Cassandra Voices

Category: Culture

  • Musician of the Month: Judith Retzlik

    One comment I hear most often is: “you are doing so many different things!” Followed by the inevitable question: “aren’t you doing too many different things?” What I detect behind this question is the idea that everyone should concentrate on a single discipline, and bring it to a certain standard of success within a capitalist system.

    I used to identify as a violin-maker then transformed into a violinist; after that I settled on being a musician, and right now I see myself more as an artist with a scent of activism in the air. But my other shapes are still alive and well. I was never able to do just one thing, and I don’t want to be placed in a single category.

    I chose to play the violin at the age of eight. One of the main reasons was my desire to be a princess, and thinking the violin would make a suitable instrument. The first time I dared go to a lesson without my mom I was allowed to choose a film I wanted to watch as a reward. I chose a Western, which seems a little unsuitable for a princess, but I liked the idea of being both a princess and a cowboy.

    My background is in Classical music, but I soon realized there wasn’t only one type of music I wanted to concentrate on. My musical horizons broadened a lot through my first big love. She showed me artists that opened doors to new worlds. I spent hours in the CD section of the library in my hometown of Celle in Germany to find music that she might like too.

    I became a big fan of Tori Amos and Fiona Apple and tried to sing and play their songs on the piano, when no one was home. I currently play with my first love in an underground duo, covering an unknown band that broke up around fifteen years ago. She plays an out-of-tune e-guitar and I play the three different beats I know on the drums, and we both drink beer.

    Choosing to become a violin maker wasn’t only motivated by passion for this kind of work, but also because I was frightened of entering the professional music world as a Classical musician. After applying to study musical education I never showed up for the entrance exam. I felt that the pressure of the academic system would destroy my love of music, which for me is all about spontaneity, lightness and variety.

    By that time I had already played in various Classical youth orchestras, as well as on the street with a group of friends. So violin-making was a way do dive deeper into the music world from a different perspective, while maintaining a diversity to what I played.

    Image: Justina Jaruševičiūtė

    Lisbon

    After finishing my three year course in France to become a luthier, I moved to Lisbon, and worked in a violin maker’s shop for five years, where my first band came along.

    I have always had an appetite for learning many different things. By that time I had begun learning Japanese, Swedish, and folk dancing, and experienced French culture. I had also taken piano lessons, singing lessons, double-bass and cello lessons. The list goes on.

    I reached the highest point of trying out things in Lisbon. That beautiful city inspired all of my senses. I played in an orchestra, in two bands, for a theatre group, ‘The Lisbon Players;’ and people kept asking, “why I was taking ballet classes instead of concentrating just on the violin?”

    In my view neat lines of separation should not be drawn between: musician or craftswoman; feeling ‘German’ or ‘Portuguese;’ being a shy girl or a party animal; a woman or a man. All these categories limit identities and are often unhelpful. We need to open a space for coexistence.

    Musical Magic

    This moment of convergence is when the magical music happens. When, on a stormy night in Sligo, I played with my band, The Loafing Heroes, the winds merged with the singing, and the alcoholic ecstasy; I found myself sinking into the sound of a wineglass, feeling the glass on my fingers that vibrated along with the waves in the air, connecting present and past feelings, all of us surrendering, and the universe surrendering.

    I do not enter a different world or shape shift, but I bring something with me and act like a linking element between those worlds. And I unite the parts of worlds in myself.

    To give an example: the dancing classes I took with wonderful Rita Lucas Coelho gave me new elements for composing music. She taught me the importance of repetition and stillness in dance, and these are also important elements in music. And life in general too.

    Currently I live in Berlin. It’s the perfect place for people who love walking through different worlds. I have discovered Balkan music and been delighted to experience styles ranging from oriental funeral doom to opera.

    Some Current Projects

    With my folk trio Gerda Vejle we do exactly this type of merging. We cover songs from various countries and styles. What brings it all together is the three of us, our stories. I play the guitar in this trio, even though I am really just a beginner. Music doesn’t live from perfect technique. It helps if you develop it, but music happens as a connection between people and energies. Or a deeper connection with yourself, your story, other stories, and your body.

    I play in  another trio called Schnaps im Silbersee. It is much more focused on lyrics and merging comedy with tragedy. It was something completely new for me to be more direct in my performances and make people laugh.

    Another project I want to present is called Simons Sofa. It is a studio space that opens a time-hole to a fourth dimension, inviting your creativity to flow on a wave of coziness and red wine. Those projects all leave their traces in my music and nourish each other.

    Activism

    Over the last few years I have felt a need to became more of an activist. As a “female” musician it is impossible to ignore the huge inequalities that still exist. There are small things, like that I get a lot more comments about my performance after concerts than male colleagues. Like constant little raindrops, they leave an impact.

    It is mostly men that interrogate my performance about where I was standing on stage; why I wasn’t singing more; why I wasn’t singing louder; why I was moving so much or so little…

    Also, sound technicians tend to treat me as if I don’t know how my own mic works. And I hear  people say: “You will have a good show, as you have a good-looking violinist.” How can you feel valued as a musician after a comment like that?

    Questions like that distract me, and make me question myself and my art. Insecurity stops the flow of creativity, and possibility to dive into a musical moment. So I need extra energy to let those comments pass over me, and remain focused on my art. If I want advice I will ask for it, thanks.

    It’s not at a new topic, so I don’t want to describe in greater detail what a lot of female musicians face. It’s structural discrimination that we all experience.

    Gender Diversity

    There are many reasons why there are more men in music than women. I am playing with the singer Rosa Hoelger who adresses some of these topics in her music, which I appreciate a lot.

    And I am part of a FLINT* (Female, Lesbian, Inter-sexual, non-binary, trans, queer) collective that gives birth to ideas to battle sexism. It is called Visibility-Breakfast, and has almost six hundred members. It was founded by Johanna Amelie and Julia Zoephel in 2017 and aims to enable personal, professional and artistic exchange within the Berlin FLINT* artistic community.

    The objective is to increase the visibility of FLINT* artists in the creative industry and stand up for gender justice, enabling activism and creating the space and impulses for it.

    Uncertain Times

    In these uncertain times, I am curious to find out what the future has in store. I am sure new projects and people will find their way to me and I will find them, as long I keep my senses open and welcoming! As Tori Amos put it, I might even “become a snow witch or maybe a sandwich and melt away and that’s ok I think.”

    Featured Image: Juliette Cellier

    Bands and Projects

    Gerda Vejle
    http://www.gerdavejle.de/

    Schnaps im Silbersee
    http://www.schnapsimsilbersee.de/

    Simons Sofa
    https://www.facebook.com/simonssofa

    Rosa Hoelger
    https://rosahoelger.de/

    The Loafing Heroes
    https://www.theloafingheroes.com/

    Linda und die lauten Bräute
    http://lindaunddielautenbraeute.de/

    Trailer of Performance: ”Chronically Fantastic and the Lady in Red OR Let your Monster be your Friend.“

    Hai La Hora
    https://www.facebook.com/hailahoraorchestra

    Raiments
    https://raiments.bandcamp.com/

    Justina Jaruševičiūtė

    If you are interested in writing a Musician of the Month column drop us a line on admin@cassandravoices.com

  • Featured Artist: Imelda O’Reilly

    Tumbling Towards Home is a short documentary, a coming of age story about Malcolm Adams, an Irish immigrant who moved to New York in 1989 to study acting under Alan Langdon. He works through the grief of losing his mother and friend Philip Seymour Hoffman. This leads to a decision of where to place his hat down and call home.

    The film delineates themes of identity, homeland, narratives across cultures, the arts, addiction and how to overcome grief. The film also explores the family unit, family on a psychological level, parenthood, domestic violence and references colonization and PTSD. Tumbling Towards Home explores the liminality of cultural boundaries, shifting between cultures and perspectives on the Irish diaspora, both leaving and returning to the homeland.

    I decided to collaborate with an animator for the first time to complete Malcolm’s backstory as it would have been difficult to recreate footage from the 1980’s when he previously lived in New York.

    I also had access to a home movie shot on super 8mm by Malcolm’s dad from Ireland in the 1970’s. I then had the aesthetic challenge to combine all of these different elements in the film and make seamless the transitions between each genre. The film provides a more hands on engagement with the research while the written work provided context.

    The film is being presented at Fordham University as part of an Irish Women Writers Symposium 2020.

    The documentary can and of itself be a form of a hybrid film. My previous film Bricks, Beds and Sheep’s Heads, that I shot in Morocco was a narrative film, but audience members experienced it as a true story. There is a sense in the documentary that you are presenting a perceived version of the truth of a situation. In fact, the documentary can cross over into narrative as you dramatize the story for a viewing audience. This allows the filmmaker to blur the boundaries between truth and fiction.

    Through the process of making this film the concept emerged of a cultural misfit and how this is accentuated when a person is required to shift between cultures. In this film I explore the concept of returning to the homeland and possessing an otherness or difference that gives you new insight and perspective on the culture you left behind. This creates a gap of expectation from the inhabitants who never immigrated. How does this aspect shift the perspective of national identity within a given country?

    While this film views a story of returning to the homeland it evokes the complex emotions that are stirred when ghosts from the past haunt us and how memory plays a vital role in this comprehension. While working on the film I coined the term “Memory Pockets” and I found myself combining my own memories with that of the visuals I was choosing. For example, I filmed the sign “Suncroft” this is the village where my own mother lived. These “aha” moments became self-reflexive for me. In fact, that is what the film explored is the ability to exercise self-reflection on ghosts of one’s past. So, I found myself trespassing on my main protagonists’ story as he looked back on his life, I too as an immigrant felt an overlap in the emotional content of the film. It helped to deepen the process and exchange and ultimately tell a more compelling story.

