It's a Boat Jam!

4

     

Looking for Duras weaves three strands of memoir into one: my lifelong infatuation with the French writer Marguerite Duras, a journey through Vietnam and Cambodia tracing her footsteps, and a musing on mothers and melancholy. (Read prev chap here).

Chap 14

There is a feeling outside the bus window that the landscape could easily disappear under water at any time. Our bus is taking narrow back roads through green rice fields and small settlements of wood and bamboo houses. It is picturesque but the road is potholed and bumpy. As if to take our minds off the road, Mr Thao is back on the microphone giving his Mekong Delta talk. He explains that from its point of origin on the Tibetan Plateau in China, the Mekong has travelled around 4000 kilometres to reach the Delta where it fans out into a number of tributaries that flow into the East Sea. The Vietnamese call this area the Delta of Nine Dragons and between them, many smaller rivers and canals, too numerous to number, crisscross the region.

I’m fascinated to learn that this was once part of the Khmer (Cambodian) Empire and it wasn’t until the 1600s that Vietnamese began settling here. By 1802 the Delta was officially Vietnamese, until the French arrived sixty years later and claimed it as part of French Indochina. When the French pulled out in 1954, Vietnam was divided into the communist North and the democratic South. In 1975 after several years of fierce fighting between the Viet Cong and the Americans during the Vietnam War, the south and the north were reunited as the Socialist Republic of Vietnam.

It’s a potted history lesson given without any emotional involvement on our guide’s part. He is part of a post war, modern generation who thankfully haven’t suffered directly as his parents and grandparents did. He must have given this talk many times before but as he continues I’m intrigued to hear that the Vietnamese were responsible in 1979 for the downfall of Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia. When the Khmer Rouge tried to take back the Mekong Delta (which they believed to be rightfully theirs), the Vietnamese Army invaded Phnom Penh, forcing the Khmer Rouge leaders to flee. This nuance of historical fact must have passed me by at the time, but now I am here in the region it is of great interest. 

         I wonder what MD’s views were on the Vietnam War. During the Second World War, she had joined a cell of the French Communist Party. She was expelled in 1950 for her so-called ‘bad’ attitude and ‘immoral’ behaviors as well as her disagreement to party policy on literature and the arts. But throughout her life she remained sympathetic to the cause in her own way.  In an interview in 1991 she said, ‘I am a communist within myself. I no longer have any hope in the world.’ *                                   

        The view alongside us is changing again, the canals and small rivers feeding the rice paddies are becoming more numerous. It feels like the Mekong must be close. In the middle of one field I spot a grouping of tombstones, gathered together as if to watch over the land and each other. A breeze sends a ripple of movement through the surrounding fields. Above them, the cloudless sky of the dry season.  In The Lover, MD remembers how even at night the sky was clear and luminescent. Her mother used to take them out into the countryside in a horse and gig to witness it. MD writes, ‘the light fell from the sky in cataracts of pure transparency, in torrents of silence and immobility. The air was blue, you could hold it in your hand. Blue.’ *

The Mekong River may not be the longest in the world but it’s in the top ten when it comes to width. We’ve arrived at the edge of a mud coloured river, but it is too narrow to be the real thing.

          ‘Still one of its tributaries,’ Mr Thao replies as one of our group asks the obvious question. ‘We have just driven through the town of Cai Be, famous for its floating market, but we are going to take you there by boat,’ Mr Thao explains.

        ‘The driver will meet us in another location. So please leave your bags on the bus. Don’t worry,’ he reassures us,’ you will see them again soon!’

        After a flurry of repacking, stashing and locking suitcases we get off the bus and make our way to a riverbank completely overgrown with masses of large-leafed, water hyacinth plants. A rudimentary jetty leads to our elegant looking river craft, resplendent with bamboo canopy and cane chairs lined up along each side.  Orange life jackets, should we need them, are stowed above us under the awning.

        There’s something very African Queen about our tourist boat (which Mr Thao has reassured us is not taking us all the way to Phnom Penh). We head out into the busy waterway past the rows of bamboo stilt houses hanging out over the shoreline towards the middle. Small and large wooden boats, all with red noses and black eyes painted on their bows manage to avoid each other as they manoeuvre their way to and from the floating market up ahead. The larger vessels look like giant clinkers, their hulls built for transporting produce. The smaller craft dart around — vendors on their way to sell morning treats to market customers, a mother ferrying her child to school, steering the boat with her foot.

