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Conversation

‘Words, still photos, moving images – they are all storytelling’

Ratnottama Sengupta introduces and converses with a photographer who works at the intersection of art and social issues, Vijay S Jodha

S Vijay Jodha
Lines, Shapes & Forms  – Vijay S. Jodha’s group show is on view at Museo Camera Gurgaon till May 26, 2025
Photo Courtesy: Vijay S Jodha

Vijay S Jodha was yet to become one of India’s leading lens-based artists at the intersection of art and social issues. Back then, in the 1990s, he had no inkling that 30 years later he would be the chairperson of UGC-CEC[1] jury for selecting the best educational films made in India. Or that he would be the national selector and trainer in photography for the National Abilympics Association of India.

When I first met him, he was mounting a collaborative exhibition of his work with the elderly, their contribution to society and the care they deserve. Little did I know that the entire bent of this journalist-turned documentary filmmaker-turned photo artist would go on to focus on subjects ranging from mob violence, riot victims, farmers’ suicide, 75 years of Indian constitution to Joys of Christmas and the Bus Art of Tamil Nadu. 

Photo Courtesy: Vijay S Jodha

Not surprising that the International Confederation of NGOs has honoured Vijay with the Media Citizen Award for using media to drive social change. And it is only one among hundreds of honours he has received in two dozen countries. These include awards and grants, from Swiss Development Agency to Ford Foundation and Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Screening of his films on 75 channels worldwide and in 250 festivals in 60 countries.

These seem tedious details? So, interestingly, two public showings of his work have been vandalised. And a false police case against him took eight years to be thrown out by India’s courts!

Conversation

Vijay how did you come into photography? 

I’m a trained filmmaker – I mastered in film production – and have been making films for two decades. My films have shown on 75 stations including Discovery, CNN, BBC. But training in photography I have none. All my photography is non-fiction work. Actually my films are also non-fiction or reality based work. I just find still photography very relaxing because, unlike films where a director is responsible for so many things, here I’m on my own. But there’s no production deadline. No huge budget is needed. I can address any subject that catches my fancy and pursue it over several years, without any worry. Otherwise it’s the same: photos or films, you’re storytelling around substantial issues that interest you, in a manner that does justice to those issues, and — hopefully — engaging to the viewers.

So who was your inspiration?

In photography it is obviously the greats who defined the grammar of the medium itself such as Robert Frank[2] and Cartier Bresson[3]. They’ve inspired us all in some manner. I’m fortunate that, as a part time journalist in New York decades ago, I got to meet and interview top filmmakers and photographers like Gordon Parks and Richard Avedon. 

I once did a course at New York’s School of Visual Arts where they honoured Mary Ellen Mark and she had come across. As a journalist, I covered Sebastião Salgado’s launch of his workers’ project that put him on the map (of photography). I met Raghubir Singh while doing a project on Ayodhya in India, and again in New York where we put up the same exhibition. He also photographed some of us – myself, Siddharth Varadarajan, the editor-publisher of The Wire who was then a student at Columbia University, and other Indian students — were protesting some human rights issue.

I’m also fortunate to have our finest photo-journalists and lens-based artists as friends. I can take across my work to get a feedback or pick their brains. This beats the best photo schools in the world. In fact years ago I did a book which had photos from all of them! This was the biggest photo project on the Tiranga[4] as listed in the Limca Book of Records. They have all done many books on their own but this is the only one where all these masters appear in a single volume, their works united thematically. Apart from Raghu Rai, Ram Rahman, Prashant Panjiar,  Dayanita Singh,  T Narayan, and the late TS Satyan, I’d also interviewed people across India, from the then Prime Minister Vajpayee to those selling flags at traffic lights for a few meagre rupees.

You did not go to any international school to train in the art or the technology aspect. So what prompted your PhD?

Three decades back when I decided to go into mass communication as a career there were few computers, no internet, no private TV channels, or mobile phones. Sorry if that makes me seem Jurassic but it was a world with very few media opportunities. Post college, I had got  admissions into a trainee programme with a newspaper as well as in the MA programme in International Relations at India’s premier Jawaharlal Nehru University. My father felt that a masters and exposure at JNU would be a better investment for journalism – probably the single best advice I’ve got in my entire career — and I followed that. 

Then for some time I worked in print media: I freelanced for newspapers, edited and published a journal for a business house, scripted for a film and worked on a book with one of my journalism heroes – late Kuldip Nayar. But in the pre-internet era newspaper articles had a very short life, so I felt the need to produce something that would last longer such as film. So I decided to get a degree in Film. It also encompassed all my interests, from writing to art to music, travel and photography.