    In participating in telling Malcolm’s story, the film coaxed me to explore the liminality of the spaces in between staying away and returning to the homeland. This “small death” of exile impacts so many individuals and the mystery and wonder that unfolds when you leave and return. Inevitably every choice you make as an individual you gain something, and you lose something, but what creates a bond whether coherent or mysterious can be unspoken and unsaid and in fact transcend culture.

    I gained an understanding of the depth of defining a homeland, I understood that identity is complex and does not only have one dimension, and the ability to exercise self-reflection is a treasure when it comes to a person’s past.

    Trauma and addictions are passed down from one generation to another and it’s complicated for a family to transcend these dysfunctions. In addition, colonisation impacts a culture far beyond the end of the direct period. It can take centuries for a country to recover from being colonized.

    It is complicated how these elements play out in a nation’s history. When Malcom speaks of his grandfather fighting in two World Wars, and how he suffered from PTSD the agony of his destiny is amplified. Through reflection on the themes in the film and engaging with the process of crossing cultural boundaries, I had the opportunity to expand my thinking, experiment with different film aesthetics and hopefully told a compelling story that audiences can relate to on an emotional level. There is a relentless tension between leaving the homeland and returning, and I hope to shed light on the many complex issues surrounding these themes.

    Title: Tumbling Towards Home

    Imelda O’Reilly – Co-Writer/Director

    Year of Completion – January 2020

    Length: 14mins

  • The Hero’s Journey

    Whitefriar Street Carmelite Church, Dublin.

    Twelve years ago I was asked to sing a selection of traditional Irish love songs in Whitefriar Street Carmelite Church in Dublin, for the launch of an anthology of Irish love poems. This collection had poems which were written over a period of 1,200 years, between 800 AD and the present era.

    Whitefriar Street of course contains relics of the even older tragic hero of many a love story, St. Valentine, who was executed for marrying young couples at a time of prohibited love. However, as I read through the love poems in the collection, the earliest ones struck me for their vivid rawness. The first poem, The Lament of Créide starts with the striking words,

    “The arrows that murder sleep
    At every hour of the cold night
    are love lamenting”

    In 8th century Gaelic these words have a sibilant, chilling cadence that invoke a dark and desperate trauma. Créide had just come on her lover Dínertach’s body on the battle field and grief menaced her mind.

    The emotions depicted create a surge in me. This was something worth expressing with music I though. It has all the essence of human feeling that great and tragic drama is made of.

    It sucked me into a renewed appreciation of early Irish mythology, and I started looking at other examples from the canon of early Irish literature, such as The Táin, for this exquisite portrayal of drama and character archetype. As a singer and a composer I found that these stories had an emotional and dramatic template that interested me.

    These were stories that lasted throughout the centuries; that contained great dramatic archetypes. They described patterns of being that seemed timeless and epic. They were crying out for melody and musical interpretation.

    In my journeys through these myths and historical perspectives I started to notice that character portrayal frequently represented archetypes within meta-narratives. Some of these archetypes could be found in similar thematic stories throughout the world. Cúchullain had his echo in Achilles, and Ferdia might be compared to the Trojan Hector.

    These archetypes manifest values of what the 17th century Italian political philosopher Giambattista Vico called The Age of Gods. Nietzche calls this the age of heroes

    I was using the modality of sean nós to interpret these stories through music, but it took me a long time to notice that perhaps I was doing so because folk music and folklore was a parable-ist way of interpreting these thematic issues and explanations of life, to the people who shared them. Traditional songs did indeed trade in the wisdom of fable and parable to enable an understanding of the world. It is a metaphorical world full of tropes and archetypes.

    I needed to look deep into the psychology of folklore and folk songs to understand why the anthology of sean nós exists. This was my reason for an enlightening return to the roots of my tradition; to try and explain how this song tradition navigates a psychological portrayal of human nature.

    Band Photography | Musicians | | Holst Photography Ireland

    The following extract is the introduction to An Bhuatais & The Meaning of Life, a book and CD collection of contemplative songs and essays. It is a hard-backed 112 page edition, based on the philosophical themes of the accompanying CD. The CD and book are complementary elements of a contemplative philosophical experience:

    A song, like a story, speaks from a time and a place. Time passes, and its voice diminishes. But sometimes a story speaks to the essence of human nature and its power lasts through time regardless of space; regardless of place.

    An Bhuatais [The Boot – the album’s title track] has a context related to a changing social dynamic between the late 18th and early 19th century in Ireland. The native Catholic population of Ireland in the 17th century were suppressed by a series of penal laws designed to disenfranchise them and leave them firmly outside the protection of public and legal institutions of state. These penal codes were defined along sectarian divides which delineated the native Irish from the coloniser.

    The native population had at least a religious institution which offered solace and sanctuary. The Catholic clergy who tended to this disenfranchised population were outlawed, and for a time had a bounty on their head. Sharing in the fate of their flock, they had spiritual and moral credibility.

    The penal code relaxed over the 18th Century and in 1795 Catholicism was officially permitted into the fold, most visibly with the establishment of the Catholic University of Maynooth.

    This is all interesting to our story because it makes the animosity of the author of An Bhuatais towards the local Priest all the more comprehensible. As opposed to the hunted priest of the recently repealed Penal period, the priest in this song clearly doesn’t suffer along with his parishioners. He doesn’t share the suffering of the songs author; he is not one of the people.  He is castigated for abandoning spirituality for profane wealth. Betrayal and hypocrisy; they are powerful themes, and they incite gut felt creativity.

    There is something basic and fundamental in the representation of the hero in the tragic mythological perspective. Friedrich Nietzsche, the harbinger of resurgent nihilism, recognised this in his analysis of the heroic archetype. This helped him form theories on the pre-eminence of the dominant will – the natural state of an amoral being – and the end of belief. While it is a helpful filter on the mythological perspective of death, it is a perspective which creates a lot more problems than it solves.

    Illusions of “the end of history” and the implication that we have no more to learn from the past are, it seems, endemic with humanity. It’s an arrogance which seems to consistently blind our species. The American playwright, Arthur Miller, enacts this folly in the character of Judge Thomas Danforth in The Crucible, where he says: “This is a sharp time, now, a precise time – we live no longer in the dusky afternoon when evil mixed itself with good and befuddled the world.”

    Danforth’s error, and burning certainty, illuminate something that has been observed by historians of civilisation throughout the ages. Ibn Khaldun and others have told us that civilisations and empires flourish and wither in cycles. Giambattista Vico, argued that the cycle of civilisations went through three stages which he called: the Age of Gods, the Age of Heroes, and the Age of Men.  Although he is ruled by superstition, Danforth’s speech is paradoxically of the “Age of Men”. His certainty that the institution of his court is the nexus of reason is an arrogance of every age. The “precise time” he talks of is his certainty in the error of past ages and the enlightenment of his own.

    Vico’s theory tells us that the age of reason is an epoch, not a culmination. That man-kind keeps cycling through the spiral of civilisational rise and fall, and that we keep refining our myths and reinventing our stories.

    Stories and songs can carry more than eternal narratives. I recall a drive on a narrow rural road, playing a recording of An Captain Ó Máille sung by Stiofán Ó Cualáin, and feeling an overwhelming sense of belonging; of returning home. O Cualáin’s unaccompanied phrasing, which emanates a familiarity with landscape, living, and language, has a close familial sense.

    His performance – though I think performance is the wrong word for something that sounded so spontaneous and lived in – is unique, and I was surprised by how much I felt I knew intimately the essence of what this voice carried. This singing has its own inscape. It’s one that is as much shaped by cultural phenotype as by the rugged landscape of Connemara.  I felt my soul could make its home there.

    An Bhuatais & The Meaning of Life is available through:

    Website:
    www.lorcanmacmathuna.com

    Bandcamp:
    https://lorcanmacmathuna.bandcamp.com/album/an-bhuatais-the-meaning-of-life

    Spotify:
    https://open.spotify.com/album/4ughUTW4jIawqVLiY8D5am?si=p6hJeIqsS0yr_3HgPBv2Kw

    Featured Image (of Connemara) by Daniele Idini.

  • Kafka’s Café

    Levi ‘Lev’ Driscoll, wrote the odd sentence or two when creativity revealed itself to him. This month, albeit at a snail’s pace, he’d immersed himself in Frank Herbert’s classic, Dune. How he relished reading the exploits of Paul Atreides and his mother Jessica, deep into the vast inhospitable desert on Planet Arrkais. Lev marvelled at how the novel’s plot had been devised to move the narrative forward – like the colossal sandworms burrowing at its centre, the sci-fi story tunnelled and lunged into a distant future, simply by devouring and expelling sand.

    At age forty-five, Lev’s daily garb consisted of jeans and a plain t-shirt. When he was in the mood, he donned Cherry Red Doc Martins, or might dye his lank auburn locks an astonishing Hulk Green. In younger days, he’d sported the facial accoutrement of two studs and a nose ring. A soul-patch still featured below his lower-lip. He listened to Wayne Shorter, Van Morrison, and The Blue Room Jazz Sessions. Some Punk. A recent listen was that band called Idles. Lev watched what he ate, adding pomegranate seeds and blueberries to his a.m. porridge. A breakfast which steeled him for the day.

    This morning’s thought had already been jotted down on a writing-pad, where he sat in the breakfast nook of his small Rathfarnham apartment, Good literary fiction is a desert citadel visited only a few times in one’s life. Breeching those stone walls brings with it a knowledge and invigorating power all of its own.

    Turning on the radio he heard writer Colm Tóbín, talking about Irish writers’ fathers and their lives, whereupon Lev thought, Jazyhus, yer man Colm Tóbín’s voice sounds like it went off to Grasse in France for an apprenticeship in perfumery. Like it rolled in a field of lavender and chamomile!

