Just got back from a weekend spent in Livingstonia, which is a town in the mountains here in northern Malawi, home to the University of Livingstonia where my friend Alfred is studying. It was a hell of a trek—two hour drive from the beach to Mzuzu, stayed the night, then took a five hour mini bus to Chitimba, and a 45 min bumpy motorbike ride up the mountain to Livingstonia. As tiring as the traveling was, the whole weekend was a much needed break from my usual schedule down here in Kande Beach. I saw a football game with the college kids, ate at their cafeteria, visited the local church, toured campus, and just tried to adapt my Grinnell College liberal artsy self to a very different and at times very similar college environment. I witnessed a basketball game, a rap battle, a lot of day-drinking, and some wonderful conversations about subjects including marriage, age differences, tuition hikes, Central and Southern African national rivalries, and how Americans woo their potential suitors. I also met a bunch of monkeys, though they were a bit skittish and ran from me whenever I tried to make contact lol.

The mountains are honestly stunning. I stayed at a place called the Mushroom Farm, which bills itself as an “eco-lodge” with “permaculture gardens” and “compost toilets.” Quotes aside, it’s all vegan food, all delicious, very warm, inexpensive, a bit hippyish and definitely worth the stay. The whole lodge is essentially hanging off the edge of a cliff, which means that 1.) the views are spectacular and 2.) you gotta watch your step. There were like five dobermans(?) guarding the lodge that are cuddly but bark a lot. I met a Dutch guy who was working as a martial arts instructor in the city and a German woman who had just finished an internship at a hospital. We ended up traveling back on Monday together, and it was real nice to get to hear the stories of other travelers, who came not for tourism but to work, at least at first.

The writing is going a bit slow. I’ve working on a poem from the perspective of a 30-round magazine belonging to an AR-15 rifle. The more time I spend here, talking with people from both Malawi and abroad, with different cultural values and beliefs, I’m reflecting a lot more on how my American identity affects my own beliefs and my own upbringing. My parents, especially my dad, have always been rather conservative while I’ve been quite left-leaning, which has historically resulted in a lot of bickering and arguments at the dinner table and in the car. An issue that really does concern them is gun violence—while they voted Republican in the last election, they are very much for gun control, and I’ve been trying to have more discussions with them about this in order to get them to reevaluate their leanings a little.

Pretty much every non-American I meet here will ask me about gun violence at some point, if we have a conversation longer than fifteen minutes. Have you seen someone get shot? Do you own any guns? Did someone ever attack your school? Why don’t they stop the violence? It’s something I can’t help but think about a lot, having lived both in California, a state with strong gun regulations, and Iowa, a state without strong gun regulations (in a town that houses one of the largest gun and parts manufacturing facilities in the nation). More personally, a friend and former teacher of mine lost his daughter in the Sandy Hook attack and took his own life (with a gun) just this year. These realities of violence in my own life and the places I’ve lived are part of why I feel so angry when the people I love support people and policies that contribute to that violence.

This is all sort of just thinking-as-I-write, but I’m beginning to connect these cycles of violence to the sort of cycles and violence I see here. There’s the natural violence of survival in the lake, fish fighting each other for territory, for mates, for food. There’s the violence of political upheaval—the recent presidential election here in Malawi was heavily contested, and there have been regular demonstrations in the cities, many of which led to rioting. There’s the economic violence that presents itself everywhere in the struggles of impoverished people, in the exploitation that tourism often gives rise to, in the mass migrations of workers from Malawi to South Africa, and the vast wealth disparity between the city elites and the villagers. I’m trying to use my writing as a tool to think more critically about these cycles of violence and how they link me with the people and places I’m meeting and visiting. For me, this begins with a poem in which I give an assault rifle’s magazine a voice, a language with which to make its purpose clear. I don’t know where it ends yet. Gotta keep writing!

Check out the Words section of the website if you wanna read new stuff I have published! Had a piece come out on the Academy of American Poets site and some more dropping soon on The Shallow Ends, Split Lip Magazine, and Hobart!

Getting on the back of a truck full of grandmothers and live chickens