I was compelled towards this subject not because I have any epiphanies about the hermeneutics of author names. Rather, I got to thinking about three-named authors because I have myself decided to join the ranks of William Butler Yeats, Louisa May Alcott, and Arthur Conan Doyle. I could probably construct a convincing (and mostly true) story attesting that my decision was driven by a desire to honor my great-grandfather, Moshe David, for whom I am named. The truth, however, is rather more base. I decided to add the David, in part, because I think it sounds good, because it will help me stand out from the crowd if my name ever gets on the side of a book. The second, and admittedly more important, reason is a certain very well known gay porn producer by the name of Michael Lucas.

In days past, before the advent of Google, I might have been able to ignore the exploits of Michael Lucas. I would not have known about his controversial appearance at Stanford University, his trouble with the Israeli Defense Forces, or his flap with The New York Times. (You got to give it to him, Michael Lucas picks his adversaries well). But in the age of the interweb, and Google’s usually helpful propensity to correct misspellings, I have a hard time getting away from him. Even if I could refrain from self-googling, I would still have to contend with the endless jokes of those people who searched for my name and came up with a suggestion for Michael Lucas, “The Porn King of New York.” (The New York magazine profile that comes up second when you search for “Michael Lukas” on Google begins “Michael Lucas has built an erotic empire for himself—but it’s not always easy being on top.”) With the addition of my middle name, I just have to contend with Michael D Lucas of Big O Tires in Cloverport, KY and the Michael David Lukas who was picked up in Missoula, MT on a warrant for a traffic charge, then released after posting a $377 bond. It wasn’t me, I swear.

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And there were false births and false deaths, endings or beginnings not quite what they were promised or expected to be. The Apple iPad appeared, and no one—shareholders, fanboys, or the beleaguered media—seems content with it, though it’ll probably sell in great numbers, and perhaps the media’s disappointment is a mirror of its own inadequate adjustment to technological change, charming mock-up videos notwithstanding. The Google Books settlement limps along, with Ursula Le Guin and the Richard Wright Estate now added to its long list of antagonists. Today is the deadline for objectors to make themselves known. Lawrence Lessig, as usual, is worth reading on this subject and his other thoughts about the future of culture and copyright.

This week also marked the observance of International Holocaust Remembrance Day, with educational events and memorials around the world. I attended a program at the Italian Cultural Institute of Los Angeles, co-produced by the USC Shoah Foundation Institute, which included a screening of the documentary Auschwitz: The Final Witness. We attendees were lucky to have Dario Gabbai, one of the documentary’s subjects, there, and he spoke movingly of his experiences as a Sonderkommando in Auschwitz. A vital 87 years old, Gabbai is one of less than five former Sonderkommandos believed to be alive, so his testimony is invaluable. The most startling and remarkable moment, though, may have been during the Q&A with Gabbai and Jonathan Petropoulos, a Claremont McKenna history professor, Holocaust scholar, and friend of Gabbai. A small, old man, sitting directly in front of me and quiet up to this point, raised his hand. In a shaky but resolute voice, inflected with the accent of old Central Europe, he said to Gabbai, “I was a prisoner at Birkenau B during that time, on October 7, 1944 [when the Sonderkommandos at Auschwitz staged an unsuccessful revolt and partially exploded one crematorium]. And I want to tell you that I have the deepest respect for you.” The room was silent, and Gabbai’s eyes looked vacant, glassy and remote, as if he didn’t even hear what the man said. Now passed a microphone, the man repeated himself again, pledging his reverence of Gabbai and the others like him who were victims of what one Shoah historian called “the choiceless choice” (be a Sonderkommando, assisting in the Nazi death machine; or die). But it was clear that Gabbai had him heard all along and was only lost in his own memories, which still produce nightmares.

“What could we do?” Gabbai asked. “Six hundred of us [out of 1,200 Sonderkommandos] died. But we had to try.”

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See if you can follow the web of corruption that Marco Vernaschi outlines in “The Cocaine Coast”:

According to reports from Interpol and United Nations agencies, cocaine traded through West Africa accounts for a considerable portion of the income of Hezbollah. These reports say Hezbollah uses the Lebanese Shiite expatriate population in South America and West Africa to guarantee an efficient connection between the two continents. To maintain and expand its influence on the Shiite community, however, Hezbollah needs money. The estimated $120 million given annually by Iran is just a slice of the pie. Most of Hezbollah’s support comes from drug trafficking, a major moneymaker endorsed by the mullahs through a particular fatwa. In addition to the production and trade of heroin in the Middle East, Hezbollah facilitates, for a fee, the trafficking for other drug-smuggling networks, such as the FARC and its cocaine trade.

