Public (E-Journal, York University)

Culley, Peter

A Bustle in Your Hedgerow: Long Beach, Led Zeppelin and the West Coast Sublime

Mahovsky, Trevor

Thinking Punching

Ger, Güliz

English

The Delights and Discontents of Shopping

Madzima, Munya

Garrett, Rebecca

The Woman with the Box 
A conversation between Munya Madzima and Rebecca Garrett 
Munya Madzima is a sculptor/painter/performance artist who exhibits 
internationally and is currently completing his Master's in Visual Art at 
York University in Toronto, Canada. Rebecca Garrett is a videographer, 
photographer and installation artist and teaches at the Ontario College of 
Art and Design in Toronto, Canada. The two artists met in Harare in 
1990, and have recorded conversations about cross-cultural issues regu- 
larly since then, in both Zimbabwe and Canada. The following is a tran- 
script of a conversation that occurred recently during a discussion of 
Garrett's photographs of the Siya so market in Harare. 
R: Did I show you an issue of Public? This is the magazine we're thinking 
of putting the photos in, and as you can see it's a very nice, well-produced 
magazine. We talked earlier about art work that is made from found or 
recycled materials out of a situation of economic or political necessity, 
and then some funny things happen, there are shifts in meaning that occur 
when this work is put in an art gallery in the first world. And I'm just 
wondering if a similar thing will happen here. How do you think these 
photos would be read if you saw them in a magazine like this? 
M: Yes, it's a very beautiful magazine. I don't know the people who look 
at this type of magazine. 
R: I would think that the people who would buy it would be people who 
are educated in the world of art and invested in it in some way. I mean 
theoretically anybody can get it, just in the same way that anybody can go 
to an art gallery, but anybody doesn't go to an art gallery. So I'm wonder- 
ing if you think the photographs will immediately become exoticized? Is 
what you say about them going to change that? 
M: If people just come upon the photos they'll get a certain impression, 
but I think people will be really interested to find out what's behind them. 
People will make assumptions about what they're seeing and the people in 
them. Like this one, this woman is carrying a huge box and it's self- 
explanatory. It's showing the struggle that women go through on a daily 
basis and one would put themselves in this position and say "would I be 
able to function even?" So it's like bridging the world, saying that across 
the world there's something different going on and people should be 
aware of this, that people are struggling. 
R: But do you think there's another interpretation that people might have 
about the fact that she's African and she's got something here from Hong 
Kong that she's willing to struggle so hard for? Is that also a part of it? 
M: For me, if I saw this picture, I know because I lived there that this 
box has nothing to do with Hong Kong but it has to do with a container, 
you know? 
R: Well I'm assuming that there's a TV in there or something. A cassette 
deck. It says it right on it. 
(laughter) 
M: Yeah, a cassette deck model 204. (laughter) I know that, okay, it 
could be a container, it could be a real cassette deck, but I wouldn't read 
it as a cassette deck myself. 
R: You wouldn't assume that there is a cassette deck in there? 
M: No. 
R: Why? It's just a handy container you mean? 
M: Yeah, it could be any box with a label on it that originally had a cas- 
sette deck, but now.. . 
R: It could be full of tomatoes or whatever.. . 
M: Yes, because the issue of recycling is BIG there, it's so big. People find 
use for these things and that's what's going on, but people who are not 
aware of these things, the text is narrating its narrative. 
R: Because I think that someone here might see it as ironic, that she 
wants this cassette deck, that she's poor but she wants it so much that 
she's willing to take on this hardship. That she's aspiring to owning this 
cassette deck and there's some kind of irony in that. But you don't read it 
that way. 
M: I read it at a very basic kind of level but if I want to be smart and 
sneaky I could take it to that dimension, making it into, like I could theo- 
rize it. But right now I'm so close to this culture, to this people, that how 
can I possibly start thinking about theory or shifting what is so clear to 
me and giving it a certain meaning? But for someone from here there's so 
much going on with the Hong Kong text, there's narrative. If there wasn't 
that narrative she would just be carrying a box. 
R: Well there's just a disjunction of expectations around the things in the 
image I think. But you say you don't objectify the things in your culture in 
that way, to see them, and I'm curious about that because I think I do that 
all the time with my culture, all the time. I'm just constantly shifting the 
frame.. . like what I was saying earlier about the guys who have the sec- 
ond hand appliance store up the street and there's a way that they're just 
sort of obvious and I guess they were sort of invisible to me for years and 
years, they're just there and part of the culture, and then at some point I 
started to see them really differently, something shifted in the way I was 
seeing them, I think because as I got to know them better I realized that 
their way of life and livelihood was this kind of hereditary thing and 
when I lived on Queen Street I saw them when they weren't at work and 
were doing other things. And I guess I try to look at what's around me in 
different ways all the time, just because.. . I don't know why. 
M: Yeah, I do it too. Like, you were the one that shot this picture. If I 
was the one holding the camera, if I see a woman, a black woman carry- 
ing a box with a thing on it that says Hong Kong Cassette Deck model 
number 204, would I run and say "Wow look! She's carrying a cassette 
deck, wow." (laughter) It's true that the text and the subject and what's 
going on, it really makes a story you know. I'm sure you might have 
thought of it like that, I don't know what went through your mind. 
R: It's not even thought out like that, I immediately find it interesting 
and that's because of my own, where I'm coming from and my expecta- 
tions or assumptions that I make culturally because of where I'm coming 
from because I was an outsider there, and so then you're reading things 
from outside the culture. After 2 or 3 years of living there I saw things a 
lot of the time that sort of made sense in a certain way and then every 
now and then something just jumps out, because you don't know, you 
don't know-maybe that's what the interest is mainly, just not under- 
standing, so you go "Oh, what's that?" 
M: You know I can have the same feeling. If this woman was a white 
