Transcription of Eleanor Morse for the show Cultural Divide #130
Dr. Lisa: Eleanor Morse is the author of three novels. Her first, ‘Chopin’s Garden’ was published in 2006, ‘An Unexpected Forest’ her second won the 2008 ‘Independent Book Publishers Award’ for the best regional fiction in the northeast region, and the 2008 ‘Maine Literary Award’ from the ‘Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance’ for best published fiction. Most recently, Eleanor published ‘White Dog Fell from the Sky’ her third novel.
I’m going to read to you a little bit from Eleanor’s book, but first, thanks for coming in and talking with us today.
Eleanor: Thank you, Lisa.
Dr. Lisa: The point is people have lost their courage. They’ve gone for safety. No one wants to be reminded what a tiny spec in the universe we are, but knowing that is the key to everything. We’re afraid of big spaces. We heard for safety, and before you know it, you’ve got civilization. In the wild, look what happens. Which animals do lions choose to prey upon, zebra and wildebeest, animals that travel in herds? The herd feels like safety, but it only makes us more vulnerable.
That’s an interesting commentary based on what I know of your life because you’re actually someone who hasn’t really travelled as much with the herd so much as following your own path.
Eleanor: Yes. It’s true, and we all heard animals to some extent. At a fairly early age, I met a man who had grown up in Botswana which is how I happen to be there. We ended up marrying. Back when I met him, it was still pretty unusual to travel that far and especially to live in Africa. It’s much less unusual now, but I think it started a lot earlier than that with my family who I’m thankful that they are in many ways a bunch of odd balls, not only my family of origin, my most immediate family but the larger, larger family. There are lot of scientists and mathematicians and people who are interested in why things happen.
When I think of what drives my own writing, it’s what the engine is really curiosity. If I weren’t curious, I don’t know what life would be like. I can’t imagine it, but I’m grateful to have grown up with people around me who had curiosity and kind of [native 00:34:45] curiosity, why this has happened and why does it happen the way it is. It does.
While I’m not a mathematician or a scientist or a research person, I do bring that to my world, and it’s caused me to choose things that are off the beaten path. It’s probably what’s caused me to live on Peaks Island which is full of people who have made similar choices in their lives.
Dr. Lisa: ‘White Dog Fell from the Sky’ is as you’ve alluded to based in Botswana, where you were when you were younger, but many years intervene between being in Botswana, actually living there and writing this book. Why is that?
Eleanor: Yes. You’re not the first person to ask me. Most people say, “Why did it take you so long to write this book?”, because I did leave Botswana when I was in my late 20s and I’m not anything like that anymore.
I think that it’s a book that required a particular emotional vocabulary that was pretty deep, and I think that I needed to live and experience life and have my own sorrows and joys, and breadth of experience in order to fully embrace what I needed to in this book. I didn’t realize it at a conscious level, but at an unconscious level, I did.
The landscape of Botswana haunted me and stayed with me in a very rich, complex way. I don’t think I fully realized that until I started working in this book. In the process of writing it, I evoked that landscape in some part of me that had been dormant and I evoked the language and the people and images, they came back stronger and stronger as I wrote. It was a really interesting book to write because all my memories are those memories from being in my late 20s, so it was kind of a double focus, double layering of time as I wrote the book.
I think that at first, I didn’t know how to handle that, but as the book progressed, it became clear how I was to do that. It was a really interesting book to write for that reason, and also really interesting to know that there are hidden parts or dormant parts in us. I think all of us have more than one lifetime, and my life is no different than other peoples in that way, and that life that I had left behind many years before was still very much alive in me.
In this book, even though it’s not autobiographical is as close to historically accurate as I could make it, and close to that period of what it was like to be in Botswana in the mid 1970s with apartheid in South Africa very much a fact of life right next door to this African country, Botswana which was independent, democratic, multiracial. It’s a fascinating time to be there.
Dr. Lisa: The 1970s weren’t that long ago for many of us. It is interesting to think about the notion of apartheid as being something that is real, that actually existed and existed pretty late into the last century. It’s not as simple as just saying, “Blacks go over here and whites go over here.” There was imprisonment and there was people being treated like animals, and in fact, Isaac, the main character in your book is one of those individuals. He was a young black man who’s actually a medical student, who was imprisoned by the South African government. Reading about this was challenging for me, because it’s hard to believe that this existed in not so long ago.
Eleanor: Yes. It was challenging. Parts of it were very challenging to write for that same reason. I was aware in the writing that I couldn’t overload the book without side of it. There’s only so much you can expect a reader to tolerate and bear, and apartheid was unbearable for so many people living it. I wanted to capture that and I also wanted to make it bearable for a reader to apprehend what that was like, so there was more than one storyline during the book partly for that reason.