You’ve not been a photo-journalist working for any journal or newspaper. Yet you felt inclined to do projects on environment, elder care, survivors of riots and mob violence, farmer suicide, art that travels. Was it inevitable, given your father’s background?

Actually I’ve done a bit of photo journalism too. During my film school days at NYU I was a writer-photographer for their student-run newspaper, Washington Square News. I’ve also been a stringer for mainstream dailies including The Economic Times where I shot images parallel to my writing. I did stills for Mira Nair’s Monsoon Wedding and of course stills for my own film projects. So I’ve a lot of published images in papers worldwide though my main gig has been films. 

Frankly I don’t see much difference between these mediums. Be it words, stills or moving images; an academic paper, photo books, or films, short or long – all this is story telling. I’m a story teller.

And subjects? I’ve filmed every possible subject except wildlife: I just don’t have the patience for that. Otherwise everything, from artist biopics — on Paritosh Sen and Prokash Karmakar, whose inaugural screening you also attended in Calcutta years ago — to films on environment. My The Weeping Apple Tree (2005) was among the first ones on climate change in India. It won the UK Environment Film Fellowship Award 2005 and had multiple screenings on Discovery, with an introduction by Sir Mark Tully.

At that time, few knew about climate change. So Delhi govt organised a special screening for their MLAs and officers of water, electricity and sanitation departments. It was screened at UNEP headquarters in Nairobi and in various festivals. UNIDO and other grassroots level NGOs used it to create awareness. Some years back an IFS {Indian Forest Service} officer told me that Himachal government uses it to train their forest officers. 

My film on gender, Pedalling to Freedom (2007) revisited an old initiative in one of the poorest parts of the world. It traced the life-changing impact of teaching 100,000 women to ride the bicycle. That film is in the US Library of Congress. It was also chosen for archiving at OSA Budapest, world’s premier repository of materials dealing with human rights. 

Then there are films that get food on the table. Training films. Corporate films. I once did a ‘funeral film’ on a well-known personality whose passing received a lot of press coverage in India but the NRI son could not come for the funeral.

What motivates you Vijay — money, international honour, or the possibility of social change?

Well, all this is livelihood so the money part is important. But doing work that gets recognised far and wide, that is substantial, to hold good for a long time – that’s a huge motivator. 

I have a slightly spiritual take towards this. I feel that regardless of our profession we are all bound by a dharmic or sacred duty. A teacher’s duty is to teach and a doctor’s is to heal. For those in the business of storytelling — including photographers — the sacred duty is to document, bear witness, push things forward. And believe you me, this has little connect with means or accessibility. 

To give you an extreme example: After the Nazis lost the war and Berlin fell, soldiers from the victorious allies army raped virtually every woman in Berlin. Few rapists were taken to task and  to top it, despite all the extensive coverage of the allies victory by forgotten photographers as well as superstars like Margaret Bourke-White  (known to us through her famous Gandhiji with charkha portrait) or Robert Capa (regarded as the greatest war photographer of all time), there was no coverage of this mass outrage in Berlin by anyone be it in photo essays in Life Magazine, or World War photo books. It appears in no Hollywood film or TV series.  

Likewise, fifty years ago, when India came under the draconian Emergency, our courts also endorsed the robbing of our Constitutional rights. Nobody documented, then or since, the forced sterilisation of 6,000,000 who were stripped of their reproductive rights. We, as photographers and filmmakers, failed on this front.

The First Witnesses is my project around farmer suicides. It is not an unheard issue nor something hard to get access. But how many have found it worth their while to document the issue? How many are documenting a disappearing art form or livelihood? Or our urban heritage being torn down? Our movie theatres once represented cinema as an inexpensive and readily accessible mass culture. Now they are being torn down even in smaller towns. Each had a unique character. Is anyone documenting that?

I documented Durga Puja in Kolkata 20 years ago when I was working with painters there. Durga astride a tiger, slaying the demonic Mahisasur emerging out of a buffalo: these elements get interpreted in hundreds of ways across the city each year. Each pandal has a different aesthetic interpretation, inside and outside. The religious aspect is no less important. But  these are also like site-specific installation art works shaped by the imagination of so many talented people but designed for impermanence. How many books of photos exist around this work now recognised by UNESCO as Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity?

How successful have you been in achieving this?

The merit of my work is for others to judge. I’m happy that, though India doesn’t have many foundations or support for non-commercial oriented art, I’ve been able to do at least a few things that are genuinely pathbreaking, substantial and have gone around the world. To be invited to UNESCO headquarters in Paris to screen a film and address delegates from 193 countries, or be honoured by our President for India’s best ever performed at Abilympics — these are certainly my career highlights.