woman carrying the same box from Hong Kong on her head, I would run 
around and get a camera. 
(laughter) 
R: Exactly. And that's what's so interesting. I have a photo that I got 
someone to take for me, of Stephen Moyo's wife Cecilia and me, standing 
together. We're both facing the camera, we're both in exactly the same 
pose. And I have an African cloth wrapped as a skirt and she's wearing a 
European dress. And it's like we're both aspiring to these things about the 
other that neither of us are, but we want to be somehow, at this location. 
And I didn't think of that at  all till I'd been back here a few years. At the 
time it was just me and Cecilia, like a family photo, and it's only with the 
distance of time and geography that now I think oh that's so funny. 
M: Yeah. If 1 was to see that picture, immediately I would say "Wow, 
look at our culture that is disappearing. We are running to connect with 
the Western culture, whereas the people from the West are actually appre- 
ciating what we are running away from. 
This woman in the photograph is carrying a box and the text on the 
box has to do with a commodity that comes in from a different culture, 
which means that with globalization people are now clinging to these for- 
eign forms of communication or technology and people are now taking 
this as their culture and replacing a song or a cultural dance, the radio 
becomes the song, and because of the TV and radio, people want to 
become the people on TV, and these are very big issues. 
R: I agree, but now I'm wondering: if this was a man, we'd read it so dif- 
ferently, wouldn't we? Or would we? If it was a man carrying the box 
instead of a woman. 
M: Well there's the issue that in Africa women do a lot of the labour, and 
men do labour in the mines too but there's an idea in the culture that 
women do the labour. 
R: So if it was a man carrying the box, would you assume he was an 
exceptional man? Or would you assume that he was being paid to carry 
that box? 
M: Well, usually men don't carry things on their heads. So what happens 
as far as culture is concerned is that women have always been the ones 
who carry things on top of their heads. So it's like seeing a man carrying a 
baby on their back. Men do not carry babies on their backs, they carry 
them on their front and women carry babies on their backs. So if I saw a 
man carrying a baby on their back I would want to take a picture, I would 
run and say "Wow, let me take a picture of that man carrying a baby on 
his back." So now a man is carrying a box on his head and you're thinking 
what kind of a man is this? So that's about cultural issues now. 
I have a picture that I took a long time ago of a man carrying a child on 
his back. I happened to have a camera with me, and this guy was carrying 
a baby on his back just like a woman and he's wearing pants and every- 
thing. At that time women didn't wear pants in Zimbabwe so when I saw 
the man carrying the baby on his back I wondered "Is it a woman wearing 
pants?" And then I saw no, it's actually a guy. So I shot the picture and 
ran after him and took another and I thought "Wow this is so ironic!" 
R: So if a man was carrying the box, he'd have it where? On his shoulder? 
M: Yeah, he'd have it on his shoulder or in front, showing that he's 
strong, that he can do it. You know carrying it on the head solves a lot of 
problems, it's balanced and doesn't cause back damage. But men put it on 
their shoulder even though they suffer because they want to maintain that 
macho-ness, to show that they can actually do it. 
R: And do you think if it was a picture of a man carrying this same box 
on his shoulder, would we assume it's his box, in the way that when a 
woman carries it we assume it's her box? Or if it's a man do we think it's 
that he's a worker and that he's carrying it for someone else? 
M: Well actually I would   rob ably think that this guy might have bought 
this radio, I'd assume there's a radio in the box if it's a man carrying it. I'd 
think "Look, he's bought a radio, now what type of machine is it?" 
(laughter) 
R: Oh, I meant would we assume that it's not his box, that he's been 
hired by his boss to carry the box if it was a man. 
M: No, he might have bought that radio if he was a man. The reason I 
say that is because when women carry things on their heads, for cultural 
reasons it is a vessel, a container. That's the cultural aspect, that the 
things that are carried in these containers are things that don't have a 
connection to the outside part. Like a woman can be carrying a gourd but 
you don't know what's in the gourd. Like with this woman in the photo- 
graph, chances are it might be a radio, but it might not, because women 
carry different things inside containers. But with a man, they don't usu- 
ally carry boxes on top of their heads, so when they finally do it, it has to 
be something that is very important. 
Can I say one more thing about this box that we've gone so deeply 
into? The reason that this picture was taken could be the fact that the box 
has text on it, and if it didn't have text maybe it would be a struggling 
woman period. 
R: Yes, and I think it would be very different, perhaps more exotic for a 
Western audience without the text, because then it's just about a strug- 
gling African woman carrying things on her head, whereas the text brings 
up a whole different set of considerations. 
M: Yes, it reminds me of what happens when traditional cultures clash 
with globalization. So here there's this clash of culture, and you can see 
the way the woman is dressed, the cloth shows that this woman is 
inclined to her cultural way of dressing and it's clashing with globaliza- 
tion right away. 
So with this one, just because it's a black woman and she's struggling 
and she could be a relative or someone I know and maybe I've carried a 
similar container like this, so when I see this automatically I know this 
woman is struggling. She's carrying a box and it's heavy and she's taking it 
from point A to point B. And then when you start getting into layers now, 
you can say well we have objects from Hong Kong coming into the country 
now, and not only from Hong Kong. The TV has become.. . It was 1979 
that the TV hit Zimbabwe and it was black and white, and then in the 80's 
everyone wanted a TV, a colour TV. So if this was 1985 I might assume that 
she's carrying a TV, but now, at this point in time those things are outdated 
and it's just a box now. But for you I'm sure you'd see an issue, and people 
who will read the magazine, they can read it both ways, they have the 
choice to see it as a struggling woman, because you see the dress is really 
torn, so it shows that she's struggling and surviving, and someone else will 
think there's irony going on. So there's more than one way to read it. 
R: Yeah. I wonder how someone in Hong Kong would read it? 


