lately

Since my last we have had

a)      the Sea Olympics, which, aside from an opening invocation from our now departed (for vacation) and much missed senior crew member, Kostas, quoting Homer and referring to matters of honor and sportspersonship, in no particular way resembled any other Olympics I have ever heard of (though, having been eliminated in a matter of seconds from the only event in which I participated, three-legged dodge ball, I may not be the best commentator on the event),

b)      two days of classes in the midst of what must be, for the faculty and perhaps the students, the most challenging part of the voyage, with class sessions only sporadically between extended stays in various Asian ports,

c)       the Talent Show, which, while exhibiting extraordinary skills in dance, music, comedy, etc., seemed to me most remarkable for its duration, of a kind I’d previously, in the cultural realm, associated only with Wagner,

d)      a day devoted to preparation for Vietnam, which showed off our educational capacities at their best: a splendid overview from Ted Farmer, one of America’s foremost experts on the history of Asia; a one-of-a-kind interview with Senator Chuck Robb and Mrs. Lynda Johnson Robb about their experiences during the American war in Vietnam; similar reflections from our marketing professor, Donald Howard, who served in the air force; and very moving reflections from two students and one resident director of Vietnamese descent, including recollections of their family members’ experience during the evacuation of Saigon, followed that evening by brilliant preparatory talks on Singapore from Farmer (again), business professor Molly Takeda, and M.I.T. anthropologist Stefan Helmreich (the last of these perhaps the most impressive performance of the voyage so far, in my opinion, and I say that not only because the Hotel Director told me the next morning that he’d liked it and assumed it had been I who’d given it), and

e)      a day, yesterday, in Singapore, which left a young member of my family perplexed as to whether he liked the food better there or in India, a quandary that, as I’m sure you’ll agree, every young person must come to be faced with at some time or other.

We’ll reach Saigon in two days.  The sea’s calm, aside from the occasional floating by of large red oil drums (!), and, at lunch, a school of dolphins swimming in the ship’s wake on the starboard side.

 

after India

Just two observations about our students as we lose the lights of India:

 

1)      My family and I went to Kathikali performances on successive nights and by unlikely (so the director at the second performance assured me) coincidence happened to see the same scene performed by two different companies.  Both were astonishing—the form belies everything I’ve tended to assume about drama, in spite of my having received good, relevant tutelage by folks who know better, and I’ll need to start over, in a way, now—so that the most apparent difference was between the two audiences.  Our students, confronted with something new and, to most of our eyes, very strange, with all kinds of baffling cues about gender, language, and bodily movement, both behaved well and clearly got it.  The next night, a crowd of French adults whistled and hooted and misbehaved and clearly hadn’t a clue what they were seeing. 

2)      Tonight the usual post-port “reflection” was a bit different from the usual: we had an hour beforehand in which students and faculty presented work they’d done in India, and then the usual “sharing” that happens on most such nights at 8 PM was replaced by small group discussion.  The students were very impressive at both—none more so, clearly, than the “gap year” student who (I’ll not name her here because I haven’t asked her permission) under the auspices of a Presidential scholarship is doing research on women’s issues in the various reports and gave a powerful talk about her interviews in India with victims of sex trafficking. It was the kind of serious undergraduate work one would hope would go on in a program like this.

 

At the end of the first session there was a splendid exchange between two members of our faculty, John Downing and Chandra Ranade, about the value of “anecdotes”—which are, after all, the best we sometimes muster, any of us, students or faculty, during these short visits—and about how they can lead, under the best of circumstances, to further research.  We none of us, those of us (like I) who stayed in Kerala and others who traveled far, saw much of India.  But we all saw enough to bring something back, to bring something to bear.  The headline in Wednesday’s Hindu, reporting on a new census, reads, “Half of India’s homes have cellphones, not toilets.”  How do these things happen?  How do they get undone, improved?  One way, I suppose, is that someone says, “This is so,” and some others then say—John Downing talked about Naipaul and the million mutinies—“This must change.”  And a long time after, maybe, something different this way comes.  One way to hear the “This is so” would be to ask a student.  It’s best when it comes from them.