Vijay S Jodha at UNESCO introducing his film. Photo provided by Vijay S Jodha

My work has received over a hundred honours across 24 countries, but what truly motivates me is when people I look up to, my heroes, appreciate what I do. That kind of recognition carries a different weight. For instance, Magsaysay awardee P Sainath, whose ground-breaking reportage has long inspired me, saw my farmers project when it was exhibited alongside his photographic work at the Chennai Photo Biennale 2019. We hadn’t met before, so when he praised my effort, it felt like receiving a medal.

Another moment that has stayed with me was post my time at NYU. My professor, George Stoney, referred to as the father of public access television and mentioned in history books on documentary cinema, mentored Oscar-winning directors like Oliver Stone, Martin Scorsese, Spike Lee, and Ang Lee. When he watched The Weeping Apple Tree, he said, “Vijay, this is better than Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth. That was a glorified PowerPoint by comparison.” That one comment meant more to me than most awards ever could.

As a photo artist what is the biggest moment of joy for you — technical hurray or the joy of the subjects?

As I just said, recognition and praise of my heroes gives the maximum joy. There are other honours. Two photo projects listed in Limca Book of Records for being the biggest and path breaking. The first was on ageing that I did over eight years with my brother Samar Jodha – he did the images while I did the concept research, writing and interviews. The other was the aforementioned Tiranga. My film Poop on Poverty (2012) won a Peabody award, the oldest honour for documentary films, and more international honours than any non-fiction film produced out of India. 

After landmark exhibitions in Hong Kong and New York I donated two complete sets of The First Witnesses, my farming crisis project, to two farmer unions including our oldest and biggest All India Kisan Sabha (AIKS). They are using it for awareness raising across villages. That’s a real high as a photographer.

Then there’s high coming from those we pass down our expertise to. Among those I’ve taught or mentored is a highly talented though physically challenged youngster from Vijayawada with missing digits and motoring issues. His family runs a Kirana shop. When he started school, they sent him back saying he cannot even hold a pencil. He won a bronze medal in photography for India at the last Abilympics in France. Another student has himself become a photography teacher in a school for hearing impaired. This is the kind of stuff that gets me very excited. 

Thirty years ago as a volunteer writer and researcher I helped Sanskriti Foundation set up India’s first international artist retreat. That novel venture raised crores in grants and set up three museums. Today it is being scaled back as its founder O P Jain is in his 90s. But that idea caught on and you have scores of artist retreats across India. 

How has digital technology influenced photography as an art form? Has it done more harm? Or widened its spread?

Digital has been a mixed experience. It democratised the process of production and dissemination — be it still images or movies. This is a fantastic thing. But it killed a lot of the processes and livelihoods such as the printing labs, film production and processing facilities. It has also killed an art form like print making. It’s a specialised skill in itself, so a lot of artistry, understanding, appreciation and sustenance of it has got compromised.

The emergence of deep fake images and piracy of work is bad news too. But it has allowed more people to become story tellers. They now bear witness, as filmmakers and photographers, of issues and events that was earlier impossible.

I can cite examples from my work. I’m National Selector and Trainer in photography for National Abilympics Association of India (NAAI) and my students are in different parts of India. Two are hearing impaired, two others have motoring issues and physical challenges. Thanks to digital tools, we’re running long distance classes every week. NAAI provides me sign language interpreter but I can send and receive digital files, use zoom to conduct classes, use google translate to send instructions in Tamil, English and Marathi to my students. Now one student, despite hearing challenge, is running a photo studio. The student who has issues with his leg also works as wedding photographer. Workshops with institutions and festivals, within and outside India, are now easy and inexpensive thanks to these digital tools and communication modes.

Has selfies on mobile camera shortened the life of portraiture?

It has certainly democratised the process while the average person’s patience to study or appreciate any art work — portrait or landscape photo — is shrinking by the minute. Of course, good portraiture requires some skill to make as well as appreciate – that cultural literacy is a challenge everywhere, not just in photo medium. As a seasoned art critic you would have noticed that in the world of painting and sculpture too. Sadly we don’t have that education in our schools. 

You have continued with still images even after doing many documentaries. What is the joy in either case?