To the right of us one small boat stands out from the rest — a narrow wooden dinghy cuts through the water with its outboard motor dangling out the back like a giant sunbeam mixing wand. At the helm squats a young Vietnamese woman dressed completely in yellow, her hand steady on the horizontal steering wheel. Her entire outfit — floral yellow and orange flares, a yellow top and yellow jacket, would be in high demand in a 70s vintage store back home. Long black hair reaches down to her waist and while her yellow, broad brimmed sunhat blocks her eyes from my view, on her cheeks and lips I detect the mark of sadness. At the same time her body is determined as she leans into the future, the red nose and black eyes of her craft protecting her from danger.  She could be a character straight out of a Duras film.  I wonder where she is going and what the circumstances of her life might be. I watch her as long as I can until she disappears from sight.

        The image of the boat woman stirs a memory. In 1970, during my second year at teachers college I went to the counselor and told her I thought I was having a nervous breakdown. I didn’t know what was wrong — I just couldn’t stop crying. The counselor signed a medical certificate giving me a week off, so I borrowed my boyfriend’s car and drove home to stay with my parents. At the time they were out at nearby Lake Eildon, on a high school camp. The huge man-made lake had been created by damming the Goulburn River in the 50s, for hydro electricity and irrigation. Towns were drowned and relocated and a ghostly landscape of dead grey gum trees hugged the perimeters.  With 515 kilometres of shoreline there are plenty of camping spots on its shores and always keen to give his students an experience in nature, principal Chas had set up a semi-permanent camp — with the school kids and teachers all in rows of tents and mum and dad in their caravan. Each day while they were all busy with ‘outward bound’ activities, I took our little rowboat, some lunch and a fishing rod out into the middle of the lake. I didn’t even pretend to fish. I just cried and cried and cried. Back in the caravan over cosy home-cooked meals, my mum and dad didn’t try to counsel me or ask what was wrong. I couldn’t have told them anyway, I didn’t know.  When the week was up, I miraculously stopped crying, drove back to Melbourne and went on as before.  Perhaps I just needed a break, or a chance to process the unexpressed emotions of seventeen years of life as a ‘well adjusted’ country girl.  Whatever it was, being out on the water every day did the trick.

        The market ahead looks like a huge boat jam. As we get closer, we notice each boat has a different vegetable tied to a tall mast-like pole. 'This is how you know what they are selling,' Mr Thao explains. It’s obvious but clever — a pumpkin on the mast means they are selling only pumpkins, corn means corn, watermelon means they have a boat full to the gills of round green cannon balls. And indeed it is true. Looking into the hull of each boat we pass, we see piles of pumpkin, piles of melon, stacks of corn.

        It seems like many of the produce sellers have travelled far to get here and that their boats are also their homes. While the bulk of each craft is taken up by the cargo hull, on the back are small living quarters with hammocks strung up, small braziers burning, potted plants blooming and a whole family sitting cross-legged on the deck eating a meal or playing cards. Laundry hangs wherever it can and it's not uncommon to see family members, especially children, sticking their bums over the back of the boat to go to the toilet. While it may seem hard to imagine what it would be like to spend your entire life in such confined spaces, as water people everywhere know, the freedom of the river is theirs.

        That freedom was heavily curtailed by the French in MD’s day as her mother used to remind her. All the junks and sampans travelling down river from far away would sit for days, banked up in one place. As well as collecting tax for the government, the greedy Sadec administrator demanded one piastre for himself.  They might be able to pay the tax but if they didn’t have the extra one piastre, they would sit in their boats by the river bank until somehow they found it. *  

        At the end of the boat jam we begin our return, passing again each vessel's black eyes and red noses bobbing about in the choppy water keeping all the bad spirits away. I jot down a list poem in my notebook, wishing I could send it on a postcard to Marj.

Banana loaded

pumpkin bearing

hammock lying

brazier burning

card playing

fish eating

red nosing

feet steering

chicken clucking

petrol guzzling

plank corking

sampan following

canal hopping

car ferrying

river boat

JC 2009

__________________

* NewYork Times 1991.  https://lithub.com/when-marguerite-duras-got-kicked-out-of-the-communist-party/

*The Lover p 86.

* This memory came to light in Woman to Woman, Marguerite Duras & Xavière Gauthier, Nebraska Press, 2004, p 99. In 1973, journalist Xavière Gautier did a series of interviews with MD at her house in Neuphe-le-Château, for a profile on woman writers for the French newspaper Le Monde. While only a few lines ended up in the article, the unedited interviews were published in France in 1974 (Les Editions de Minuit) with the English translation only appearing 20 years later. Gauthier was nervous, said she could ‘hardly bear the tension of the first interview, faced with her gaze.’ MD asked her to stay, which she did, for ‘nearly the whole summer.’  She says she was ‘captivated by Marguerite Duras’s generosity and openness: by this anxious, ardent, tormented, peremptory and intransigent woman.’ In between their interviews, they made jam.