    Lev left his flat, caught the No.16 bus into town and went dandering about in Dublin city centre. He mooched for a few deals in Dunnes before deciding to walk the 8km home. It was late autumn and the sun was bright but the air very cold. Wind-raked dead leaves heaped at the sides of pavements with their muted browns, and October yellows.

    Quiet were the white swans of Portobello, and their amorous dalliances on the Grand Canal went unnoticed by busy Dubliners in the early afternoon sunshine. He walked south of the city centre, into Rathmines and regarded a church’s chiselled proclamation, SUB. INVOC. MARIE. IMMACULATE. REFUCII. PECCATORUM (of Mary Immaculate, Refuge of Sinners, or possibly “Shinners,” as the IRA once stored weapons and ammunition in its vaults during the War of Independence). A Neoclassical colonnade and four columns stood proud as the façade, sprouting fleur-de-lis, under a copper-covered dome. The original burnt down in a fire of 1920 where a new one sits in its place, peeping over the skyline, in a shade of aquamarine flaring with copper hues and an impressive, oxidised jade patina. Rumoured to be destined for Saint Petersburg’s Russian orthodoxy, the impressive architecture conjured places such as Rome, or indeed, Russia, thought Lev. Yet, it seemed like an opal set in granite.

    To get off the street, Lev didn’t even look up at the sign above its door before entering one Rathmines establishment. Without registering its high-windows, tables and chairs, or mute patrons within, what he wanted was a hot drink and to sit down. Maybe a freshly baked Danish, if there was one? And for some reason, at that moment, he mused about Vermeer’s chequered black & white tiled floor. Would it, he wondered, have been mopped, regularly? Also, he pictured Joseph Decker’s painting, Green Plums. Then Lev summoned from memory, some NASA photos he’d seen, of Jupiter’s meteoroid scarred moon, Europa.

    Inside the café, a Gaggia coffee machine operated at full steam. Out of it gurgled runnels of a dark, bubbling, black gold. At its side, feldspar porcelain espresso cups piggy-backed on top of each other along with small white matching saucers stacked and ready for dispensing. An alluring aroma of roasting coffee beans permeated the café where chatter was subdued. The high-fi-system played Handel’s Water Music, seemingly on a loop. Not a flat-screen television in sight, and a sign stated that it was forbidden to use smartphones. Plastic mother-in-law’s tongue sat sterile in plastic pots. Fake ferns and philodendrons were fixed with grey pebbles inside sable-coloured wooden borders. A glass cloche covered some raisin-studded scones nestled beside the cash-register up front.

    When his turn came to be served, Lev stepped forward and almost absentmindedly asked, “Can I have a cappuccino, please?”

    “Did you submit Form 1A?” enquired the lady behind the counter. A pair of lacquered chopsticks held her brown locks in place and she sported tortoise shell-coloured glasses. White shirt. Black apron, trousers, and shoes. Her elaborately embossed name tag said simply, “Server.”

    “No, I’m afraid I did not,” Lev was lost.

    Pink slips of paper were piled high in an in-tray before him, but he hadn’t noticed.

    “You still have to submit Form 1A.” She said glaring through her glasses at Lev.

    “I just want a coffee,” replied the writer, now sheepish. She sighed.

    Another customer stepped forward to order and Lev stood back a little, letting the other customer pay for and receive her green tea.

    “There’s your receipt, and here’s my receipt, for your receipt.” clarified the lady in the glasses, securing her own slips in the till. Thinking about writing, Lev conjectured, You have to keep a full-stop dancing on its tippy-toes. He then moved forward again. At this, the lady clucked her tongue.

    “I’m still waiting,” Lev reminded her. She looked at him again with an imbibing eye, imagining he was an outlier and hence, a troublemaker.

    “Which street do you live on?”

    “What does it matter which street I live on?” Lev began to show signs of incredulity.

    “Because, Sir,” she snapped, “We only serve some streets on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, and others on Mondays, Fridays and Saturdays. It’s all here in the rules,” She said, tapping a laminate posted at the till. And on it was a map depicting which streets were allowed to order coffee on what days. Lev found it all rather formal. Something about it didn’t sit well with his socialist perspective.

    “This is wile bad craic, Hey!” He uttered, entirely exasperated.

    “Now, you’ll have to fill out Form 1A. With adjuncts A1 and B1, Sir.”

    What fresh hell is this? Lev pondered.

    “Why?” was all he asked.

    “Because, Sir, you fail to follow protocol.”

    A speaker above the coffee-machine barked out, ‘More A32 Forms, immediately!’

    On the counter was a box of black ink Biro ballpoint pens, and a photocopier behind the counter ran pink slips of paper which were bakery warm to the touch.

    While all around him customers filled in their forms in quiet acceptance, he regarded the server in question and her carapace of harshness with a mixture of bemusement, anger and wonder. Was this Stalinist Russia or Thatcher’s Britain, where civil servants replaced all working roles with their applications and forms inhabiting long corridors to the sound of opening and closing doors behind which were row upon row of file cabinets filled with documents ranging from ordering a clothes peg, Form 2344ABX, to marriage vows, Forms 32 C & D. Entering here meant submission to an authoritative power and being controlled by it. Out in grey society, the faceless masses walked around with their heads drooped, proles going about their conforming lives. No individuality permitted. Conform through endless bureaucracy or go insane in the process. Few go insane. Most do conform. But, under no circumstances would Lev. He aimed for coconut shampoo, raspberries and cream, lemon-curd sandwiches, a three-day weekend with Habanero sauce. Peaking cream puffs and apple-turnovers. Falling popcorn, the fifth of November, and bonfire night. Dance music. Pubs. Freedom of choice. Not this, whatever this was.

    “May I have a scone with my cappuccino?’ asked Lev.

    “Oh, you want a fruit scone?’ She said with all the vigour of a congregating sloth at a sleepover in Connecticut. Lev sensed that his request was bothersome, but he would hold out to see how far this would go.

    “Please move over to the other line. This line is for people with slips. The other line is either for those who have not made their minds up yet, or Sabos like yourself. That’s short for Saboteurs around here,” she explained. Lev saw no other line, but he spied a stand which read “Sabos.”

    “Does this work the same way for a bacon sandwich?” he asked, arching an eyebrow.

    “To have a bacon sandwich, you’ll have to make an appointment.”

    “To have a freaking BLT?”

    “An appointment with the chef.” She stipulated.

    “Lemme get this right. To order a simple bacon sandwich, I have to make an appointment with the establishment’s cook?”

    “His title is Chef Martine, Sir,” said the server, adding, “And yes, that’s the rule. There are no exceptions to the rules. Not here. Would you like to make an appointment?”

    Stunned, Lev nodded his assent, as the server spoke into an intercom.

    “A Sabo requests an appointment, Chef Martine.”

    Lev stood for forty minutes before being ushered into a small yet neat stainless-steel kitchen where, with a square blade, the chef was decapitating a head of lettuce from its white neck. Luscious and wet, the green leaves fell open in that kind of surreal slow-motion Lev had only seen in advertisements on TV. This was the inner sanctum of scones and other closely held secrets. Chef Martine’s accent was fabulously French. “No. Get rid of dis, and dis, and dis. Out!” Pausing his pointing at which produce needed to be replaced or replenished, in less than a split second, he looked Lev up and down, before waving him away.

    “I have no time to…to…to deal with the likes of you, Monsieur!”

    Backing out to the café, again Lev attempted to ask for a drink and without the appropriate paperwork. He was denied. Lev wondered about the hivemind rolling over to authority. The weak-livered acceptance. Rising up, he steadied himself upon a table top and announced, “You! All of you!” Around twelve café patrons looked up from their flat-whites, green-teas and Americanos. “You have freedom of choice to come in and order a drink without having to fill in mundane forms!” No one dared to agree with his rebellious talk. “To spend your lives in cubicles fulfilling meaningless work just because it’s been set out for you, is a form of bondage and slavery! You in your Birkenstocks, reading gossip magazines full of middle-class morality and intolerance by the cart-load!”

    “SIR! Can you calm down?” called out the server, white face contorted in confusion, indignation and trembling with anger.

    “I WILL NOT CALM DOWN, you… COG! What kind of establishment is this place, anyway? What’s it called?”

    “Sir, you are in Kafka’s Café.”

    Something clicked and so he saw it all now. The endless bureaucratic processes. The strict adherence to these formalities. The authoritarian staff. The server’s clerkish comportment. He felt anger. Despair. Hopelessness. This was not just a comment on the establishment in question, but to a wider enslavement of human beings. Freedom of expression was viewed as distrustful and downright careless. Dangerous even. People like Lev were to be ridiculed and ignored. They were insane outliers who were not at all loyal to the state.

    “Okay, I’ve read The Trial. The Castle and this…This is circumvented madness towards a form of totalitarian rule. I just wanted a fucking coffee!” said Lev out loud.

    With a nod, the server sent a staff member out back to alert the relevant authorities. Stepping down from his table top pulpit, Lev sat quite still playing The Clash’s Rock the Casbah on his smartphone. Café personnel looked on and whispered at the bizarre behaviour of this madman. Lev did not hear a van screech up to the pavement outside. Nor did he notice as burly men in dark uniforms stormed in, until they grabbed hold of him. His phone was sent crashing to the floor, where its plastic housing cracked and scattered.

    Screaming “Poseidon! Poseidon!”* Lev was brought out into the street by a balaclava-clad, snatch-squad and dragged into the back of a waiting van. His demonstrations were soon silenced by its doors when they were slammed shut behind him, before the vehicle roared off and disappeared.