Vernaschi’s photos are just stunning, too—it’s worth checking out the article just for the pictures.

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1. How did you come to be preoccupied with Ethiopia in the first place?

I guess like most preoccupations it began more or less randomly, through no special initiative of my own. One day an old friend called and said he was going to Addis Ababa with a group of people looking into new ways of dispensing charitable aid, and sitting there idly at my desk, which was covered in paper, it occurred to me, hey, why not go along? It was just one of those sudden impulses. When I came home and told my wife about it she had a sudden impulse of her own: I wasn’t going, she was. So we argued. Finally she said, “Look, you want to go because you’ll find it interesting. I want to go because I might actually do something.” This seemed all too irrefutable. So I caved in, and she went and did something (in fact she’s in the final stages of setting up an NGO even as I write this), and I stayed home and thought semi-interesting thoughts about not-going, and somehow one thing led to another and we wound up adopting a ten year old AIDS orphan and becoming, in entirely different ways, obsessed with the place. Whether this is because of Ethiopia itself or our own multiply-determined need to expand our personal horizons at this point, I have no idea. I mean, if my friend who called had been going to Senegal, or Lladakh, or Cleveland, my preoccupations would probably be running towards those areas instead.

2. What was it about the Axum Obelisk that originally fascinated you?

The comedy of it, along with the sadness. All those years of fervent negotiation, all that grand patriotic hoopla when the obelisk first came back, and then, literally for years, nothing but difficulties, and of the most banal kind. It just seemed like an irresistible symbol of what happens when you take something out of its cultural framework: how hard it is later to wipe the slate clean. We see this in the museum world, with the repatriation of various treasures, a mess no one seems quite able to untangle. Is it better to empty out the museums, and send all the old treasures home? And are the home countries, for all their righteous protestations, really prepared to deal with that? The truth is that some are, and some aren’t. Most have mixed feelings, I think. It just so happens that mixed feelings and tangled motives and the serio-comedy of futile, intractable projects—this is the sort of thing that interests me. It was the setting and the scale that seemed new.

3. What do you think will happen with the obelisk? What do you think it will mean for Ethiopia if and when it is ceremoniously re-erected?

First of all, it has been ceremoniously re-erected: as of last September, the obelisk is now back in place, more or less where it was—though not how it was. The truth is the granite had been lying around in pieces for centuries by the time the Italians stole it. So even the notion of “restoration” in this case should be taken with a grain of salt. But as for what it means for Ethiopia, that depends who you talk to. To the government and the historians and the media, to the Tigrayan authorities, to everyone involved in getting it back, it means a great deal. For most people I met on the street? Not so much. A lot depends on one’s politics. Meles, the Prime Minister, comes from Tigray, so in other regions they tend to view the re-erection hoopla through that lens, as a native son bringing home some major pork and glory while the rest of the country fights for crumbs. It’s not like Ethiopians do a lot of in-country tourism; almost no one I met in Addis had ever been to Axum. But this may be too cynical for all I know. My sense is when the obelisk first came back, five years ago, the patriotic feeling was genuine, not just something manufactured by the govenment. Then with all the delays that feeling grew attenuated, so by the time of the re-erection the whole thing seemed kind of wan and forced.

4. Some of the underlying tension in this piece has to do with the impossibility of being a respectful, fully engaged Western traveler in the third-poorest country in the world. Do you think there is a way to travel and experience Ethiopia without the problem an imperialist point of view?

No. But I didn’t mean to suggest in the piece that it’s difficult to be respectful and fully engaged when traveling there: in fact it’s super easy. The people are lovely, affectionate, full of warmth; it’s a pleasure to travel among them. What’s impossible, and should be, is to forget for one second that you’re a farenji. The second you arrive you’re in a kind of Heisenbergian dilemma: no matter how low a profile you keep, every time you look out at the people on the street you’re aware of them looking in, at you. Let’s face it: most white people who travel in East Africa are either businessmen, NGO types, missionaries, or extreme travelers. It makes for preconceptions on both sides. There may be personality types who can just ignore this as they go about their business, but I’m not one of them. Then too, every writer who travels is an imperialist of sorts, greedy for some narrative treasure or other to bring back home.

5. You bring up the question of belonging—where do people and things belong, what happens when stolen antiquities are returned to their country of origin—and you relate them to first world/third world adoption. What prompted you to consider this question and do you think all adoptive parents of African children must address these issues?

