesting to note that the Papiamentu word “mondi” also means forest – our language makes no distinction, allowing the imagination to turn the dry shrubbery into something far grander and more heroic. Just as the word “seru” for the island’s humble hills that do not rise above 400 meters, also refers to lofty mountains covered by snow.

As children, we would turn the Plain of Hato – a narrow strip of red sand, bounded by the rough North Coast and a limestone ridge – into a veritable desert in which you could get lost for days without finding an oasis. The exploration of the great explorers spoke to our imagination, acting the discovery of the North and South Poles, to find Livingstone in the heart of Africa, to climb Mt. Everest. Then there were the children’s stories of solving mysteries, like those of my favorite author, Sientje van Iterson, whose adventures took place in the island’s old, forsaken plantation houses and the surrounding mondi. The books’ title pages said “voor oudere jongens”– for older boys – which angered me, for after all, they were written by a woman, in fact a woman I knew personally. But that did not stop me from devouring those books.

It is our imagination that calls us to explore the mondi. In Mountains of the Mind, the author – and mountain climber – Robert McFarlane writes “We read landscapes (..) we interpret their forms in the light of our own experience and memory, and that of our shared cultural memory.” This is why the mondi appeals to some of us, while to others, like by friend quoted above, it is just another hindrance to be cleared, a “green thing that stands in the way”.

The Christoffel Park was established over an area of 2,300 hectares, covering not just the highest “mountain” on the island, but all its surrounding hills, including Ser’i Bientu. This was in 1978, long after I left the island, but on my yearly visits, much before the ‘speurneuzen’ were formed, my brother Fred and I would wander through the mondi in this large park, climbing the Christoffel off-trail from every possible side; discovering the manganese mines that were lost even to the rangers; scouting the ruins of old plantation houses, and of course, marveling at the sabal palms on Ser’i Bientu.

The borders of the park gave us a sense of security to explore the mondi without the danger of trespassing on private property and being challenged by an enraged owner with a shotgun. Moreover, with much less chance of being mugged, as violent attackers – a growing phenomenon on the island – would likely stick to the city and not be found wandering in this difficult terrain.

Within those borders, mondi-walking is perhaps also a way of crossing borders – to cut a path where it is hard to get through, where the mondi is “closed” – the mondi será. The idea that I can go across something that is closed is an act of crossing boundaries that provides a sense of freedom, a sense that no rules can stop you.

In a way, entering into the mondi is, for me, an act of reclaiming the forbidden domain where, as a little girl, I was warned never to tread because of all the dangers lurking in the dark, dense shrubbery. It was the chaos beyond the cosmos of the safe home. I often wonder if these fears were instilled only in little girls, to keep us at home, as the boys enjoyed the freedom to wander into the mondi and shoot iguanas with a slingshot.

Making my way across the mondi symbolizes, for me, the blazing of my own trail on this little island where all the ways were set, where social behavior was strictly controlled while I was growing up, particularly for women. Even – or rather, especially – for the more privileged among us.

On another level, this need to explore – here, the countryside –  parallels the need to explore the secrets of the past, to unearth the truth about the island’s social hierarchies and their unspoken rules that keep everyone in their place –  something that has always grabbed me as a child. To explore is to find out for yourself, without asking, without a guide who shows you the way, who gives you the answers.

Secrets, too, have a boundary, a boundary that the curious among us desire to cross – the boundary of knowledge. A secret is what one person knows, or is allowed to know, but is hidden from others. Or,  what is known by all, but cannot be spoken out loud, such as knowledge about the brua, the local voodoo-like practices; about the tambu, the ecstatic drum dance that was still forbidden in my childhood, and most of all, about the yu dj’afó – the ‘outside children’ a fact of life that was so commonplace in the patriarchal colonial society in which I grew up – itself an act of crossing the borders of race and class, afforded to privileged white men.

And the shadow of slavery still hovers over these hills – in ruins of plantation houses with slave-bell pillars, in what was believed to be the tiny cells where rebellious slaves were incarcerated. The impenetrable mondi around the Christoffel would have provided shelter and temporary freedom for the enslaved who had escaped from the nearby plantations during the Great Slave Rebellion in 1795. In my youth, the knowledge of slavery was, in some ways, a kind of dark, open secret that was shoved into history books, allowing descendants of slave-owners to distance themselves from all traces of a social order erected by their ancestors. 

The etymology of the word ‘mondi’ is a question of speculation. It might come from the Spanish and Portuguese ‘monte’ which means mountain – and which can also refer to ‘forest’, in regions where mountains are forested. Similarly, to Curacao’s ‘seru’ (mountain) that is covered with ‘mondi’ (forest) – to play with the ambiguity of the word and its aggrandizement on this small island.