    The citizens in the café merely blinked as they began filling in their 1A forms again. The age of banality was long and continued unabated as, outside, a stroke of raindrops dashed the Dublin pavement, people filed along the streets where, once more, normality pervaded. The white floating petals of the swans’ feathers, the hue of hedge bindweed (Calystegia Sepium) drifted down the canal water’s surface and on into the diminishing autumn evening.

    *Poseidon is a piece of prose by Franz Kakfa.

    Featured Image: Egon Schiele, Self-Portrait with Physalis, 1912.

  • The Dogs and Deer with Fionn mac Cumhaill

    We’ve lost Fionn and his Fianna, the stories that were told for hundreds, thousands of generations by firesides in Ireland and Scotland. Our language gone from us, and with it these science-fiction-like stories have drained away.

    The stories of the poets and hunters and warriors may, it seems to me, have been part of a Neolithic shamanistic religion.

    This was Ireland’s Dreamtime, our golden age, the perfection of time and place that we long for, we remember, we memorialise, we identify with, we idolize.

    All of the important names of these idols of the Fiannaíocht relate to deer. Fia is a deer in Irish, a fianna is a deer herd; Fionn, named for his white-blond hair, was originally Deimne, a fawn; the name of his magically-acquired wife, Sadhbh, means a doe, and Oisín and Oscar, his son and grandson, are both words for young male deer.

    Both Sadbh and Oisín came to Fionn in deer form – they were hunted down by the Fianna’s hounds, but defended from the hunting-pack by the enchanted superdogs Bran and Sceolan.

    Tír na nÓg

    The Fianna and their wit and prowess are part of the language – of our lost language in Ireland. To someone arriving late and bewildered we used to say they were “Oisín i ndhiadh na Féinne” – Oisín long after the Fianna, searching hopelessly for them. It’s a saying that came from the story of Oisín, lured to the land of youth, Tír na nÓg, by a seductive blonde on a white horse; he comes home for a visit and finds himself crumbling into a man of three hundred years old as soon as his foot touches the soil of Ireland.

    Ossian playing his harp, by François Pascal Simon Gérard, 1801.

    For equality we said cothrom na Féinne, the equality of the Fianna, because equal shares and equal respect were their watchword. Even our picnics and barbecues were fulacht fia, the word coming from the ancient method of pit cookery. We said “Dar fia!” for “by Jove!” Our ancient board game was fiachall, played with pieces called fia. It’s not for nothing that our national anthem starts “Sinn na Fíanna Fáil”, identifying us as Destiny’s deer.

    All of the stories might be medieval fanfic; or they might have been written by monks schooled through childhood in the oral tradition, who took their chance to undercut the Christianity from which they were now making a nasty, brutish and short living. Or they might be ancient béaloideas given written form by those transgressive monks. Wherever they come from, their echo rings out from our hearts.

    Fionn mac Cumhaill

    Fionn, the leader of the Fianna, started his life, as did many heroes in stories everywhere in the world, hidden from those who had killed his family and were hunting for him. Brought up by poet aunts deep in the woods of Slieve Bloom, he sallied out and became the leader of the royal guard that included his father’s killers.

    In between battles and contests, hunts and hero-deeds the Fianna loved to sit around on mountain-tops composing poetry. In one of the beloved stories of these poem-contests, one of the lads asked what was everyone’s favourite sound. The pretty boy Diarmuid said it was the cries of women in love; Oisín said it was a cuckoo calling from a hedge; Oscar, the sound of a spear on a shield. Then they asked Fionn, and he said the best music in the world was “the music of what happens”.

    But back to the dogs. The Fianna’s dogs were central to their stories, and especially Bran and her brother Sceolan: “We went westward one time to hunt at Formaid of the Fianna [aka Ballyfermot], to see the first running of our hounds.”

    These are the words of Fionn Mac Cumhaill’s son Oisín, a few days earlier a buff young man in his prime, now suddenly three hundred years old and feeling it.

    Lady Gregory

    “It was Fionn was holding Bran, and it is with myself Sceolan was; Diarmuid of the Women had Fearan, and Oscar had lucky Adhnuall,” he says, in Lady Gregory’s translation of the debate between the the two ill-tempered old gentlemen, St Patrick and Oisin, in her book Gods and Fighting Men.[i]

    “Conan the Bald had Searc; Caoilte, son of Ronan, had Daol; Lugaidh’s Son and Goll were holding Fuaim and Fothran.

    “That was the first day we loosed out a share of our hounds to a hunting; and Och! Patrick, of all that were in it, there is not one left living but myself.”

    Oisín had landed back from his Tír na nÓg love nest and gone around Ireland looking for his family and friends. Everyone he met told him these were people from a myth, or had lived hundreds of years ago. He was at the south end of Glenasmole, in the Dublin Mountains, when he went to help some puny little fellows who were trying to shift a boulder out of the way of a road they were building. The girth of his horse broke and he got a shocking land, his burden of years coming on him in a moment. St Patrick took him in, in the hope of bringing him to the Christian way of thinking. But they had one big problem with each other: their attitude to dogs.

    “Fionn, the son of Uail, delighted in dogs,” wrote James Stephens in one of the best children’s books ever written, Irish Fairy Tales[ii], a reworking of the Fiannaíocht stories. “And he knew everything about them from the setting of the first little white tooth to the rocking of the last long yellow one. He knew the affections and antipathies which are proper in a dog; the degree of obedience to which dogs may be trained without losing their honourable qualities or becoming servile and suspicious; he knew the hopes that animate them, the apprehensions which tingle in their blood, and all that is to be demanded from, or forgiven in, a paw, an ear, a nose, an eye, or a tooth; and he understood these things because he loved dogs, for it is by love alone that we understand anything.”

    Fairy Child

    John Duncan ‘Riders of Sidhe’

    Fionn was the son of Uail Mac Baiscne. He was, in the way of mythic heroes, also a child of the Sidhe; his mother, Muirne, was the granddaughter of Nuadha Airgeadlámh, the Tuatha de Danann’s silver-handed king.

    Fionn was also – in one of those family problems we don’t talk about – a cousin of his dogs Bran and Sceolan. Fionn’s mother’s sister, Tuiren, made the mistake of falling for and marrying Iollan, a man of the Sidhe, but Iollan’s old partner, Uct Dealv, took grave exception to his marriage.

    She kidnapped Tuiren and turned her into a bitch, as you do, and handed her over to Fergus Fionnlaith, the man in Ireland who most disliked dogs. However, Tuiren’s charms were just as powerful in doggy as in human form, and Fergus was soon as besotted as anyone with a new puppy.

    Fionn tracked down his auntie and disenchanted her, but in the meantime she’d had two pups which remained in dog form, and were Old Irish superhero dogs – Bran and Sceolan.

    Bran, whose name meant ‘raven’ was the kind of dog we nowadays call a merle. “Speckled back over the loins; two ears scarlet, equal-red… Yellow feet that were on Bran, two black sides and belly white, greyish back of hunting colour,” as Douglas Hyde translated the bitch’s description in his collection Beside the Fireside, adding “Bran would overtake the wild geese, she was that swift.”[iii]

    Some 1,969 years later, Led Zeppelin underlined this good taste, singing, “You can tell all your friends around the world, ain’t no companion like a blue-eyed merle.”[iv]

    Heaven Awaits

    As Oisín debated with the newfangled patron saint of Ireland, he was enraged by Patrick’s insistence that his beloved dogs would not go to heaven, a place Patrick was bigging up.

    The leap of the buck would be better to me, or the sight of badgers between two valleys, than all your mouth is promising me, and all the delights I could get in Heaven,” he says snarkily. “Fionn never refused strong or poor, although cold Hell is now his dwelling place.

    Patrick tells him he’s a withered, witless old man, and what’s more, the Fianna are all in Hell.

    “O Patrick, tell me as a secret, since it is you have the best knowledge, will my dog or my hound be let in with me to the court of the King of Grace?” asks Oisín.

    “Old man in your foolishness that I cannot put any bounds to, your dog or your hound will not be let in with you to the court of the King of Power,” says Patrick.

    Yes, the pre-patrician old Irish were doggy people. In the long-gone words of Oisín:

    If I had acquaintance with God, and my hound to be at hand, I would make whoever gave food to myself give a share to my hound as well. It was a delight to Fionn, the cry of his hounds on the mountains.

    Lucille Redmond’s collection of stories, Love, is available on Amazon and on Apple Books

    [i] Gods and Fighting Men by IA Gregory, published by John Murray, London, 1905

    [ii] Irish Fairy Tales by James Stephens, published by Macmillan, New York, Toronto, London, 1920

    [iii] Beside the Fireside: a collection of Irish Gaelic folk stories, by Douglas Hyde (parallel texts in English and Irish), published by D Nutt, London, 1890

    [iv] Bron-y-Aur stomp, from Led Zeppelin III, released by Atlantic, 1970

    Feature Image: The Monarch of the Glen, 1851, by Sir Edwin Landseer

  • Chambí’s World: Martín Chambi (1891-1973)

    Before Ireland’s third pandemic lockdown began, in December 2020, I paid a visit to my local library, in the hope of stocking up on books and films to sustain me in the months ahead. And I’m glad I did: the long weeks of isolation would have been far heavier, more dispiriting and lonely, without the hoard of soul-food I gathered from the library’s gloriously ample and eclectic store.

    Among the titles which have so enriched my days since, was a retrospective collection of work by the indigenous Peruvian photographer, Martín Chambi, born (to my rather boyish delight, exactly a hundred years before myself) in 1891. I can say without exaggeration that it’s become one of my favourite books.

