Reading 'Chocolate', tasting chocolate: bitter, sweet, alive
Reading 'Chocolate',
tasting chocolate,
bitter, sweet, alive.
I can see them,
the Mayan farmers
in southern Belize,
harvesting
their precious black gold,
the only mean of their survival
and then
blending rich, dark chocolate
in centuries old secret ritual
among some renmaints
of the ancient wall
in their long lost kingdom,
blending the richness
with a refreshing twist of orange
that is perfectly
balanced by the warmth
of cinnamon,
nutmeg and vanilla.
Have you been there,
Joanne Harris?
Your book tastes just like that.
Tasting chocolate,
reading 'Chocolate',
page 1 to page 39
February
Shrove Tuesday
the Carnival
maybe their final destination
in this old French little town,
for a mysterious woman..
A wanderer,
who calls herself Vianne Rocher,
and her precious daughter,
Anouk
with an invisible grey rabbit
Pantoufle
under her arm.
Vianne Rocher
meets her 'black man'
Cure of the local Parish,
Francis Reynard.
And whatever you might think,
he is not unique,
with his unaswerable voice
of authority,
a specious logic,
which keeps you frozen,
obedient and fearful.
You want to break free
from that fear,
to run in hope and despair,
to run and to find that
all the time
you were carrying him inside.
Who is your 'black man'?
Who stops you to dream?
Who force you to worry
about how things
are supposed to be or
have always been?
The Black Man
full of hate
The Black Man
you can not love.
Just remember,
start running away
from him
and you'll be on the run
forewer.
Vianne tells you fiercely:
' Stay and fight'.
On February 14th
St Valentines Day
you meet Guillaume
a retired master of the local school
sad and miserable
but full of love
for his dying dog
Charlie.
Can you apprehend
so much despair,
so much devotion?
It smells too strongly
of wasted hope.
Vianne believes that
being happy
in spite of everything
is the only important thing.
Old Armande Voizin knows...
knows the wind they blew in on,
she felt it herself,
she likes magic,
just like Vianne's Mum,
used to...
I have found out
on page 49
I wish to see the world
through Armande's eyes,
before they turned blind...
a sense of wonder,
openesss to inner feelings
her art of turning bad luck
into good,
her appreciation of those
others,
abandoned by everyone.
She understood Gypsies,
their wonderlust,
which took them all over Europe,
deported countless times,
arrested but released without charge.
People without home and without jobs,
languages and names constantly changed.
Life was a fine adventure,
but not for long,
Reynard, the black man,
preaches against them,
he plans to chase them out.
Reading Chocolate,
I thought of my own Father
in those last months.
His pallor,
the way the flesh melted from him,
revealing a delicate beauty
of stripped bone,
bleached skin.
His bright and feverish eyes
begging:
"Find me a doctor to cure me,
I don't want to die."
His furtive cries in the night.
After a while,
you just want to stop
to look after the decaying body
and feverish mind
and go on with your own life.
After a while,
it's the lack of dignity
that hurts more
than anything else.
Reading Chocolate,
I thought about my own Mother,
who has to have control
all the time.
Always correcting me,
always carrying on,
about meeting my Father
first time when I was 22 year old.
It surprised me a little to see us,
so alike,
circling each other
with the caution of friends
reunited after long years
of separation.
" Pretty face has your mother,
no strength of its own."
He sighed
looking me in eyes:
"You know mistletoe,
invasive and poison,
everything,
it touches.
It's not her fault.
It's a fact of life."
Reading Chocolate,
I thought of my homeland,
about my own life,
Since I left places
I knew
15 years ago,
haven't the winds
blown less hard,
less often?
Hasn't there been
a kind of regret?
I find myself
looking at the sun
and wondering
what it would be like
to see it rise above
the river Danube
again?
The river Danube
is mostly brown now.
I dream to float
down the stream
from Budapest,
seeing ashore
a team of Hungarian cowboys
perform thrilling horseback stunts,
my cousin is there among them.
Next day I awake in Vukovar,
Croatia,
my forebearers came from there,
to settle in Slovakia.
The following day,
I explore Belgrade
in Serbia.
A part of my family reseatled
in a nearby village
a hundred years back.
The Danube scenery is
always changing,
with forests giving away to cities,
then villages with onion-domed churches.
At the little Bulgarian town of Arbanassi
I visit an astonishing 16th century church
where I find my 80 years old uncle
dusting its 2000 frescoes and icons
and talking about good old times.
After the chasms known
as the Iron Gate of Romania,
my Danube family adventure ends
with a day in Bucharest,
I do not intend to visit the grave
of Romania's national hero,
Count Dracula.
I used to live in this city
in my childhood
with my Mother and her boyfriend,
a wellknown Romanian Soccer player,
my stepbrother lives somewhere here.
The river Danube is mostly brown now,
can you ever forget,
who you really are?
On Friday 7th of March,
on page 173
the Gypsies are leaving Les Marauds,
they have nowhere to stay
and no one to befriend.
