Swim for the Dark Spots

Swim for the Dark Spots, Persimmon Tree, December 2023 Swim for the Dark Spots – Persimmon Tree

Arctic Reveries: Reflections on Trekking in Eastern Greenland

 published in Wild Roof Journal, issue 12, January 2022 https://wildroofjournal.com/issue-12-rita-mendes-floh/?fbclid=IwAR0g6d1-mjn6UsMZTcCABAVviGargOzEddk-qu5BE5Lwo2mZkWBM5fCQMDo

Mondi of the Mind - exploring the wild, thorny wilderness in Curaçao

As published in the literary journal Kristòf, 2020, Volume XXI-1, Curaçao

MONDI of the MIND

 The tree which moves some to tears of joy 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, made up of cacti and prickly acacias, interspersed with small hardy trees that can survive in the long periods of drought. It is a dry wilderness of thorns and ensnaring lianas 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, does an occasional orchid bloom.

 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 the 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. Here the Curaçao trade winds are at their strongest, bending, and contorting trees, making them dance the tumba, 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 rise the highest peak of the island, the Christoffel, and the 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 and give the place an enchanted ambiance.

 Sliding down a slope on the western side of the Ser’I Bientu ridge, we spot the bright yellow Kenepa plantation house that stands out against the dusty green of the mondi below. Yes, we must slide down on our bottoms, as the hill is so steep and gravelly with hardly any trees to hold onto, so that it is hard to keep our balance while standing upright. It is here that we find a lone, blooming white orchid in the armpit of a tree, that I rush to photograph.

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.  

Now we must 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 so decide to go up a hill that looks less densely grown, believing it 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 on which we slid down, 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, literally ‘a fighting lady’. But I no longer care, my adrenaline takes over. Only when Ben and I are almost there, my exhaustion reaches 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, that can be found only in these higher hills; unusual trees or birds. Or to know where the rooi is going, to see how far down we can get, if it is possible at all to reach the road to Kenepa, to understand the lay of the land. “Because we have not been there before” as my brother says, 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 with snow peaks.

As children, we would turn the Plain of Hato – a narrow strip of red sand, bounded by the rough North Coast on one side and a limestone ridge on the other – into a veritable desert in which you could get lost for days without finding an oasis. The expeditions of the great explorers spoke to our imagination, as we acted out the discovery of the North and South Poles, finding Livingstone in the heart of Africa, climbing 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’ front 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.

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 the reason 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, in the park, there was 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 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. The boys were not cautioned about these dangers; they 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, the need to explore the countryside parallels my 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, to partake in forbidden knowledge. Yet some of the island’s secrets are not forbidden knowledge, for they are known to all. What is forbidden it to speak them out loud, such as secret knowledge about the brua, the local voodoo-like practices; about the tambu, the ecstatic drum dance that was still forbidden by law in my childhood, and most of all, about the yu dj’afó – the illegitimate, or ‘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 Curaçao’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 gully 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 since my mother’s death, I notice that the idea of the mondi has gained a broad, perhaps romantic, 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? Here, I have reflected on what it means to me: reclaiming forbidden terrain, uncovering secrets, blazing a trail of my own. To each of us, the mondi means something different. It is, indeed, the mondi of the mind.

*****

Jerusalem, 2020

 Notes:

1. Robert McFarlane, Mountains of the Mind, 2004, New York, Vintage Books  

A Place of Anchoring - Reflections on Hiking in the Negev Desert

A Place of Anchoring - my essay about reflections while hiking in the Negev desert, is published here in About Place Journal, together with my photographs:

Rita Mendes-Flohr – Navigations: A Place for Peace – About Place Journal

Photographs and Words - the stories behind the photograph

PHUNCHOK’S MOTHER

Phunchok, our trek organizer in Ladakh, arranges a special finale for our three-week journey, a visit to his mother in her village. She is a spirited woman in her seventies, who still actively works her own land. Doreen and I connect with her immediately on a visceral level, even though we do not share a common language. Perhaps, being close in age helps to create this bond. It is not often that I allow myself to photograph portraits of people on my travels, reluctant to turn them into exotic objects. However, her delightful energy shines through, and we share an intimate space that lets photography - my language - be a natural part of our conversation.

MAKING TIBETAN BUTTER TEA

The photograph was made while trekking in Nepal in October 2014 on the Tamang Heritage Trail, when we stayed an extra day at the home of our guide’s parents, witnessing daily life in the Tibetan Buddhist village of Briddim, his mother cooking traditional meals and making butter tea, his father, the village shaman, divining his clients’ maladies and fates – including ours. 

I love the chiaroscuro ambiance in the Himalayan interiors, the light always filtering through the windowpanes, bolstered by the glow from the hearth or burning stoves – with no lightbulbs on, even when electricity is available. On the other hand, though the scene here looks very traditional, our hostess was using a blender to make butter tea, rather than the traditional butter churning tool.

SAD EYES

I photographed this buffalo with his pleading eyes as we passed his shed on our way to have lunch at a teahouse on the Khopra Ridge trek in Nepal in 2018. A few minutes later, he was dead.