    Cataloguing and celebrating the work, migration, landscapes, and customs of  primarily Quechua-speaking peoples in the Peruvian Andes, where the Inca empire reigned until the late sixteenth century, Chambi’s images form a mesmerising record of the effects of social and political marginalisation; while at the same time seeming nearly to sing, in festive tribute, to such communities, his own.

    “He was the first great photographer not to regard us through the eyes of the colonist”, observed Sara Facio, founder of the Museum of Latin American Photography in Argentina (Hopkinson, 2). “I am representative of my race”, he said himself: “my people speak [through] my photographies.”

    I’ve never practiced or studied in the visual arts, and so my response to photographs tends to be intuitive and instantaneous, rather than analytical and honed. In so far as I’m able to classify my preferences, I seem to share François Truffaut’s belief, “that a successful film”, for example, has “simultaneously to express an idea of the world and an idea of cinema,” and moreover to sympathise with his demand “that a film express either the joy of making cinema or the agony of making cinema.” I expect the same from photography.

    I’m most attracted to those artists who deploy their techniques and draw on their chosen traditions skillfully, of course, but also with a view to making a statement on reality. And by reality, I mean any space of experience and interaction in which other people – their rhythms, labours, presence, and visual attention – are implied or acknowledged.

    Also with Truffaut, I like to glimpse, if I can, something of the artist’s own peculiar passion from the work they’ve produced: to trace beneath the surface of a photograph, or indeed a poem, some shadow of that human fixation, that otherwise private and unresolvable neediness and knottiness, which partly impelled its making. In other words, I go back to images and artworks that seem, however delicately, to dramatise a tension I also feel in my own life, between outwardness (love of the world) and introspection (the ability to self-examine). These, broadly, give some indication of the shaping concerns, and no doubt also the limitations, of my appreciation for photography: what I look for, and why.

    Such reflections also drive to the heart of what I found, and what I value so much, in Martín Chambi’s work specifically. By approaching his “people” in a spirit of creative sympathy and affection, camera in tow, he was also, I believe, asserting and defining his own life in the world: taking a side, but in a way that affirmed his deepest needs and sense of belonging; the instincts of his evolving self, as an inheritor of Amerindian culture in a rapidly, often violently modernising era. All of this, moreover, shines, easily and entrancingly, in the images he left behind.

    Importantly, to the extent that he was photographing indigenous, peasant, and labouring people as people, with the warmth of recognition and respect, Chambí was not only offering a series of social documents on his time, but elaborating a visual rebuke to those discourses and forces (of metropolitan disdain, colonial hegemony, economic plunder) that thrive on the invisibilisation of some classes and communities, and the elevation and sanctification of others. His photographs are a defiant counter-narrative to the schematism, relentlessness, and embedded calculation of such world-histories.

    Within (or alongside) this quality, however, is another. In fact, there’s a baseline atmosphere in Chambi’s work, difficult to describe, but which I find totally captivating. Its main element, I think, is intimacy: an intimacy, reached for and reciprocated, with his subjects. In real terms, after all, almost anyone can point a camera in a given direction, and click: anyone can take a photograph. But it’s surely a rare observer who can sight and salute, in every other portrait, the exact individual and their humanity. Trawling his work today, it’s as if Chambi has seen some inner light in each person, each scene, a light that even they had only been foggily aware of before, and handed it back to them, in praise and thanks – for it was theirs to give, theirs to keep.

    I’m thinking of the so-called “Giant of Paruro” (7 ft tall), pictured by Chambi in 1925: the gentleness in his face and hands, the intense, unobtrusive quiet of his stance, raggedly clad and yet majestic. Or a year later, the portrait of Miguel Quiespe, known as ‘El Inca’ after tramping barefoot across the mountainous region of his native Paucartambo, organizing for the cause of land rights and reform; later (I learn) he was found dead in Lima, assassinated. He sits before the camera, both statuesque and bristling, in native garb, seemingly immersed in thought, as he raises a (criminalised) coca leaf in one hand, his eyes turned downwards, hidden in shadow and light. Then, one of my favourites, a photograph in which Chambi himself appears, pacing a hand-woven, local rope bridge in Cuzco, 1929, a trail of bent-backed, quick-stepping pedlars passing on either side of him, as they haul their loads against a backdrop of wide, sun-white sky.

    And there are many more: carefully glanced and emotionally laden images of life and the living, in the far reaches of an epoch hostile to both, promising only poverty and physical erasure. In Chambi’s work, by contrast, every presumed margin seems to gleam, a vital centre and a known locale, human to the root. Linger long or attentively enough over these pictures, and you might just hear their chatter and talk, the lithe exchange of their moment, break out – photographer and friends, laughing shyly with one another.

    Speaking for myself, I look at these social portraits with a sensation that blends vivid familiarity and strangeness, awake to the dauntingly vast distances (of time, place, circumstance and experience) over which my nevertheless visceral certainty of identification must travel. Perhaps this is an effect of the artist’s own kinship: the impression, always, that the particular gaze – directed as it may be, curated as its chosen vistas undoubtedly are – is not so much motivated by acquisition and judgement, fixing people in their places, as filled by what is surely a kind of joy, the capacity for human affinity and recognition.

    As our twenty-first-century pandemic rages on, as vaccines are tested, staggered, and accumulated unevenly across the globe, I realise that we live in an era, as Eduardo Galeano once said, “of powerful centres and subjugated outposts”, ruled by regimes of in-/visibility and engineered inequality – whose dominance is never total (267). I believe that’s why these photographs speak so eloquently: with their art, vision, feeling, and friendship. We still live in Chambi’s world.

    References

    Eduardo Galeano, The Open Veins of Latin America (NYU Press; New York, 1973/1997).
    Amanda Hopkinson, Martín Chambi (Phaidon; London, 2001).
    François Truffaut, The Films in My Life (Da Capo Press; Boston, 1994)

  • Wonder Woman: The Baudelairean Ideal

    Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867) reshaped the trajectory of modern literature. In acknowledgement T.S. Eliot famously called him ‘the Father of Modernism.’

    Many monolingual English speakers might be unaware that, along with Shakespeare and Dante, Baudelaire has been instrumental to how we in the West perceive the world.

    As an example, I think back to the early nineteen-nineties when I was living in Paris and the Austrian hosiery company Wolford were launching an advertising campaign using the photography of the celebrated fashion photographer Helmut Newton. I remember being on Place Concorde, not far from the Louvre, when his iconic black and white photographs of the giantesses were illuminated in the night sky, transforming the very street into a living interior of the exterior; just as Walter Benjamin had remarked about the arcades in his remarkable study of the nineteenth century French poet. This was pure Baudelaire in the late twentieth century.

    Of course, the Baudelairean woman is a whole motif or trope in herself, and is certainly one of the principal reasons why readers, male and female, still turn to Baudelaire, as he is one of the few poets who can write about women and love in a truly remarkable way, and which still makes sense to us today.

    Take the transversion of the poem ‘Sisina’ which I have transversed as ‘Wonder Woman’ in place of the name Théroigne, which according to my Flammarion notes is a reference to Théroigne de Mericourt (1762– 1817), who was involved in the French Revolution in 1792.

    The poem makes reference to a particular incident which happened on a staircase. This same woman appears in the famous French historian Michelet’s Histoire de la Révolution Francais, and she is also found in the poet Lamartine’s Histoire des Girondins. Apparently, Baudelaire was inspired by a drawing by the artist Raffet that depicts the incident and which was published by Pommier & Pichois.

    As this historical connection is likely to be lost on contemporary readers, I have supplanted it with the reference to the movie Wonder Woman. You have to choose your battles.

    I was particularly impressed by the character in the film while watching it with my ten-year-old daughter, as I thought she made a very good role model for young girls. My choice, I believe, is in accord with the symbolism and underlining metaphor in the poem.

    Baudelaire’s reference is to another actress Elisa Neri, who played the role of Théroigne, from what I understand, in theatrical productions during Baudelaire’s day. The poet came into contact with her through his attachment to Mme Sabatier, who was to have such an impact on him.

    I am of course referencing the climax of the Marvel movie when Wonder Woman, played by Gal Gadot, confronts Ares the God of War – thus mirroring the original reference made by Baudelaire to Théroingne de Mericourt played by the actress Elisa Neri.

    I expect Baudelaire would be entirely at home in today’s world where women have taken such a prominent place. After all, are the Gal Godot’s of today not the very same women of Baudelaire’s time? Women who showed incredible strength in the face of adversity.

    Surely, it is in the role of the Amazonian that the Baudelairean Woman is most idealised, which the poem Sisina is an example of, though it certainly stands alone.

    Spleen and Ideal is full of references to Amazonian and powerful women of which Lady Macbeth is one of the crowning figures, but first here is the poem ‘Sisina’ by Baudelaire followed by my transversion into English, which I have given the title ‘Wonder Woman’.

    LIX.- SISINA

    Imaginez Diane en galant equipage,
    Parcourant les forêts ou battant les halliers,
    Cheveux et gorge au vent, s’enivrant de tapage,
    Superbe et defiant les meilleurs cavaliers!

    Avez-vous vu Théroinge, amante du carnage,
    Excitant à l’assaut un people sans souliers,
    La joue et l’oeil en feu, jouant son personnage,
    Et montant, sabre au pong, les royaux escaliers?

    Telle la Sisina! Mais la douce guerrière
    A l’àme charitable autant que meurtrière;
    Son courage, affolé de poudre et de tambours,

    Devant les suppliants sait metre bas les armes,
    Et son Coeur, ravage par la flame, a toujours,
    Pour qui s’en montre digne, un reservoir des larmes.

    Wonder Woman

    Imagine Diana and her gallant retinue
    Charging through the forests bursting through the thickets,
    Mane and throat to the wind, drunk on uproar,
    Superbly defiant the best riders!