I’d never presume to say what other people should address. Adoption is a pretty strenuous business all around, and I have nothing but respect for those who involve themselves in it. At the same time, it was weirdly unsettling, having breakfast with our daughter in the Ghion dining room, seeing our happy little tableau through the eyes of the staff. We could have chosen to ignore it, dismiss it as reflexive liberal guilt; probably we should have. But our attitude towards foreign adoption was almost mystically pliant and unformed. That feeling we had in the Ghion seemed to go to the heart of something very complicated, something we weren’t quite prepared for. On some level—and I don’t mean to overstate this, just to state it—you feel like a pirate. You’re going into a poor country and taking this child. It’s not just that, of course, but it’s also that. To pretend that it’s not, that the process is untouched by consumerism, of the kind that sends people to the third world in search of cheap organs, a kidney or a liver or what have you, seems naïve. However selfless your motives, the moment you enter the scene you change it for good. That child will never quite fit back into their country. Why this struck us as surprising is itself a surprise I guess. But it did.

6. Your published work consists mainly of fiction, and in your most recent novel, one of the main characters experiences a crisis and escapes to Ethiopia. How do you approach the processes of writing fiction and non-fiction differently or similarly, especially when it is about the same subject?

The novel was pretty far along already when I first went to Ethiopia, so in some sense there wasn’t much of an overlap. Also the places I sent my protagonist—Dire Dawa, Harar, the Danakil Depression—were places I was never fortunate enough to visit. They were actually easier to write about, it turned out, than the places I did visit: less obligation to empty out the notebooks, get it all down. Essentially the two projects looked through opposite ends of the telescope: the fiction was about stepping away into remoteness, and the nonfiction was about return. But both are haunted by the sense of this stranger wandering out into Otherness, using it and being used by it in turn.

7. What are you working on now? What are you reading now?

You mean, other than this Q&A for you guys? Isn’t this enough?

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Steve Almond has already astutely (if somewhat angrily) defended himself at The Rumpus, as well he should, being in the category Roiphe attacks: the new and supposedly castrated generation of white, heterosexual males. But I would like to pick up on a few of the very clear and very relevant points Almond lays out, which Roiphe ignored in her essay.

Roiphe argues for the explicit sexual conundrums in Portnoy’s Complaint and Rabbit, Run, and waxes poetic for “something almost romantic in the old guard’s view of sex: it has a mystery and a power, at least.” But she fails to examine the most obvious of counterpoints. First and most glaringly: that endorsing Portnoy’s penis as a guide post for literary sex is like saying guys these days should act more like Mad Men’s Don Draper. It ignores the blatant sexism of the era’s context, which renders the whole endeavor impotent. This isn’t to say Portnoy and Draper aren’t interesting. They are—indeed, they are mysterious and powerful—but they aren’t in any way meant to be ideals.

Second—and Almond vociferously defends his peers in his essay—Roiphe missed a whole swath of white, heterosexual male writers who do write dangerously and beautifully about sex. She wrongly accused Jonathan Safran Foer of avoiding sex when his first novel, Everything is Illuminated (one of the more successful of the decade), takes its title phrase from the idea that people having sex and having orgasms transmits a glow out into space, “coital radiance.” Similarly, some of the most tender and transcendent moments in Ron Carlon’s short fiction occur at the moment of marital and extramarital copulation. And Steve Almond himself is the author of a few of the most discomfort-making and exacting passages about sex, specifically in the novel he co-wrote with Julianna Baggott, Which Brings Me To You.

Which brings me to my third point: for God’s sake, what about all the women? Those writers that aren’t white and male? Don’t they, too, contribute to the literary conversation? By not including women writers and their subjects, Roiphe assigns 100% of the power to Updike and Roth and their minions. But we can’t forget the horrifying and pornographic inner lives of Mary Gaitskill’s characters, or the confused sexual liberation in Joy Williams’s stories, or the eternal sexual curiosity of the characters of Julianna Baggott, who, appropriately, just wrote a crystalline editorial in the Washington Post about how much easier it is to get recognition as a male author than as a female author.

Fourth, Roiphe offers no cultural examination aside from “we have landed upon a more conservative time” for a newfound approach to sexuality. Sex is for sale everywhere and anyone who has ever taught an introductory creative writing course knows that young would-be writers know that sex is for sale everywhere. Often, as the symptom of a chronic disease, it pops up in their poems and stories as very bad, clichéd, self-indulgent, and sexist sex scenes. When sex becomes less shocking and slightly less sacred, it becomes harder to write about as the transcendent or transformative moment—because maybe it no longer is. So, perhaps the Roth-ian style of explicit sexuality isn’t so much (as Roiphe calls it) “threatening” to our modern sensibilities as it is just no longer relevant.

