Anywhere You Wear Your Hat
by Jim Washburn
I recently inherited hundreds of books. After dispensing with the dispensable ones, I still had scores of them sagging my shelves and further clogging the plaqued-up arteries of my garage.
What’s one to do, except buy more books? When I was at a South African safari resort recently (not my usual retreat!) they had a coffee table book on a coffee table. It’s called Inside Cuba, and it’s such a lush perusal of Cuban homes and architecture that I sought a copy out when I got home. While I was at it, I bought a smaller tome, South African Style. Both are from the German publishing house Taschen. While perhaps better known for such art-house eroto-esoterica as “Tokyo Lucky Hole” and “The Big Penis Book,” the company has a fine number of architecture and design books.
Inside Cuba pokes around everywhere in the forbidden isle: 1700s’ mansions and palaces dripping with Old Europe opulence; the grand mob hotels; places where Hemingway wrote and drank; an atypically tropical Richard Neutra house; 50s-futurist nightclubs and ice cream parlors; a cigar factory; and, significantly, the apartments, row-houses and cinder-block tobacco farm shacks of the working folk.
Some characteristics go across the board. One is that, except for the mildew and verdigris, it feels like everything in Cuba stopped growing circa 1962. They’ve had to make do without Pizza Huts, cookie-cutter gated communities and, apparently, money. The other thing that gets you is the sense of color and style at play in even the poorest houses. Like their Caribbean neighbors, Cubans love bold, deep colors. For a nation supposedly under the “communist yoke” or whatever, the people there get away with more personal dash and style with their domiciles than would be permitted in any of the community association-run gulags here in Orange County, CA.
South African Style takes an equally eclectic romp through that visionary nation’s domiciles. Again, you’ve got the colonial manors mirroring the estates back home, built in this case by the homesick Dutch and Brits of bygone days. For present-day properties, there are ones where the hard geometries of postmodernism stir it up with post-tribal thatched roofs, stone floors, cut-log benches, patterned rugs and leadwood branch appointments.
And then there are township properties, where hard necessity stirs it up with whatever people can lay their hands on: Some are just plywood sheds. The furniture’s not just old school; some looks like it was literally salvaged from an old school. Meanwhile, flattened Knorr oxtail soup boxes, vegetable curry packaging and other trash is recycled as colorful patterned wallpaper, though it probably helps to like oxtail soup.
I’m reading yet another book, this one with words, some 936 pages of them. It’s Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts. An elderly British book dealer in Victoria, BC recommended it so passionately that to not buy the book, I felt, would have been a repudiation of everything this guy held dear.
He was perhaps justified in that passion. Parts of the book may be a tad overwritten, and sometimes events jumble atop one another, but it is a magically evocative read. The book is Robert’s somewhat fictionalized autobiography. An escaped Australian convict who made it to India, he wound up living in one of the worst of Bombay’s slums: 25,000 people crammed into a field, living in dirt-floored huts made of plastic sheeting, cardboard and bamboo, with no running water, toilets or electricity.
He talks about the smell of the place permeating his skin when he first arrived there, but mostly he talks about the life, color and love he found there. India has more love than other places, he argues, and it’s out of necessity: to live in such proximity to other people, in such conditions, would be impossible without an abundance of love.
The book is full of ripping adventure, philosophical discussions, globe-spanning smuggling and the like. But Roberts stops to detail the little things people do to personalize and claim even the trash bag-thick lean-tos they call home. I saw that in the tent city that’s sprung up near Ontario, CA as well. Wherever you are in the world, no matter how reduced your circumstances, even if you don’t have a hat, you want a place to hang it. And you will do whatever you can to make it a home.
i know what you mean…first hand…once i lived with my small children and husband (now ex) in an abandoned trailer in thousand oaks. no utilities. LOTS of fleas underneath. the only water we had was a faucet in the front yard. i was PISSED. one afternoon i was washing dishes in the front yard in a plastic pan and husband came home and i started bitching about our predicament and he said, “most people in the world don’t HAVE running water in their front yard.” that shut me up.
2008-11-16 by Donna Schoenkopf