Men Of Maize Quotes

...condemning Nyasha to whoredom, making her a victim of her femaleness, just as I had felt victimised at home in the days when Nhamo went to school and I grew my maize. The victimisation, I saw, was universal. It didn't depend on poverty, on lack of education or on tradition. It didn't depend on any of the things I had thought it depended on. Men took it everywhere with them. Even heroes like Babamukuru did it. And that was the problem. You had to admit Nyasha had no tact. You had to admit she was altogether too volatile and strong-willed. You couldn't ignore the fact that she had no respect for Babamukuru when she ought to have had lots of it. But what I didn't like was the way that all conflicts came back to the question of femaleness. Femaleness as opposed and inferior to maleness.

However life treats you, as time goes by you always get the feeling you've lost life in the very living of it.

In prison there's no bad, everything's worse. Worse bellyache, worse misery, worse sadness--the worst of the worst. Jailers and judges seem like people without reason, deranged. Compliance with rules and regulations which have nothing to do with reality turns them into madmen, at least they seem such to those not under the strange influence of the law.

Down in the valleys women scratch the soil that is left, and the maize hardly reaches the height if a man. They are valleys of old men and old women, of mothers and children. The men are away, the young men and the girls are away, the soil cannot keep them any more.

Moreno, Morelos, Cantine, Gomez, Gutierrez, Villanousul, Ureta, Licon, Navarro, Iturbi; Jorge, Filomena, Nena, Manuel, Jose, Tomas, Ramona. This man walked and this man sang and this man had three wives; and this man died of this, and that of that, and the third from another thing, and the fourth was shot, and the fifth was stabbed and the sixth fell straight down dead; and the seventh drank deep and died dead, and the eighth died in love, and the ninth fell from him horse, and the tenth coughed blood, and the eleventh stopped his heart, and the twelfth used to laugh much, and the thirteenth was a dancing one, and the fourteenth was most beautiful of all, the fifteenth had ten children and the sixteenth is one of those children as is the seventeenth; and the eighteenth was Tomas and did well with his guitar; the next three cut maize in their fields, had three lovers each; the twenty-second was never loved; the twenty-third sold tortillas, patting and shaping them each at the curb before the Opera House with her little charcoal stove; and the twenty-fourth beat his wife and now she walks proudly in the town and is merry with new men and here he stands bewildered by this unfair thing, and the twenty-fifth drank several quarts of river with his lungs and was pulled forth in a net, and the twenty-sixth was a great thinker and his brain now sleeps like a burnt plum in his skull.

And they shall offer thanks to the earth where all people dwell — To the streams of water, the pools, the springs, and the lakes; to the maize and the fruits — To the medicinal herbs and the trees, to the forest trees for their usefulness, to the animals that serve as food and who offer their pelts as clothing — To the great winds and the lesser winds; to the Thunderers; and the Sun, the mighty warrior; to the moon — To the messengers of the Great Spirit who dwells in the skies above, who gives all things useful to men, who is the source and the ruler of health and life.

The eyelashes droop a little in the dark, ageless, vulnerable faces. The drum is a heart beating with insistent thuds. And the spirits of the men go out on the ether, vibrating in waves from the hot, dark, intentional blood, seeking the creative presence that hovers for ever in the ether, seeking the identification, following on down the mysterious rhythms of the creative pulse, on and on into the germinating quick of the maize that lies under the ground, there, with the throbbing, pulsing, clapping rhythm that comes from the dark, creative blood in man, to stimulate the tremulous, pulsating protoplasm in the seed-germ, till it throws forth its rhythms of creative energy into rising blades of leaf and stem.

Ah, Jerry. All my ideas are the same old scam: the bigger the fib, the bigger they bite. The first shamans around the fire were in on it – they knew growing maize along the Euphrates was for mugs. Tell people that reality is exactly what it appears to be, they’ll nail you to a lump of wood. But tell ’em they can go spirit-walking while they commute, tell ’em their best friend is a lump of crystal, tell ’em the government has been negotiating with little green men for the last fifty years, then every Joe Six-Pack from Brooklyn to Peoria sits up and listens. Disbelieving the reality under your feet gives you a licence to print your own. All it takes is an original twist – an artificial intelligence, created by the military to invade and take over the enemy’s computer and weapons systems, has broken loose and is controlling the whole planet with a chilling agenda of its own – and Joe Six-Pack hands you his credits cards, and says “Tell me more . . .