The Woman with the Box

Contributors
Stephen Andrews is a Toronto-based artist *hg.-
has exhibited his work across Canada andThe
United States as well as in BraziI, Scg,fland,
France and Japan. His work deals witfl mem-
or5 identitn surveillance and their refresenta-
tions in various media. He is an ana[hronism
who still draws with a pencil becaus$ he can't
use Photoshop /
Karl Beveridge and Carole Cond6 live and work
in Toronto. They have collaborated with various
trade unions and community organizations in
the production of their staged photographic
work. Their work has been exhibited across
Canada and internationally. Recently it has been
included in exhibitions at the Massachusetts
Museum of Contemporary Art, the Canadian
Museum of Contemporary Photography, and
they will be producing a public art project with
the Edmonton Art Gailery in the fall of 2003.
Luke Bezuidenhout is a Zimbabwean writer
and artist. He is at present a resident artist at
the Surprise Art Centre.
Berry Bickle is an artist horr. Zimbabwe whose
trajectory has taken her from painting to work-
ing in collage, cloth, ceramics and mixed media
to installation works that deal with issues of
colonial intervention and identity. She has
exhibited at the Biennale de l'Art Africain Con-
temporain; Dieleman Gallerg Brussels; Centro
de Cultura Contemporania de Barcelona;
National Gallery, Harare; and the Centro
Atlantico de Art Moderno. Las Palmas.
Claude Closky is a French artist who works with
video, photography, the internet and drawing. He
has exhibited internationally and his work will be
shown at Location One, New York, in September
2003. He is represented by the galleries: Jennifer
Flay, Paris; Mehdi Chouakri, Berlin; and Edward
Mitterrand, Geneva. More information is avail-
able on his website: wwwsittes.net.
Christopher Cozier is an artist and writer living
and working in Trinidad. He has participated
in exhibitions in the Americas, Europe, and
Africa focused upon contemporary art in the
Caribbean. He works in collaboration with a
number of younger developing artists, designers
and illustrators, and the work consists of multi-
media projects involving sound, video, live per-
formances and installations, including
drawings, constructions and appropriated
obiects. The artist is currently working on
upcoming exhibitions at the Marlborough
Gallery in Madrid and at A-Space in Toronto.
The latter, curated by Andrea Fotona, will
include a video collaboration developed from
his installation, "The Attack of the Sandwich
men" with Canadian artist Richard Funs.
Vera Frenkel is a multidisciplinary artist whose
practice is rooted in an interrogation of the
abuses of power and their consequences,
exploring through her projects the forces at
work in human migration, the experience of
displacement and deracination, the learning
and unlearning of cultural memory, and the
bureaucratisation of everyday life. An animated
version ol her Messiah Project on the relation
between consumerism and fundamentalism,
originated in Newcastle, England and produced
by Artangel,was installed for five months on
the Piccadilly Circus Spectacolor Board in Lon-
don, England in 1,990-91,. A single channel
videoversion, This Is Yowr Messiah Speaking,rs
available through V Tape Distribution in
Toronto (wandav@vtape.org). Currently, Vera
Frenkel is the Leverhulme Visiting Professor at
the University of Leeds and her Body Missing
proiect (www.yorku.calBodyMissing), currently
installed at the Freud Museum, London, Eng-
land was the subject of an ICA conference ear-
lier this year.
t56
Liberman & Weinstein have collaborated on art 
projects since 2001, when they were married. 
Andsew Weinstein is an art historian, fiction 
writer, and contributing editor at Boulevard. 
Ruth Liberman, an artist and Ph.D, candidate at 
NYU, had her most recent exhibition at the Kof- 
fler Gallery, Toronto. Liberman & Weinstein are 
based in New York, where they only shop online. 
Munya Madzima was born in Zimbabwe and 
has exhibited locally and Internationally since 
1990. He has worked in sculpture, painting and 
photography, and is known for his work in 
installation, performance and kinetic art. Madz- 
ima is currently completing a Master of Visual 
Arts degree at York University in Toronto. 
David McIntosh teaches Media Studies at the 
Ontario College of Art and Design and is a pro- 
grammer for the Hot Docs International Docu- 
mentary Festival. He is currently completing his 
doctoral dissertation on globalization, cultural 
policy and media practices in Canada, Mexico 
and Argentina through the Communications 
and Culture Program at York University. 
Charles Mungoshi is a Zimbabwean writer. In 
1985-87 he was Writer in Residence at the Uni- 
versity of Zimbabwe, and since then has worked 
as a free-lance writer, script writer and editor. 
Mungoshi has written novels and short stories in 
both Shona and English, as well as two collec- 
tions of children's stories, Stories from a Shona 
Childhood and One Day Long Ago (Baobab 
Books, 1989 and 1991); the former won him the 
Noma Award. He has a collection of poetry: The 
Milkman doesn't only deliver Milk (Baobab 
Books, 1998). He has won the Commonwealth 
Writers Prize (Africa region) twice, in 1988 and 
1998, for two collections of short stories: The 
Setting Sun and the Rolling World (Heinemann, 
1987) and Walking Still (Baobab, 1997). 
Tom Sherman is a media artist, writer, and 
broadcaster. He knows the media environment 
from several perspectives, having worked in 
mainstream radio and television, but also hav- 
ing produced groundbreaking art with video 
gear, industrial robots, surveillance systems and 
telecommunications networks. He founded the 
Media Arts Section of The Canada Council for 
the Arts, co-founded Fuse magazine, and repre- 
sented Canada at the Venice Biennale. Sherman 
performs and records with the group Nerve 
Theory. He currently teaches media art history, 
theory, and practice at Syracuse University in 
New York, but considers Nova Scotia's South 
Shore his home. His contribution is reprinted 
from Before and After the I-Bomb: An Artist in 
the Information Environment, Banff Centre 
Press, 2002. 
Eileen Sommerman is a curator and art writer, 
and the former editor of C International Con- 
temporary Art. 
Stevi Stephens has been a migrant labourer in 
the groves of academe for most of her life. She 
has taught at  almost every university in British 
Columbia and Alberta in the past twenty years 
and now has permanent part-time positions at 
the College of the Rockies and the University of 
Victoria. She spent most of those years as a sin- 
gle mother and takes pride in the fact that nei- 
ther of her children is an axe murderer, or as 
her son says, "Not yet." 
Dot Tuer is a writer whose work focuses on the 
intersections of memory, history, and technol- 
ogy in Canadian and Latin American art and 
culture. A collection of her essays, The Making 
and Unmaking of History: Reflections on Con- 
temporary Art is forthcoming from YYZ Press. 
Tuer is Professor of Liberal Studies a t  the 
Ontario College of Art and Design. 
Deborah Root is a Toronto based writer and 
critic. She teaches art history at the University of 
Guelph, and is the author of Cannibal Culture: 
Art, Appropriation and the Commodification of 
Difference (Westview, 1996). 