The solution is not Roiphe’s solution—we should not return to the romanticized ways of the irreverent and overly sexed old guard. If we did, we might not even recognize it. Just as Updike and Roth moved forward the sexual conversations of D.H Lawrence, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and James Baldwin, we must also find a new way of writing about sex, a way that speaks to us through the ugly noise of Jersey Shore hot tub hookups and Gawker crotch shots. In this context, the masturbation of the Zipper King’s daughter doesn’t do it anymore. But I’m not worried: there are writers out there doing just this kind of work, writers like Steve Almond, Julianna Baggott, Alexander Chee, Junot Diaz, Amy Bloom, Mary Gaitskill, Ron Carlson, Ian McEwan, and the list goes on. This is serious business, sex, but it is also beautiful, and we should treat it as both.

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Here is some of the data I collected in about an hour:

• US life expectancy in 1950 and 2009
• schematic overview of the drug development process, with average length and cost of each step
• the names of every single drug approved by the FDA (over 100 of them!) in January 2009
• the names of every single drug approved by the FDA in 1950 (who knew 1950 was the year of percodan and penicillin?)
• several highly entertaining political cartoons
• quotes on drug discovery from FDA committee chairs, pharma reps, physicians, patients…everyone except the family dog
• op-eds from the pharmacology and public policy literature debating drug prices and their implications for American health care
• a 100-page document on pharmaceutical development from the Congressional Budget Office
• the current weather in Chicago, including radar forecasts (too much heavy reading required a break)

I found more information than I can fit into a single presentation. In the absence of the internet and a search engine, how would one even go about investigating congressional publications or lists of approved FDA drugs? That information wouldn’t be in an encyclopedia, and from my vague memories of the library card catalog as a child, I don’t think there would be a search phrase there either. That information likely would not have been publicly accessible just a few years ago. Even if the data could be found in a specialized library somewhere, I would not have been looking it up from the comfort of my papasan chair. There is a vast amount of junk on the internet, but amid the celebrity tweeting and Facebook frenzy, there is information that has had a profound influence on what we read.

I shudder at the stories about the old days of Index Medicus from some of my science mentors. By the time I was done with my thesis, it had over 250 references, and I didn’t have to go to the library to photocopy a single journal article. Instead, with a few clicks of a mouse, I found each reference on the National Library of Medicine’s Pubmed database and then downloaded a copy to my Endnote library. This unfettered access to information has led to an explosion of research advances within the scientific arena and the translation of scientific and technological ideas to the public. The abundance of science and health blogs maintained by major media outlets testifies to public interest in these subjects and the accessibility of information that was once dominated by career academics. (Gina Kolata’s science column in the New York Times often makes their list of their ten most emailed articles.)

I can’t help but wonder how much the internet has expanded the scope of our literary horizons, even in the realm of fiction. The grand aphorism of the craft of writing is to write what you know; to what extent do the endless details available online supplement personal knowledge? Memories of a person, a place, a story will fade or change over time, and writing realistic fiction requires accurate details. Can research that would once have been done on location now find a virtual substitute, and, in the process, help aspiring novelists finish their work? And once a novel is published, does the thriving business of used books for sale online—think Amazon or Half.com—allow more people to add to their personal libraries in a way that would have been unthinkable at $29.95 new hardcover prices?

There is one significant downside to our information smorgasbord. The current publishing trend is towards fewer books being published each year. Library bookshelves no longer carry as many titles as they used to. Some of the most robust genres of the past—memoir, travel writing, literary biography—are no longer leading sales for publishers or book retailers. Competition from internet may well have something to do with this. In that sense, the internet is probably good and bad for the world of writers, readers, and those who like to do a bit of both. It gives all of us access to more knowledge than any generation which has come before and, for that, whatever its impact on publishing, I can only conclude that’s for the best.

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JW: I’ve heard you are working on a book. Since we’ve pointed our readers to articles you’ve done in venues like the Chronicle of Higher Education and the New Republic, I think some of them would be very interested in seeing that longer work when it comes out. Can you tell us any details about the topic, the publisher, and when it is due out?

MH: My book is called The X-Y Problem, and it’s a narrative nonfiction work about sex selection and gender imbalance in Asia and Eastern Europe. It will be published in 2011 by Public Affairs.

The book grew out of a feature I wrote for Virginia Quarterly Review on China’s sex-ratio imbalance. I reported the piece in a Jiangsu province county where the sex ratio at birth is 152 boys born for every 100 girls, according to recent Family Planning Commission data. Later I expanded my research to India, South Korea, Taiwan, Vietnam, and the Caucasus countries.

Most journalism on this topic tends to focus on the cultural traditions that encourage son preference. I instead emphasize the link between sex-ratio imbalance and economic development – and connect what’s happening in Asia to new sex selection technologies in the West. I also look at the pernicious side-effects of tens of millions of “surplus” males: an increase in international marriage brokering, sex trafficking, and other forms of instability.