    Have you seen Wonder Woman, lover of carnage,
    Happily defending the down-trodden,
    Cheek and eye aflame, enfevered in her role,
    Assaulting, sword and shield in hand, the staircase?

    Just like Gal Jadot! But the gentle warrior
    Is as much a charitable soul as she is a seasoned killer;
    Her courage, panicking in the explosions and drums,

    Is to know when to put aside weapons before suppliants,
    And her heart, ravaged by both fire and pain, is always,
    For those who have some dignity, also a reservoir of tears.

  • Fiction: Luigi’s Trip  

    My boss sent me looking for Luigi. One of his super-rich clients had been sucked in by a betting scam Luigi was running down at the dogs. Luigi took this dude for a lot of twine and you could maybe say that my boss was seeking… restitution. It was my job to stick close to Luigi, wait for him to slip up.

    First stop, his apartment. He wasn’t there, but Dolores was. Five foot five and stacked, packaged in a singlet and daisy dukes. Biting that lip.

    “Hey, Carter. You look good.”

    She came up close to touch my cheek, then spun around and yeah, ground that tush of hers into my crotch. The glance over her shoulder said Follow me, and I did.

    Dolores was juicier than a peach. Hungrier than a shark. When we were done, she lay on the bed like a rag doll. Zipping up my pants, I asked her, “Where is he?”

    “Luigi? Oh, Luigi’s long gone.”

    He’d been a busy boy … tying up loose ends, collecting debts. Generally making people nervous, like something big was going to happen. People were looking for him. But now, no trace.

    A few days before, I was having breakfast at the Valhalla when my phone went off. Hamzy’s retread factory had gone up in flames overnight … and was still burning. Did a drive-by and sure enough, Fifteen engines plus cops diverting traffic. Smoke poured out the back of a building packed with enough rubber to blaze for days.

    Hamzy liked the gee gees, but they didn’t like him back. When he’d burned through every legit line of credit to feed his habit, he had to turn to some pretty unsavoury people. He’d gazed into the abyss, and the abyss was gazing back. Desperate times.

    Hamzy and Luigi shared a love of fishing, and it’s not hard to imagine Hamzy pouring his heart out during a day spent chasing snapper off Long Reef. Luigi had his fingers in a lot of pies, but now some of those pies had teeth. The brain trust’s coinciding interests might’ve come up with the idea of a new start, in a new state, for Luigi.

    You could rely on Luigi to fly under the radar. He’d never been flashy, not even in the good times. He liked to do the rounds in a battered ten-year-old Commodore with multiple plates, driven by Dolores’ brother, Pete.

    Pete was big.  Not the sharpest tool in the box. A rangy guy with massive hands, he didn’t like me running around with Dolores. Not out of loyalty to Luigi, but because he just plain couldn’t stand the sight of me. One drunken night he let the cat out the bag when he says to me, “I wanna punch you in the face, Pretty Boy.”

    I filled the boss in about Hamzy and how I thought Luigi was in the picture, especially given his history of playing with matches. A while later, the boss passed on scuttlebutt he’d picked up in the city: suspected arson, accelerant used. Police investigating. A two and a half million-dollar property insurance policy. No financial loss cover … maybe Hamzy didn’t want peeps looking at the books.

    The boss pulled a few strings. His office was lousy with strings: like a cat’s cradle. He got me an in with Hamzy’s brokers…I was to be Hamzy’s quote unquote special adviser, sitting in on his meetings with the loss adjuster and lawyers. “Keep your mouth shut and listen,” he said. “Don’t fuck up.”

    So, I got some cards printed…Lloyd Carter, Business Continuity Consultant or some such bullshit…and dusted off my only suit. I’d been spending some time on the weights, and the sleeves were tight as sausage skins. No way I could have buttoned up the jacket. Still, the fake credentials worked.

    The law offices were located on a floor high above the harbour, and tiny sailboats way down below threaded around the ferries and gin palaces. In the boardroom, I sat with Hamzy across from the adjuster, a hatchet-faced Irish dude, and some other fuckers.

    Hamzy had dressed to impress, black shirt and purple tie under a grey leather bomber. Hair slicked back, trailing a cloud of Drakkar Noir so potent it stung my eyes.

    Hatchet Face was all business. “Mr Hamzy, I’d like to explain the process to you. If your claim is to be accepted, we need to determine the cause of the fire and rule out the possibility that you had any involvement. This will involve a physical investigation at the site, as well as a factual investigation. You and your staff will have to be interviewed, give statements and so on. At the end of that process, I will report to my principals and seek their instructions.  Do you understand?”

    Hamzy was smooth.  Cucumber cool. “I understand. You have your job to do. I just worry about my guys, their families. Those poor kids…” I swear, his eyes welled up like he was chopping onions. Fuck, he was good. Here’s how Hamzy told it:

    As usual, the factory closed at midday on Saturday. It was locked up tight, and the alarm activated. I was fishing all day. At 21:00 I got to the factory and parked my boat. The missus doesn’t like my boat parked on her driveway, so I keep it at the factory. That way on Monday morning, the guys can give it a good wash. So, I turned off the alarm, and put the boat inside, before locking up tight again and reactivating the alarm. Then I get a call at 06:00, about alarms going off like crazy, and authorities already alerted? I got back there at 07:15, and the place was already an inferno.

    That’s all he knew. Then they put him through the wringer. For six weeks. They got nowhere. Forensics came up with nothing…too many chemicals in the place, so they couldn’t root out the accelerant. The employees knew nothing and Hamzy stuck to his story. The cops lost interest. The money men knew in their guts he did it, but they couldn’t find a (fancy word) nexus.

    So back to the aerie over the sparkling sea, the boardroom was chock full of suits. I didn’t know who they were, but there was a guy down the end with a poker face, in a navy suit that cost more than my car. I thought, That’s the guy.

    Hatchet Face said something like “You know that we know. We know you did it, and we can drag this out. Make you take us to court. It could go on for years. But the clients are reasonable people, so in the interest of harmony and goodwill, they’re willing to settle the matter by a final payment in full. One million.

    “Thank you. Can I take a moment to discuss this with my adviser?” That was supposed to be me, but Hamzy didn’t need my advice. He just stood at the picture window in reception, staring all the way out across the sparkly blue to the Heads. Maybe he was thinking of snapper. We went back in.

    “I want to thank you, Gentlemen, for your candour. I agree that it would be best to finalise this troublesome matter, so we can all get on with our lives. I would hate for us to go through the expense and inconvenience of legal action. The only winners are the lawyers, right?” A nervous chuckle went through the room. Not me. I don’t chuckle. Anyway, I was likely to split a sleeve if I did. Suit was quiet too, looking at his manicured nails.

    “One and a half million,” said Hamzy. Hatchet looked at Suit. A signal. “We’ll send a release out today,” said Hatchet.  “Thanks for your time, everybody.”

    Boom. Job done.

    Then I was back to core business, looking for Luigi. All roads led to Dolores. She would give me a lock on Pete. Also, Dolores was a rabbit hole I was happy to fall into.

    I met with her at the Valhalla for a steak. She arrived in a white shirt dress; top buttons undone showing a fluorescent orange push-up bra. She had a side hustle, selling used panties to pervs on the net. She’d hooked up with someone in factory seconds who sold her the slow-moving stock dirt cheap. Which meant her lingerie was always…interesting.

    Dolores was short-sighted but didn’t like glasses, so she walked in chin up and looking down her nose, like a queen. We sat side by side in a booth for ease of canoodling, and rejected the cat-piss House Red in favour of a nice Barolo. Went back to the place she shared with Luigi…cartons of knickers and packing materials all over the place, a vacuum sealer she got on eBay in the corner, to ensure freshness. She liked to look after her customers.

    But at that particular moment, she was looking after me. Afterwards, I asked her about Pete.

    They were close. He was eleven and Dolores just fifteen, when she woke him before dawn, her finger on his lips to hush him up. The two of them lit out, away from the busted furniture, dogshit and violence thrumming like a high-tension wire. They hitched rides to the Emerald City, where she took care of him, kept him safe.

    It was only natural that he swung by to let her know he and Luigi had concluded some business. They were gonna make themselves scarce for a while. He and Dolores had no secrets, so Pete spilled the whole deal. Here’s how he told it:

    Luigi and Pete were waiting at the factory when Hamzy arrived. Hamzy killed the alarm and opened up. While he messed with the boat and trailer, the boys headed out back and poured petrol all around the place. They half-filled heavy-duty plastic bags with petrol, hung them off machines. Luigi drilled a hole through the metal wall cladding and pushed through a short length of cordite, one end into a little plastic bottle of petrol. Everybody out, alarm on. Locked up. At 04:30, Pete and Luigi went back and lit the fuse. And presto! Inferno.

    So, see Hamzy hadn’t uttered a word of a lie. No wonder his story held up. Next day Luigi and Pete hopped into the Commodore and drove west with a few bricks of fifties totalling a hundred grand; to be split 70/30, because Luigi was the brains.

    “Pete called me,” said Dolores. “He’s in Broken Hill.”

    I got on a plane along with all the miners in fluoro. Pete was holed up in a shitty motel on the Silver City Highway, drinking rum and Coke at ten in the morning when I busted in. “The fuck you want, Pretty Boy?”

    I told him I knew the story but had no dog in the Hamzy hunt. What I wanted was Luigi. He laughed at me. “Luigi? Good luck with that; I reckon the pigs have him finished off by now.”

    On the road, Luigi was excited, chatty, talking about the casino in Perth, and his plans for a lesbian double at the Golden Apple. Pete asked if he was going to bring Dolores out west. Luigi said he and Dolores were through: she was nothing but a cunt and a whore, just a set of holes to stick his dick in. He knew she was running around on him and she could go fucking rot.