I’m doing still photography and movies parallel to each other. Last month I had a book on public policy, as I mentioned. Also launched last month – by our defence minister –was my film on our Armed Forces Medical Corps – it’s one of the oldest divisions in the world, going back 260 years. I’m working on a project on the Indian Constitution and a biopic on Amitabh Sen Gupta, the artist whose retrospective exhibition this year is organised by Artworld Chennai. My still photography project on the farmers crisis is also going on for the past 7-8 years.

All projects are joyous and offer their own challenges. It’s like bringing children into the world. You do the best you can, hope they’ll do well and go far, but you don’t know which one will. Regardless of their line of work you feel happy with each of them and what they achieve. 

What is the future of Arriflex, Mitchell, Kodak Brownie? And that of Yashica, Nikon, Canon, Leica, Olympus…?

Some old camera brands like Konica and Minolta have merged, or evolved into digital Avatars like Arriflex. Others, like Kodak, have faded into history. Interestingly, a small Indian company has licensed their name to market TVs under Kodak brand name now. For those of us from the analogue generation, it’s a bittersweet feeling. When a beloved brand disappears, it feels like saying goodbye to an old friend. But such is the nature of change.

My friend Aditya Arya, one of India’s eminent photographers and a passionate camera collector, has created a remarkable space to preserve this legacy. He established the Museo Camera in Gurgaon, a non-profit centre promoting photographic art, which has become not only a camera museum but also a leading art and culture hub in the Delhi national capital region. If you’re an old time photographer passing through Delhi, it’s a wonderful place to revisit these “old friends.”

(Website of Museo Camera https://www.museocamera.org)

Photo Courtesy: Vijay S Jodha

[1]  University Grants Commission-Consortium for Educational Communication

[2] Robert Frank (1924-2019) was a photographer and documentary filmmaker. 

[3] Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908-2004) was a humanist photographer, a master of candid photography, and an early user of 35mm film. One of the founding members of Magnum Photos in 1947, he pioneered the genre of street photography, and viewed photography as capturing a decisive moment.

[4] Three colours, published in 2005

Ratnottama Sengupta, formerly Arts Editor of  The Times of India, teaches mass communication and film appreciation, curates film festivals and art exhibitions, and translates and writes books. She has been a member of CBFC, served on the National Film Awards jury and has herself won a National Award. 

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Categories
Notes from Japan

Therese Schumacher and Nagayoshi Nagai: A Love Story

By Suzanne Kamata

Therese & Nagayoshi Nagai. Courtesy: Suzanne Kamata

I first learned of Therese Nagai while listening to a student presentation. I was teaching a class of first year pharmacology students at Tokushima University. Their assignment had been to make a group presentation on something related to their major. One group chose to introduce Nagayoshi Nagai [1844-1929], the Father of Pharmacology in Japan, and the founder of Tokushima University’s Pharmacology Department. My ears perked up when the student mentioned that he had married a German woman.

How was it that I had lived in Tokushima for 26 years, yet no one had ever mentioned her to me? Didn’t ordinary people know of her? I knew of the Wenceslau de Moraes, the Portuguese sailor who’d settled at the foot of Mt. Bizan and who wrote about Tokushima in Portuguese. There was a museum dedicated to him at the top of the mountain. I also knew of the German prisoners of war who’d been interred in nearby Naruto during World War I. Because of these foreign men, the prefecture had established ties with both Portugal and Germany. But what about this woman, Therese? I was determined to find out more about her.

In the photo of Therese and Nagayoshi Nagai that pops up in a cursory Internet search, she is staring off in the distance, her expression determined, resolute. Her hair is pulled back, her Victorian dress buttoned up her neck and decorated with a large cameo pin. She looks serious, sensible. He is wearing Western clothes as well — a suit, and a tie. He gazes directly at the camera, but his head is tilted toward hers. She looks as if she might be lost in thought, thinking of her native Germany, or how to improve upon her life in Japan. He seems to be thinking only of her.

Nagayoshi was born in Myodo District in Awa Province, which is now known as Tokushima Prefecture, on the island of Shikoku. His father, a physician, taught him about the medicinal properties of plants, and expected his son to follow in his footsteps. His mother died when he was a child. As a young man, he embarked for study in Nagasaki, at the Dutch Medical College. Nagasaki was the first port of call in a country newly open to foreign trade, and the influx of Western culture, after 230 years of isolation. There, Nagayoshi saw pale, big-nosed Europeans for the first time in his life. He got a job at the first photography studio in the country, where he took photos of foreigners and Japanese, such as folk hero Ryoma Sakamoto. Sakamoto, who was also originally from Shikoku, albeit further south, in Kochi, encouraged Nagayoshi to go abroad and learn from the West.[1]

From Nagasaki, Nagayoshi went on to study at Tokyo University, Japan’s equivalent to Harvard — not bad for a boy from the backwoods. Still, when he was awarded a coveted study-abroad slot at Berlin University, he felt compelled to ask his father for permission to go. His father was afraid he would never come back. “You have a responsibility to become a great doctor,” he told his son. Nagayoshi couldn’t bring himself to tell his father that his interest had turned to chemistry and pharmacology. He had no interest in becoming a doctor.

