As we came in the second time…we put the first firecracker straight into the campfire…And it blew up and it blew burning embers into Mutondo’s nice new tent. And it went up in a sheet of flame. And there were a few more exchanges of gunfire, him shooting at me with an AK and us shooting back with firecrackers…
An engrossing story from the New Yorker:
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/04/05/100405fa_fact_goldberg
3 comments:
A good and very twisty read about a morally complex subject. The mid-story exchange:
“Yes, Madam. I myself always wanted to talk to someone who has flown up in the sky with a plane.”
“Well, you can talk to me,” I say, as I pour salt into a jar.
“I myself always wanted to know, Madam, if you fly at night, do you go close to the stars?”
I explain that on earth we are so far from the stars that being up a few thousand feet does not make any difference in how close they look. But I don’t know if he understands, so I end by saying, “When you fly at night, you feel closer to the stars.”
made me recall the passage from Isak Dinesen's Out of Africa:
Once, when Denys and I had been up, and were landing on the plain of the farm, a very old Kikuyu came up and talked to us:
"You were up very high to-day," he said, "we could not see you, only hear the aeroplane like a bee."
I agreed that we had been up high.
"Did you see God," he asked.
"No, Ndwetti," I said, "we did not see God."
"Aha, then you were not up high enough," he said, "but now tell me: do you think that you will be able to get up high enough to see him?"
"I do not know, Ndwetti," I said.
"And you, Behdar," he said, turning to Denys, "what do you think? Will you get up high enough in your aeroplane to see God?"
"Really, I do not know," said Denys.
"Then," said Ndwetti, "I do not know at all why you two go on flying."
The kicker in the New Yorker anecdote above is that the native had experience flying in a plane IIRC and was just humoring the white (wo)man.
My take was that Owen's anecdote was a (one of many?) fabrication.
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