Edward T. Hall, anthropologist and author of The Hidden Dimension (1966), first coined the term, “proxemics” in the early 1960s. The concept deals mainly with how people set up personal and social spaces and interpersonal distances. One of the interesting assumptions, of which humans have been well aware of for centuries, is that different cultures have different rules of keeping distances, that is, the distance between two or more individuals is culturally set. The violation of these spatial rules will put one in trouble. Thus, one can say that the American expression of stepping on one’s toes is probably connected more to distancing than to corporal punishment. In fact breaking established social norms for distancing could be interpreted as something far more serious.

Americans have been said to have closer distancing than, let’s say Germans, and yet, Latin Americans will consider Americans as people who maintain considerable more distance from each other. Apparently, it is this sense of cultural relativity that has attracted and intrigued anthropologists and psychologists to the study of proxemics.

It is most stimulating to observe Americans, and also the various strains of newly arrived Hispanics from Mexico, Dominican Republic, Cuba and Puerto Rico, in these space related close encounters. I, being Puerto Rican, was perturbed one day, after having recently arrived in the States from living in Puerto Rico. I was back again in the “land of the free” after thirteen years on the Island. I asked some fellow in a gasoline station for directions. I had lost my bearing in the drive from Orlando International Airport to Gainesville, Florida. When I posed my question, the person became quite startled and backed off a little. But I just moved towards him making no thought of why he acted the way he did. (more…)

It was Monday morning, maybe that’s what started the fight over all the pies. Like always, everybody was sitting around the diner having a cup of coffee or a couple of eggs, getting ready for work. And, like always, nobody looked very happy about it.

Rosie was grumbling that her old man, who was out back fixing something, hadn’t cleaned the grill right. She said she wasn’t getting squat for tips that morning and it wasn’t her fault if the eggs were coming out smoky. Joann, who was sitting next to me, was agreeing with that, saying her ex-boyfriend was always a bastard about his eggs. Me, who was throwing my good eye on Joann, was agreeing with her, saying that smoky eggs could be tasty. A couple of truckers who were passing through were sitting up front bitching about the cops on I-95. Harry was hunched over his baseball scores with nothing to say, as the Reds had lost. Down the far end, Big Rick was quiet too, looking thorough his receipts book, scowling and scratching his goatee. Down the other end, as far away from Big Rick as you could sit, Dom, huge and hairy as a buffalo, was plunked down on his stool. Sitting next to Dom was his son, Eddie. The kid’s about 16, and skinny as a beanpole standing sideways. He doesn’t say much, but when he does it’s usually something goofy.

Now, the standard story is that Big Rick and Dom hate each other’s guts on purely business grounds: each guy says the other is a stinking bastard that scrounged him out of customers and so he wants to kill him. Fair enough. Other folks claim that milk had nothing to do with it, and that the bad blood between them is because both were boinking that hot number Sarah Jennings. I mean, why else would she need two milkmen, right? Well, however it was, each guy thought the other guy was plowing his tomato patch, and so finally they locked horns. It was down to ‘world famous’ Charlie-O’s one night, and legend is that sexy Sarah was waitressing. Folks that saw it said it was like a hurricane that started in the bar, flew out onto the sidewalk, then went ripping down Main Street. I suppose that one’s a stretcher, but even the next day’s newspaper said how those two put a whole shift of cops in the hospital. (more…)

How to navigate the river of a son named David
at the hot time of day is what we want to know
and we donít hear the knock.

I dream we are in the bedroom.
We don’t know what to do in Africa
but love each other and walk the beach.

Andrew loves the brown women, lets tide
somersault him in undertow, loves the tormenting market,
sniffs pineapples for the sweetest. (more…)

They met where the south marched north,
where crosses sullenly blaze
and men shoot guns.

We drove in silent marvel down roads
where pigs mutter in front yards
and dead deer hang from the trees.

We were to turn at the town store, easy to miss,
disguised as post office and gas station.
The light was almost out of the day
when we finally found the church.
The glossy brown oak leaves
drained somber like the sky. (more…)

In the dead of night, my hands hit the face of the drum
Every beat tears my skin, calling for my love
While shadows of angels are dancing across the moon
Their hands are stained from the remains of my wounds

Ah, my country was my medicine
Ah, like raindrops on my skin

I kissed The Book three times before I laid to sleep
Said a silent prayer blessing the souls that weep
May each tear from their eyes cover my beaten flesh
The numbness in my body longs for the pain that left (more…)

Walking briskly, almost at a half run, Hema loped around the track. She couldn’t believe how much space there was here - so much space to drown herself in. She loved it. Basked in it. Being alone on the track didn’t bother her - indeed she looked forward to these stolen moments at lunch. Instead of eating she would take off, run towards the track, the bottom half of her pantsuit exchanged for flowing cotton pants. Summer on the East coast was not arid like the heat of Calcutta and by the time her legs, unaccustomed to pantyhose and sneakers, hit the asphalt of the track, she was already sweating.

The dark circles forming under her arms and around her neck would later disappear when she exchanged this twin set for a fresh one. For now however, nothing mattered but her and the silence. She tried to imagine the vastness inside her, tried to compare it to the circle of the track. She wanted to picture her lining inside, red, soft and cushiony, waiting to nourish their baby. The image was fuzzy in her head because she kept getting distracted by the doctor’s voice, “Keep trying, keep trying. There’s nothing wrong with either of you. You’re both perfectly healthy.” Hema had wanted to slap his smug face. He had beamed at them from behind a desk cluttered with pictures of a chubby boy with a toothless grin and a dimply girl in a children’s bathing suit. They were in various poses, sometimes with a woman, sometimes on their own smiling into the camera. Each picture was in its own frame. Six in all. The images of their pale white skin haunted Hema’s sleep.