This Compost" Something startles me where I thought I was safest, I withdraw from the still woods I loved, I will not go now on the pastures to walk, I will not strip the clothes from my body to meet my lover the sea, I will not touch my flesh to the earth as to other flesh to renew me. O how can it be that the ground itself does not sicken? How can you be alive you growths of spring? How can you furnish health you blood of herbs, roots, orchards, grain? Are they not continually putting distemper'd corpses within you? Is not every continent work'd over and over with sour dead? Where have you disposed of their carcasses? Those drunkards and gluttons of so many generations? Where have you drawn off all the foul liquid and meat? I do not see any of it upon you to-day, or perhaps I am deceiv'd, I will run a furrow with my plough, I will press my spade through the sod and turn it up underneath, I am sure I shall expose some of the foul meat. 2 Behold this compost! behold it well! Perhaps every mite has once form'd part of a sick person—yet behold! The grass of spring covers the prairies, The bean bursts noiselessly through the mould in the garden, The delicate spear of the onion pierces upward, The apple-buds cluster together on the apple-branches, The resurrection of the wheat appears with pale visage out of its graves, The tinge awakes over the willow-tree and the mulberry-tree, The he-birds carol mornings and evenings while the she-birds sit on their nests, The young of poultry break through the hatch'd eggs, The new-born of animals appear, the calf is dropt from the cow, the colt from the mare, Out of its little hill faithfully rise the potato's dark green leaves, Out of its hill rises the yellow maize-stalk, the lilacs bloom in the dooryards, The summer growth is innocent and disdainful above all those strata of sour dead. What chemistry! That the winds are really not infectious, That this is no cheat, this transparent green-wash of the sea which is so amorous after me, That it is safe to allow it to lick my naked body all over with its tongues, That it will not endanger me with the fevers that have deposited themselves in it, That all is clean forever and forever, That the cool drink from the well tastes so good, That blackberries are so flavorous and juicy, That the fruits of the apple-orchard and the orange-orchard, that melons, grapes, peaches, plums, will none of them poison me, That when I recline on the grass I do not catch any disease, Though probably every spear of grass rises out of what was once a catching disease. Now I am terrified at the Earth, it is that calm and patient, It grows such sweet things out of such corruptions, It turns harmless and stainless on its axis, with such endless successions of diseas'd corpses, It distills such exquisite winds out of such infused fetor, It renews with such unwitting looks its prodigal, annual, sumptuous crops, It gives such divine materials to men, and accepts such leavings from them at last.

TOTALITARIANISM: People are interested in ants because they think they have managed to create a successful totalitarian system. Certainly, the impression we get from the outside is that everyone in the anthill works, everyone is obedient, everyone is ready to sacrifice themselves and everyone is the same. And for the time being, all human totalitarian systems have failed. That is why we thought of copying social insects (like Napoleon, whose emblem was the bee). The pheromones that flood the anthill with global information have an equivalent in the planetary television of today. There is a widespread belief that if the best is made available to all, one day we will end up with a perfect human race. That is not the way of things. Nature, with all due respect to Mr Darwin, does not evolve in the direction of the supremacy of the best (according to which criteria, anyway?). Nature draws its strength from diversity. It needs all kinds of people, good, bad, mad, desperate, sporty, bed-ridden, hunchbacked, hare-lipped, happy, sad, intelligent, stupid, selfish, generous, small, tall, black, yellow, red and white. It needs all religions, philosophies, fanaticisms and wisdom. The only danger is that any one species may be eliminated by another. In the past, fields of maize artificially designed by men and made up of clones of the best heads (the ones that need least water, are most frost-resistant or produce the best grains) have suddenly succumbed to trivial infections while fields of wild maize made up of several different strains, each with its own peculiar strengths and weaknesses, have always managed to survive epidemics. Nature hates uniformity and loves diversity. It is in this perhaps that its essential genius lies. Edmond Wells Encyclopedia of Relative and Absolute Knowledge