    I could picture Pete’s heavy hands tight on the wheel, his eyes on the road.

    Luigi needed to piss, so he had Pete pull over. Luigi walked a little way off and was going like a horse when Pete came up from behind with a tyre iron from under the driver’s seat. Clubbed him to the ground, turned him over and bashed his face to jelly.

    “You’d better keep your mouth shut, Pretty Boy.” I put up my hands and backed out, leaving him to his rum and Coke, his hundred thousand dollars, and his shitty motel room on the Silver City Highway.

    Back in Sydney, me and the boss closed the book on Luigi. Not the result we were after, but restitution of sorts.

    And Hamzy. For a smart guy, Hamzy was fucking dumb. His payout staved off trouble for a while, but soon he was up to his old tricks. They found his Sportsman drifting 20NM off the Heads. Open verdict.

    Me and Dolores still fool around. Her and her crazy lingerie. She looks after me. And I look after her.

    Featured Image: Kings Cross, Sydney.

  • Chef Death

    “Take me off!” Dad directed all his anger at Mi Sun, an Asian nurse who barely spoke English. But now she understood him perfectly. For Rage is a universal language. Frantic, she phoned my sister and managed to communicate that despite my father’s protests, she didn’t have the authority to halt a patient’s treatment in mid-dialysis. I was tired too and despite my weariness, found myself frying, flipping, and browning. Making meals up until the moment he would no longer be able eat. I’d no choice but to continue. My dying father was living for my cooking, and for lack of a better title, I appointed myself, “Chef Death.”

    It was the least I could do. He’d been enduring four-hour-long dialysis appointments, three days a week, for the last seventeen years. Even in 97 degree heat, he would conceal the gruesome shunt on his arm, with the long sleeve of a heavy sweatshirt. I for one, couldn’t fathom what it felt like to have the blood drained from your body and rinsed “clean,” before then having it pumped back in again. He spent his last session screaming.

    In his youth, he’d been an athlete, scouted by all three New York pro baseball teams. Turning his attention to drawing, he’d supported a family of six on a freelance artist’s salary. But at that stage he could barely walk, and those graceful hands that won art awards and fielded line drives, now struggled to pick up a fork. He’d had it. He’d had it with my sister too. She’d been living with him for five years, pleading that he adjust his diet, which might’ve made life easier between dialysis sessions. Unfortunately, what made him happy, made him worse. However, with death imminent, hospice gave him the green light for unlimited amounts of comfort food.

    I’m the middle daughter of a Sicilian mother. One who got bitten by the culinary bug. On a white sheet which stretched the length of our dining room table, I watched my grandmother lay freshly made ravioli.  My job was to close the ends of each ravioli with a pinch.

    My mother was also a good cook, but her talents were wasted on my picky father’s pedestrian palate.  Once it was me on the frontline, I was a sleepwalking waitress. A glorified short order cook who didn’t aim for extraordinary. I’d been helping him for months prior to his hospice kicking in, carefully commuting from Covid ravished Queens to pandemic plagued Jersey.  My sister assured me these efforts were appreciated, “Dad said you’re great!”  He said, “She cooks, she cleans, and she drives!”

    Irony, you are one serious Bitch. This was supposed to be my “Summer of love.” I’d even burned foul smelling sage, while performing an embarrassing full moon ritual to declare this my “Summer of love.” But instead of primping for socially distanced dates, there I was, putting his preferred number of ice cubes in my father’s plastic cup. Once when I was roasting chicken, out of nowhere my father says, “Laura, I’m going to introduce you to…”I stopped breathing. Did he actually have a contact that could be the glimmer of a potential boyfriend? I was psyched as he continued, “I’m going to introduce you to … the greatest sandwich on Earth … liverwurst and onions!”  I top off his Coke and cover my mouth. What was I thinking?  He didn’t have any romantic contacts for me, and even if he did, physically he wouldn’t have been able to flip open his poor old phone.

    We’d had a running sandwich feud over Levy’s Rye bread. Because I’d pronounced it, Levi’s, like the jeans.  Every time he asked me to buy this bread, I’d say it wrong and he’d go ballistic. “It’s Levy’s bread, not Levi’s jeans!”  Dumbfounded, I’d yell back, “Who cares, Dad?  Do you have stock in Levi’s bread?” In the supermarket, eyeing eleven brands of rye, I don’t see the one he would want. About to give up, I spotted it, that glistening gem in a sea of plastic packaging. Levy’s Real Jewish Rye. I grabbed it like I was Leonardo DiCaprio in Blood Diamond, only to return home and commit the sin of mispronunciation. “Dad, I got Levi’s bread!”  He was speechless.

    When you’re ninety and stop dialysis, the expectation is that you’ll be dead in a few days, or well on your way to a kind of sleepy incoherence. This is what the hospice nurse had said in private. But my father’s mind was running at full capacity about his empty stomach. “I’ll take four pancakes, one at a time.” I obliged while he explained his reasoning. “If you give me two pancakes at once, by the time I finish the first, the second one is cold.” His pancakes also had to be five inches in diameter and I was careful to adhere to those measurements. He was even more exacting about maple syrup distribution and didn’t trust me with the task. As he took the bottle from my hand, I watched him start from the center, then pour a perfect circle around the piping hot pancake, as if he was putting the finishing touches on one of his water colors. Inhaling, I stifled my impatience. “Let me do it,” he said. “No one lets me do anything anymore. I can still do things!”

    How horrible, trying to control the one thing he could and wanted do. My sister alleviated that guilt by reminding me I was sleep deprived. I’d been up since 5:45 am hunting for non-existent car keys my father said fell under his hospital bed. This wasn’t how I imagined my “Summer of love,” crawling around in my underwear to appease my father’s nightmare. As a result of the three Extra Strength Tylenol my sister-in-law had given him for his excruciating pain, he was hallucinating. Again.

    We persuaded him to take Lorazepam, a hospice drug that alleviates agitation and induces deep sleep.  As the night aide, Agar, wheeled Dad into his room, he placed his breakfast order, “Tomorrow, one egg sunny-side up and four sausages.” For all my father’s fascism about food, his soft side was equally extreme. Dad insisted his day aide, Sunday, a six-foot-two Nigerian man, abandon whatever he’d brought to eat on his break, in favor of sharing a meal with my father. I was raised by a working-class artist who never employed people. If he understood the concept, it was only to firmly reject it. Our rotating 24/7 aides were treated as any guest would be. Dad was delighted when they would break Levy’s bread and drink Margaritas with him. In this way the atmosphere here was less hospice and more of a Happy Hour.

    In between meals, my father asked me a sobering question; what will I miss when I die?  I confessed I had never thought about it. But he had, “I’ll miss the trees.” This made sense. When he retired from commercial art, he painted landscapes for fun. Trees and sky were among his favorite subjects.  “I’ll miss their leaves blowing in the wind.” His response seemed so simple, and even simpler that I could love him more for missing trees, even if his answer to that question wasn’t me.

    Yesterday, he requested veal cutlets with A LOT of garlic. He spouted his specifications all day. “Go to the butcher. Have him pound the veal thin. Ask him to pound the cutlets very thin.” My sister bought veal at the supermarket where there was no real butcher. And they weren’t thin. Using the back of my knife, I pounded with Sweeney Todd vengeance. They were haemorrhaging as my father shouted, “Don’t pound!  It’s too much work!” But as long as I pounded, he thrived.  My nurse friend had warned me that his demise could get ugly. But we were over a week in and he wasn’t even puffy yet. My food was magic!  I put in the extra garlic, parmesan, parsley, and breadcrumbs, combining ingredients until all the flavors came together. My hands worked independently of my body. All my life I’d hated my hands. They were my mother’s hands. It never made sense that my slender body should lead to these chubby, tapered elf fingers that didn’t match the rest of me. I felt my mother took control as I chopped, breaded and fried, finally internalizing why I inherited these hands from her. They weren’t meant to be pretty. They were destined for a purpose.

    Delivering the cutlet to my father met with silence, until…“This is so delicious,” he said, almost like he was praying. He asked for another, insisting his aide Menoushka and I experience the same bliss.  I hadn’t had this dish in twenty years. Welcome back to my mouth veal cutlets. You’re perfect.

    As a girl, my father tucked me in to bed, so It seemed fitting that at the end of his life, I return the favor. Curling up behind him, I floated my arm over his body and sang, “Good night Sweetheart, ’til we meet tomorrow.” He joined in, ”Goodnight, Sweetheart, sleep will vanish sorrow.” Neither of us could remember the rest, but by then he’d fallen asleep.

    The next night another role reversal occurred, when while spooning with him, I momentarily shifted my body. “Stay with me,” he insisted. We had a chat about breakfast. He wanted pancakes again, and for the first time, I told him my order. “I want one egg scrambled, three slices of bacon and one slice of Levi’s toast.” Through a garbled, fluid filled voice, he laughed hard. That was our last conversation.

    My father lingered another miraculous fifteen days. I was with him when on his own, he took his final breath. The four oxygen tanks we’d stockpiled would benefit someone else. His last aide Dee, was there with us too, and after he passed, she said, “Your father really loved you, because in his dreams, he was always calling your name.” I said, “Dee, it wasn’t me he wanted, it was my food.”  She was polite when she disagreed, “No Laura. I think what he wanted was you.”

  • Tales from a Fourth Industrial Revolution

    Back to the Future in search of ‘Green’

    Conversations, perceptions and priorities change over time. About a decade ago, most energy and ‘green’ talks highlighted examples such as Brooklyn Bridge Park, once the greenest destination in New York city; Solar Power Towers in California; planning for the renewable energy ‘supergrid’ in Europe; the U.S. Navy’s plans for a Green Fleet; or Los Angeles’s centrally planned mechanism for ending the use of coal by 2020.