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By the early ’70s—and with the development of inexpensive offset printing—every school seemed to have its own quarterly. Before long, the combined forces of identity politics and cheap desktop publishing gave rise to African American journals, Asian American journals, gay and lesbian journals. Graduates of creative writing programs were multiplying like tribbles. Last summer, Louis Menand tabulated that there were 822 creative writing programs. Consider this for a moment: If those programs admit even 5 to 10 new students per year, then they will cumulatively produce some 60,000 new writers in the coming decade. Yet the average literary magazine now prints fewer than 1,500 copies. In short, no one is reading all this newly produced literature—not even the writers themselves.

Here at VQR we currently have more than ten times as many submitters each year as we have subscribers. And there’s very, very little overlap. We know—we’ve checked. So there’s an ever-growing number of people writing and submitting fiction, but there’s an ever-dwindling number of people reading the best journals that publish it.

The result is that great keepers of the literary flame like TriQuarterly, New England Review, and Southern Review are on death’s doorstep. (By Cliff Garstang’s rankings of the Pushcart Prize anthologies, these represent three of the top twelve venues for fiction of the last decade—and another, Ontario Review, closed in 2008.) And if these journals go, they will join the illustrious ranks of Chelsea, DoubleTake, Grand Street, Other Voices, Partisan Review, and Story.

We dare say that half of the top fiction venues of the last decade—and indeed some of the great American fiction venues of all time—are in danger of folding or have already folded for lack of readership. And yet the number of fiction writers grows and grows. Fiction writers, we’re asking you directly: Why don’t you subscribe to just one or two magazines? Is $50 too high a price for the future of literary fiction?

The argument is already on over at the Mother Jones website. Feel free to comment there or share your thoughts here.

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January 11 to 13, 2010

I was staying in the Villa Creole in Petionville. It’s the “elite” part of Port-au-Prince, on a huge hill with narrow, winding streets to the top. Most foreigners live there, most of Haitian rich.

It was a violent quake. No warning. Happened about 4:50 p.m. on Tuesday, 1/12. First a minor tremor that shook a painting or two, followed by one where I could only stand because I was sheltered in the doorway of my hotel room. My butt against one side of the frame, hands holding to other side. It definitely had the “freight train” sound you hear about. Thought I was okay until I saw a part of the hotel wall tumble down across from pool. Don’t know how long it went on. Hard to estimate accurately, but was at least 30 seconds. I’ve heard some people say much longer but when you are scared everything seems longer than it is.

Took a quick video shot, which was dumb. I should have just gotten out. Decided to shove everything in suitcases and grabbed a water cooler the hotel had provided. More dumb decisions in aftermath of quake, but I risked it. Did not know if I was ever coming back to room. Villa Creole hotel was built in 1945 or so, and mostly stayed up. Hotel was in reasonable shape. Dining room wall collapsed, but no dinner being served that early. We had no deaths; one man with injured arm. That was it. One Frenchman ran out of hotel during quake and the shaking threw him into the hotel pool.

Hotel Montana was not so lucky. Near total collapse. I spoke to other Coast Guard members who saw large piece of it slide down the hill. Many people killed, I believe.

This quake was like that. Total collapse on one building, another with only minor damage. Sort of gives you religion to see something like that.

All hotel guests fled into street in front of hotel. Tremendous screaming and yelling from Haitians down the hill. Aftershocks raised even more panic and voices.

An American, “Henry” started treating a few Haitians who had been injured. A man from West Virginia, “Steve,” joined in. Soon the rest of us did, too. Henry and Steve worked like dogs . . . kept going long after I stopped the next morning. They are heroes. None of us were medical professionals. Henry had taken an EMT class or had once been an EMT. Steve had some animals at home and had some basic vet skills and a calm demeanor. The other huge asset was “Melissa,” an owner of Hotel Creole. You have to understand that the Haitian elite and the Haitian people do not mix. They may not even be able to speak to each other (or refuse to) as the poor use Creole and the elite speak French & English. But Melissa let us start ripping up bed sheets for wounded. Let us break apart furniture for splints. Canadians like “Richard” and “Gerard” helped with translation and gathering supplies. “Alex” a French woman who lives in Cap-Haitien was a huge help. Another American, “Chris” worked all night. “Jim” another American, became a true pro at ripping up sheets. Another French woman whose name I never got.  “Peggy” was an American who also helped.

Soon other Haitians began arriving. We used car headlights to work on wounded. Had to keep backing up the cars to make room for new victims and keep lights on new wounded. We just put them on the street. We were not very organized . . . but it worked. Must have backed up our two main cars 200 feet by the time all was done. I was an EMT years ago. I remember all the short classes on splints and mass casualties. You think you will never use that stuff . . . My two years at Western Albemarle Rescue Squad in 1985–86 were a huge help . . . but we had no equipment to work with.