Contributors

Contributors 
Writer and art critic Peter Culley lives in Nanaimo, on Vancouver Island. A 
collection of his poems entitled Hammertown was just published by New 
Star Press. Vancouver. 
Geoffrey Farmer is an artist living in Vancouver. He is represented by the 
Catriona Jeffries Gallery, Vancouver. 
Rodney Graham is an artist living in Vancouver. His upcoming retrospective A 
Little Thought will be touring in 2004105 at the Art Gallery of Ontario, The 
Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles and the Vancouver Art Gallery. 
His work appears here courtesy of Donald Young Gallery, Chcago. 
Peter Hudson is a doctoral candidate in American Studies at New York 
University. He currently lives in Brooklyn. 
Trevor Mahovsky is an artist and writer who lives and works in Vancouver. 
Phillip McCrum is an artist who lived in Belfast during 2001-2002 and in 
Hangzhou, China, from 2002-2003. He is recovering, teaching in the 
Department of Art of the University of Lethbridge. 
Michael Euyung Oh has presented his work in a solo show at the Or Gallery 
in 2002 and recently exhibited in group shows at Access Art Centre, Presen- 
tation House Gallery, and the Western Front. A graduate of the Emily Carr 
Institute of Art and Design, he is currently a MFA student at The University 
of British Columbia. 
Amy Pederson is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Art History of 
the University of California, Los Angeles. She travelled to Asia in 2001 on a 
Pre-Doctoral Fellowship for Summer Travel Abroad by Historians of American 
Art from the Center for the Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National 
Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. 
Marina Roy is Assistant Professor in the Department of Art History, Visual 
Art, and Theory at The University of British Columbia. Her book Sign After 
the X is available from Advance EditionsIArsenal Pulp Press and Artspeak 
Gallery. She will be exhibiting a collaborative video project with Natasha 
McHardy at the Or Gallery, Vancouver, in February 2004. 
Kevin Schmidt is an artist who lives and works in Vancouver. 
Steven Shearer is an artist living in Vancouver. 
Reid Shier is a curator at the Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver, and an 
artist and writer. 
Ron Terada is an artist based in Vancouver. Recent exhibitions and projects 
include "Baja to Vancouver: The West Coast and Contemporary Art", Seattle 
Art Museum, Defile Magazine, Art Metropole and YYZ Artists' Outlet, 
Toronto; "Big Toast", iprojects.org, Charles H. Scott Gallery, Vancouver. He 
is represented by Catriona Jeffries Gallery. 
Althea Thauberger is an artist whose photographic, performance, and 
video works often involve collaboration with their subjects. She lives and 
works in Vancouver. 
Michael Turner is an author living in Vancouver. His most recent novel is 
The  Pornographer's Poem (2002) published by Vintage Books Canada. 
Neil Wedman is an artist and singer who lives in Vancouver. 
William Wood is Assistant Professor in the Department of Art History, 
Visual Art, and Theory at The University of British Columbia. 