While we were having our lunch on a sunny balcony, we looked out on a grassy field, where a family was cleaning the slaughtered animal and dividing its meat into a dozen little piles neatly laid out on a colorful cloth. Doreen, who has always been a vegetarian, just could not look, when we realized what we were seeing. But I photographed the scene of family togetherness.

Several hours later, and much higher up on this route that is hardly traveled by other trekkers, we stayed the night at a small, cold, dark guesthouse. Its owner, Dil Bahadur, a rugged old man, but still younger in years than Doreen, was sharpening his knives, and offered us fresh buffalo meat that he just got from his relatives further down the mountain - it was from the very same buffalo I had photographed earlier...

Needless to say, I too refused.

********

BEYOND YELLOW EYES - A photographer’s questions about color vision after cataract surgery

BEYOND YELLOW EYES

            A photographer’s questions about color vision after cataract surgery

 In a state of ecstasy after my first cataract surgery, I marvel at the blues and violets I can now see with my operated left eye, especially that royal purple of the couch cover that looks radiant, almost psychedelic. Comparing my vision to that through my right eye that also needs surgery, I notice that those brilliant purples had been a muddy, nondescript color, and the white walls a dirty yellow, as if I had been seeing through a yellow filter without realizing it, like the proverbial frog in a slowly heating pan of water.

 Next month, I will have cataract surgery on my second eye and wonder how I will be able to compare my new vision to the yellowed colors I was used to seeing. Can our brains remember exact colors? Are there experiments that can help me measure the difference? Perhaps one way is to look at artworks created in the different modes of vision as evidence of perception.  

 Claude Monet, who was increasingly seeing yellower and yellower with growing cataracts, as can be illustrated by his brownish paintings of that period, finally agreed to have cataract surgery at the age of 82. The medical technology at that time could not yet replace the clouded lens in his eye - that in all of us has natural UV protection - with an intraocular lens (IOL) implant, so that Monet was looking at the world without any lens in his eye - a condition called aphakia. Apparently, he was then able to see UV light, as revealed in his late paintings that show a bluish tint in his white waterlilies. (1)

 How did I photograph, in the past few years through my cataracted eyes? And especially how, as a nature photographer, I had not noticed I was seeing through a dirty-yellow filter? Were my photos different from those that I took before the cataracts started? I love to photograph the desert on my many desert hikes, while I also create macro-images in my studio of organic materials, like kombucha mushrooms. Was my choice of warm earth colors determined by my not being able to see blues? But then, I always preferred the oranges and reds.

 As an art photographer who is not at all concerned with “representing reality”’, if there is such a thing, I loved to complement my orange-reddish palette with a bluish glow in my photo-editing, as if two different sources, like the sun and incandescent bulbs, were simultaneously lighting the scene. Apparently, I was not satisfied with only the warmer ends of the spectrum. Something was missing. Was that more strongly so during my blue-blind years?

 I wonder if the new IOL (intraocular lens) that was implanted in my left eye gives my vision a bluish tint, rather than how I imagine seeing through a clear lens – my brown sweater clearly has a purplish glow in sunlight, and when I look carefully, the white walls that are no longer yellow do have a bluish tinge.

 So, am I, like Monet, seeing ultra-violet light? My eye surgeon says my IOL implant has UV protection - as the retina is overly sensitive without it – but perhaps it is only partial, and I can see some of the UV frequencies? I checked the specs, and apparently what I have is rated halfway between lenses that block the most and those that block the least UV light.  

 In my web searches on these questions, I came across an article with an image of a color spectrum. Its writer says he can see the violet stretching beyond what most people see as the end of the spectrum. (2) I too see beyond the end of the violet in the spectrum, but not as far back as the author says he does.

 There is something exhilarating about seeing the world in ways that most people do not, to distinguish invisible colors, to perceive a different reality. As if I am privy to a secret knowledge, shared only with a chosen few.

 But what if I am seeing a distortion? While my post-surgery blues are brighter, I notice that the greens have become a little duller, since they are now lacking some of the yellows that I see with my right eye – do I like that view with my “old” eye better, at least when it comes to the greens? Or is this the way greens are “really” like? Can we speak of a perfect pitch in color perception, or is it all subjective, and we can never know if the blue I perceive is the same shade of blue you see?

 I am told that in time the novelty of my post-surgery view wears off, the way yellow sunglasses at first make the world yellow, but then gradually, our brain adjusts itself and we start to see the colors in the “normal” way. Does that mean then, that before my surgery, my brain had adjusted to my yellowed cataract filters and I did see the whites as white, and the blues as blue? That possibility soothes my broken pride as a photographer that I could have photographed all this time without realizing I was seeing through a dirty yellow filter.

 And so, will I, in time, slowly, without realizing it, stop seeing those vivid blues and purples with my two post-surgery eyes? Then I will no longer marvel at all the colors I could not see before the surgery, relishing this moment in time.

 I will then see the world just like everyone else.

 ***

 References

1.      https://www.outsidethebeltway.com/monet-had-an-ultraviolet-eye/

 2.    https://www.quora.com/What-does-UV-light-look-like-to-those-who-can-see-part-of-it/answer/John-Mullen-57

 Jerusalem, Feb 14, 2021    

 www.ritamendesflohr.com