After getting the go ahead from his father to set out on this great new adventure, he sailed by boat to San Francisco, then took a train to New York, and finally sailed on another steamer to Liverpool. In Europe, everything was shiny and new – the water pipes, the gas lamps, the glass windows. He was also deeply impressed by the architecture in Berlin, declaring in a letter to his father “Everything that is built by humans is finely detailed.”[2]

Although there were several boarding houses that catered to young Japanese men, he took up residence with Frau von Holzendor, where no other Japanese student was living in order to expedite his German language learning[3]. After she passed away, he moved into a boarding house run by Frau Lagerstrom.

The young Nagayoshi was intense and single-minded, too caught up in his studies to bother with a social life. His mentor, German chemist August Wilhelm von Hofmann, suggested that if he was planning on staying in Germany, he should marry a German woman.

“That’s not as simple as you think,” Nagai allegedly replied. “Orientals are still a rarity in Germany. In Japan, foreigners are considered outsiders, and they’re called ‘Meriken’ and held at arm’s length. It will take time to get the consent of my father.”[4]

According to one biographer, Hofmann began plotting to find a German bride for Nagai. He invited his protégé along for an unveiling of a statue of his former teacher, Justus von Liebig, the founder of organic chemistry, the University of Giessen. The proprietor of the boardinghouse where Nagai was staying also accompanied them, perhaps as part of Hofmann’s plan. After the ceremony, Nagai decided to take a trip to Switzerland. On the way, he stopped at the Nassauer Hof Hotel in Frankfurt.

Looking out of his pension window, he spotted an attractive, young German woman, and asked Frau Lagerstrom how he might go about meeting her. She conspired for the two of them to have a meal with young Therese Schumacher and her mother. The Schumachers were visiting from their home in Andermach, a picturesque, medieval town on the left bank of the Rhine. Therese’s father was a local lumber and mining magnate. Nagayoshi was so tongue-tied at breakfast that he could barely manage to get a word out. When he finally spoke, he asked if she would like some honey for her bread. “Yes,” she replied.

After breakfast, Nagai and his landlady ran into the mother and daughter in town.

“Will you be going out somewhere tonight?” he asked.

“Yes, I’m going to the opera,” Therese replied.

Nagai invited himself along.

That evening they went on their first date to the Frankfurt Opera House, chaperones in tow. When asked later what the performance had been, Nagayoshi laughed and said that he didn’t remember. He’d been so mesmerised by the young woman sitting next to him, he hadn’t paid any attention to what was happening on the stage.

The next morning, Therese and her mother departed by boat to Wiesbaden. They continued on a day or two later to Schlagenbad, where the Schumchers had an exclusive contract to provide building materials for a new hotel under construction. When they returned home to Andernach, Therese was astonished to find Nagai, wearing a suit newly tailored for the occasion, waiting on the docks.

For the next three days, he was the guest of the Schumacher family. Therese gave the dapper scholar a tour of the main house, built in 1746, and the stone and lumber works.

“You’ve caught yourself a Chinaman,” Therese’s brother Mathias teased. More likely it was Therese who’d been snared by this polite, erudite Japanese visitor.

The following year, a delegation arrived from Tokyo Imperial University, inviting Nagayoshi to return to Japan head the university’s first Department of Pharmacology. In the film version of their story, Nagayoshi is torn between staying in Germany with the woman he loves and returning to the land of his birth. Of course, he was obligated to return. The university had sent him to Germany to learn for the benefit of his nation, after all.

He proposed marriage to Therese. She said “yes.” After becoming engaged, he returned to Japan alone. He worried that his bride-to-be would be discontent in backwards Japan, where country folk still clattered around in wooden geta clogs, and rickshaws were the choice mode of transportation. In the Japanese movie version of the story, his younger sister assured him that if Therese truly loved him, she would be happy to be with him no matter where they lived. It’s likely, however, that his father and sister were not quite as agreeable as they appear in the film. After all, in that era Japanese men rarely married for love, and Nagai, the only son, was eager for his father’s approval.

In 1885, Nagai experienced a breakthrough in his research, when he successfully isolated the active ingredient of Ephedrine. Later, his findings would be instrumental in the development of medication for asthma and cough suppressant. And even later, he would develop methamphetamine.