But I prefer to think of the consonants that link mondi to mundu – meaning “world” - as to me, entering the mondi is a total immersion into an entirely different world. It is perhaps to lose the way, and then, unexpectedly, to come upon an elusive deer drinking from a puddle in a rooi, that just filled with water from yesterday’s rain.

Proverbs in Papiamentu with the word mondi abound – the poet, translator and ardent proponent of Papiamentu, Lucille Haseth, provided me with at least fifteen. The mondi in all these sayings is deep inside the creatures who live there, be it the deer, goats, wild donkeys and a great variety of birds – it is their nature, and a wild place of freedom, even if it might offer a meager existence. “A deer will always return to the mondi” and “The quail says: better a hundred years of hunger in the mondi, than one day inside a house”.

On this visit, after an absence of seven years, I notice that the idea of the mondi has gained a broad appeal – judging from groups on social media called “re-discover your mondi side” and “mondi addiction”; from “Mondi Mágiko,” a night walk through a magically illuminated grove; and “Mondi Fun”, a children’s discovery program. Even holiday accommodations lure potential tourists with the word “mondi” in their names, while increasing numbers of jeep and walking tours bring more and more visitors into the mondi.

With this new popularity of the mondi, which mondi are they talking about in each of these instances? What is the mondi to all these people? To each of us, the mondi means something different – here I have reflected on what it means to me. It is, indeed, the mondi of the mind.

.*****

Rita Mendes-Flohr - email: ritme4@gmail.com

Jerusalem, February 12, 2020

SWIM FOR THE DARK SPOTS - on participating in "Swim for the Roses," my first open water swim in Curaçao

Growing up on the Caribbean island of Curaçao, with its tranquil beaches where the water is an unbelievable turquoise, you would assume I’d be a natural swimmer. But despite all that splendor, I had a very ambivalent relationship with the sea. 

As a child, I loved nothing more than going to the beach, but would enter the water only where it was clear as glass and you could see the white sand below. I was terrified to swim over the “dark spots” where there were rocks covered with seaweed and especially with the dreaded sea urchins and their long, black needles that could pierce your foot.

Swimming over those dark spots, you could not see what ravenous creatures would be lurking among the dark rocks, below you. Of course, there was absolutely no factual basis for those fears, as shark or barracuda attacks on swimmers were almost unknown. And it was way before “Jaws” was made, by which time I had long left the island.

The calm, turquoise beaches are found along the south coast of the island, hidden in protected coves with rocky cliffs on either side. I certainly did not dare to swim out beyond the coves into the open sea - the laman dj’afó,  or ‘outside’ sea. There, in those deep, dark waters, you could certainly not see what was hiding beneath the surface.

Learning to swim at age five was a traumatic experience. As I have always been athletic and well-coordinated, I quickly picked up the ability to keep myself afloat and do the movements of the breaststroke in shallow water. Then one day we were told to jump into the deep end of the pool.

Standing on the edge of the pool, looking down, I was overcome by terror and started to cry desperately. I was not yet ready for the jump, the deep, dirty-green water - saltwater from the sea mixed with chlorine - would certainly pull me down to the depths, swallow me whole into an endless void. What if there were monsters down below, predators that I could not see in the cloudy greenish water, that would devour me alive.

It was my swimming teacher, a Dutch ex-marine, who was the shark. “Jump in”, he ordered “Do you think I have all the time in the world?” His yelling grew louder and louder, but I just stood there, crying even more. Then he marched up to me, picked me up like a package under his arm and carried me demonstratively to his office, where he sat me on a chair and locked the door behind us. He pulled out a pair of scissors, and I was sure he would rip me to pieces with the sharp teeth of a barracuda. Instead he cut a large piece of bandage tape and plastered it over my mouth. “That will teach you to stop crying” he said, and went back to his class, leaving me behind near the changing rooms, trembling. I felt deeply ashamed and hid from the others what went on in his office, as if I had done something terribly wrong.  Of course, I never returned to that class, while the other children went on to get their swimming diploma.

I might have given up on swimming after that painful incident, but they say you must always get back on the horse when you fall, and my mother, who had been a trained swimmer in her youth, allowed me to practice with her at the beach, and I learned quickly. Still, when she was not by my side, I had to wear that large, bright red swimming vest to my great embarrassment, until I actually got my swimming diploma a few years later, of course with a different teacher, but the scars in my psyche took an immeasurable time to heal.