Gomez, Alberto

CHUKY 
Alberto Gomez 
This is a true story. It's not fiction, although it may seem like a black 
humour tale. It was late on Friday night when I arrived home and turned 
on the television to see what was happening. I had intended to watch the 
news for a few minutes and then finish an article for a deadline the next 
morning. The twenty-four hour news channel Cronica (the one with the 
marching band music and the red headlines filling the blank white screen 
flashing "4 DEAD" "4 DEAD" every time there is a robbery or an uprising) 
had a live image of hundreds of police in front of a local supermarket. I 
didn't pay much attention to it and began to change channels, but 
TeleNotica had the same footage, and so did all the others. I returned to 
Cronica to see a red headline flashing: "SUPERMARKET WITH HOSTAGES. 
STILL ALIVE." I decided to keep watching Cronica, and this is what they 
were reporting. 
At seven o'clock in the evening three teenagers, a sixteen-year-old, a 
seventeen-year-old, and "Chuky," their fourteen-year-old "boss," entered 
a supermarket in a suburb of Buenos Aires called EKI, which in Spanish is 
pronounced "X," to rob it. The alarm sounded and the police arrived. 
Chuky and his "boys" wanted to flee, but the store didn't have an exit in 
the back. So they decided to stay and play the last card they had: to take 
hostages in order to negotiate an escape. At first there were only a few 
police in front of the supermarket. Inside, there were shoppers from the 
surrounding neighbourhood and the store employees, twenty-one in total. 
The gang decided to keep nineteen hostages and to let a seventy-eight- 
year-old woman and an eleven-year-old child go. Chuky, who had just 
turned fourteen, didn't want to risk the lives of children and grandmoth- 
ers. He was the one who decided who stayed and who didn't, and this 
made him the boss. From that moment on, I was hooked by the TV. 
As "crisis" experts-psychiatrists, psychologists, sociologists-began to 
arrive at  the television stations to discuss the precociousness of the 
assailants, people from the neighbourhood gathered in the street in front 
of the supermarket to watch the hostages. The unfortunate clients of X 
were lined up against the glass window of the supermarket with their
hands in the air. It was a large window occupying the entire front of the
store, and the hostages looked out onto the street-where the police, their
neighbours, and their family members stared back-with expressions of
horror on their faces. The journalists were conducting live interviews, talk-
ing with the parents, the wives and husbands, and children of the hostages,
and asking them if they could recognize their family members on the other
side of the window. Some said yes; others cried that they weren't sure.
There had been lot of hostage-taking recently, but this was the first time
one could see everything that the victims and the victimizers were doing. It
was like gazing into a huge crystal box; it was like a dream reality show;
and it was being transmitted live to Brazil, Uruguay, and Chile. \7e don't
know about Bolivia, but it's entirely possible that the coyitas were occu-
pied with problems of their own at the time.
The police, who now numbered several hundred, plus a special anti-
terrorist unit, circled around the supermarket with a huge public display
of force. Inside, Chuky became nervous. After all, he had only wanted to
rob a supermarket and now he was being transformed into a grand spec-
tacle for all of Mercosur. The gang decided to try to relax, and begin to
open the drinks for sale in the supermarket. They started with wine, con-
tinued with beer, and when that was gone they finished off with cider. I
have to declare at this point that they had been holed up in the super-
market for hours, and that the negotiations were in full swing. Chuky
had asked for a 4x4, with a full tank of gas, in order to make his get
away. The spokesperson for the gang was Big Ears, the sixteen-year-old.
Ve found out later that his real name was Gabriel Galvan and he had
escaped from jail two days before. The negotiator for the police was a
specialist in hostage-taking trained in the USA, known as Vampire. His
second-in-command was called Baby. In total, the operative had five
hundred men plus a S\7AT team led by a commissioner named Claudio
Smith-at last an English surname!
Smith ordered Vampire to try to distract the hostage takers. Inside the
supermarket, Chuky was watching himself on TV. Big Ears may have been
the spokesperson but Chuky was the chief, controlling everything via the
television: everything that was being said by Big Ears, and everything that
was being said about himself by the experts. 'We learned afterwards from
the hostages who survived that Chuky had become rcalIy angry with the
professional crisis specialists, declaring, "\7hat do they know? They're
just government stooges." For Chuky it seemed, the system and the gov-
ernment were the same thing, but in any case it's not really important.
After all. Chukv was only a thief. not an academic.
There was a lot of tension in the air. The police had refused to give
chuky his 4x4 and the negotiations had stalled. chuky came towards rhe
door of the supermarket with a woman hostage and a gun in hand, put
the gun to her head, and screamed at the police, "If you don't give me
what I want, there's going to be blood." The tension mounted. Cronica
played the theme song from the film Jaus to make the moment seem more
dramatic. Then Chuky went back inside again. He didn,t shoot the
woman. Millions of television witnesses in the southern cone breathed a
sigh of relief. Vampire called to Big Ears through a megaphone, trying to
convince him to hang on a little longer. Big Ears resumed the negotiation,