I think as a young woman, I was certainly aware of apartheid next door. I was aware of people being thrown out of ten-story windows as part of police “investigations”. In actually travelling to South Africa, much of that was hidden and I mostly only rub shoulders with white people when I travel there and I didn’t spend a lot of time in South Africa, but enough to know that whites were anxious to rationalize a system or at least the people that I met.
It seemed pointless to argue but it was terribly upsetting to be there. I was often held up at the boarder because I had a radio program there and I was an educator and I was an American, and those were three strikes against me. I often spend time at the boarder waiting for clearance when I went through one way or the other from Botswana or back into Botswana.
I don’t think I was fully aware of … I didn’t allow myself to feel right down deep into the fact of apartheid and what it would be like to live within that system. That’s one of the things in the writing this book that I had to come face to face with through research through my own imagination part of why It was hard to write.
Dr. Lisa: We live now in a society that is increasingly I believe more accepting of people of different skin colors, different religions, of different spiritual inclinations. That’s on the surface. There are still some people who have deeply held beliefs about separation and about superiority. What was it like to be in a country or next to a country that was entirely of that belief or at least the laws were structured in a way so that people were separated and there was a class system, and to know that this was so against what you yourself believed in?
Eleanor: As I’ve said, it was horrifying and I have the experience of being in a Mafikeng train station and dashing up to “Black the [inaudible 00:42:44]’, the black stairway and being shouted at. If I’d been a black person running up a white staircase, I’ve probably would have been shot or put in prison. Who knows what would have happen to me.
I had those small experiences. As I said, I didn’t live in South Africa. I was living in Botswana, so my experience day to day was quite the reverse of that. I had the experience of being a white person for the first time, being a minority person and occasionally felt the brunt of that in my work and outside work, not strongly because Botswana was a … It felt like a very kind, multiracial country at the very top of the country. Seretse Khama was a very enlightened statesman like black president. His wife was white, a white British person. That multiracialism filtered down through the country and it was a very strong part of what I felt that I belong to.
My husband was white, but he was a citizen of Botswana. We were minority and sometimes, that minority felt privileged but sometimes it felt the reverse. I feel grateful to be a white person to have had that experience of being sometimes in a very unprivileged position which is what black people in this country have experienced for hundreds of years now.
Dr. Lisa: We’ve been speaking with Eleanor Morse, author of ‘White Dog Fell from the Sky’. For more information on Eleanor, visit ‘Eleanormorse.com’. Thank you for bringing your writing to the world and for speaking with us today, Eleanor.
Eleanor: Thank you, Lisa.
Dr. Lisa: The goal of the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour is to help make connections between the health of the individual and the health of the community.
The goal of Ted Carter Inspired Landscapes is to deepen our appreciation for the natural world. Here to speak with us today is Ted Carter.
Ted: On April, 22nd which is Earth Day this year, my new book ‘Earth Calling’ is being released co-written by my co-author, Ellen Gunter. It is really a handbook on climate change for the 21st century. This is something that is going to affect every single one of us. It doesn’t matter where you live or what socioeconomic brackets you’re in. Every single piece of the human spirit will be touched by the changes going on in the environment.
This has been something that’s been going on a long time, and we keep putting solutions off, we keep putting things off to the future and hoping that maybe another generation can handle this, but it’s really up to us. We’re the stewards. We’re the ones that are being called to handle this now. It’s not about giving up everything you have. I think people are terrified thinking that, “Oh my gosh. I can’t have a nice house or drive a nice car, or have my things” I guess. That’s not the case at all.
I think it’s about [and in 00:46:13] both, and about walking between our worlds and trying to come up with solutions that are really helpful to everybody, and get out of ourselves for a minute and start to see the world around us with a much more holistic perspective.
I’m Ted Carter. If you’d like to contact me, I can be reached at ‘Tedcarterdesign.com’.
Dr. Lisa: The ‘Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast’ understands the importance of the health of the body, mind and spirit. Here to talk about the health of the body is Travis Beaulieu of Premier Sports, a division of Black Bear Medical.
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Dr. Lisa: Now in its 17th year, the ‘Maine Jewish Film Festival’ has presented over 300 domestic and foreign films and sold over 32,000 tickets to both Jewish and non-Jewish attendees. This year, the ‘Maine Jewish Film Festival’ will be held on March 22nd to 29th in venues throughout greater Portland, as well as selected sites throughout the state.
Here’s an excerpt from next week’s show on the ‘Maine Jewish Film Festival’. Today, we’re speaking with film festival executive director, Louise Rosen and filmmaker, Richard Kane.
It is interesting that the same time, you’re celebrating diversity, you’re also celebrating connections so that people will see films that are put out as ‘Maine Jewish Film Festival’ films, and yet there’s a universality about them. I know, Richard, this is something that you are very aware of because you’ve done work not only on artists but you did work with … One of your pieces was called, ‘In These Times’ and another was called ‘Turning Clothing into Food’. Those were two short documentaries hunger which is something that impacts all of us in one way or another.