Most of the injures were from falling debris. The Haitians make most buildings out of concrete and cinderblock in Port-au-Prince and that stuff fell on people. Imagine someone dropping 2–8 cinderblocks on you from six feet above and you get an idea of the injuries that we saw. Over and over again I asked “le bloc est tombé?” (“the block fell?”—or my approximation of it) and they answered “oui, oui.” Reached back to high school French all night. Wish I had paid better attention to Madame Crouch all those years.

1. Broken Bones: Probably what we saw more than anything. We made improvised splints and ripped up Villa Creole’s sheets to splint. Somehow we had hundreds of rubber gloves and I suspect someone from a relief organization had them in their suitcase and donated. Turned out to have double use: After people took off used gloves we filled some with ice and used them as ice packs. Saw many, many compound fractures (bones protruding). We covered and bandaged. Those people are going to be a huge problem in coming days. Infection will set in and we are going to lose many more Haitians. We are going to see a generation of crippled people. Bones will set in awkward positions and legs and arms will have to come off. It’s going to get much worse. The cable stations are focusing on buried people, and that deserves some attention. But the walking wounded are going to be a huge problem soon. There are calls now for heavy equipment. No. What we need is lots and lots of bandages and antiseptic. Orthopedic surgeons/nurses. Lots of antibiotics.
2. Head wounds/concussions. Many of these. Attended one ten-year old girl who had knot on back of head and was unresponsive. Pupils unresponsive . . . barely constricted with light. Convulsing on left side and bleeding from left ear, which is never a good sign with a head injury. We tried to keep her still. Parents kept trying to take her somewhere, wanted her better . . . and I tried to explain in broken French that keeping still and reducing swelling was the goal. A young Haitian, “Teri” helped translate to Creole. Many Haitians look to the “blans” (literally “whites” but the meaning is more figuratively “foreigners”) as being people who can fix problems, and that was the case here despite our lack of supplies and equipment. I had to keep explaining in broken French that there was very little I could do, that none of us were doctors, but Steve and Henry and Chris and Alex and Robert and Jim and I were the best option around. Many of the wounded had tried to go to hospitals but the buildings were either too damaged or the crowds too large for them to get aid … so they came to us.
3. Internal injuries. This scared me most of all. Many victims had just minor cuts and scrapes—in triage, you just shove them off to the side. But then someone throws up blood. A woman had blood in her eyes and obvious swelling in her stomach. Nothing we could do but keep them still. We had an oxygen tank and used it . . . but I don’t know that it did much good. I think we were helping minds more than bodies. For the Haitians to see someone, anyone, doing something provided some calm.
4. Burns: just a few of these. I thought there would be more but did not see burning fires after quake. I suspect the quakes struck before many had started cooking, and that most Haitians are so poor they don’t have much fuel to cook with anyway. Heard from another USCG member that some of the slums down the hill had more burn victims.

World of “les docteurs” at Villa Creole got out and more and more people arrived. We worked all night. Hotel Creole staff brought out Cokes and some food, kept water for washing wounds. Hotel Creole did so, so much. Melissa was an angel. She was calm and collected and helped translate. The oil that kept our lumbering machine running. Hotel Creole could have locked up its doors and gone into a defensive crouch. They did not.

By morning of 1/13 we were all exhausted. Thought it was 8:00 or so and looked at my watch: still 5:30. Kept going for a while, but I gave up about 9:00. I was traveling to Haiti under the auspices of the US government. I knew the embassy would come looking for me soon. So, I got my things ready again, sat with other guests by hotel pool. Henry and Steve kept up their diligent work. One American had a car and decided to try and drive to Dominican Republic. Don’t know: given road conditions, that may not have been a good decision. Roads in Port-au-Prince were okay, really. A few walls collapsed into the street . . . but only a few. There are not many high buildings there, so they did not often fall into street. Few, if any, abandoned cars. But Haitian streets are very narrow, winding, and jammed with people. You got traffic jams around gas stations.

I was already feeling guilty about stopping my first aid work. But I felt like my job was to let the embassy know I was okay (never managed this: no cell network; land lines did not work) and stay put. And then the Villa Creole chef set up a grill and did steaks now thawed from freezer. VC has a generator, but they had not used it. They were afraid of electrical shorts and I suspect they wanted to conserve fuel for later on when they might need it more. But there I was, eating steak on one side of the wall, bloody Haitians on the other. It seemed overtly symbolic and did not make me feel great about myself. To be honest, part of stopping first aid was because we were almost out of supplies and, by giving aid, we were attracting more and more people to our street. This shut down the street and put a lot of people in a very small area. A few Haitians walked off with a fax machine and the hotel staff finally closed the wrought-iron gates and set up security. Our aid was accomplishing very little, and I decided to try and be ready for evacuation.