calm

We have had, knock on wood, calm seas for a bit now: their sunny, flat beauty is a lovely luxury.  There is, accordingly, something of a routine to our regular class days by now too—we have passed, or are passing, through midterms, and people are getting a clearer sense of where we all are, academically and otherwise.  By tomorrow the run-up to arrival in the next port will begin in earnest, but really it has already begun, because two “interport students” from India have been with us since Mauritius.  They were just here in my office to talk about their role in tomorrow’s cultural pre-port briefing (our ritual for our second night before any port), and when I asked them what they might say about how Semester at Sea has struck them, they took great delight in celebrating the openness of American students.  For just a second I was able, for one of the rare times on this voyage, to remember myself at 20 and to recall how the English and Irish students I met then would comment on our American “openness,” our splendid self-serving naïve Yankee gab. 

 

There is also, I confess, a little shadow over this sequence of the voyage, occasioned by some bad behavior during our brief stay in Mauritius.  But that is being processed in a steady, deliberate way, and there is reason to hope that it will have been only an unhappy exception.

 

The best ‘the-dog-at-my-homework’ excuse I have ever received came about 15 months ago, when I was having to pester all the faculty on our voyage to submit their syllabi for approval by the relevant UVA departments.  One among them, Rob Thomas, an astonishingly accomplished professor from Montana-Western, explained that he was about to leave for Nepal to train sherpa guides in geology; he’d be on or near Mt. Everest for some weeks and wouldn’t have an internet connection—could his syllabus be a little late?  Well, yes.  He’ll be lecturing about his experience in Nepal in the Union tonight after dinner.

a passage to India

My silence here has a simple and unhappy explanation: beginning two days short of Cape Town the heavy seas began to get to me, and between Cape Town and Mauritius—which we left earlier today—I alternated my required sessions here at the desktop computer, or at the nearby table where I meet with students faculty and staff, with recuperative sessions in bed.  I am hoping that perhaps I may now have found the right sized patch to allow me to be both awake enough and other than ill enough so that I can fulfill my duties.  But with that very sentence the boat resumed its steady rocking—big waves now, and my desk chair wants to lurch back, and my desk drawers have already swung open.  We’ll see.

 

Cape Town’s, and South Africa’s, combination of a horrific political and social past, and a not much redeemed present, with astonishing natural wonders is hard to put together in one.  It needs instead half a dozen headings or more.  Our morning spent in Mauritius—which, as you may know—came, because of the heavy seas, a full day late, was half so long as originally scheduled, and came only after we had announced on the ship that no disembarkation was possible: that seems a much clearer and digestible (if I can, without excessive risk, use that word just now) mélange.  Or rather it was such an extraordinary mix of so many elements—Chinese, India, African, European—that, especially given the brevity of our visit, it seemed much easier simply to take as a mélange, an impressive one, a moving one, but a kind of quick glance at a collage, the individual materials of which will have to be returned to at another time.

 

But now, per Whitman:

 

Passage to more than India! 

O secret of the earth and sky! 235

Of you, O waters of the sea! O winding creeks and rivers! 

Of you, O woods and fields! Of you, strong mountains of my land! 
Of you, O prairies! Of you, gray rocks! 

O morning red! O clouds! O rain and snows!  O day and night, passage to you! 240   

 

O sun and moon, and all you stars! Sirius and Jupiter!  Passage to you!    

 

Passage—immediate passage! the blood burns in my veins! 

Away, O soul! hoist instantly the anchor! 

Cut the hawsers—haul out—shake out every sail! 245

Have we not stood here like trees in the ground long enough? 

Have we not grovell’d here long enough, eating and drinking like mere brutes? 

Have we not darken’d and dazed ourselves with books long enough?

 

Well, no.  But give us time…

 

 

fins

All afternoon yesterday you could see, if you looked closely, little pops on the ocean’s surface, followed each time by a strange skidding, hovering that shortly disappeared back into the water: little diving birds, I thought at first, but no, they were too small; little flying fish they were, lots of them, using the surface to escape (so one of our scientists explained to me) our big hulking ship.  Yesterday a faculty member saw a hammerhead shark, and someone else saw a whale up ahead.  And this morning I glanced up from my computer screen here just long enough to see fins—several, I thought, looking, at their distance, as if they made up one big beast’s back (so this is how those sea monsters got their shapes on the old maps), but no, I think they were a group of dolphins, on their way.

