From To the Ubekistani Soldier Who Would Not Save My Life
by Susan Smith Nash
PEANUT FARMING IN MOZAMBIQUE
Muggy and surreal winds were coming up from the south.
I said, "Here we see bodies that matter! The materiality of the husk, the papery interior, the patterned and flashy shell, and then I look at what is underneath - it is hard, twinned (its dual nature can't be denied), delegitimized by social processing, seemingly passive, potentially toxic."
My latest relationship had just failed (again), and I was trying to relate everything to something I could pick up in my hands and crush.
The dirt we had to work with was dark and resistant. The
Russian tractor I had bought on a business trip to Moldova was beautiful
for tractor art or wonderfully dissectable for an Alexander Calder mobile,
fabulous for pulling heavy equipment through the bloody, bullet-filled
soil the local
Investment Ministry called "a good investment."
My arms were raked raw; I had scratched furrows into myself at night as I slept. I had become very thin. I liked it this way.
That happened after he left me. Did I blame him? No. Did it matter? No.
And now I was wearing long sleeves to hide the evidence, taking aspirin-laced-with-morphine to deal with the pain.
The people in Mozambique had no idea this was going on. They just looked at my sunburned, wind-leathered face, my strangely tense hands, my sun-bleached blonde hair and thought "Rich American." Since they had never met a 40-year-old American woman who decided to make a peanut farm out of an old United Nations demilitarized zone, they didn't know my idiosyncrasies weren't the norm.
I slept in burlap. I drank coffee shot through with laudanum drops. Laudanum, opiate drops of the poets. I sat on the roof and read poetry. I wore short skirts with hiking boots against the snakes). I put dark curtains in the room I stored my books, burned incense in the barns where we kept the peanut bins.
We planted. But if a peanut plant were to emerge, I wouldn't
know what it looked like. I was only here to look at the peanuts. I love
peanuts themselves. They remind me of humanity. Each body is separate.
Each body is unique. This means there are infinite variations on a single
theme, but
nevertheless, each body is judged by one norm. So. Try to conform even
though no one can ever possibly measure up to perfection. Try anyway.
When you fail, blame yourself.
I dressed in burlap. The living peanut. Flesh and sweat underneath, but still with husks and a hard, broken core. The Mozambique district chief asked me if I wanted to go by jeep to the nearest village and buy cloth (it is good and made by hand, he said) and have it made into dresses. I looked at my burlap skirt, my loose & flowing burlap top, my bleached white Fruit of the Loom t-shirt and cotton boxers underneath.
"You would look very nice in flowered cotton," he said. "I can take you to the market."
"Thanks. Maybe later," I said.
I picked up a peanut and crushed it in my hand. The way the shell crumbled and the husk flew off in the hot, southern, horribly surrealistic wind made me feel terribly sad, terribly alone.
The Mozambique spring was worse than usual. We had floods, then drought. I bought four more Russian tractors, built six barns. We continued to plow up bullets, occasionally cloth, occasionally bones.
Someone asked me to sell arms. "Pull in a good profit, for once," he said. I told him to fuck himself.
At night I continued to plow up my sad, thin arms with the same hands that had once touched a person I thought I would love forever. I went up to the roof, read poetry, and prepared my coffee, this time without laudanum.
***