The Hat-Speak of Panama

Storm gathers over Santa Fe, photo courtesy  Paul Sigurdson, Coffee Mountain Inn

Rattan, acorn and pita are the fibres needed: I didn’t know. But there’s no point pretending a short visit will lead to any level of enlightenment: a few days or weeks in any country is barely a starting point for questions.

There’s a little town in Veraguas Province, in Panamá, called Santa Fe. To get there, turn inland from the Panamerican Highway at Santiago de Veraguas and follow the meandering road up into the hills.

The leaves of the chisna plant provide the colour: new to me. It’d seemed so obvious, while in Panamá, to buy one of those famous Panamá hats. Surely owning a Panamá hat could make a life marginally more complete. Santa Fe is a pretty place and tranquil, suitable not least for considering a minor life issue such as the lack of a Panamá hat.

And yet, when it comes to a people, their character, culture and endemic wisdom, it takes a long while to gather any of it. It’s not a simple matter of plucking leaves and stems and working them together, and even if all the fibres were available, there’d be no artisan how-to for the assembling. Nor can you simply buy it. To knowledge there aren’t any short cuts, there’s no voilà!

Which is why when it came to the hat buying, I had no idea.

Street scene in Santa Fe, photo courtesy Marnix van Suylekom, Hotel Anachoreo

And yet, from a short sojourn it might be possible to offer some cursory observations. Weave and weft, the fibres of a few weeks’ experience may be sufficient to make more out of Panamá than the of-course-impressive canal. One of the simplest observations, from the border but especially towards the heartland, was that the Panamanians were indeed a well-hatted public, especially the men in rural towns. It wasn’t unexpected. Hats are practical because of the sun.

It’s from the chisna leaves the dye comes, boiled together with the fibres to make the fashionable designs of dark stripes. It’s an old, well-known recipe, I believe. It’s a trick of the Panamanians, the ones that weave.

Santa Fe is surrounded by the green hillsides of a large national park. There are waterfalls, brightly spotted frogs and tropical looking butterflies in attendance, though it’s cooler in the hills. There are just a few small shops in the casual town centre; it’s not a commercial place, and the worn, modest houses of the town clearly hold for their owners the attachment of a much-loved pair of jeans. The churches in the area are cosy and from the football field the molar-shaped mountaintop, Cerro Tute, bites the sky.

Santa Fe also has a craft market. It was there that I negotiated for said hat, and managed to find one that fit nicely. It had that shitolpati cool feeling of woven fibre, the flexibility that’s always the secret to strength, and a soft brim so useful in shade provision. The mildly amusing thought of coming to Panamá to buy a hat made me smile; but it was a foolish smile.

Unfortunate fact: Panamá hats are not from Panamá. In equal measure, the hat-of-Panamá is not a Panamá hat.

The hills around Santa Fe, Panama, photo courtesy Celestino Montes, Coffee Mountain Inn

Wake up call: Panamá hats are from Ecuador, where their manufacture dates back to the seventeenth century. In the centuries that followed, the Panamanian isthmus grew to be a busy transit point, for both goods and passengers travelling the short distance overland between the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans, on the way between Asia and Europe, within the Americas too. Even to go from New York to California, a suitable option was to take a ship south to Panama and join a north going ship again on the Pacific side. It was before the construction of the canal.

Meanwhile, Ecuador was a much quieter place, so by tradition the locally produced hats were shipped up to Panamá where sales, with all the transit passengers, were understandably more brisk. They proved to be popular. The only downside to the trade for the Ecuadorians was that their beautiful hats, internationally, adopted the name of Panamá.

So what was it so many Panamanians were wearing? What did I actually buy? I mean, I still like the hat: it’s comfortable and stylish; and I’ve never had a hat patterned with chisna leaf dye before.

Wake up call: the hat-of-Panamá descended long ago from the square-edged, flat-round topped sombreros of Cordoba in Spain, and sombrero is not a reference to anything Mexican-shaped but means not more than “hat”. The hat-of-Panamá is properly called the sombrero pintado, or painted hat, and evolved under the weave of Panamanian culture and the weft of flora species found on the isthmus. The hats are not painted, but woven with design by the darker, chisna-dyed stems. Over the centuries, the sombrero pintado became a veritable cultural symbol of Panamá. So I had managed to collect a little artefact of the spirit of the people of the republic of the isthmus; and there are certainly worse things to do than that.

And yet, I remain greatly unenlightened about that hat. Wake up call: there are many kinds of sombrero pintado. In the central provinces they specialise in white; while Veraguan hats are generally cream; while the ñopito is completely white unless it features a little black design on one side; while the Guatemalan is fashioned by weaving black acorn among the white; while under the brim, there can be a black spotty design known as a mosquito brim. There is even a style endemic to Santa Fe, but whether or not my hat is of the classic Santafeño style I couldn’t say: because understanding cultures is not a simple matter of plucking leaves and stems, even if you knew which ones were worth plucking.