Nagayoshi and Therese were separated for months. When he finally returned to Germany, he was 40 years old. Therese was 21. They married on March 27, 1886, in a church in her hometown, Andernach, despite the fact that Nagayoshi was not Catholic.  He would convert to Catholicism thirteen years later.

Once in Japan, Therese sent a flurry of letters back home to Andernach. She wrote of homesickness, but also of “standing firmly on two feet in their new life. I feel as if gradually new roots form and I become habituated to this strange way of life, to unusual manners. I’m making progress.”

Broadened by his own experiences abroad, and influenced by his sharp, young bride, Nagayoshi was a strong proponent of education for women. He co-founded Japan’s first college for women, now known as Japan Joshi Daigaku, where Therese was employed as an instructor of German. She was, reportedly, an energetic teacher, enriching her lessons with instruction on manners, customs and German cooking.

Eventually, they would have three children – Alexander, Willy, and Elsa, all brought up to be bilingual, and with an awareness of their German heritage.

In addition to being the Father of Modern Chemistry and Pharmacy in Japan, Nagayoshi served as president and founder of the Japanese-German Society. Therese is credited with introducing German food and culture to the Japanese, and, along with her husband, hosted Albert Einstein and his wife Elsa during part of their visit to Japan in 1922. Therese also helped to interpret for the couple.

Therese died in 1924.

When the eldest son, Alexander, first visited his mother’s hometown, Andernach, he claimed it as his second home. Later, during World War II, Alexander Nagai, would serve as a Japanese diplomat to Germany at the embassy in Berlin. One writer mused that his cross-cultural upbringing made him especially sensitive to the plight of the German Jews. Alexander was a member of a group that resisted intolerance toward Jews and is reported to have helped enable the issue exit visas to Jews who sought to escape Nazi Germany.[5]

In 1994, Teigi Nagai, grandson of Nagayoshi and Therese, donated an ornate chandelier to the church where his grandparents were wed in homage to their legacy and love.

References:

[1] Kokoro Zashi – Seimi o Ai Shita Otoko, 2011

[2] Hoi-Eun Kim, Doctors of Empire: Medical and Cultural Encounters between Imperial Germany and Meiji Japan (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2014), 91

[3] Kim

[4] Nobuko Iinuma, Nagai Nagayoshi to Terēze : Nihon yakugaku no kaiso (Therese and Nagai Nagayoshi: Father of Japanese Pharmacology), Tokyo : Nihon Yakugakkai, 2003

[5]The Free Library. S.v. Japanese Diplomats and Jewish Refugees: a World War II Dilemma..” Retrieved Jul 29 2015 from http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Japanese+Diplomats+and+Jewish+Refugees%3a+a+World+War+II+Dilemma.-a095107554

Suzanne Kamata was born and raised in Grand Haven, Michigan. She now lives in Japan with her husband and two children. Her short stories, essays, articles and book reviews have appeared in over 100 publications. Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize five times, and received a Special Mention in 2006. She is also a two-time winner of the All Nippon Airways/Wingspan Fiction Contest, winner of the Paris Book Festival, and winner of a SCBWI Magazine Merit Award.

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Categories
Slices from Life

It’s Amazing the Things We can Do

By Erwin Coombs

That’s the title of a narrative that needs explaining. I have to start off by being quite honest: I was raised in a cloud of cynicism and despair. As I’ve already hinted — my upbringing was classically dysfunctional with a broken home at age six and all kinds of attendant problems. Poverty was one. Actually, poverty is never one problem because it has a ricochet effect like shooting a gun in a metal room as it leads to a whole bagful of treats that make life that much more difficult. Apart from the outward signs of misery, there were all kinds of internalised ones.

I am a huge optimist by nature and why I don’t know. It might have to do with a faulty IQ or some brain injury suffered in youth that I can’t recall, for obvious reasons. Mind you, I did fall out of my highchair when I was a toddler in Cairo, Egypt. I don’t know if the highchairs at that time were substandard or perhaps my mother didn’t bother to do up my safety belt, but I went down like a ton of bricks to the non-carpeted floor. I’m sure there was no permanent damage, except for the fact that there is an indent in the middle of the top of my head.

When I was young and had hair, I remember occasionally coming across that indent and thinking “Thank God I have hair to cover THAT thing up with!” But God has a delicious sense of irony and between Him and gravity, or rather with gravity working as his foot soldier, time chipped, or rather pulled away at my hair. And as my hairline receded like a Maple Leaf fan’s playoff hopes, that deformity became a feature of mine. I’m not a vain man, by any stretch, but this was a bit to deal with. Over time, I got used to it.

