Foreign Correspondence: Ananda Osel’s ‘Dispatches from the Third World’
By Erin Foran
Ananda Osel’s chapbook Dispatches from the Third World comes at us with a sense of urgency. The poems, all about his experiences in Thailand, are gritty, unfinished almost. Indeed, as the title suggests, they are “dispatches” sent quickly from author to reader. They ask to be listened to. Yet, they are not political pleas – Osel makes it clear that he is uninterested in the revolution and ongoing political strife. They are messages about everyday life – the foreigner’s life, and the Thais’ life, butting up against each other in the hot, polluted streets and quiet cafes.
Through Osel’s poems, we meet the monk, the little girl who should be in school, the tuk tuk driver. They move in and out of the frame – in fact, the main subject of the book is the author himself, experiencing Thailand as a writer and outsider. Something about the country causes Osel to consider life existentially. In the first poem, “the sky crumbles with laughter,” “it” is a noun, omnipresent misery bearing down on everyone, and there is nothing to do but laugh. In “room #3,” Osel contemplates being, the “is” of life, “the is is dancing in the belly of the mosquito.”
Perhaps these thoughts came to him in those still moments of escape from the bustle (in “a real American” we find ourselves with him, lying on the bed, unable to face the outdoor heat yet again). Though he clearly tries to avoid, and likely detests, didactic politicking, the sex trade and the maimed beggars and the poor – they get to him. They get to us. They get to the young Thai woman too – in the title poem, she trembles to acknowledge the even younger girl being led away by an older foreign man.
This is one of those moments where Osel shows us Thailand’s complexity. It is ironic that he begins his chapbook with a word from the author in which he states that when people ask, he can say the book is about “the third world… no explanation needed, I hope.” Osel gives the reader a window not only to the dark underbelly of child poverty and social injustice, but to young lovers and giggling girls, “trash men collect(ing) trash” (not letting it rot in the streets, as some might think of “the third world”), and monks meditating over convenience store snacks. The third world is not a cut and dried idea. In Thailand at least, Osel shows us the contradictions – there is shame, but fierce pride too.
Despite the book’s tendencies toward self-reflection, in the end, Osel leaves the reader with the sense that the foreign tourist and writer must write of his travels, in part, on behalf of the Other. Dispatches from the Third World ends with the poem “outside Nana,” where the American poet meets the young Thai man, and finds that he has no other choice – for himself, the young man, and the distant reader – but to write.
outside Nana
outside the Nana tailor shop
sat a young man
no hands,
no feet,
no shade.
as i passed he put both stubs in
the prayer position and said
“suh-watt-dee – suh-watt-dee”
his stubs shaking with
unfounded hope.
as i passed him i nodded,
tried to look like i
understood,
even though
i didn’t and
don’t.
then i walked back to my small room
and wrote it all down thinking that
one day i should stop
writing this stuff
but knowing that men with
no hands,
no feet,
no shade,
and a smile the size of
an expressway
would never let
me get away
with that.
Ananda Osel is a poet, editor, artist, and two-time Pushcart Prize nominee. He is the Executive/Poetry Editor of CommonLine, an American literary magazine of art, poetry, interview, and review. “outside Nana,” reprinted with permission here, was originally published in Dispatches from the Third World. The book is available for purchase from the publisher’s website at http://www.proletariatpress.org/ for $9.00 USD (shipping included). Find out more at www.ananda-osel.com.
——
Erin Foran is the poetry / photography editor of The Wanderlust Review.
Photograph on the main page is used in conjunction with Flickr’s Creative Commons Agreement. It can be found, in its original form, at http://www.flickr.com/photos/zoutedrop/2651287850/. The photograph within the article appears courtesy and copyright of Ananda Osel.
This entry was posted on Monday, July 27th, 2009 at 2:00 am and is filed under Non-Fiction. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.
