{"id":8599,"date":"2024-08-30T17:56:55","date_gmt":"2024-08-30T21:56:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/a-tender-lunar-fable-about-the-stubborn-courage-of-making-the-impossible-possible-the-marginalian\/"},"modified":"2024-08-30T17:56:55","modified_gmt":"2024-08-30T21:56:55","slug":"a-tender-lunar-fable-about-the-stubborn-courage-of-making-the-impossible-possible-the-marginalian","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/a-tender-lunar-fable-about-the-stubborn-courage-of-making-the-impossible-possible-the-marginalian\/","title":{"rendered":"A Tender Lunar Fable about the Stubborn Courage of Making the Impossible Possible \u2013 The Marginalian"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Profit<\/a>
\n<\/p>\n

\n

\"Kamau<\/a><\/p>\n

We are lucky accidents of chemistry and chance, children of choices made for us by the impartial forces that set the first atoms into motion and by the human partialities that have shaped this latest blink of cosmic time we call history. The astonishing thing is that not one human being who ever lived has chosen the body, brain, place, or time to be born into, and yet in the narrow band of freedom between these chance parameters, we must find a way to live lives of substance and sweetness. Chance deals the hand and we must play it, and in how we choose to play it lies the measure of who we are. <\/p>\n

Poet Aracelis Girmay and artist Diana Ejaita take up these immense, intimate questions with uncommon soulfulness in Kamau & ZuZu Find a Way<\/em><\/strong><\/a> (public library<\/em><\/a>) \u2014 a magical-realist story, lyrical and consummately illustrated, about a little boy and his grandmother who wake up one morning to find themselves on the Moon, pressed to make a home amid its inhospitable strangeness. What emerges is an ode to the stubborn courage of choosing to make a lush life out of even the most arid circumstances, to the defiant will of prevailing over the odds with fearless grace. <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The Moon has always been our nearest notion of another world and other worlds have always been one of our most imaginative ways of thinking about our own, about otherness itself. Five millennia after Johannes Kepler pioneered science fiction by challenging humanity\u2019s unexamined assumptions with an allegory about life on the Moon<\/a>, here is an allegory that touches with great tenderness the global consequence of one of humanity\u2019s most inhumane choices. But although the book celebrates the African diaspora \u2014 an undeniably singular experience \u2014 it has universal resonance for the broader experience of finding oneself transplanted, by choice or by circumstance, to a world so profoundly other that it appears alien, that one feels alien in it. (That is what America felt like when I arrived alone from Bulgaria in my late teens \u2014 incidentally, having been raised there largely by a grandmother named Zizi.)<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

ZuZu, discomposed at first by how different the lunar landscape feels from their home village, sets out to grow the most vital nourishments for body and soul. \u201cHello there, Sister,\u201d she says to the ground as she presses a kernel of corn into it, then a clothespin from her apron, then a photograph of her mother, then a square of cloth tucked inside her favorite book.<\/p>\n

In time, all kinds of things begin to grow. (\u201cWherever life can grow, it will. It will sprout out, and do the best it can,\u201d Gwendolyn Brooks wrote in her poignant tribute<\/a> to anti-apartheid activist Winnie Madikizela-Mandela.)<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\n

From the kernel grew moon corn, but also moon beans<\/p>\n

From the clothespin grew trees \u2014 mango, cashew, and willow.<\/p>\n

And from the square of cloth, a wide and silent kite. And also a flock of birds and a very small meadow of flowers.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The tears ZuZu cries missing her family \u2014 the psychology of missing being one of the hardest and most defining aspects of human experience<\/a> \u2014 stream down her face and into the ground to become a deep well of drinking water. <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

And so the boy grows, and learns to plant, and learns to sing, watching his grandmother dance. (\u201cEverything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms \u2014 to choose one\u2019s attitude in any given set of circumstances,\u201d Viktor Frankl wrote<\/a> in his timeless memoir of surviving the Holocaust.)<\/p>\n

Meanwhile on Earth \u2014 in that beloved \u201cBack Home\u201d place \u2014 ZuZu and Kamau\u2019s family search for them near and far \u201cfor days, then weeks, then years.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

And then one day, by the same unexplained miracle that had landed the boy on that alien world, a letter appears in his father\u2019s pocket to let him know that Kamau is safe with ZuZu on the Moon. <\/p>\n

Word spreads across the village, exuberant with relief: \u201cThey\u2019re all right! They have sent word!\u201d<\/p>\n

But then comes the question of how to write back. <\/p>\n

Everyone shrugs, stumped, until Kamau\u2019s sister comes up with an idea partway between science and magic \u2014 she heads to the ocean on her bicycle to harness the eternal relationship between the Moon and the tides<\/a> (which Kepler uncovered), writing her letter in the sand for the water to carry it to her little brother. <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

And soon, the whole village is sending oceanic letters to the Moon. (\u201cEach that we lose takes part of us,\u201d Emily Dickinson wrote<\/a>. \u201cA crescent still abides, \/ Which like the moon, some turbid night, \/ Is summoned by the tides.\u201d)<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

So begins the correspondence between Back Home and the Moon. \u201cThese letters did not make the distance any less great,\u201d Girmay writes, \u201cbut they had found a way to know each other.\u201d <\/p>\n

ZuZu finds a way to help Kamau know the Back Home world, too.<\/p>\n

\n

They would often sit and look out into the big, bright blue of Back Home, and he would ask his questions, and she would tell him everything she could. The noises, the fruits, the camels, the sea.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

At the heart of the story is a reckoning with the meaning of resilience, of strength, of that bright stubbornness by which we make our lives emblems of the possible amid the improbable. <\/p>\n

Looking at their new home on the Moon \u201coutside the realm of what anyone thought could be,\u201d knowing it is not what she would have chosen for her grandson, ZuZu captures the essence of the human spirit:<\/p>\n

\n

But we will have to find a way to live, as people do.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\n

Something about the way she said \u201clive\u201d always filled Kamau\u2019s blood up with sun.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Kamau & ZuZu Find a Way<\/em><\/strong><\/a>, which comes from the always inspired and inspiring Enchanted Lion<\/a>, is lifeblood for the soul from cover to cover. Couple it with I Touched the Sun<\/em><\/a> \u2014 a tender illustrated fable about how to find and bear your inner light, also from Enchanted Lion \u2014 then savor a very different existential meditation lensed through our closest cosmic companion in Dorianne Laux\u2019s stunning poem \u201cFacts about the Moon.\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n

Illustrations courtesy of Enchanted Lion Books. Photographs by Maria Popova.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

\"Profit<\/a>
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We are lucky accidents of chemistry and chance, children of choices made for us by the impartial forces that set the first atoms into motion […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":8600,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8599","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-purpose"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8599","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8599"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8599\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8600"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8599"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8599"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8599"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}