But we were always safe. The Haitians were scared—often praying to God and one woman doing what could only be described as Voodoo—but they stayed calm. The irony here is that the Haitians may rebound from this much better than Americans could. Most didn’t have running water before the quake. Most didn’t have electricity. They lived in terrible conditions. So what would debilitate an American hurts a Haitian, but they keep going.

I did a last check of my room and someone came down the hall yelling my name. It was a driver from the embassy. Lugged out the bags and he took me to an Army staff member’s house nearby—a rally point. Seven other USCG members there. As we drove along, we saw Haitians on the street in their usually improvised markets. Not so many, but it was going on. A man selling silk scarves? Who wants to buy that after a quake? But there he was. A few people in loud arguments with vendors, especially those selling food. I suspect there was some price gouging going on.

In four cars, we drove from there to the US Embassy. That’s where the last video footage comes from (market/mall/theater collapse and men using truck for dead). One of our drivers was amazing. He had heard that his sister was dead, and yet, there he was weaving us through traffic. Heard from other embassy personnel who said the same thing. Their Haitian nannies and guards were on station and refused to leave to care for their own families. The US Embassy, built only a few years ago, looked in good shape.  Talked to my local contact there who said a US Coast Guard C-130 was waiting to take us out of the country. Was very happy to see my own service as one of the first to arrive in country.

The embassy’s job in this environment is to clear the decks. They want all non-essential Americans out. Fewer people to sustain; fewer variables to deal with; fewer people to be under risk later on. All of us were ready to stay, but the fact is that Haiti is barely stable. More stable than in years . . . but never far from a tipping point.

We are now in a hotel in Santo Domingo. Slept for first time in 50 hrs. Got food. At lunch today, said the traditional Catholic blessing, “Bless us, O Lord, and these Thy gifts, which we are about to receive from Thy bounty, through Christ our Lord.” I was composed until I tried to add a prayer for the Haitians. Sort of lost it for a while. The hostess left me alone until I could eat again. Seeing this changes a life.

I very much want to acknowledge that:

• Owners of Villa Creole hotel were heroes. “Melissa” was an angel who kept us safe, watered, and fed as we tried to help Haitians. Let us rip up every sheet/towel in her hotel and break apart furniture for splints.
• I did very little of the work. Two Americans, “Henry” and “Steve,” took the lead. Worked long after I stopped on 1/13 to wait for evacuation by embassy personnel.
• The other people who did awesome work were the embassies in Port-au-Prince and Santo Domingo. They worked very hard to ensure my safety.

Update: Jeb is interviewed by Sandy Hausman of WVTF Public Radio in Roanoke.

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Anthony Ham’s essay, “The Lost Herd,” in VQR’s Winter issue follows the nomadic elephant herds of Mali as they move across the dry lands of the Sahara and the Sahel in search of water and food. As Ham sets out on his quest to catch a glimpse of the roaming elephants, his conversations with Mali’s villagers about their whereabouts reveals the special reverence the villagers have for their mysterious movement. A travel writer who has written for Lonely Planet, Ham’s essay is both an endearing portrait of the deserts of Mali as well as an ecological analysis of the climate changes that affect elephants and humans alike. Here, Ham explains his past work and how it influenced his essay in VQR.

1. In your essay, you build suspense by tracking the elephants as they move from place to place until, at the end, you and your guides finally spot them. What were your feelings during the search? When they eventually appeared, what was your impression of them?

I love the Sahel and Sahara but it’s always tough love. This is one of the most marginal environments on earth for humans and animals alike, and my journeys are always shadowed by exhilaration and despair in equal measure. On this journey my initial excitement often gave way to disillusionment. Watching wildlife here is so different from elsewhere in Africa—distances are vast, herds are small and wary, and the infrastructure is extremely basic. But seeing them took me back to the first time I ever saw elephants in the wild—a sense of wonder at this ancient life force.

2. As you move through Mali in the piece and speak with villagers about the elephants, the elephants seem to take on a mythic status as roaming beasts, both enigmatic and feared. Your writing, on the other hand, suggests a special harmony between humans and elephants from an ecological standpoint. Do you think this relationship is changing due to environmental threats for both?