Wake up call: worse than that, the sombrero pintado sends social signals depending on how it’s worn. Should I be embarrassed now, in retrospect – did I wear it foolishly back in Panamá? Because, if you fold the brim up at front and back, it signifies success, masculine charm and skill in fighting; because, if the brim is folded up at the back only, the wearer is an intellectual; because, if the brim is folded only at the front, the wearer is a lady’s man ready for conquest! Tilt it forward on the head and the wearer is upset, disappointed or going through a duel. Meanwhile, if the brim is not turned up at all, the hat is being used to shade from the sun. So how exactly did I fashion it? What signal, what hat-talk did I push out into the Panamanian universe, to whom and when? Was there any chance I was hat-rude?

But perhaps the Panamanians know: the foreigner is hat-foolish, doesn’t have a hat-clue about his hat-speak – he hat-says he’s a fighter but maybe he’s not; he’s hat-telling he’s unhappy, so why is he smiling?

And that’s the warning: while in the weave of a Panamá hat might be a little of the modern engineering marvel of the Panamá Canal, and before that, the convenience to transport of the geography of the isthmus, it’s really all about Ecuador; while in the weave of a hat-of-Panamá is the spirit of the Panamanians, a culture that’s strong and flexible, a foldable-brim-form of expression, and just possibly a little of the verdant landscape of Santa Fe, and that hat can also, as a bonus, protect the humble head from the everyday harshness of a tropical sun.

Here’s the hat-lesson: the act of leaving doesn’t make attachment broken; it doesn’t make the Panamanian learning of one simple foreigner ended.

Church belltower, Santa Fe, Panama, photo courtesy Marnix van Suylekom, Hotel Anachoreo

With special thanks to www.visitpanama.com for enlightening one foreigner on the sombrero pintado, and to the good people of Santa Fe and Panamá for sharing their photos, as this writer’s camera was sadly in its death throes when he was there.

Sombrero Pintado, photo courtesy Charlotte Summers @ Panama Prattle.

Ah, something else to read?

The Central American Trail

Island Hopping in the West Indies

At Home in Bolivia

India Will Decide

This article also published in Star Magazine, here: The Hat-Speak of Panama

Pura Vida; or, a Coati's Tale

 “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.” 

– Henry David Thoreau in his book Walden; or, Life in the Woods, 1854

(Guest writer: a Costa Rican Coati)

For a good life, take it from me, nothing will surpass a patch of pristine rainforest and a decent sized public rubbish bin.  Sure, a shiny car, ultra-modern, sleek and featuring the latest ergonomics might be enough to make all the other vehicles in the traffic blush.  Sure, a long, tree-lined driveway of pebbles capped by gates in swirling wrought iron might be the envy of friends.  But it’s not pura vida, that quintessentially Costa Rican Spanish phrase that means ‘real living’ or ‘plenty of life’, and is also used for ‘hello’ and ‘goodbye’.

Big experiences aren’t necessary either.  While it might be enjoyable to jet off to Cannes for the film festival now and then, to walk the red carpet; or to lounge in the Anguillan sun waiting for chilled refreshments to be brought right to your deck chair, such moments are only fleeting.  Take it from a Costa Rican: keep it simple.

But what would I know?  I’m only a coati and for those who are not quite the mammal experts they might wish to be, think of me as a cousin of the raccoon.

I’m based up in Monteverde, which is sort of in the middle north of Costa Rica about five hours from the capital, San Jose.  It’s not a bad spot: the morning air is crisp and foggy as the clouds roll in over the hills and in the nights there’s a wondrous chorus of insect and frog to promote blissful slumber.  Tree and branch, Monteverde is rich in green, within the 26,000 acres of the Cloud Forest Reserve.  You could say there’s a bit of a backyard at my place. 

 

In pursuit of packaged pura vida the tourists arrive from early morning to take a stroll in our patch of forest.  They’ve made trails for themselves with boardwalks and wooden stairs.  The tourists can be noisy and nosy when they come, but we don’t mind posing for their cameras, knowing that by habit in their backpacks is likely some portion of our lunch.  It’s a straightforward matter to take a break atop the visitor’s centre roof or in a tree, to wait for the tourists to shuffle off into the greenery.

I don’t wish to indulge in needless nationalism but I like being Costa Rican.  Well, I write ‘Costa Rican’ but casually we’re known as Ticos, particularly the humans.  We coatis are Ticos too and it’s not a bad thing to be.  I don’t mean to bore you with facts but our Costa Rica has around 25% of its land area protected in national parks and reserves, more than any other country.  Costa Rica’s been recognised as the planet’s greenest nation and since 2007 we’ve had this little goal of becoming the first carbon neutral country by 2021.  I don’t mean to sound proud, just because our Tico facts are impressive enough to be printed on t-shirts to sell to the tourists.

Anyway, for me and my coati friends it’s rather more the 2012 ban on recreational hunting that’s the favourite, because we do sport rather pretty jackets and it’s not everyone who can let that be.  So we retire to the tranquillity of our cloud forest, and the general dampness and breeziness, let me assure you, is not much of a bother when one has the warmth of fur to rely on.  It’s about dressing appropriately, nothing more. 

If I mention the sifting through trailhead garbage for food, my pura vida might not sound like your cup of tea.  But the tourists are generous in their bread crumbs, shards of vegetables and leftover fruit.  It’s incredible the amount of perfectly good food scraps they discard.  Better still, the rubbish bin is an ecosystem that attracts insects.  It’s a one-stop shop for all the nutritional requirements and the smell isn’t too atrocious on account of the rainforest air.  I’ll tell you something else: it’s tiring to wander the pristine wilds on a daily basis; much better to hang around the rubbish bins.  You can think of it as recycling, as any good Tico would.  Our omnivorous diet is our national contribution.