Even though I was born on a Caribbean island surrounded by magnificent coral reefs, I never went snorkeling in my youth, not even on my frequent return visits. I was afraid. The first time I dared to swim over a coral reef was when I was almost fifty and living in Israel. It was at the Sinai coast, after I had gone trekking for seven days in the Sinai mountains – in itself, an act of overcoming a different set of deep-seated fears – my fears of the desert.

At the famous Blue Hole in Dahab, we rented snorkels, masks and fins. I believe it was the high from my total surrender to the mountains, the sense of fulfillment, the awe in the face of those numinous mountains, that gave me the courage to go snorkeling for the very first time, and to see what I had been missing all my life. I could not believe the beauty of that enchanted undersea world, the rainbow hues of the large parrot fish, the swishing schools of fish in all colors and shapes, the anemones gently waving their tentacles. I was totally embraced by the magic, feeling the silence reverberate in my entire body.

My brother Fred, an experienced scuba diver, took me snorkeling the next time I came to Curaçao, showing me the magical forests of corals near the entrance of a bay, not really far out into the open sea. I can’t say I was not scared, but it is easier to swim over those reefs swarming with fish when you “look them in the eye” as it were - and can admire their beauty, as well as see what is coming, rather than imagine it. Even a barracuda, my brother assured me when we actually saw one, can be like just an innocent aquarium fish, if you just let it be.

There is certainly something sexual in my fear of the sea. Rather than a fear of drowning in waves or strong currents, it is a fear of the violation of my body, of rape. Immersed in water, you are at your most vulnerable - your body almost naked, open to attack from all sides, and with no ability to run away from rapists and murderers. Like the iconic bathroom scenes in movies.

I ask myself if this irrational fear of being ambushed by some sinister creature can be attributed to the way girls were raised in that patriarchal society where I grew up; if those fears were not deliberately instilled in little girls in order to keep us in the protected home. Boys were not brought up that way.

Perhaps there was more to it than a sensible warning to protect little girls from being violated by men, particularly by strangers - we were never told to watch out for men who were close to us. Perhaps the grownups meant to frighten us about the chaos outside the cosmos of the home, a chaos that would certainly awaken our closely guarded sexual desires. Perhaps those fears – of the street, of the wild countryside, of the deep blue sea - were inculcated in us as a barrier against erotic temptations, keeping us far from the luscious beauty and freedoms of the world.

**

Despite all these inner obstacles, I have become a passionate open water swimmer. It has been a long, step by step process. I have learned, already at the age of five, that I cannot jump into deep waters, when I don’t feel ready. I must slowly, but surely, conquer my fears.

It was only in my mid-fifties that I started to swim seriously, when I joined my brother doing laps along a calm, protected beach on my visits to Curaçao. At first, I did not even put my head in the water doing the breaststroke. Back in Jerusalem, I improved my stroke in the local pool, eventually teaching myself the crawl. Then I took a course in Total Immersion (T.I.), the energy preserving swimming method especially suited for open water swimming. That really ignited my enthusiasm.

First, I joined the yearly 4 km “Crossing the Sea of Galilee” swim, where I knew for sure there are no sharks and the water is always calm in the early mornings when the swim is held. Soon after, I started to participate in more and more challenging swims, mostly competitions, off Israel’s Mediterranean coast with its small or larger waves, but at least there were no shark attacks that I ever heard of.

Deep inside, I knew that someday I would have to vanquish the specters of my childhood and venture out in the open sea in Curaçao. The perfect opportunity would be the “Swim for the Roses”, a 2.8 km swim, organized every year to raise money for cancer research and care.

In my ambivalence, I let many years go by, until finally, in January 2020, I buy a ticket to Curaçao. Excitedly, I tell everyone, both in Jerusalem and on the island, that this is my reason for going to Curaçao, after having been away for seven years.  

Together with my brother Fred, I sign up for the swim. During the two weeks before the swim, we practice along the turquoise beaches, and easily do the three kilometers of the organized swim in those calm waters. I refuse to practice in the rough, dark blue open sea, as Fred suggests, because I do not want to risk being discouraged before the Big Day. I want to jump in, on that day, and give myself over to the occasion – and only then cope with my fears.

It has been windstill for several days. Great, I think, no waves. But that brings reports of Portuguese jellyfish being spotted close to the shoreline, just where the swim will be held. I am told about the horrors of jellyfish burns by Michèle, Fred’s partner. I think of Diane Nyad swimming from Cuba to Key West, and how she was constantly stung by jellyfish – while sharks followed the boat accompanying her. No way I can swim in such waters.