The situation is changing significantly. The special relationship between locals and elephants dates from a time when most of the people living in the Gourma were nomads and there was indeed an ecological balance and a complementary relationship between the two groups. There was sufficient water for everyone and elephants were seen as guides for the local people in their quest for scarce resources. But drought, growing human and livestock populations, and policies by governments and NGOs to encourage sedentary lifestyles, and hence agriculture, have threatened this balance. Talk to most nomads and the relationship remains relatively intact. Inhabitants of the permanent villages which have become established throughout the region, however, rarely have that same relationship with elephants. Elephants are a threat to their livelihoods and, as relative newcomers to the region who have migrated here due to drought and famine elsewhere, they don’t view the elephants as special at all, merely troublesome. These are people living a hand-to-mouth existence and this has become a quintessentially African dilemma: how to protect threatened wildlife and equally threatened people on land that is already close to breaking point.

3. You’ve written for Lonely Planet travel guides, specificially on the Middle East, Norway, Spain, and West Africa. Did you find there was a large difference between the reporting you did for the West Africa travel guide versus your piece in VQR? How does an awareness of a personal nonfiction narrative affect your primary experience of a place?

There are some similarities: developing a strong sense of place, a need to make every word count, and the imperative to reveal just enough without taking a sense of discovery away from the reader, for example. But there is a clear expectation with guidebooks that the person reading them will visit the place with their guidebook in hand, whereas a personal non-fiction narrative demands that I take the reader places that he or she is unlikely ever to visit. The focus for so much guidebook writing is necessarily practical, while I see my task in other nonfiction writing to find and bring back the stories that illuminate a place and the lives of its people, and to tell those stories which don’t otherwise get told.

4. Lonely Planet guides seem to provide more information other than the usual tourist hot spots, particularly regarding the nuances of food, arts, and culture in a locality. Are you able to learn this information just by spending a lot of time in a place, or is it a matter of knowing how to chat up the locals? Did you find yourself relying on these skills when you researched for your VQR piece, particularly as you tracked the elephants using word-of-mouth clues?

I read widely about a place before I travel there and I talk at length with other travelers about their experiences, but there’s no substitute for spending as long as I can in a place and spending most of it in the company of locals to take readers to the heart of a place. In the case of Mali, over a number of visits I have built up a network of trusted friends who serve as my guides to the country. Their stories and explanations could fill entire books and much of what they tell me never appears in my writing. But it all contributes to a deeper understanding of the country, and the 10 percent I do write about wouldn’t be possible without the other 90 percent.

5. You used to work as a refugee lawyer in Australia, but then decided you wanted to explore the worlds where your clients were coming from. What other circumstances motivated you in this direction? Also, where specifically did you want to travel, and why?

Traveling from a young age is very much a part of the Australian psyche. It comes from growing up in a place so far from anywhere else. I had a Masters degree in Middle Eastern politics and most of the asylum seekers with whom I had worked came from Africa and the Middle East. I felt as if I knew these places but only had half the story. It’s also true that I traveled initially to escape. Three years of listening to stories about rape, torture and broken lives, then fighting against a skeptical government, had taken its toll. In working with asylum-seekers, I’m reminded of a quote from a story by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, where she writes of people in Nigeria with difficult lives: “Of course they nurse resentment, as they well should, but it has somehow managed to leave their spirits whole.” I wanted to meet more people like this, to see them before their lives became broken and to immerse myself in their worlds.

6. As you set out on your travels, did you know you wanted to be a writer at that point, or was it an occupation that developed along the way?

I have always written and had a few pieces published here and there, and I’d always had a passion for stories and for the written word. But it was not until I was sitting on the running boards of a train in Thailand and had a moment of blinding clarity: I wanted to be a writer. As a lawyer I had felt that I could make a small difference in someone’s life, but I’d reached a point where that was no longer enough. I wanted to change the way that people thought about the world by bringing back its stories and challenging the stereotypes we have about little-known corners of the world. Although most writers have this dream of changing the world, I think that all we can do is bear witness by telling stories that don’t otherwise get heard, and hope that this makes the world a better place in some way.

7. When you’re reporting abroad, do you travel light because you’re not always sure what’s going to happen, or do you bring a lot of things so that you are always prepared? What are some essentials you always carry with you?

I always plan to travel light and never do. I always have my laptop, camera, lenses, tripod and a pile of books that weighs down my baggage. A short-wave radio is also always there. I don’t use it often, but it keeps me in touch with what’s happening in the world. On a journey into the Sahara in Mali in January, I returned to Timbuktu to discover that President Obama had been inaugurated as president. I’d had no idea because I’d just returned from a place where there was no electricity and no sense of the great moments in history that were occurring beyond the desert. And of course I always carry with me a photo of my wife and young daughter.

8. What are you reading right now?
I always have at least three books on the go at any one time. Right now I’m reading JMG Le Clézio’s recently translated Desert, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s The Thing Around Your Neck, and, for the fourth or fifth time, Peter Matthiessen’s African classic The Tree Where Man Was Born.

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