Down the road a bit the tourists like to watch the hummingbirds that come, attracted by the nectar trays hung out.  They’re small birds, hummingbirds, of several species in Monteverde, all with delicate curved bills suited to nectar-feeding.  But it’s neither their size nor their shiny feathers that impress the tourists, I suppose, as much as how rapidly they can flap their little wings to hover, mid-air, while they eat, if they wish.  At the other end of the scale in terms of speed are the two and three-toed sloths that tourists like to spy on night hikes.  They’re so slow that moss can grow on them.

In every respect Costa Rica is a wildlife haven.  Being in Central America, species that developed in both the North and the South, separately, learnt to intermingle here when the land bridge formed and the landmasses joined.  As I said, our cousins the raccoons prefer up north while in South America are other coati species.  As a result, while our Costa Rica might account for only 0.25% of the planet’s land surface it has 5% of the world’s biodiversity, right here!  Ah, but I sound like I’m boasting.  I would only mention how I like living in a cosmopolitan, multi-species cloud forest society.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect to our lifestyle is how attracted the foreigners have become to our Tico ways.  It’s not a decent habit to eavesdrop but I once heard these American girls, mid-twenties at a guess, talking about a retreat down on our Pacific coast where foreigners try to live in harmony with nature.  There’s no TV there and I believe as much as possible they grow their own food.  I guess even in America the heritage is not only the bright lights of Hollywood, the oil tycoon tiffs of Dallas and the roulette wheels of Vegas.  There’s also Walden Pond in Concord, Massachusetts, where Mr. Henry David Thoreau in the nineteenth century once tried to live a pura vida of his own.  That’s American heritage too.  A secret: Walden’s back in vogue.

There’ll always be critics, those who find my words too 1970s and hippy.  I’d remind that if we think of the 1970s it was flower power that ended the Vietnam War.  It’s not an achievement to be scoffed at.  Not that we could ever have a problem like the Vietnam War here in Costa Rica, because our renowned President José Figueres Ferrer constitutionally abolished our standing army in 1948, leaving more to spend on health, education and culture; making us the most peaceful and politically stable country in Central America.  Neighbouring Panama followed our example in 1990 so it’s catching on.  There must be another tourist t-shirt in all that somewhere.

I’ll have to leave you there: think I smell some tourist tamale, made of corn, delicious, and there has to be some left on the plantain leaf it’s wrapped in when they toss it out!  Do stop by though, if you’re ever lucky enough to visit Costa Rica.  No appointment needed: we coatis will be right here, hanging out around the Monteverde Cloud Forest Reserve rubbish bins. Pura vida!

Statistics in this piece researched on Wikipedia here and here.

Algo mas?             

Bolivia en Español?   

Bangladesh en Español? 

Something else?  

Bolivia in English?     

Argentina, Chile or Uruguay? 

This article also published in Star Magazine, 
here:Pura Vida

The Last Dinner

Wikimedia image: The Last Supper, by Henry Holiday, 1909.  Panel in St. Chad's Church, Kirkby.

I discovered this, which I wrote in 2008 at the same time as the events described in China (I believe on that day)....

2007: what happened that year, to resolve, to get over, is going to take my life.

2008 Zhanjiang China

‘If you try to become famous from this, they will kill you,’ Chicken-bones said in the car as he drove back to my apartment on the last night we had dinner. He said it calmly, as though mentioning a forecast for rain or telling the time. The phrase should have upset me but it didn’t.

I was used to being interviewed in the car, especially on the way home. It was in the car that the most valuable information was sought, where my reactions to ideas or events were tested, and where I learnt most about the progress of this. Sometimes I must confess I only went to dinner for the ride home, to see what was up.

It was difficult to be angry with Chicken-bones. He was no more than a messenger, he looked after all the foreigners in Zhanjiang, to be sure they didn’t get into trouble, and it seemed he was a messenger for all sides to boot: in the car the harshest comments were made, at dinner things were motherly and particularly pro-China, and between the two, as we walked in and out of a restaurant, in the doorway and across the car park, he’d sometimes throw little comments my way I’ve always believed his truest feelings, for those comments were designed to help or contradicted the official line, and spies always talk most freely on the street or when moving, the surveillance weak spot. He admitted freely that his ethics were so-so and seemed to have no problem with the hidden agenda that must have formed a good deal of his human relationships.

Apart from being the messenger he was scrawny, how I’d come up with his name. It fit not because of his stature but because of his self-image, as from time to time he’d waffle on about how much stronger he was than he looked, how clever the Chinese were or how he was expert in bed. ‘The best lovers have imperfect eyesight and go bald in the end,’ he’d once told me, explaining the symptoms of high levels of testosterone, symptoms from which, coincidentally, he suffered. In my mind, the self-aggrandisement made his arms shrivel until they were so slim they risked being accidentally snapped off by a passing waiter and lost in the small jar of toothpicks compulsory on any Chinese restaurant table; it made him lose centimetres in height and he started a good foot below me; and it made his wispy hair recede further still from a decent cut. Sometimes as I looked across the table it seemed his suit, usually in elephant grey, was still on its coat hanger. I don’t suppose it would take much to kill me, I knew, but the chance of Chicken-bones leading the charge had to be zero. In his own right he could arouse no fear or loathing, or indeed any emotion at all with any strength to it. He was simply Chicken-bones.