I recall one day I was helping out in one of my daughter’s grade two classrooms. I was sitting reading a story to several cute little kids when one of the girls asked, in a completely good-natured way, “What’s that big lump on your head?” I wanted to explain that rather than a big lump it was actually a crevice which gave the appearance of a big lump, but how lame would that have sounded? Instead, I did more of that thinking on my feet thing and said, “You see, Ariana, I have so many smart thoughts that I don’t have room for them in my brain. So, I store them there.”

She looked wide-eyed at this new marvel she had never heard of before and I could tell she was impressed. I had turned what could have been a potentially embarrassing deformity for my daughter into a point of admiration. I had new cache as the really smart guy. Score one for Dad.

Thinking back on that highchair fall, there was another potentially brain damaging incident that took place in Cairo. Given that there were two such events it’s amazing I can even remember them. But I guess the damage was fairly minimal, though I’m sure several former teachers of mine would claim otherwise. We had just arrived in Cairo as my father was posted at the Canadian embassy, but our house wasn’t ready yet. That meant a two week stay at the Cairo Hilton on the public coin. Being a toddler, I couldn’t entirely appreciate how cool this was, but my family did and when Dad was at work we spent a lot of time at the pool. I couldn’t walk then but neither could a lot of the guests who made good use of the pool-side bar. My Mum no doubt did, and my siblings were busy playing childish games. I was plopped on the steps of the shallow end of the pool to bake in the sun and hopefully not teeter into the water. Hope is a fine thing, but you don’t want to risk a toddler’s life on it. And sure, as shooting I did the teetering and as with the highchair, toppled to the bottom. The landing wasn’t so bad, it’s just that there was no resurfacing to go with it and so I sat comically at the bottom, no doubt waving my arms and looking wide eyed.

Meanwhile, on terra firma, someone thought to look for me.

“Has anyone seen Erwin?’

If I had a toddler that was missing poolside, I would have phrased it a little more urgently. But the whole family circled the pool until my brother Eddy spotted me at the bottom, now fairly blue through lack of oxygen and called out.

“There he is!” I believe he said it like a child finding a hidden Easter egg in a hunt instead of a drowning sibling. But for all that they did pull me out, dry me off and I was not much the worse for wear. Here’s a funny follow up lest you think that our childhood experiences don’t have some kind of resonance in our adult years. I was never told of this almost drowning incident until I was well into my teens, for some reason. Yet my whole life I had been, and am still, subject to a recurring nightmare where, you guessed it, I am at the bottom of a pool, gasping for breath and I wake up panting. As the song says, take good care of your children. If you don’t they might end up with misshapen heads and poor sleeping habits.

There was a third incident in Cairo involving a camel and the pyramids. My God, but it sounds like I’ve had this exciting life but really most of it has been spent holding onto a channel changer and dreaming of better days. While in Cairo the family decided to take a tour around the pyramids riding camels because, hey, that’s the thing to do there. And it would have been a grand idea except that my Mum had just strapped the baby me onto the camel before she got on when the camel decided that one passenger was enough, and it bolted. Camels are ornery beasts and when they get a mind to something they do it and apparently kidnapping the blonde baby was a bee in its bonnet so off it went. Soon one of the camel instructors leapt onto another camel and chased me down in the Sahara after a few minutes. Had he not, I might well have wound up as a Bedouin being raised in the desert as some sort of a poor man’s Lawrence of Arabia. Looking back on my time in Egypt, it seems clear that my parents had decided to do away with me but lacked the foresight for a proper plan or the energy to keep at it. But I hold no grudge. They did have three other mouths to feed, after all.

Despite all those damages to my brain at an early age I have managed to negotiate this old world with some degree of success. And one of the points I want to make in this narrative is that people are extraordinarily able to do things they think they wouldn’t otherwise be able to do, if that doesn’t sound too convoluted a sentence. In other words, we can accomplish things under the most enormous pressure and under terrible conditions that we think we might not be able to do even under ideal circumstances. What this says about human beings is that we are to be marveled at and not despaired over, as we so often do. We look down on our species and God knows we look down on ourselves countless times a day.

