The kindness
of strangers
Kate
McFadyen
Cate
Kennedy
Sing, and Don’t Cry: A Mexican
Journal
Transit Lounge, $29.95 pb, 301 pp, 0975022814
‘THERE
IS NO pleasure in travelling,’
Albert Camus jotted in his notebook
while in the Balearic Isles one summer.
‘It is more an occasion for spiritual
testing.’ Pleasure, he argued,
leads us away from ourselves; travel,
which he considered part of the eternal
search for ‘culture’, always
brings us back to ourselves.
When Cate Kennedy left rural Victoria
for an extended posting in Mexico with
Australian Volunteers International,
she was motivated by a desire for a
challenge. Her gaze was fixed on a new
cultural horizon. Sing, and Don’t
Cry documents Kennedy’s time
working for URAC, a microcredit co-operative
providing a secure savings and loans
system for campesino peasant
communities. Based in the town of Tequisquiapan,
Kennedy and her co-workers’ role
is not limited to financial administration.
They travel large distances to co-ordinate
savings meetings, run nutrition and
child health seminars and deliver livestock
— even at one point hosting a public
meeting with members of the infamous
Zapatista resistance movement.
Much of the charm of Sing, and Don’t
Cry lies in hearing Kennedy’s
tone gradually relax. She grows warmer
and more responsive as her eye is caught
by the smaller, knottier, quotidian
concerns of the people about her. Her
observations become more attuned to
her surroundings: the intractable poverty,
the harsh environment and the optimistic,
hard-working and generous townspeople.
The many set pieces describing the proud
campesinos and the desert landscape
are the most accomplished sections of
the book.
Kennedy watches in awe the televised
excesses of Holy Week, which culminate
in the passion plays during Semana
Santa. Still trying to make sense
of this religious fervour, she steps
out of her front door only to be swept
up in a strangely pagan fiesta celebrating
Christ’s resurrection, and begins
dancing and whooping at the fireworks
along with the locals. Her first experience
of the dusk ritual of the paseo,
when everyone in the community comes
out after work to stroll about the zócalo,
the town plaza, and to greet their neighbours,
is similarly enlightening. Initially
shocked at the easy intimacy of the
local people, observing the absence
of guarded formality or any suspicion
of her as an outsider, Kennedy realises
how unaccustomed she is to kindness
from strangers.
In many ways, this book is a lament
for the loss of the social glue that
binds individuals together into a community.
Kennedy admits to a ‘wounding little
stab of grief for my own society’.
She ruminates on the lack of a strong
sense of cultural integrity and connection
in contemporary Australia. ‘Instead
of strolling on the paseo,’ she
writes, ‘people are racing down
freeways in a perpetual frenzy of going
somewhere else, striding along talking
into their mobile phones, or walking
aimlessly through shopping hypermarts
for recreation.’
Kennedy writes about what she sees with
a satisfying depth. Confronted with
the poverty of the campesinos,
she struggles with feelings of guilt
and impotence. The only practical skill
she feels she possesses is as a consumer,
handing out pesos to begging children,
or patronising the local produce stalls
and trying to distribute her disproportionate
wealth as evenly as she can. Her frustrated
attempts to find a broader solution
contrasts with the attitude of the locals,
who laugh at the Western arrogance that
assumes that the world will bend to
the will of an individual. She applies
her smattering of Zen philosophy to
the elastic sense of time signified
by mañana, noting that
the Spanish word for ‘wait’
is the same as the word for hope. It
is when she eventually succumbs to the
Mexican concept of time and their stoic
approach to external events that things
become interesting. A whole new filter
is superimposed over a range of cultural
and philosophical certainties. On her
return to Australia, Kennedy is unable
to settle. She feels increasingly distressed
by a society she perceives as being
characterised by thoughtless consumption
and selfish individualism.
When Westerners write of their experiences
in the developing world, there is always
the danger that the locals become fodder
for a crude display of cultural superiority.
Kennedy becomes aware of the pitfalls
of romanticising the peasants’
life. She is initially susceptible to
gauzy clichés about the nobility
of poverty, only to wheel around and
face these platitudes head-on. She unpacks
their components and acknowledges some
painful cultural and personal truths.
She is frank about her own failings
and misconceptions, and dogged in her
examination of her own culture as it
is thrown into relief by Mexican customs.
Sing, and Don’t Cry is an
eloquent portrait of how lived experience
can inform and alter a person’s
intellectual and spiritual alignment.
Kennedy’s desire for an investigation
of her inner life makes this book a
profound and evocative document of a
particular place.
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