The restaurants we frequented, his choice, were a vast fair of activity. Village girls in short-skirt waitress uniforms and immaculate hairdos rushed back and forth like Disneyland attendants, for as little as $100 per month, working ten to twelve hour days with just one day off. Others pushed trolleys stacked with little plates of food, the doughy balls the Chinese call bread, bony meat dishes or the rubbery brown and black discs of sickly sweet desserts. Older waitresses in serious suits paraded by, checking their apprentices and wielding special authority such as placing orders for fish dishes which must have varied day to day. Their salaries could rise to as much as $300 per month. There was the clash of crockery and rumble of conversation for applause, morning, noon and night.

That day he ordered chicken and fish rather than the usual dishes of eggplant beef and garlic pork. I usually stuck with those two because I liked them, and to avoid the minimum ten minute discussion between Chicken-bones and the waitress a change in order would have necessitated, for things to be perfect. I sometimes wondered if the phrase ‘Can I have?’ in Cantonese didn’t run on for several minutes. With the ordering done, and thankfully he’d taken the initiative to change dishes that last evening without consulting me, he looked seriously in my direction and said, ‘well this is it, the last dinner.’

The way he said it, I knew it meant something. As we washed our chopsticks and crockery with the first pour of tea, as is customary in China, he spelt it out because I hadn’t caught his meaning. ‘It’s a famous painting,’ he said.

‘Yes,’ I laughed, ‘that’s right. Da Vinci’s The Last Dinner’.

‘In the painting,’ he said, ‘which one is Judas?’ It was a comment designed to shock me and, as messenger, I’m not even sure Chicken-bones understood. It was a comment from about two years earlier, when I was living in Nicaragua. It didn’t shock.

I’d stayed in Granada, Nicaragua for about five months waiting for Julie to finish work and arrive from Australia, so we could travel around the world together, and I was living in one of the grand old Spanish villas typical of the oldest city in Latin America. The house had two fine courtyards, a green parrot, two turtles and a lazy cat. It belonged to a delightful elderly Nicaraguan couple who’d taken to renting out rooms to fund their retirement. The husband was absolutely insistent his guests walk in the shade as they made their way along the street, and he used to stand in the front doorway calling ‘La sombre! La sombre!’, pointing to the shady side of the street in earnest, until you crossed over in compliance. ‘The shade! The Shade!’ The wife wove intricate culinary masterpieces with the help of a servant or two, beans and beef, salad, vegetables and fruit as you’ve never known them before, included in the rent.

The meals were so delicious I used to be disappointed if ever I were asked to eat out, and only did so begrudgingly. Sometimes I’d search for an excuse so I could eat at home instead. I was happy in those days as life was simple. I’d started out English teaching, what I did in China too, but after a few weeks I’d decided Nicaragua was cheap enough to devote myself to writing the book on South America instead, particularly as the teaching salary wasn’t even covering my expenses. I had no laptop so I used to go to internet cafes around town and do my best to write something worthwhile between power-shortages, in the matchbox-sized booths allotted to each machine that left my knees with bruises.

Over the dining table in the villa was a picture, The Last Dinner according to Chicken-bones, one of the many crucifixes, Virgin portraits and religious paintings that demarcated the domestic territory as very catholic indeed, decorations that reminded me a little of my grandmother’s house. There were others staying there, up to eight or so in the various bedrooms strung out around both courtyards, a constant stream of people from beyond Nicaragua’s borders, mostly Americans who needed to learn Spanish. In the day they’d attend their courses, and of course be home for dinner. One of them was Christine.

From New York state, Christine was a good few years younger than I, still in her early twenties and with a spectacular English vocabulary that made me want to give up writing each time we spoke. We got into the habit of pursuing obtuse and finicky philosophical discussions about any subject that came to us; some of the time we were serious but much was for fun. I remember in particular the lengthy discussions concerning the fundamental existentialist questions elaborated in Shakira’s song ‘Hips Don’t Lie’, repeatedly played on MTV at the time. We would speak until we couldn’t for laughter.

Christine was good looking, with curled brown locks that tumbled like a dryer beyond her shoulders. Natural curls like those were a rarity amongst Nicaraguan girls, and her light brown hair was considered blond by the Latino boys, both attributes making her extremely popular. She did charity work at a local orphanage as well as taught English. Intelligent, caring and attractive, it was a pleasant surprise to find she had flaws, or at least one: she’d make the occasional faux pas or slip up in her speech, and with her vocabulary consistently intimidating, I took great delight in those occasions. Sometimes I invented them, which she didn’t mind because against my will we’d become friends: actually it was her and I only, at least in the months I lived there, that our hosts the Nicaraguan couple had taken to calling their son and daughter.

One morning at breakfast she came to the table where I was already seated and looking at the painting behind me, said ‘Which one is J...?’ She stumbled slightly on the word, and I started laughing. ‘Which one is Jesus?’ I suggested, completing her sentence. It prompted a lengthy discussion, the pros and cons of each figure in the painting, in turn considered in relation to what features of a Messiah they had.