Guillaume asks Vianne
what
she believes in.
Josephine Muscat leaves her husband,
the violent and abusive man.
" I'd like to be an adventurer,"
Josephine whispers:
" to follow the sun with nothing
but a single suitcase,
to have no idea at all
of where
I might be tomorow."
"Believe me, you get tired,"
Vianne shakes her head:
"And after a while,
everywhere
starts to look the same.
I want to stay here,
forever.
My fears are gone.
I need no longer
be afraid
of my face.
I have a home,
I have friends."
How many times
we dream,
just like Vianne or Josephine did,
to be free,
free to run,
cut loose
like an untethered balloon
on the changing winds?
How many times
the reason
and duty stops us.
Listen to Vianne's words:
"Are you ready
to give up your safety
in exchange for a little knowledge,
a glimpse of an ocean,
and what then?
The wind always brings you back
to the foot
of the same wall."
I know she is right,
wherever I go,
the banks
of brown river Danube
will always be my home.
For a second
I hesitated
with Vianne,
the story heroine,
on page 186,
Josephine's abandoned husband
and Reynard, the black man,
left covered by darkness.
There have already
been too many men
bad and good,
left behind.
Roux, the redhed Gypsy
another one,
she met along the road,
he and Josephine belong together,
" What might this do to them?"
Vianne wonders,
and yet,
Roux and Vianne have one night stand.
But then I understand,
Roux is just a man,
she cares for but not love.
" Please, what would I do without you?"
She cries out for her child.
With a sudden overhelming clarity,
she saw her child,
growing, changing,
the adolescent, the adult,
the stranger she would one day becomes,
but nothing can lessen her love for her child.
There is nothing stronger than woman's love for her child.
Reading 'Chocolate',
tasting chocolate,
bitter, sweet, alive.
can you ever forget,
who you really are?
From the land of chocolate origin to my homeland
Peruvian mountains early in the morning
Meeting these Peruvian women I feel in love with their enthusiasm, verve for life, kindness, integrity and sincerity
Life in these mountains seems a lifetime away from us yet the products of their labour reach us nearly every day...
I remember them when I sip a hot chocolate in Perth on other side of the world
When I asks a Peruvian living here if there is anything he misses in life, I am suprised that he struggles to find something
And then I am not, what is there really to miss about our modern civilization?
Watching these two South American Condors, I was thinking about my dream of letting go, to be free...
Then there was only one Condor left and I realize, to be free is also means to be on your own...
My journey through Peruvian mountains began near this magical lake, I sat there for a long time thinking about my own beginings...
Travelling and discovering new places has become a way of making sense of my life
I was thinking about my parents a lot travelling through these mountains and how their pasts had shaped my current relationships
What I learnt form my parents is that to have control in a relationship, you need to devalue the other person.
Sarcasm and emotional detachment to distance yourself from what you can't control are the usual tools used in communication among couples
How profoundly complicated all relationships are?
I think about my children reaching their adolescence and early adulthood years
It is an extremely vulnerable period of life. There is a period in which you are not a fully engaged adult responsible for your own life.
The price of freedom is worse mental health..there can be a lack of structure and values.
The brain is actually developing until 25. The frontal lobes don't really come on stream until around then.
You've got this emotional risk-taking part of the brain in full flight. My empathy is personal although my children live in wealthier environment I used to live.
However I am fully aware that personal identity with which each young individual struggles to some extent
is at the heart of mental illness. Psychiatric symptoms are a legitimate response to the soul destroying demands of an unreasonable world.
People have been looking for a help in religion before.
I watch how Peruvian Indians are treated outside their villages...
I read in 'Chocolat' and I know from my own experience how Gypsies are treated in Europe...
WA /my adopted homeland/ has recorded the highest proportion fo racism complaints of any state in Australia
60 percent of racism allegations were perpetrated against Aboriginal people /original inhabitants/
Racist attitudes in communities and the need to protect people from them did not change from the time described in the 'Chocolate'.
We like to describe ourselves as an egalitarian and tolerant people but significant and unjustified inequalities remain everywhere.
" This proble is something that definitely needs to be addressed." Politicians murmur under their breath from time to time.
And the rest of us just turn our heads away
and get on with our lives. There is nothing we can do about it.
We can close our eyes for a while and pretend for a while that this problem does not exist.
But one day it will catch us. I take a piece of chocolate with me as I leave South America for my homeland.
I am cruising the brown river Danube on which banks I was born
The story of this river is a story of truimph and survival throughout the rich European history
My personal story is just a drop in her muddy waters that slowly flows through the towns and cities of my childhood
Travelling again on her waters gives me a deep understanding of my origin
of the connectedness of people and the largeness of human character.
Medicine saves your life, your homeland gives you the identity.
In a literal sense, books open you a door to other people,
their struggles and victories
and their indentities.
Books for me are not about escaping
but rather gaining a deeper understanding about our place in the world.
The books that I find profoundly sustaining. The 'Chocolate' is one of them.
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