which was taking place by shouting through the door of the supermarket.
Vampire told Big Ears that Chuky had to wait for his demands. Big Ears
replied that his boss was really crazy and wanted blood. one does have to
think about the amount of drinking that had been going in Supermarket
X over the last few hours.
At this moment, something bizarre was happening inside: the robbers
were now serving drinks to the hostages. The psychiatrists commented
that this meant that the robbers were overextended, and weakening. They
gave a vote of confidence to Vampire. He was achieving his objective,
which was to gain time and trust. Suddenly, a hostage came yelling
towards the door. "For God's sake give them the 4x4 and let them go!',
Had there been a change in roles? rWas it no longer Big Ears who was
negotiating, but a hostage? \7as this an excess oftrust, or of alcohol? The
sociologists were confused. Nobody had explained this possibility to
them, neither Foucault nor frou-frou, and now Chuky could no longer be
seen through the window.
From this moment on, Chuky never appeared again. Big Ears seemed to
have assumed the role of the chief negotiator. speculations ensued. Some
journalists claimed that chuky had escaped through the subterranean
passages of the sewer tunnels that lead to the Rio de la plata. It's impor-
tant to remember that the real chuky is an evil doll, a master of terror, or
at least according to Hollywood. And it's also true that this Argentinean
version also had something dolllike about him: short and fat with clothes
that were too big. suddenly it seemed that the final assault was abour ro
begin. The theme song from Jacus increased in volume. At the door of the
supermarket appeared a hostage with a white handkerchief. He yelled,
"I'm Alejandro the butcher. I want a cellphone. A telephone!" Vampire
was disconcerted. He couldn't understand this continual changing of
roles. His Yankee professors had never coached him about this scenario.
In any case, he listened to the demand and told him he,d see what he
could do. Then the butcher, Alejandro, just kept walking until he had
crossed the police line and was free.
Vampire turned to consult with his chief, the one with the English sur- 
name. The butcher disappeared into the crowd. Big Ears came back out- 
side again, screaming, "Give me a cell phone!" Vampire thought for a 
moment, and answered him through the megaphone. "OK, but give me 
someone to come and get it," trying to take advantage of the butcher's 
strategy who had managed to escape from the supermarket. In any case, 
Vampire was applying basic Yankee theory: grab everything you can. But 
Big Ears ruined his plan. "No, you idiot," he yelled back, "I want a 
policeman to bring me the cell phone here." That was a smart move on 
Big Ears's part. Vampire thought again. "I'll give you the cell phone, but 
why do you want it?" he asked. "I want to talk to my mother," answered 
the delinquent. The police were disconcerted. The psychologists and the 
psychiatrists commented that we were witnessing a regressive syndrome: a 
search for a secure place, for the mother's womb. And they proceeded to 
analyze the cellular umbilical cord. 
Vampire conceded to Big Ears's demand. He no longer understood 
what was happening. But that didn't really matter as Big Ears had told 
him, "Give us the telephone-and we'll give ourselves up," and had 
added, "Chispita is going to talk with his girlfriend." Chispita was the 
third delinquent, who had been guarding the hostages, although by this 
point everything was a bit confused as one could see through the glass 
that the robbers and hostages were in conversation and were all drinking 
together. We learned afterwards that Chispita needed the cellular phone 
to call his girlfriend as he had promised to take her to a dance that night. 
He wanted to tell her that he didn't think he was going to make it; as he 
was tied up with a problem. During all this time nothing more had been 
seen of Chuky. Some thought that he had been transformed into a toy, 
like the one in the film, and that he was now in the children's section of 
the supermarket waiting for an opportunity to escape. Others recom- 
mended that if, by chance, one saw a little doll walking by, not to touch 
it, just in case it turned out to be the evil Chuky. Inside the supermarket, 
one could see Big Ears, then Chispita, talking on the cell phone. Of 
Chuky, nothing. Then the two of them started to walk towards the 
entrance of supermarket X. 
There was tension in the air. The theme song from Jaws played louder. 
The robbers hugged the hostages; they kissed each other. "They're afraid 
of being killed," said the sociologists. The police prepared to attack. Big 
Ears, who was the tallest of the three, came out first, carrying something 
on his shoulder that looked like a sack. Vampire yelled, "ON YOUR 
KNEES! SLOWLY! WITH YOUR HANDS IN THE AIR!" Big Ears dropped the 
sack on the ground. The sack began to move. It wasn't a sack at  all. It 
was Chuky. Completely drunk. The police ran forward to grab Chuky and 
the others. Suddenly everyone was running; everyone was yelling. The 
standoff had ended. 
In the testimonials that followed, Chuky's grandmother said that the 
child had never drunk anything stronger than Coca-Cola, and that his 
name was Miguelito. "He's only a baby," said the old woman from Villa 
Tranquilla (Tranquility Shantytown) where Chuky lived. The hostages 
recounted that Chuky was totally out of his mind and that he wanted to 
kill them all. Big Ears and Chispita had taken away his gun and put him 
in the safe of the supermarket with a bottle of whisky to keep him quiet. 
If you don't believe my story, or think it fiction, I have photographs, testi- 
monies, and newspaper clippings to prove it happened. 
Translated by Dot Tuer 