‘Do you think he might be the one in the middle, that everyone is looking at?’ I asked eventually.

‘Too obvious,’ Christine said, ‘Da Vinci was a Master and he would have been more subtle.’

Ultimately we’d agreed as the most likely candidate the plump fellow on the far right of the picture, who in our version of the painting wore a pink cape. We agreed to ask the other housemates, in a serious tone, and have a kind of vote, mostly to see their reaction at the stupidity of the question, to see how long it took for them to realise we were joking. Which one is Jesus?

What Christine had been meaning to say, before I’d completed her sentence for her, is ‘which one is Judas?’ Now it was being repeated, on the other side of the world after two years, by Chicken-bones the atheist, who barely would have known who Judas was and certainly didn’t care.

I knew I’d written something about Nicaragua in e-mails so it didn’t surprise the phrase should turn up later. The Australian authorities had taken significant interest in what I wrote.  My writing was never sufficiently conservative for their policing minds.

In fact it was quite pleasant Chicken-bones mentioned it because it reminded me of the good food lazy days of Nicaragua.

Later I would think about it more: as was usual multiple interpretations came to me. Was I supposed to be Judas, which would make sense if I was talking to a Christian fundamentalist, as had happened in Australia during 2007?  Or was Judas around me, a symbol of betrayal by one of the two principle branches of inquiry in China, the most likely sources, through either Chicken-bones or the girl? I didn’t appreciate an analogy that would place me as Jesus, but from a Machiavellian standpoint it made sense and I was already worried about it; that as I would be leaving China soon an attempt might be made, the several references to death aside, to frame me for something, as the Australian authorities had for rather many years seemed rather keen on doing. Was it the last dinner for that reason?

At dinner though, I didn’t think it over greatly, and by mid 2008 such things didn’t stress me anymore, as they had done a year earlier. Chicken-bones and I talked instead about religion in general terms and I told him what I thought: that the essence of the Christian religion is love and tolerance, what I liked about it but not always how it is preached. For Chicken-bones all religion was backward superstition, no more: his in-the-restaurant point of view.

The death threat in the car on the way home was preceded by three other notable statements. As we crossed the bridge over the small manmade lake that featured in the local park, Chicken-bones said ‘Australia’s security is not your concern,’ and halfway up the hill, before the death threat he’d said ‘the Australian government doesn’t support you,’ and a little further on, ‘if you go back to Australia it will be the same’. None of the comments made me flinch; as I said I got used to such things in 2007 and more particularly, they sounded like the last desperate cries of a child stamping around to get attention. The comments and not Chicken-bones did though make me angry.

To the first I’d replied, ‘Australia’s security is everybody’s business and what happens if there was ever some horrific terrorist attack in Australia. How could I just say, ‘yeah I knew ASIO was crap but I didn’t do anything about it.’ When it comes to terrorist attacks they have hardly a hope in hell of preventing one. To the second comment, about government support, I said, ‘well they’re going to wish they had,’ which was pure bluff and in any case I ultimately was a bit past caring: the Rudd government was at least immeasurably better than its Howard predecessor and since the election my life had become liveable again. To the third comment, that if I returned to Australia I would face more of the torture of 2007, I stayed silent.

When Chicken-bones gave the final warning, ‘if you try to be famous from this, they will kill you,’ it made me angrier still. I told him how I wished I’d stop being told to be a coward, that the world has enough cowards in it. I thought to add ‘and half of them seem to work for ASIO’, but I controlled the urge.

I thought, ‘and what the hell is this exactly?’ The investigation had been referred to as this before, when I was told the authorities had decided to leave my parents out of this. This was a many-year cock-up of monumental proportion that had nearly cost me my life a few times. This was born not of my actions but of the prejudices and shortcomings of others, taxpayer funded, by a lack of imagination and unaccountable policing. This was a future for the world of war and division and more of the simplistic nationalism that proved so deadly last century. This was racism and bigotry. It has never been fame I cared for. I never asked for this. My goal now is far simpler: I don’t think as human beings we should accept corruption or anything less than full human rights. And as an Australian I don’t think my country benefits from an unaccountable secret police agency.

And so I write.



But the world is not only about security or freedom of expression of course.  There are also random travel tales, cool people and well, english-by-association...

The Meaning of Seeing Things

Sydney, Australia.
When you’re at school in Sydney it’s quite a thing to wear glasses. They can be a beacon for bullying; inviting all sorts of taunts from immature minds unimpressed by what was sometimes called ‘facial furniture.’ It must be quite a challenge to self-esteem; one can only imagine. I couldn’t say for sure since I’ve always been blessed with twenty-twenty vision.

Hatiya, Bangladesh.

It was just another moment in the tea shop, years ago; the usual one in Hatiya, Noakhali. Late afternoon was giving in to early evening. The tea was sickly, the conversation as the breeze, without strength and waning. In such moments there’s little to do but gaze across the strip of road that gives way to the bridge over the canal, and ponder what merit there is in breathing-away an afternoon in such fashion. My village friend Situ was there, similarly waiting for some conversational front to arrive and stir the place to humour or interest. That’s when the pair of glasses came in the uneven doorway of the shop.

They belonged to a university student, hair carefully combed, shirt tucked in; neat, respectable and typical. He sat a bench or two behind us.