Richard: Right. I guess I’m very interested in community and in issues that impact people. It’s hard to realize that when you’re living in an affluent place, that there are people who are falling to cracks and we’re very interested in … and my partner, Melody Lewis came was very interested in the local food pantry and how can we help.
We collaborated with them to create a film that is about hunger and about how food pantries can be of a great help in helping those people who do fall to the cracks, and people with two jobs working minimum wage can’t make it with a couple of children. They need something like a food pantry to be of … It’s a supplement, their diet.
Now, the films have been showing and many of the places around, many of the theaters around Maine, we had the great fortune of having Noel Paul Stookey contribute the music and the title in these times to the film. He’s a great member of the community that I live in in Blue Hill.
That film as well as the film that we made for the ‘Natural Resources Council of Maine’, I’m very interested in our environment, and I think the NRCM does an amazing job to really protect the nature of Maine, so I became involved in that project. I’m also doing commercials and politicals, as well as commercials on different products.
I just like to be involved in a visual medium like film which is what perhaps attracted me to making films about art in Maine. That really has become my life’s work. For that, I’m very grateful to have that opportunity. Many of the artists happen to be Jewish.
When I started this project on Jon Imber, it wasn’t about a Jewish artist, and it’s knowing that the film is part of the ‘Jewish Film Festival’ to ‘Maine Jewish Film Festival’ has made me begun to think about my own Judaism. Jon’s wife, Jill Hoy who’s a really accomplished artist herself and has had a long history of being in Maine, she talked about how Jon’s Judaism was really deeply rooted and who he is. In the film, when they’re looking through old family photos, they come across a photograph of Jon nine years old at a family Passover where there’s uncle Isaac and uncle Herman and his grandmother, Michael Abbey, and Jon is like a peacock in a way. He’s hamming it up. He’s stretching out his neck to be photographed.
Hamming it up is who Jon is in part. Jill descries Jon as … his Judaism being deeply rooted in who he is. Let me just quote what she says. Jon asks, “How so?” She says, “Your delivery, your being, your responsibility, your search, your quest for the integrity of what you do, I think there’s a very deep root there.” It made me think about, “Who am I as a Jew?” Both of us, Jon and myself, we always thought about ourselves as being secular Jews. Maybe we’re both Bar Mitzvahed but it was almost more of a social event than it was a religious event.
It’s something that the film begins to deal with. Jon actually has a very long history of having a very significant ancestor by the name of Naftali Herz Imber who was the author of the ‘Israeli National Anthem’. He wrote a poem, ‘Hatikvah’ which means hope. It became the words to the Israeli National Anthem.
Dr. Lisa: I do think that this is something that I find very interesting and something I think you and I talked about on the phone, Louise. It’s this idea of documenting of really making sure that things are not forgotten. This is a big piece of what you’re doing as you’re bringing some of these films like the ‘Jon Imber’ film to Maine for the ‘Maine Jewish Film Festival’. Tell me about some of your favorite films.
Louise: I think it’s important to bear in mind that all of these films come from what I would refer to as ‘Independent Sources’. In other words, these are not being made by a studio system. They represent a kind of independent spirit and from a huge range of countries. We’ve got certainly Israeli films, France, Germany … these countries are represented. We’re really curating a collection that reflects an international sensibility.
In terms of favorites, it’s a tough question. I mean, we’ve certainly got edgy films, a film called ‘The Gatekeepers’ which was nominated for an Oscar last year which is a very, very tough look at Israeli approach to dealing with terrorism. It features the heads of the Israeli intelligence agency called ‘Shin Bet’. They talk about their careers as the head of that agency and reflecting back on whether their approaches ultimately made sense in terms of peace and the world peace for Israel. It’s a tough film and very similar in style to ‘Fog of War’, and as much as it uses interviews combined with archive material.
In relation to what you were just saying, yes, that’s a document. We have cultural documents, a very Indie and very fun film that touches on music called ‘Awake Zion’ that makes the connection between a reggae and Jewish music, and explores the new reggae movement that exists in Israel where there’s a very vibrant reggae scene, but also connects with Crown Heights and of course a period of time when the Caribbean community in Crown Heights and the Orthodox community clashed, but then, looking at the fact that there’s now this inspired fertilization between the two communities and musically speaking. Great film.
We’ve got a German film called ‘An Apartment in Berlin’ that looks at the immigration of young Israelis to Germany which for a lot of the older generation is really a bit of a taboo idea and yet, Israelis are drawn, these 20 somethings, 30 somethings are drawn to a place like Berlin for all the reasons anyone would be. It’s a cosmopolitan city, it’s got wonderful quality of life, very lively, active place. Dealing with Berlin as having been the center for the extermination programs during the holocaust, there’s a big push pull there.
It’s exciting to learn about, “What are these young people thinking, and what are their experiences being there and how are their families responding to them?”