The old ‘pop’ psychology of examining the self is not just a cutesy way of filling up self-help books with advice. Self-help books are generally, a dark alley to visit. They are great at momentary inspiration but generally don’t last beyond the initial reading. That’s why people keep poring over them again and again. And here is one of the problems with self-help books; they tell us what we already know to be true and what should be done. The advice is common-sensical. But following advice is much more difficult than just seeking it out and so we repeat the patterns of dumb behavior. And as long as we are seeking advice from a friend or a book, we get the feeling we are doing something. It calls to mind the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius who said, “No longer talk about what a good man should be. Be one.” Or in the words of my father, “shit or get off the pot.” I’ve always thought a good title to reveal this problem with self-help books would be Breaking the Self-Help Dependency Cycle: Volume 8.

Returning to my narrative highlighting the amazing things people can do and not even realise they can do it. I have a life and death example from World War II. I knew an old woman whose life had been a series of tragedies. Sure, she had had some joy. She was born in the First World, had children she loved and grandchildren, had friends and all manner of hobbies from knitting to crocheting and everything in between. Mind you knitting and crocheting are close so there might not seem a great deal in between, but there is, and she pursued them, getting a joy out of the little things in life. This despite the fact that she was raised in Nazi occupied Holland, had a brother who died in a Nazi work camp, one of her children was killed in a traffic accident while just a boy, her husband had died of cancer, she had defeated cancer, well, the list goes on. But despite the list of reasons to give up and surrender to despair she found joy where she could, displaying a strength of character that people who have suffered much less and whined much more would do well to learn from.

Here is her story of doing what you think you can’t when circumstances demand you step up and find a solution instead of an excuse. This lady, Gail, was living on a farm near some woods during the Nazi occupation of her country. One of her two brothers had died in that German work camp so the other one who was at the same camp, decided that he was not going to stay. He escaped from Germany and somehow made his way home to the farm. His family hid him, but he had to spend a lot of time living in the woods to avoid the SS (Shutzstaffel) who knew he was there but couldn’t catch him. One day he was at the farm splitting wood when word came that the SS were coming for him. He naturally ran to the woods. Here was the trouble. The Nazis arrived and demanded to know where he was. Gail was the only one home and denied that he had been there for over a year. The crafty head of the unit spied the partially split pile of wood and asked who had been doing this job. Gail calmly said she had, and as the Nazis had taken away the men, she had no choice, now did she? The head of the unit nodded calmly and in an equally calm manner took out his revolver.

“You are doing a very good job. You’re pretty skilled for a little farm girl, aren’t you?”

He looked at her smilingly and gestured to the pile of logs.

“Show me how it’s done. If you can prove it wasn’t your brother who did this, well, that will be fine. If you cannot, you die here and now at the hands of an officer that you’ve lied to.”

He stepped back, keeping the gun pointed at Gail. She told me she had never picked up an axe in her life, but she knew that if there was ever a time to do it and to learn how, this was it. She said that she was trembling inside but knew that that fear had to be kept hidden. She also knew that if she failed and was killed it would redouble the SS man’s commitment to track down her brother. Even when her life was hanging by the swing of an axe, she was concerned with the fate of someone else. And this also speaks to me about the true nature of humanity. Despite the fact that whatever selfish tendencies we have can be played upon to act in more selfish ways by people who make a profit out of selfishness, we are fundamentally a caring species with streaks of unselfishness that are not merely streaks but represent our true colours.

Gail stepped up to the pile, picked up the ax and said a silent prayer of desperation and hope while she put on a brave face,

“Dear God, please, just let me swing this axe true, just this once.”

She had seen others do it and tried to replicate their movements, placing a log on the stand, shifting her hands down the shaft and giving a mighty swing. The log split in two with the softest sound. She hid her own amazement and looked at the man holding his gun and her life in his hands with a bored “See?” sort of expression. The Nazi uncocked his gun and placed it back in the holster.

“Couldn’t have done better myself. Carry on,” and he and his men walked away to continue the search for the brother that I’m happy to say was never successful. That’s the brother whom I knew as a delightful old man who had given me those sharks teeth all those years ago. He, like his sister, was so full of life and happiness despite all they had gone through. Or perhaps not despite but because of all they had gone through. From the wonder of a hundred-year-old shark’s tooth to the smile of their babies in their arms, they loved all that life had to offer because they knew how precious and, surprisingly, readily available joy is in this world.

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Erwin Coombs is a retired teacher of philosophy, history and literature who has rejected all forms of retirement. He is an avid writer, reader, and observer of life. When not observing and reading and living, he is writing. Erwin has lived in Egypt, Jamaica, England and travelled a great deal but, in his mind, not enough. His writing is a celebration of people and opportunity, both of which life gives in abundance. These narratives are from his, as yet unpublished book, Dusty the Cat: Her Part in My Downfall.

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