‘Those glasses aren’t real,’ Situ said. ‘What?’ I asked, slightly smiling at the unexpectedness of the statement. ‘They’re not real. They have plain glass,’ he said, ‘Young people wear them to look smart.’

I suppose it’s not surprising, given people pump toxins like Botox into their faces to enhance their looks, but in the village it was amusing. Why indeed if it was a matter of fashion he could not have chosen sunglasses like everybody else? ‘You’re not serious?’ I said to Situ. I had to be sure.

‘Excuse me?’ I said to the guy, ‘I need to borrow your glasses.’ He took them off in that unquestioning, nonchalant way villagers do; in the village things generally run their course unchallenged, everybody wanting to see, without a hint of prediction or inquiry, what will happen next.

It was uneventful. Sure enough, they were fitted with plain glass.

A few moments later the glasses were gone, off towards the bridge over the canal and their home. Situ and I took amusement from the absurdity of human beings, playing with others’ perceptions in such a futile way; what is there to do about vanity?

La Paz, Bolivia.

The trouble with South America is it’s a long way from Hatiya. I used to feel that when I lived there; why I’d made my English class study Tagore, so at least we could talk about Bengal. You won’t find him on any syllabus.

The Bolivian capital is an unlikely city, clawed out of an Andean valley three thousand six hundred metres above sea level. It’s the world’s highest capital. In La Paz, the sunset is one of shadows rather than light, as the rim of the high plateau sends a gradual line of darkness across the bowl of the city. The temperature drops a few degrees at the shadow-line; noticeable enough to want to stay sun-side for as long as possible.

It was at that time, as late afternoon was giving way to early evening, that I’d met my student Bernie by the witches’ market. A thirty-something-year-old secretary, she’d asked to meet because she wanted to buy me a farewell gift, for I was set to start a new job in Nicaragua. She wanted to present me with a traditional Aymara coat, in black and red with pre-Columbian style embroidery across the front and sleeves; easy to find in the souvenir shops in that part of town; shops that competed for space with those selling the supplies of ritual offerings: potions, twigs, coca leaves and dried llama foetuses, used by local ‘priests’ in sacrifice to Pachamama, the mother-spirit of the Andes. Pre-Columbian religions live on in Bolivia.

It must’ve been because I was leaving La Paz, a city that had become familiar and full of friends. It’s probably why I remembered Hatiya, the village I’d also regularly left, and funnily enough those glasses came to mind.

Wearing my new coat I let Bernie lead me down past the grandeur of San Francisco Church and across the square to where there were yet more stalls of clothes and trinkets. In more or less an unbroken row were the sellers of glasses' frames, which came with plain glass in them when you purchased them. I’d told Bernie the story; we’d decided it might be amusing if I wore plain-glass glasses to my farewell party, where I would be able to take ‘glass-wearing’ photos to send to Situ. He’d laugh when he opened the attachments on a computer in Dhaka.

There was the usual bargaining with sellers, and we’d laugh as they offered discounts at the optometrist’s to have the prescription lenses fitted. Eventually I settled on a black steel-rimmed pair Bernie said suited.

The following afternoon, the last of several farewells, since Bolivians were rather social people, I sat at a touchingly long table on the lawn of a restaurant in the fashionable Zona Sur district of the city. Zona Sur is at a lower altitude, and thus warmer. Another student, a doctor called Fernando was there, as I waited for the other guests, for Bolivian time to reach the place. Bolivian time is somewhat later than Bangladeshi time. As we waited I played with my glasses.

As a prop they were great. With Fernando I’d practised the various postures: the pensive glasses hanging by one of the handles from the mouth; the confrontational looking over the rim whilst addressing people; the holding them in your hand for emphasis like a pointer; all the opportunities people who really wear glasses have.

I asked Fernando if they’d work in the classroom, and rehearsed ‘do your homework’ with glasses on and off, asking which was more compelling. ‘If you wear those people won’t talk to you,’ he joked. ‘Why not?’ ‘Because you look so intelligent they’ll be scared they might say something stupid!’

The guests arrived. ‘I didn’t know you wore glasses?’ everybody said. They’d known me for more than a year and never seen glasses before, and here’s an interesting thing; people are so unwilling to trust what they know. ‘Try them,’ I tempted, and one after another they put the things on. ‘Do you need them only for reading?’ some asked. ‘The prescription is very minimal,’ many said, being too polite or unsure to challenge me outright. There was only one student with enough courage to say it: ‘These are not real!’

Through lunch in the afternoon sun they heard of a rustic tea shop in Hatiya and the glasses became the source of much mirth. For me it was especially nice, since with them just sitting there on the table, it was as though in some way the village at the flatland mouth of the Meghna was sharing the enjoyment of the high-Andean gathering.

Granada, Nicaragua.

Glasses are quite annoying. I can understand why people take them off, how easy they are to lose; leaving them on a table or the arm of a chair. My little experiment taught me that, especially in Nicaragua.

I’d settled into one of those gorgeous colonial villas, Spanish-style, that make up the city of Granada. It belonged to an ageing couple who’d taken to renting rooms to travellers, mostly Americans.

There was an open courtyard in the middle of the house; the spacious tiled living room on the street side; and many bedrooms including mine, a little wooden add-on up a few stairs in the corner. The very Catholic household was shared with two kindly servants, a parrot, a cat, and two turtles in a bucket.