Her legs drove her onwards; she pumped her hands as she had seen the elderly women in her neighborhood do every evening immediately after dinnertime. She could feel the cotton rubbing slightly across her hips, chafing with the rotating movement of her thighs. The shell of her twin set hung directly below her navel and she fought the urge to feel for her bellybutton. She was fascinated by this hole. Its emptiness was evidence of her lifelong debt to her mother. She tried to imagine a cord stretching from between her legs to the center of a squalling, blood-covered infant. She couldn’t. (more…)

pre Such, a, clear

post paper, lost, black ink, scribbles, two, tow, towing other rooms

AA: Such clear night, riding above, riding, taking there, light, horizon ground, doting, dots links, no links, light to light, shapes night rue, night

city, dominion lines, angles, angels east, west, curving for the Water meeting, meet, the stree, streets, movement below, movement in, movement above, landing land, flat, flat, flat, gone, one, on, e, yet, u

Yisroel Rosenburg was not the first student in Yeshiva to have non-Jewish magazines in the dormitory. That is an accomplishment so old that no one dares take responsibility for it. Nor was Yisroel the first Yeshiva student to start a secular magazine. That honor lies with a young Texan who was responsible for an issue of Rodeo USA. The Texan is learning in a kollel in Israel right now, and refuses to discuss his magazine out of embarrassment for his lasso days. Yisroel Rosenburg though was the first Yeshiva student to interview a famous hip-hop artist in his dormitory.

Friends of Yisroel’s father arranged a meeting between the now famous student, and the chart-topping hip-hop star, GJ57. It had been Yisroel’s aspiration for a number of years to be published in a music magazine, and he saw an in-depth exclusive interview with the nation’s hottest star as his ticket into an already overrun market. They met in his small 20ftx20ft dorm room, leaving the rapperís entire posse outside to scare the students and flip out racy comments through the window to the seminary girls, walking by the building below.

“So,” Yisroel began, taking a deep breath and praying to G-d not to let him screw up. “What was your intention in writing this last album… how did you conceptualize it in the development?” (more…)

(A Sierre Leonean hangout near the nation’s capital)
Red Apple is not just another grocery store - it’s a way of life for Africans in the Washington Metropolitan area. It’s situated at Langley Crossing shopping center in Maryland, a heavily immigrants populated area. Red Apple is owned by Asians - Chinese immigrants with a mostly minority work force from third world nations of North, Central and South America and Africa. This is a place where Africans, especially Sierra Leoneans, come to shop, hangout and gossip. Here, one can give and take updates on past, present and future events. One can hardly see inside the store from outside because its dirty windows are papered with posters and flyers of announcements of past and future events. Many, in fact, are several years old. Inside, shoppers, mostly Africans, crisscross its busy aisles, to buy oggiri[1] and kaenda[2], to buy maggi[3] and peppe.[4]

The checkout clerks at the cash registers are all Chinese. Immigrants from Africa, the Caribbean and South America make up the rest of the store’s work force - mostly stock clerks and meat cutters. Tall poles are welded onto the store carts to prevent shoppers from taking, riding and abandoning them in the parking lot of a huge apartment complex, a block down the road, nicknamed Little Freetown but known officially as New Hampshire Towers. Its rear balconies are lined with rusted railings caused by years of residents hanging their laundry out to dry. In response, the complex’s management sent a strongly worded letter to its mostly Sierra Leonean residents banning this practice, and continues to send reminders, especially to the “jos cam”[5] residents. In and around the lobbies and parking lots of Little Freetown, the tones and inflections of Krio[6] abound.

Claudia Johnson, a long time resident of Little Freetown, stood by the door of the south tower looking for Rugi, her friend who lives in the north tower. Rugi is slender in shape, but when dressed in a burgundy mini skirt she is fond of, her waist and belly look like half a portion of red apple. It was a hot summer day, and Claudia watched her walk on the sun-lit sidewalk across the towers. Claudia was dressed in a locket-and-lapa, an African outfit that is made of a gara[7] cotton blouse and a wrap-around. She is slightly heavy with over-sized buttocks and she thinks African apparel fits her better. Claudia and Rugi used to be dark in complexion, but are much lighter now having bleached their skin. Traces of their former complexion could only be seen on their knuckles, which are resistant to bleaching. Rugi pushed open the door and beckoned Claudia outside. (more…)

[Set somewhere in a USA east coast barrio.]
Si, si, I knew Father Delgato, some twenty years. But he was here long before that, you know? When this barrio was new, he came then. You ask the old people, they remember. Maybe thirty years back it was. Even twenty years ago this was a different barrio. Different south side, too. Better or worse, I dunno. People was poorer then, maybe more chances today. But back then people was more honest, and less in a hurry. Well, times change, no? Them times gone. An’ priests like Father Delgato, them gone, too.

You know that church on 4th? Si, si…that one all closed up now. That was his. Long time back that was something. Everybody went. Mass, weddings, baptism, funerals, you know. But then, kinda slow like, it died off. Times change. Father Delgato used to hold the Mass anyway. Necesscito, comprendi? Only some of the old people went though. I know, I used to bring my mother. God rest her.

But when I was a kid we’d go every Sunday. Father Delgato, his Mass, easy to understand. Simple stories, simple Spanish. Was just a kid, but even I knew his meaning: some things is right, so do it, an’ some things ain’t, so don’t. My mother, god rest her, said he was a genuino padre. I didn’t know what that meant. Now I do. (more…)