 

These days and the time when we return to the ship after Cape Town are mid-term time here, with lots of papers due, lots of exams scheduled, a certain amount of tension all around, the first time on the voyage when the halls of the Explorer have really reminded me of what I know from previous semesters at other schools—with the main difference being our steady swaying and rolling.

Reading the DAILY GRAPHIC

I’m months away, I think, from being able to say anything about Ghana that I’d trust: none of the assumptions that I’m used to relying on about time, about poverty, about religion, about government services, etc. seem to hold in the same ways there, and some of what I saw—at the slave dungeons at Elmina and Cape Coast and on the half-built highways passing the businesses that some might use to illustrate Ghana’s status as a kind of model of development—so fully dispenses with basic historical narratives I’ve relied on, that I’d need to reconstruct them or assemble news ones before I could begin a sentence with the words “Ghana is….”

 

But there is something I think I can now say about Semester at Sea as a program.  I think my experience during the time the ship was docked at Tema might have been in some ways typical: I went on two SAS-run field trips and made two other trips into Accra, one in a private car and one on the shuttle that SAS had arranged to take people from the dock.  Some students may have made more such trips, but I’d guess that quite a few had approximately the same number I had.  And here’s what I find: having picked up Thursday’s edition of the Daily Graphic, the main newspaper, I have enough knowledge now to understand a bit of the context for the great majority of the stories.  Here on page 1 is something about the government fraud scandal that we were told about by a State Department official who boarded and briefed us the morning we arrived; the lead article is about the ceremonial opening of the “George Walker Bush Motorway,” built with a Millennium grant from the US, which was described by the guide on the bus that took me and others on that highway on our way to the dungeons.  Inside, there is a full page headed “Tamale in Focus,” a set of articles about the place where our Ghanaian interport visitor Sheriff Ghale is from.  And a page of “Regional news” describes a workshop designed “to encourage the use of local languages,” a seminar on “electronic waste,” and a forum on maternal care: each of these relate to topics discussed in particular courses offered on the ship. 

 

Semester at Sea, as a study-abroad program, faces reasonable skepticism about its relatively brief stays in various countries.  But if the quality of the programming is such so that it can render legible the crucial events of the times and places of its visits—even if that is but a passing knowledge, which mightn’t be expected to apply if the same newspaper were picked up a year later—then, as a series of comparative experiences, the knowledge it is offering seems to me to have real traction.  As in any kind of education, the responsibility must ultimately fall upon the student to retain the knowledge and to build upon it: it will be up to our students to extend the ship’s teaching, and their in-port experiences, so that the same set of newspapers (or web sites, or briefing memos) could in fact legible to them some time from now.  But the slice of Ghana’s present to which we were exposed, coming in between similar slices from Manaus and Cape Town, seems to me to have been an extraordinary privilege.  And if my experience was at all typical, the mnemonic force of what we saw, heard, and did seems likely to make a lifetime of building upon the brief visit to Ghana almost unavoidable.

 

We sailed yesterday past the Prime Meridian.  I’m told that the captain and the crew made jokes about making sure none of us would miss the spot—that there is a buoy there, that one can pick up mail at that buoy, etc.  No, it’s not easy to spot these things.  But that doesn’t mean that they aren’t, in some important sense, there.

 

Neptune

The musician and educator Sheriff Ghale’s time on the ship has been a miracle of sorts: he has done more, and done more well, and done more good, than any person could reasonably have been expected to do in the same circumstances.  Having arrived just as seas got rough, he had to contend with the same seasickness as most of the rest of us—which scuttled the first rehearsal of the little faculty band we’d organized for him to use to demonstrate to the rest of us what he was hoping to work on musically during his stay.  But a day later he was up and around and making fine things happen.  He has visited, by my count, twelve different classes, speaking about Ghana in relation to subjects ranging from social media to sexuality to prayer.  And his performances in our big lecture hall, the Union, have been awe-inspiring. 