There were many guests, but it was an American girl, Christine, who I’d become friends with; and although there were always departures and arrivals, it wasn’t all the guests the Nicaraguan couple started calling ‘son’ and ‘daughter’ like they had with us. For me it was quite a feat since they spoke no English and my Spanish was worse than most of the guests.

When not teaching English, when Christine wasn’t helping at the orphanage, we used to steal across the street where there was a café specialising in iced coffee. It was a godsend in the Nicaraguan heat. I recall our Nicaraguan mother making incredibly tasty yet simple meals of beans and rice; father calling us to the table from across the street. I remember too how father, when we’d walk down the street, used to yell after us, ‘la sombre! La sombre!’ It means, ‘the shade! The shade!’ He wouldn’t let us walk on the hotter, sunny side of the road.

Christine was rather impressive; a literature graduate who wore glasses herself, and all kudos to her, as soon as she tried mine she declared them a fraud. I told the story of a Hatiyan tea shop and a La Paz restaurant.

There are photos of me around Granada wearing glasses. The house guest who’d accompanied me to take them thought it odd I only needed them for photos; so I told her the story too. When we got the prints back she’d said, ‘You know, you really do look better in glasses.’

It happened many times: my Nicaraguan mother or one of the servants had come across my glasses lying somewhere around the house. As caring as they were, they’d put them aside, warning as clearly as they could manage in Spanish, ‘You should look after your glasses. You’ll lose them.’ There was only Christine to provide the knowing, bemused look.

Meanwhile I’d loaded the Granada glasses photos onto the internet, typed the address for Dhaka and pressed ‘send’, to make Situ laugh.

Sydney, Australia.
These days those glasses live on a shelf somewhere in the Sydney house, a pair of innocent-looking respectable spectacles that cannot improve anybody’s vision but mine; for just to hold them is to conjoin the unwinding of a lazy Hatiyan afternoon, the communion of a La Paz farewell and a home in Granada with a parrot, a cat and two turtles in a bucket.

In Hatiya I don’t see that guy wearing the plain-glass glasses anymore. Fashions have moved on, and the latest, all the rage in Kolkata, would seem to be those jeans with random pleats in their legs so as to make them look perpetually unironed. Now why would anyone wear jeans like that?




Feel like getting Nicaragua noisy, knitting yourself silly in Bolivia or fishing and floating in the Bay of Bengal?

This article also published in Star Magazine, here: The Meaning of Seeing Things





At Home in Bolivia: Article Index for articles about Bolivia

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The Culture of Sound

Granada: it's not a place that looks loud

Standing in Farmgate, or at any other busy intersection in this everything-to-everyone city, you could be forgiven for thinking Bangladesh is the noisiest country on Earth. It’s not just the cacophony of car horns, the deafening rumble of bus engines or the carillon of rickshaw bells; there’s the bargaining for vegetables, the shouting at someone in the way; the call of ticket-sellers and touts. There’s one man on crutches chanting ‘Allah, Allah,’ in the hope of alms, as another calls ‘Allahu!’, while shifting a heavy sack. There’s the clash of crockery at a tea shop, the feet on pavement, someone cracking the bones in their fingers and the snip of scissors at a pavement barber’s. And being Bangladesh, there are hundreds of mobile calls in progress. Only Bangladeshis can hear that well!


Yes, Bangladesh as noisiest country is a claim that would’ve set my head nodding in delighted agreement; at least it was so, before 2006, before I found the other contender to the title: Nicaragua.

Cultures have a sound. Bangladeshis know this, for on 21 February you celebrate your language in a way no other country does, and you remember the sacrifices made for Bangla: not only in its written form, for its great works of literature or the beauty of its script; but in its oral form too, the sound of its vowels and consonants, the melody of its song. Ekushey is recognition that language is an integral part of culture and self-identity; so too with sound.

The palm-filled courtyards of Granada

Almost exactly on the other side of the world, in Nicaragua, lies the small city of Granada. The oldest colonial city in the Americas, it’s the place I was fortunate enough to call home for five months in 2006. It’s not a place that looks loud: set around a leafy square in a fairly regular street grid, Granada is sultry and tropical. To the east of the main square lies the shore of Lake Nicaragua, the vast expanse of brown that forms the largest lake in Central America and the city’s best form of air-conditioning, when gentle lake breezes offer respite from the heat of the day. It should be tranquil.

A city of tradition, Granada is blessed with splendid Spanish-style villas featuring customary curve-tiled roofs and internal courtyards of palm trees and gardens. Street-side, houses are thick-walled and windows few; in every feature, the large wooden doors of each entrance and the use of columns and arches, the strong influence of Islamic architecture on Spanish tradition is evident. In Granada though, you’ll find no Muslims; instead small colonial-style churches are sprinkled here and there, with tall bell-towers in place of minarets. That Nicaragua is a very catholic country is evident in Granada. It’s a pious city. No, apart from the brash colour of the buildings, the mustard yellow, cool aqua, red ochre or lilac-trim, there’s little visual stimulus to allude to the city’s noise.