    Moreover, where previously to be ‘green’ was associated with activism, now it’s considered more in terms of economy, business and investment.

    This explains in large part the recent emergence of triple-helix connection between research, industry and government, and a green emphasis found in university curricula and other educational institutions. This draws on global evidence of the effectiveness of renewables in transforming rural livelihoods, the nature of community development, and addressing the energy-poverty nexus.

    We are now witnessing a steady increase in the proportion of renewable energy sources; this is a gradual transition from mere ‘additives’ to ‘alternatives’ within the total energy mix in rural areas of developing nations.

    About two-thirds of the world’s poorest people live in rural areas. Among the numerous factors that lead to the eradication of rural poverty are increased access to goods, services and information, requiring increased participation from institutions at all levels.

    The alleviation of poverty is hindered by two inter-linked phenomena: a lack of access to improved energy services and worsening environmental shocks due to climate change – which severely affects the vulnerable, poor, most of whom live in rural areas. Mitigating climate change, increasing energy access, and alleviating rural poverty are thoroughly entwined; this overlap leads to an energy-poverty-climate nexus.

    Improved access to energy services alone will not eradicate poverty, but it does create immediate and visible impacts. Up to 1.5 billion people still live without access to electricity, another billion only have access to unreliable electricity, and close to half of the global population depends on traditional biomass fuels for cooking and heating. Energy-poverty results in unmet basic needs and depressed economic and educational opportunities that particularly affect women, children, and minorities.

    Electricity catalyses rural economic activity and increases the quality of services available to meet basic business and domestic needs through improved lighting, labour-saving devices, and access to information via TV, radio and cell phones. The provision of high-quality public lighting can increase security and improve delivery of health and education services. Improving the delivery of affordable, reliable energy services to rural communities is critical for helping them develop human and economic capacity to adapt in the face of a changing climate.

    The largest wind farm of India in Muppandal, Tamil Nadu

    Sustainable Development and Energy Access

    The umbrella term ‘sustainable development’, can be viewed as a water tank having two-leaks, one leak being ‘poverty’ and the other ‘environmental degradation’. Both these challenges, i.e. the leaks, need to be dealt with simultaneously. In modern times, no country has managed to substantially reduce poverty without greatly increasing the use of energy, or utilising efficient forms of energy and/or energy services. Without ensuring minimum access to energy services for a significant proportion of the population, countries have been unable to move beyond a subsistence economy.

    However, merely introducing cheap, easily available ‘green’ energy is insufficient. Its utility lies in facilitating human development. The energy sector has strong links with poverty reduction through health, education, gender, and the environment.

    One of the most important factors in sustainable development is a fully sustainable supply of energy resources. About one-third of the world burns wood and other biomass for cooking, heating and lighting, accounting for more than 13% of global energy consumption. In rural areas conventional cooking fuels, burned in traditional cooking stoves, emit toxic emissions resulting in more than 1.8 million premature deaths per year, according to WHO estimates, with children younger than five accounting for half of all fatalities.

    A secure supply of energy it thus an essential requirement for development within a society. In the long term, moreover, a sustainable supply of energy resources should be available at a reasonable cost, and without negative societal and environmental impacts, assuming an effective and efficient utilisation of energy resources.

    A typical rural peasant Indian village in Rajasthan, India.

    Sustainable Energy Development Strategies and Renewable Energy

    Sustainable Energy Development Strategies typically involve three major technological changes: energy savings on the demand side; efficiency improvements in the energy production; and replacement of fossil fuels with various sources of renewable energy. This is important because, energy savings and energy efficiency are critical components for achieving sustainable development, as suggested by several researchers. In addition, however, efficient renewable energy technology management is also required.

    While energy saving and energy efficiency are two issues that public policymakers consider when formulating a strategy to maximise available energy potential, management of renewable energy technologies involves a wider variety of private and public actors along with the participation of users at the grassroots level.

    India, in particular, has seen how the public-private-people partnership mechanism works for renewable energy technology applications in rural areas. The public and private sector work together to bring solar energy technologies to rural users, working closely with NGOs, VOs, suppliers, universities and think-tanks to create a win-win for all stakeholders involved.

    Additionally, evidence show how renewable energy-based entrepreneurship has transformed rural lives and rural development management. The use of solar lantern, lamps, irrigation pumps, home lighting systems, amongst other innovations, have proved useful for businesses and families in many rural areas. This not only raises income levels, but also brings the community closer together, thereby generating social capital through increased connectivity and collaboration.

    Woman harvesting wheat, Raisen district, Madhya Pradesh, India.

    Renewable Energy and Rural Livelihoods

    From alternative job creation in rural households to electrification of schools for children’s education, along with uses in the health service and maintaining biodiversity, renewable energy promises a wide range of development options to rural areas. In rural India, RETs provide lighting to thousands of remote villages that cannot access electricity through grid extension. This provides clean energy to rural households in the so-called electrified villages. It can also supplement electricity in households with poor electricity supply (ranging between 5 to 8 hours per day) through grid tail-end injection systems (which have increased costs and are difficult to adopt in households without an initial induction).

    There are huge market development possibilities wherever the government establishes renewable energy markets for rural population. Central governments in developing nations (especially in emerging BRICs) can target key provinces for the development of specific renewable energy option, and also explore and encourage potential government-industry partnerships to spur market technology.

    Adoption of effective policies – the building of an institutional framework to support renewable energy development; the establishment of effective financial mechanisms to provide capital for renewable energy development; the implementation of market transformation strategies to encourage renewable energy development; and the enhancement of international co-operation to promote renewable energy technologies; will together create the necessary and much anticipated level playing field, essential to enabling renewable energy technologies to compete with conventional energy options.

    Solar Power Plant Telangana II in state of Telangana, India.

    Solar Energy-based Entrepreneurship in South Asia

    The South Asian experience with Renewable Energy Technologies (RETs) and its dissemination to low income, rural households, along with developing solar energy-based entrepreneurial opportunities, have been highly successful. Initially, it was a success story from Bangladesh, which claimed the title of ‘solar nation’ due to its proactive rural development plans, tied to alternative energy use. This in turn inspired neighbouring countries.

    However, research shows that India started its work with RETs well before most other nations (East or East), led in particular by organisations that have built or supported solar energy entrepreneurs, which have been instrumental in transforming rural livelihoods and wellbeing, using solar energy technologies.

    The penetration of RETs in the form of Solar Home Systems (SHS) in rural households and the use of that technology for creating micro enterprises has been widely cited as a successful case of solar RE contributing to rural development. Households who received the SHS used the technology to start micro-enterprises from home by making and selling different home-made handicraft goods e.g. jute and silk products.

    These micro-enterprises, particularly those run and managed by women, also hired and actively engaged workers from the local community.

    In addition to SHS, there are entrepreneurs who have started energy-based businesses in rural areas using solar lanterns, solar mobile charging stations, solar headlamps, amongst many other forms of solar technologies. Rural women are often the ones leading the way in assembling solar accessories in village-based technology centres. Solar engineers are increasingly employed in designing SHS, working in battery factories, and other accessory-related businesses.

    India International Trade Fair, Pragati Maidan, in New Delhi on November 15, 2006.

    Who is a Solar Energy Entrepreneur?

    In this context, a ‘Solar Entrepreneur is someone who would do one or a combination of the following – buy, rent, borrow, sell, maintain, service, manufacture or install – any or a mix of solar energy technologies for setting up an income-generating energy-based enterprise/s.’

    Examples of these technologies include solar home lighting systems, solar lanterns, solar crop dryers, solar kilns, solar wax melters, solar cookers, solar lamps and headlamps, solar irrigation pumps, solar mobile phone chargers, solar vans, and short-haul transport mobility vans amongst many others.

    The applications and multi-faceted use of these technologies are visible in both rural and urban areas. A wide range of local-level applications, however, is largely seen in rural areas where communities are involved in the process of use and expansion of these technologies amidst a growing realisation that solar energy technologies are not merely ‘additives’ or ‘add-on’ energy options, but an ‘asset.’

    Research shows that solar energy entrepreneurs typically develop community-based initiatives, and are drawn from both sexes, work with various institutions and different partnership arrangements. For example, prior to the introduction of new technology in a rural area, an NGO or VO (informal institutions) works on sensitising the region before any change takes place.

    This would ordinarily involve trainers and educators coming from universities, thinktanks, governments and also informal institutions. This is also a stage where potential entrepreneurs are identified and supporting mechanisms are discussed. The technology would be provided by a thinktank or a corporate body and, in some cases, indigenous renewable energy-based enterprises who work closely with local SME-ranged suppliers.

    The finance required to secure a solar energy technology can come from entrepreneurs’ personal savings or family/community borrowing. Increasingly, there are also options available from cooperatives, regional rural banks and microfinance bodies.

    The building of solar energy entrepreneurship is generally activised by a host of actors (both public and private) at the initial stage until it catches on in rural areas. As it grows through community adoption, many more individuals and groups tend join in to expand the scale and operational effectiveness of solar energy technologies. Community involvement in projects where local-level entrepreneurship is generated is not optional anymore, similarly, the importance of locally sourced enterprises cannot be stressed sufficiently at a time when indigenous products need to gain more markets, locally and nationally. While cheaper ‘made in China’ products can be more accessible, this won’t help local suppliers and nested institutions that are committed and engaged in supporting indigenous solar energy businesses.

    Feature Image: Social forestry near Mothugudem of Khammam district in Andhra Pradesh, India