 

Take this past Wednesday: from 8 to 9 PM he gave a talk on the Ghanaian music industry, drawing on his own experiences to help us understand the cultural and economic differences between Southern Ghana, which has been the focus of most of the country’s population growth and development, and Northern Ghana, where he is from, which has had much less; then from 9 to 10 PM, he offered a musical tribute to Bob Marley (whose birthday had passed on the day of our highest swells) that was beautiful and moving.  I know I’ve never before seen anyone give a compelling lecture and then immediately give an equally compelling concert—it was astonishing, all of it. 

 

Then, the next night, having visited five different classes that day alone, he collaborated with our two Brazilian students, two other students, and our ethnomusicologist, Julie Strand, on a comparison, via performance, between Brazilian and West African music.  He’ll speak tonight on a panel alongside Professor Strand, Professor Chandra Ranade (who has done substantial work for the World Bank in Ghana), and our visiting Ghanaian student, this comprising our usual “cultural pre-port,” letting everyone know what to anticipate by the way of food, opportunities. Everyone on the ship’s quite excited about our arrival in Ghana, not just because of the excitement of the destination but because we’ve been now a long while on the Amazon and the Atlantic.  Yet for all that happy anticipation, we have—or at least I have—been relishing the disorientation or reorientation of being surrounded by nothing but sea all this week.  A few minutes ago I glanced up and saw, for the first time in a week, a passing ship, and I felt mildly offended, as if it had trespassed on the long vista I’d grown accustomed to.

 

Neptune Day has come and gone since my last posting.  The students and many others celebrated it with gusto: as per ‘tradition,’ many submitted themselves to being doused in (faux) fish entrails, and a somewhat smaller number (64, I think I heard, including at least one faculty member) had their heads partly or completely shaved.  (The Spa on board offered to finish the job cleanly for five bucks a pop, and I’m told they had many takers.) Many students, perhaps all of them, posed individually with my fellow dean Bob Vieira in his King Neptune garb—he was very green and carried a trident.  I offered the following ceremonial welcome, which reflects, among other things, how intense are my football loyalties and how limited is my recollection of my high school Latin :

O Deus Neptunes, omnes nobis bowus downus ad tuus, Grandis Kahuna.  Protectamos nos de grandis aqua et maximi swellami; non compelus ad vomitus nos pasta.  Tuus potentia magis grandis sum qui Bob Vieiraus. Non subsudo nos in ignominus disgracis patheticus cum New Englandus Patrioti.  Permitti nos ad cruces vos mari cum securito and felicito et interdum Dies Taco.  Gratitudum accepto di tutti ad Semesterio ad Mario.

 

The hair will grow back before we reach San Diego, but what is even more reassuring about Neptune Day is the way, in spite of its being so atypical, it fit in with the agenda here.  Technically (if that’s ever the right word to apply to this kind of fête), and according to genuine tradition, Neptune Day ought to happen on the day we first cross the Equator: it was delayed to suit the academic schedule.  By the time it was done, students could be found all around the ship settling down to read, and by 4 PM that day they were all in their discussion groups for the Global Studies course, the first of four such sessions on the voyage. I visited quite a few discussions and found them serious, intense, and productive.  And that night we were all in the Union for Sheriff’s double-presentation.  It’s possible to brook, even to encourage, a good bit of the festive here (I will admit that I served the other night on the ‘panel’ for a kind of mock game show, based on distinguishing the real definitions of words from ones we’d made up, called Liars Club, complete with an emcee, loud music, and—for others, anyway—zany garb), because the default seems to be a good level of engagement.  Attendance at optional academic programs in the evenings has been very high—my administrative colleagues who are veterans, between them, of many previous voyages, tell me they’ve never seen it so consistently high; the drop-in writing center, a relatively new part of Semester at Sea, is doing steady and intense business; the students who come to see me about administrative problems are thinking, all the while, about substantive ones. 

 

Last night Prof. Ranade modestly concluded his quite wonderful lecture on recent Ghanaian economic history by saying that the hard work that he and his team of three fellow World Bank economists had done in Ghana over the years could not match what the 750 of us might do by way of observation and analysis when we get there next week.  It was a precise and as a profound account of what this program’s potential as I have yet heard.