CHUKY

Stephans, Stevi

The Papuan Queen Doesn't Shop Here Anymore

Mungoshi, Charles

The Hare

Kincaid, Jamaica

My Brother 
Jamaica Kincaid 
After I saw my brother that first time and returned to the place I was stay- 
ing, the place that was not my mother's house, I went to the manageress 
and said, "I need a drink." I have heard people say just that before, "I 
need a drink," but I thought it was a figure of speech, I had never needed 
a drink or  any other kind of mood alterer before; I have taken mood- 
altering substances many times, but I never felt I needed them. I drank 
five rum-and-Cokes. I do  not like the taste of rum, really, but I drank five 
of these drinks all the same and could have drunk more than five but did 
not. The manageress, a very nice woman, sat next to me and we struck up 
a conversation; I told her my brother was sick and in the hospital, and 
when she asked me the cause of his illness I told her he had AIDS. This 
disease, in Antigua, produces all the prejudices in people that it produces 
elsewhere, and so like many other places, the people afflicted with it and 
their families are ashamed to make their suffering known. It was for my 
own peace of mind that  I said it; I wanted it to be real to me, that  my 
brother was suffering and dying from AIDS; hearing that he was sick and 
dying was new to me and so every opportunity I got I would say it out 
loud: "My brother is sick from and dying of AIDS." But my announcing 
to this woman led to  something. She told me of a doctor in Antigua who 
she said was always on the radio or television talking about the danger of 
AIDS, how it could be contracted and how to  avoid contracting it. H e  
was considered the leading authority in Antigua in regard to this disease 
(though in fact he was the only doctor in Antigua who was publicly 
involved with this disease). She said his name was Dr. Ramsey. The next 
day I looked him up in the telephone book and called him. 
The reason my brother was dying of AIDS at  the time I saw him is that 
in Antigua if you are diagnosed with the HIV virus you are considered to 
be dying; the drugs used for slowing the progress of the virus are not avail- 
able there; public concern, obsession with the treatment and care of mem- 
bers of the AIDS-suffering community, does not exist. There are only the 
people suffering from AIDS, and then the people who are not suffering 
from AIDS. It is felt in general, so I am told, that since there is no  cure for 
AIDS it is useless to spend money on a medicine that will only slow the 
progress of the disease; the afflicted will die no matter what; there are 
limited resources to be spent on health care and these should be spent 
where they will do some good, not where it is known that the outcome is 
death. This was the reason why there was no AZT in the hospital; but 
even if a doctor had wanted to write a prescription for AZT for a patient, 
that prescription could not be filled at a chemist's; there was no AZT on 
the island, it was too expensive to be stocked, most people suffering from 
the disease could not afford to buy this medicine; most people suffering 
from the disease are poor or young, not too far away from being children; 
in a society like the one I am from, being a child is one of the definitions 
of vulnerability and powerlessness. 
When I called Dr. Ramsey I asked him if he would meet me at the hos- 
pital and examine my brother and give us, his family, medical advice, as 
to what we could do, what we could not do, what we could expect and, 
perhaps, when to expect it. He agreed to meet me and at the time he said 
he would arrive, he arrived. I only mention this because in Antigua people 
never arrive when they say they will; they never do what they say they will 
do. He was something I had long ago thought impossible to find in an 
Antiguan with authority: he was kind, he was loving toward people who 
needed him, people who were less powerful than he; he was respectful. He 
greeted my brother as if they were old friends; he spoke to him of cricket, 
of calypso, and of a trip he had taken to Trinidad to celebrate the carnival 
there. He examined my brother with his bare hands, he felt his neck, he 
listened to his breathing through a stethoscope, he looked in my brother's 
mouth, at his throat, and he made me look at the large ulcer that was 
near his tonsils. After he was done, he sat and talked to my brother some 