Remarkably, we still have a ‘wild’ Indian’s account of his capture and incarceration. In 1878, when he was an old man, a Kamia called Janitin told an interviewer: I and two of my relatives went down ... to the beach ... we did no harm to anyone on the road, and ... we thought of nothing more than catching and drying clams in order to carry them to our village. While we were doing this, we saw two men on horseback coming rapidly towards us; my relatives were immediately afraid and they fled with all speed, hiding themselves in a very dense willow grove ... As soon as I saw myself alone, I also became afraid ... and ran to the forest ... but already it was too late, because in a moment they overtook me and lassoed and dragged me for a long distance, wounding me much with the branches over which they dragged me, pulling me lassoed as I was with their horses running; after this they roped me with my arms behind and carried me off to the Mission of San Miguel, making me travel almost at a run in order to keep up with their horses, and when I stopped a little to catch my wind, they lashed me with the lariats that they carried, making me understand by signs that I should hurry; after much travelling in this manner, they diminished the pace and lashed me in order that I would always travel at the pace of the horses. When we arrived at the mission, they locked me in a room for a week; the father [a Dominican priest] made me go to his habitation and he talked to me by means of an interpreter, telling me that he would make me a Christian, and he told me many things that I did not understand, and Cunnur, the interpreter, told me that I should do as the father told me, because now I was not going to be set free, and it would go very bad with me if I did not consent in it. They gave me atole de mayz[corn gruel] to eat which I did not like because I was not accustomed to that food; but there was nothing else to eat. One day they threw water on my head and gave me salt to eat, and with this the interpreter told me that I was now Christian and that I was called Jesús: I knew nothing of this, and I tolerated it all because in the end I was a poor Indian and did not have recourse but to conform myself and tolerate the things they did with me. The following day after my baptism, they took me to work with the other Indians, and they put me to cleaning a milpa [cornfield] of maize; since I did not know how to manage the hoe that they gave me, after hoeing a little, I cut my foot and could not continue working with it, but I was put to pulling out the weeds by hand, and in this manner I did not finish the task that they gave me. In the afternoon they lashed me for not finishing the job, and the following day the same thing happened as on the previous day. Every day they lashed me unjustly because I did not finish what I did not know how to do, and thus I existed for many days until I found a way to escape; but I was tracked and they caught me like a fox; there they seized me by lasso as on the first occasion, and they carried me off to the mission torturing me on the road. After we arrived, the father passed along the corridor of the house, and he ordered that they fasten me to the stake and castigate me; they lashed me until I lost consciousness, and I did not regain consciousness for many hours afterwards. For several days I could not raise myself from the floor where they had laid me, and I still have on my shoulders the marks of the lashes which they gave me then.

These New World practices (enslavement and genocide) formed another secret link with the anti-human animus of mechanical industry after the sixteenth century, when the workers were no longer protected either by feudal custom or by the self-governing guild. The degradations undergone by child laborers or women during the early nineteenth century in England's 'satanic mills' and mines only reflected those that took place during the territorial expansion of Western man. In Tasmania, for example, British colonists organized 'hunting parties' for pleasure, to slaughter the surviving natives: a people more primitive, scholars believe, than the Australian natives, who should have been preserved, so to say, under glass, for the benefit of later anthropologists. So commonplace were these practices, so plainly were the aborigines regarded as predestined victims, that even the benign and morally sensitive Emerson could say resignedly in an early poem, 1827: "Alas red men are few, red men are feeble, They are few and feeble and must pass away." As a result Western man not merely blighted in some degree every culture that he touched, whether 'primitive' or advanced, but he also robbed his own descendants of countless gifts of art and craftsmanship, as well as precious knowledge passed on only by word of mouth that disappeared with the dying languages of dying peoples. With this extirpation of earlier cultures went a vast loss of botanical and medical lore, representing many thousands of years of watchful observation and empirical experiment whose extraordinary discoveries-such as the American Indian's use of snakeroot (reserpine) as a tranquilizer in mental illness-modern medicine has now, all too belatedly, begun to appreciate. For the better part of four centuries the cultural riches of the entire world lay at the feet of Western man; and to his shame, and likewise to his gross self-deprivation and impoverishment, his main concern was to appropriate only the gold and silver and diamonds, the lumber and pelts, and such new foods (maize and potatoes) as would enable him to feed larger populations.