Fortunately, just a day before the swim, the wind comes back and is blowing from its usual direction, so that the jellyfish disappear into the horizon. But now I must worry about waves whipped up by the constant trade winds. A friend shows me a website with wind and sea measurements for sailors. For the day of our swim, it predicts waves of a meter and a half. I don’t know how I can possibly cope with such high waves, if the readings of the website are correct. My brother, who in the past has done a lot of windsurfing, tries to assure me that such high waves would never be found near the shore. Besides, the current will be with us, going east to west, as always.

The night before the swim my heart is beating fast and I cannot sleep. My anxiety is exacerbated by a profound sadness, knowing I will be leaving the island the day after the swim, and realizing how much a part of me Curaçao still is. How will I be able to swim, if I feel like this?  

But I know that I cannot give up now. I have told everyone that I came to the island in order to swim and they all expressed their admiration for my determination. I have been dreaming about the swim for months. Can I allow myself to give up on my dream? Should I quit, my childhood fears of the open sea will overpower me again, and who knows when I will muster up the courage to try again?

Diana Nyad was forced to abort her swims from Cuba to Florida four times, until she finally succeeded, at the age of 64. George Mallory, obsessed with climbing Mt Everest, went back to the Himalayas three times, and perished in his last attempt, so that nobody knows if he actually was able to feel the triumph and liberation of making it to the top.

What drives such swimmers and mountaineers to try and try again? Not everything I attempt is equally important to me and merits such persistence. I know the relief, even the joy of quitting. But swimming in open water, for me, is another matter – as well as hiking in deserts and arctic regions or trekking in the high mountains of the Himalayas. These efforts touch upon much deeper desires and passions, a yearning for freedom and expansion of my soul.

It is this that drives me to try, again and again, to overcome the fears of getting lost, of being abandoned, fears of falling from heights, and most of all, fears of being ambushed, robbed, raped - all fears instilled in little girls to keep us away from desire.  It is this drive that enables me to break out of the protected walls of the home, the narrow confines of the island, and to venture into the wilderness, to embrace the wildness at the ends of the earth, and fly.

**

The morning of the swim, my anxiety of the night before is replaced by growing excitement. We drive early to the starting point at the Jan Thiel beach, so as not to feel pressured, and quickly finish with the registration and required medical examinations. That allows us time to jump into the clear waters of the bay, ahead of the start, and warm up by swimming a few laps.

It is indeed reassuring to see how calm the sea is here, so that outside the bay, there certainly won’t be any meter-and-a-half waves. Starting the swim when we are already in the water takes away the tension of the competitions in Israel that start on the shore and everyone runs into the sea at the count of ‘go’ – heightening the competitive spirit, so that you involuntarily fall into the temptation to start out much too fast, and soon run out of breath.

And so, I start slowly, at first swimming beside my brother and another friend as we leave the protected bay, but soon, we lose each other and are on our own in the wide-open sea. I am doing fine, I feel confident, finding my own rhythm that allows me to swim long distances without exhausting myself.

Surprisingly, I do not think of sharks and barracudas and other predators in the sea, perhaps because I convince myself that we are a large group of swimmers who are disturbing the waters, so that all the sharks and barracudas will be driven away. Or because, with my goggles, I can see that no such threats are hidden under the surface. Wearing the white cap with red letters of “Swim for the Roses”, I feel reassured that I can easily be seen from the accompanying boats and paddleboards, should I need help.  

There are places where the route takes us close to the shore, and I delight in reefs with impressive elkhorn corals. Even the fire corals that can burn you, do not frighten me. I do not think of jellyfish or the deceptively beautiful, yet venomous, lionfish that has invaded these reefs. I just swim, and swim, my mind in a calm, meditative state. It is this total surrender to the act of swimming, to being in the water, that allows me to completely push my childhood fears out of my consciousness. Nothing else matters but the pure joy of swimming. Nothing else exists.

Despite this discovery that the point of the swim is the swim itself, there still is the sense of accomplishment in reaching the finish line, the proud “I did it”. The announcer, cheering us on as we emerge out of the water, asks me my age. He is not particularly impressed by my 72 years; he is looking out for the swimmer he is told is in her eighties. He does not know that it is not the effort of swimming the distance, but my journey to surmount my ingrained fears of the laman dj’afó, the “outside sea”, that is the real triumph.

my brother Fred and I after the swim, February 2, 2020 with our roses. photo credit: Michèle van Veldhoven

*****

Rita Mendes-Flohr, Jerusalem, in corona seclusion, April 1, 2020