more; he spoke to him in broken English; I could not understand what 
they were saying, they spoke very fast, it was the most animated I had 
seen my brother since I first saw him lying there dying. He even laughed 
out loud at something Dr. Ramsey said, something I did not understand. 
Afterward Dr. Ramsey told me that since my brother did not yet have 
diarrhea, one of the symptoms common to AIDS sufferers in the 
Caribbean, there was a chance that AZT could slow the progress of the 
disease and allow my brother to live longer than we thought; certainly it 
would alleviate some of his immediate suffering. When I had heard about 
my brother, I asked my mother with what medicines he was being treated 
and she said they were giving him something for pneumonia and some- 
thing else for thrush, medicines a doctor at the hospital had given her a 
prescription for and she had gone to a pharmacy in town and purchased. 
These medicines common in the treatment of AIDS-related illnesses are not 
kept in the hospital; people who are not infected with the virus that causes 
AIDS do not get an extreme case of thrush, do not get a terrible kind of 
pneumonia, and so the medicines that would treat these afflictions are not 
on hand at the hospital. But then this: one night my brother had a terrible 
headache and needed something to ease the pain; there was no aspirin on 
the ward where he was staying and no aspirin in the dispensary. A nurse 
on duty had some in her purse for her own personal use and she gave my 
brother two of them. There are people who complain that a hospital in the 
United States will charge six dollars for a dose of Tylenol; they might wish 
to look at this way of running a hospital: bring your own medicines. 
When my mother told me AZT could not be obtained in Antigua, I 
called someone I know, a friend who is a doctor, and I asked her if she 
would write a prescription for a month's worth. She said yes immediately, 
and said she would give me more if it was necessary. I was used to this 
sort of kindness. I did not know then if even a month's worth would be of 
any use to him. She gave me a prescription for a more powerful drug than 
the one he was taking to treat the pneumonia he had and a more power- 
ful drug than the one he was taking to treat his thrush; when I first saw 
him, the thrush had made it so difficult for him to swallow anything that 
the pills had to be crushed before he could swallow them. 
After he saw my brother, Dr. Ramsey told me that, with one exception, 
he had not seen anyone over the age of thirty-two suffering from AIDS. 
The exception was a man sixty-six years of age. He said that in August 
one year, in a two-week period, seven people, young people, all under 
thirty-two, had died of the disease. As far as he could tell, the people who 
died did not know each other. He said that people who are not HIV-posi- 
tive give up too soon on the people who are, but that he tries to keep 
everybody alive, because you never know when a cure might come along. 
He said that-you never knew when a cure might come along-and I 
could not tell if, in that, he was asserting native Antiguan foolishness or 
faith in science. Antigua is a place in which faith undermines the concrete. 
He said my brother did not look too bad, he had seen people who looked 
worse; what he meant of course is he had seen people who were on the 
verge of dying, and by the time he saw them, it was too late to do any- 
thing. But what could he do, I wanted to ask him, if there was no medi- 
cine available, if the people suffering did not have a sister who lived in the 
United States and this sister could call up a doctor who would write a 
prescription for some medication that might be of help, what would hap- 
pen then? He is a very loving man and the other reason I have for saying 
this is I saw that wherever he went, people, ordinary people, would go 
out of their way to greet him and ask him how he was, but not because 
they really wanted to know; it was just to hear his voice. 
Excerpt from Jamaica Kincaid, My Brother, (NY: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, LLC, 1997). 
Reprinted by permission. 


My Brother

Not a member yet

A Bustle in Your Hedgerow: Long Beach, Led Zeppelin and the West Coast Sublime

Thinking Punching

The Delights and Discontents of Shopping

The Woman with the Box

Contributors

Contributors

CHUKY

The Papuan Queen Doesn't Shop Here Anymore

The Hare

My Brother

289

389