Kerraway » Latin America

Circolombia

Michael Kerr — Sun, 09 May 2010 12:33:22 +0000

To the Roundhouse last night to see Urban, the new show from Circolombia, a company formed from graduates of a circus school for street kids in the Colombian city of Cali. They marry street dance with acrobatics in a tumbling, teeterboarding, tightrope-walking, skipping, somersaulting sensation of a show. The video below, of an earlier performance, doesn’t really do them justice. If you’re anywhere near Brighton, they’re on there from May 11 until May 22.

Listening to Global Voices

Michael Kerr — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 20:18:20 +0000

I came across Global Voices the other day while doing some background reading about Colombia. The point of the site is to shine light “on places and people other media often ignore”. It does a good job at that. Its Spanish section, complete with summaries and translations of blogs, could also prove extremely useful to students of the language.

The Yanomani, Survival and Norman Lewis

Michael Kerr — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 10:51:41 +0000

This morning’s Today programme on Radio 4 had a representative of Survival International talking about how seven Yanomani Indians in Venezuela have died from a suspected outbreak of swine flu.

I was reminded immediately of the great Norman Lewis, whose article in The Sunday Times in 1969 about massacres, land thefts and genocide in Brazilian Amazonia led to the founding of Survival.

Lewis remained committed throughout his life to the rights of tribal people, and in his writing about them regularly challenged clichés and preconceptions.

In one of his last books, A Voyage By Dhow, he wrote of a swamp-dwelling tribe in Mexico: “The Chontals inherit elaborate social graces from noble forebears, and they are saturated with the sly, defensive humour of the underdog. When I asked the man in charge of this party what the goings-on on his Tarzan T-shirt were all about, he displayed the ruin of his teeth in a stealthy grin and said, “These are the legends of a primitive people.”

The Spanish for strike

Michael Kerr — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 17:19:51 +0000

M y regular email arrived this morning from the dictionary publishers Collins with a ‘Spanish word of the day’. They missed a trick. The word is ‘huelga’, which refers to ‘a common phenomenon in some Latin American countries’. The email gives examples of how to use huelga in relation to doctors, teachers and dancers — but not postmen. A huelga is a strike.

Scaring the readers to death

Michael Kerr — Thu, 29 May 2008 16:03:00 +0000

Being frightened to death is one thing. Being able to communicate that fear in prose, so that your readers are almost as frightened on your behalf, is something else. Richard Grant did just that last weekend, writing in the Telegraph Magazine of his encounter with the bandits of the Sierra Madre.

A slogan for Nicaragua

Michael Kerr — Fri, 02 May 2008 15:12:35 +0000

What pictures come to mind when you hear the word Nicaragua? Not, perhaps, a scene like the one above, though this photograph, which I took from the fort of El Castillo on the Rio San Juan, is a truer representation than most people’s preconceptions.

The country is trying to rebrand itself, or rather brand itself, to appeal to tourists, and casting around for a slogan that will do the job.

“Contra to expectations” certainly summed up my experience, and was the headline we used on my piece about the country last year. But given that the Contras were the enemies of the Sandinistas, and that the former leader of the Sandinistas, Daniel Ortega, is Nicaragua’s current president, I don’t think that suggestion is likely to get very far. Any better ideas?

A full belly in Nicaragua

Michael Kerr — Mon, 04 Jun 2007 21:16:45 +0000

One of the many things I didn’t have much space for in my Telegraph piece on Nicaragua was the food. Two young Americans I met there who were working as volunteers had beans and rice pretty well every meal. I did better. Yes, there was beans and rice with the huevos revueltos (or huevos perdidos — lost in the scrambling) at breakfast, but at lunch I had excellent fish in several places, simply cooked and usually served with a chilero — a bowl of homemade pickled peppers, carrots and onions. Particularly memorable was a steak in a restaurant named Zaguan in the city of Granada — one of the tenderest I’ve had in a long time. Barriga llena, corazón contento (Full belly, happy heart) as they say there.

A guide worth following

Michael Kerr — Wed, 16 May 2007 20:17:37 +0000

I hate guided tours, those sheepish outings on which you trail through streets following a barking man or woman waving a flag. A tour with a guide is a different thing altogether.

I’ve just returned from 10 days in Nicaragua, where I spent most of my waking hours in the company of a man named Juan Carlos Mendosa. He was the perfect ambassador for his country: sharp-eyed, informed, entertaining, and with that knack of knowing when to sketch in background and when to let the place speak for itself.

Ours was a viaje de relampago — a lightning tour — taking in Managua, the little-visited coffee town of Jinotega, the Pacific coast, the colonial cities of León and Granada, the wildlife reserves of the Río San Juan and, finally, the Solentiname islands, renowned for their community of naïve painters.

I’ve come back with two books full of notes, 300 pictures and a strong feeling that I won’t be up to doing the country justice when I come to write about it for the Telegraph. But I’ll try. If you’re ever heading to Nicaragua, book a little time with Juan Carlos. You’ll find him at carelitours.com.

The best novels in Spanish

Michael Kerr — Sun, 08 Apr 2007 14:57:00 +0000

If you study Spanish in evening classes, it tends, even at intermediate level, to be language only; you’re unlikely to get a reading list of literature. So, Cervantes aside, what should you be reading?
The XIII Congress of Spanish Language Academies, held in Cartagena, Colombia, at the end of last month, threw up some suggestions. A panel of 81 writers, editors, academics and journalists brought together by the Colombian magazine Semana chose what they considered to be the best novels in Spanish published in the past 25 years. The top 10 included two works each by Roberto Bolaño and Javier Marías, but first place went to Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez.
It was a good month for Márquez. He celebrated his 80th birthday, the 25th anniversary of his receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature, and the 40th anniversary of the publication of the book that won it for him, One Hundred Years of Solitude.
At the time he finished that novel, Márquez was down on his luck and considering giving up writing. When he and his wife went to the post office to send the manuscript to his editor in Buenos Aires, they were told it would cost 83 pesos. They had only 53 pesos with them, so they sent half of it. “It was only later,” he recalled, “that we realised we hadn’t sent the first part but the second.” The editor was so keen to see how the book started that he advanced them cash to send the rest.

Why there are no coups in the US

Michael Kerr — Fri, 23 Feb 2007 21:02:38 +0000

The trailer for The Good Shepherd, the film about the formation of the CIA that opened in Britain this week, reminds me of a line from Isabel Allende’s wonderful memoir about Chile, My Invented Country, which I read recently. Allende recalls a joke popular in Latin America: Why are there no military coups in the United States? Because there is no American embassy.