forced to join the fighting, which was why their families and communities—including Salva’s schoolmaster—had sent the boys running into the bush at the first sign of fighting. Children who arrived at the refugee camp without their families were grouped together, so Salva was separated at once from the people he had traveled with. Even though they had not been kind to him, at least he had known them. Now, among strangers once again, he felt uncertain and maybe even afraid. As he walked through the camp with several other boys, Salva glanced at every face he passed. Uncle had said that no one knew where his family was for certain . . . so wasn’t there at least a chance that they might be here in the camp? Salva looked around at the masses of people stretched out as far as he could see. He felt his heart sink a little, but he clenched his hands into fists and made himself a promise. If they are here, I will find them. After so many weeks of walking, Salva found it strange to be staying in one place. During that long, terrible trek, finding a safe place to stop and stay for a while had been desperately important. But now that he was at the camp, he felt restless—almost as if he should begin walking again. The camp was safe from the war. There were no men with guns or machetes, no planes with bombs overhead. On the evening of his very first day, Salva was given a bowl of boiled maize to eat, and another one the next morning. Already things were better here than they had been during the journey. During the afternoon of the second day, Salva picked his way slowly through the crowds. Eventually, he found himself standing near the gate that was the main entrance to the camp, watching the new arrivals enter. It did not seem as if the camp could possibly hold any more, but still they kept coming: long lines of people, some emaciated, some hurt or sick, all exhausted. As Salva scanned the faces, a flash of orange caught his eye. Orange . . . an orange headscarf . . . He began pushing and stumbling past people. Someone spoke to him angrily, but he did not stop to excuse himself. He could still see the vivid spot of orange—yes, it was a headscarf—the woman’s back was to him, but she was tall, like his mother—he had to catch up, there were too many people in the way— A half-sob broke free from Salva’s lips. He mustn’t lose track of her! Chapter Twelve Southern Sudan, 2009

The species of grain eaten by men are brethren that have prevailed for millennia. If we omit rice—whose history is totally at variance with that of the other grains—there are six that man has used since primitive times. These are: millet, oats, barley, and wheat in the earliest period; rye since the late classic period; and maize or Indian corn since the discovery of America. These six brethren have fed the world for nearly ten thousand years.

Texcoco and Azcapotzalco, where peoples lived on maize and beans, cooking tamales and tortillas, drinking alcoholic pulque made from the agave cactus (much weaker than tequila and fermented rather than distilled). Women spun cotton textiles; men farmed and fought – they deployed neither metal nor the wheel but their children’s toys had wheels; they used rubber mixed with the sap of morning glory (a process not discovered in the west until the nineteenth century) to make balls for their games. In the absence of metal, they crafted obsidian volcanic glass for their weapons.

To the kids, this extravagant convoy might even seem normal. They’ll have to see ordinary trains, at other times in other places, do you realise just how magical this caravan of gypsies is. A few years in Europe will suffice for them to recreate the landscapes handed down to them by their patriarchs and discover that their life is just a chronicle foretold. Then these men of maize will only have to write well to get the Nobel Prize for poems of love and songs of despair.

Thirty-eight of the seventy-three households in Mashai reported that they brewed and sold beer at least six times in the last year. Many brewed far more often than that, and some brewed once a week or even more. Brewing can bring in a significant amount of money. Most often about forty liters were brewed at a time, which could be sold for between M4 and M10 depending on the quality of the beer. The ingredients, which included a washbasin full of sorghum and a small bowl of maize meal for each forty liter batch, usually cost less than M1, so it was possible for a diligent brewer to net as much as M5, M10, or even more per week from beer. For many households which lacked wage labor, beer brewing was the main source of income (see Gay 1980a for an account of the economics and sociology of brewing in a lowland village). Beer brewing, like many other economic activities through which women support themselves, must be understood not simply as a productive activity, but as a mechanism of redistribution. Beer is sold only to local villagers, predominantly men, and brewing is first of all a way of obtaining access to the cash earnings of employed men. Production of beer is directly stimulated by the presence within the village of men with money to buy it, and it is best understood as one of a number of possible ways for women to get a piece of that money. Brewing is thus very much a dependent or derived form of production; without migrant labor, the villagers of Mashai could no more support themselves through beer brewing than Mark Twain’s famous townsmen could support themselves by taking in each other’s laundry. Understood in this way, it is easy to see why brewing is as much a social skill as a technical one, and why one’s ability to make money by brewing is not a simple matter of the amount of beer one produces. Beer drinking is the main social event in the village for men, and it goes on in small or large groups every day. To sell a lot of beer a woman must be a cheerful and congenial hostess, and have a strong social position in the village. Making money on beer requires the same kinds of skills and social assets as throwing a successful party. It is thus a form of economic activity which is deeply embedded in the social relations of the village. I shall return to this point later.