The city's 'running of the bulls'

View from a bell tower

But in and around the main square, to the south in the bazaar area and further west where the new shopping district lies, at full voice the city shouts. Some of the noise is familiar to Bangladeshi ears: transport engines; the din of portable generators, for Nicaragua has that problem too; the clip-clop of horse-drawn taxis like the ones to be found in old Dhaka; the monsoon rain on the roof; the bargaining and begging and touting. Megaphones are used for canvassing, driven around town for an effect reminiscent of the death announcements and cinema advertisements you hear in a Bangladeshi village. Other sounds have Bangladeshi parallels, like the church bells that replace azan or the screech of the souped-up cars of young drivers, ripping by at ludicrous speed, stereos blaring, which might compensate for the more restrained use of car horns in Granada. Still other sounds are unique.

Hawkers in the leafy main square

Yes, to make up for the lower population, Granada with just 240,000 people and all Nicaragua with a population of only about 5.5 million, in a country only slightly smaller in area than Bangladesh, the help of amplifiers is required to increase decibels. Shops belch an array of drum beats and tunes, from Nicaraguan folk songs to Spanish pop, at a volume where going shopping can risk causing headaches; but to ‘Nicas’ it’s normal.

If that were not enough, Nicas have a penchant for festivals. Most festivals have an origin in Catholicism, and the catholic calendar when properly played out is a busy one. It’s not uncommon in Granada to accidentally run into a parade, church attendants at the front holding staves aloft, with flags, candles and a statue of some saint or the Virgin Mary; and at the back, most probably, will be a mariachi brass band, trumpets blasting and large drums pounding out a marching rhythm. There’s the running of the bulls, more famous in Pamplona, Spain, when bulls are let loose to chase spectators down the streets. There’s the parade of proud and strong horses from outlying estancias (farms), which curtsey and dance for peoples’ amusement. These events, and of course weddings, are also suitable for brass bands.

View to the Cathedral and beyond, to the lake

With all the occasions, the brass bands need to rehearse and in Granada rehearsal’s not considered a private activity, so they set up on the back of small trucks and play as they are driven around town in preparation for an upcoming event, regardless of the hour. It was on more than one occasion I was awoken at 3 a.m. by a brass band in full throttle being driven past my bedroom window. I could only sigh; happy I was there.

There’s much to do around Granada: you can go kayaking on the lake or visit one of the volcanoes that create the fascinating dinosaur landscape that makes up much of the country. There’s active Masaya volcano, where you can look down into a steaming, hot crater; a few years ago that volcano suddenly spit out a boulder that flattened a car. Closer to Granada is the extinct, water-filled Laguna de Apoyo crater, crystal clear and idyllic for swimming; and closer still, overlooking the town, is dormant Mombacho, whose hillsides are covered in jungle suitable for hiking. There you can see pillars of steam rising from cracks in the earth; but even the volcano-jungles, true to their nationality, manage to be noisy. Particularly in the mornings and evenings, when defending their territory of treetops, the howler monkeys bellow, a grunting rhythm that can be heard many hundreds of metres away.

Laguna de Apoyo

The link between sound and culture plays true when you meet the people, the Nicas, for apart from the nearest neighbours perhaps, you’d be hard-pressed to find people more like Bangladeshis: friendly, sensitive, spirited and soulful, these are adjectives that apply to the people of both countries. Nicas might be a little shier, although my poor Spanish didn’t help; nonetheless I found myself wondering if similar people make similar sounds, or if similar sounds make similar people.

In South Asia, arguably, nowhere is home to literature more than Bengal and in Nicaragua it’s said ‘a Nica is a poet until proven otherwise’. What a great saying!

As you celebrate Nazrul, Tagore and the others, Nicaraguans remember in statues and street names their great author and poet Rubén Darío (1867-1916), renowned throughout Central America and often regarded as founder of the Latin American literature movement called modernismo.

Granada home-cooked meal. Yum!

The Masaya Crater

And in the deep wells of brown Nica eyes, where there’s a complex concoction of despair, hardship, humility, joy and hope: a history as difficult as this country’s, marred by dictatorship and war; the same worry of securing a salary, of finding a job at all; the beauty of landscape; the strong sense of community; in those Nica eyes I thought, yes, maybe a little, I could sense the spirit of Bangladesh.

The smoking Concepcion Volcano, on Ometepe Island to the south of Granada

Last February, in this city, as the tragedy unfolded in Pilkhana, I’m sure I was not the only one in nearby neighbourhoods to despair at the eerie silence in normally busy streets, the quiet that screamed all was not normal. I can’t be the only one who hoped for a return to the raucous clash and clang of traffic, the hubbub of markets and life: all the sounds that make Dhaka. Thankfully they have returned, and with them my secret link to Nicaragua. For yes, if you stand at Farmgate and close your eyes, you might just be able to imagine Granada.

Round-tiled roofs and horse-drawn taxi

As evening yawns and most of Granada’s sounds have gone home for the day, people open their doors and relocate to the footpath, the best place to enjoy the lake breezes funnelled along the streets. They sit in rocking chairs and chat with family members, neighbours and friends. Could it be the time, in the Bangladesh of Latin America, reserved for a little adda-in-Spanish?




This article is also published by Star Magazine, here: The Culture of Sound


Excuse me, You forgot Your glasses, here: The Meaning of Seeing Things

Catholic parade in Granada's streets

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