from paris to brooklyn, via casablanca

Springtime still finds me in Paris, continuing to teach literature at the Sorbonne, while working on my PhD on the literature of exile. Celebrating the solstice is not enough here in France, I have learned. The Spring Semester also brings with it a week of ski vacation and a week of Easter vacation, which sandwich another oddly-timed week of "winter" vacation. I happily ask no questions of their scholastic chronology and eagerly leave town.
The end of April will find me in Brooklyn, luxuriating in all things sororal and Lama Marut. Before that, though, it is off to Casablanca. Unrelatedly, but always with that great magic of bookstore synchronicity, I am reading Laila Lalami's Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits. She is a Moroccan author living in California where she got her PhD in linguistics, after having studied in Rabat and London. I came across her first book par hazard, after having read an article she had written in Le Monde. She was writing in response to their journalistic treatment of fifteen Moroccan immigrants who had drowned while crossing the Straits of Gibraltar on a fishing boat. The news received slight mention at the bottom of their online page. In her article, Lalami discusses how the Monde article was the catalyst for her book, how her only way of coping was through the transmutation of tragedy into fiction. In the Lonely Planet guide on Morocco which I am reading, it states, understatedly, that Lalami "explores the promise and trauma of emigration."

this is what change looks like

Spring Solstice brought with her the blossoms, my birthday and Obama's health care bill. For me, a happy trinity. Triads have expanding harmonic frequencies which seem to offer forever unfolding possibilities, resonances of newness which are emboldening and exciting. The sustained effort of a bleak winter is rewarded by red berries and yellow daffodils. Transformation is no longer a metaphor. If it worked for Persephone, it can work for me.
As I begin my new year, I feel the need of a metamorphosis. In his remarks after the approval of the bill, Obama spoke to us about the possibilities that can occur when we rise above the weight of our politics. He said that "We did not fear our future - we shaped it." With a change in tense, I have found the mantra that I can chant as I decide to finally depart from my inverno, my long winter. This past summer in Italy, we drove past Lago d'Averno, the lake 10 miles west of Naples. For the ancient Romans it was the protection for the nearby cave which was the formal entrance to the underworld. I would like to go back there now to fling all the battered baggages for Charon to ferry away.