Eagle
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Re: Eagle
by tsukoui » Fri Apr 22, 2016 5:14 pm
How I came to Sheikh Nazim is a strange and intricate story that I don't want to rush into. As I said I was raised a communist, and whilst I now question whether the atheist aspects of Marx are appropriate for the contemporary time, it is generally accepted that when you disagree adab advises one to be silent. I never claim to be Muslim, however many times I have been greeted as one. If you knew your history you would know that the communist party of Cyprus originally was founded by both Greek and Turkish Cypriots, so it is not so unusual that we should meet up, at least for me. Nazim's own position on communism was quite strong given that his Grandsheikh was persecuted by the Soviets. I try to take the middle path. Anyway, as I said, I don't want to rush into talking about religion and politics, they are generally heavy subjects for most people that require careful meditation. Coffee would be lovely. I'm sure we can find lighter things to talk about as well 
Where is good for you? I live in East Finchley so anywhere on the Northern Line is easy for me to get to...
Where is good for you? I live in East Finchley so anywhere on the Northern Line is easy for me to get to...- tsukoui
- Regular Contributor
- Posts: 1063
- Joined: Thu Sep 30, 2010 9:10 pm
Re: Eagle
by tsukoui » Sat Apr 23, 2016 9:27 am
hard working trainee Pilot. seeks honest loving caring gentleman . searching for my soulmate previously heart broken do to lack of honesty. i enjoy tapas, rioja , romantic country walks, honesty, compassion and somoene who really wants a relationship. i have a lot to give in return . i have 2 little girls who i work hard to support and encourage to fulfill their dreams as I do mine .
- tsukoui
- Regular Contributor
- Posts: 1063
- Joined: Thu Sep 30, 2010 9:10 pm
Re: Eagle
by tsukoui » Sat Apr 23, 2016 2:34 pm
He arrives on time, smiling and bathed in cologne, with the freshness of someone who has bathed before battle. A friend predicted Angel Santiesteban would summon me to a bunker to grant me an interview, but, when I called him in the morning, we agreed to meet at the coffee shop at the intersection of 23rd and 12th streets at two in the afternoon.
His voice sounded a bit coarse. He spoke with some difficulty, as though I’d gotten him out of bed. And I had. He was working through a literary hangover from writing from midnight to four thirty in the morning, his favorite time for writing. He had been working intensely for weeks. He usually wakes up at eight in the morning, rereads and corrects what he writes in the early morning and submerges himself in the world of his characters, who demand more life.
No smoking, no drinking, no music. Alone with his demons, he sits in front of his computer every day and starts to write the film that plays out in his mind. “That’s how I get my ideas. First there’s an image, then a moving picture. No notes or drafts,” he says, mentioning how busy he is. He must send Cuban writer Amir Valle, who lives in Germany, one short story every week, for a book to be published by Fischer. He would have preferred to publish Dios no juega a los dados (“God Does not Play Die”), a novel about prison, a testimony of his recent experiences in prison, but Amir, who is also his friend and agent, has recommended he let the story rest for now.
Santiesteban’s cell phone vibrates. It’s his girlfriend. He answers. “She’s just reminding me I have a doctor’s appointment at three. I had completely forgotten it. She reminded me before I came here.” We’ll only have twenty short minutes for the interview, if nothing else urgent comes up. He seems exhausted, he can’t conceal this even though he wants to. He rubs his eyes in circles with the index and thumb. “This heat is overwhelming, it puts you to sleep. But don’t worry. Even though this horse seems taciturn, tired, don’t believe it, he works with his mind. So, don’t worry. Let’s continue.” A Leo, who was born on August 13, the date of the horse in the Chinese horoscope, suffers from chronic gastritis, a hiatus hernia and a bleeding ulcer on the walls of his stomach. Days before, they detected a blood clot in his intestine that makes his condition even more delicate. It’s no wonder he’s lost weight.
“I got all this during my last stay in prison. I went on two hunger strikes, one lasted 16 days and the other 18. I wanted to see if I could teach a lesson to this totalitarian regime that barely lets you breathe. That’s what I wanted. To sacrifice myself and use my death to try and damage this dictatorship, make it accountable.” It was 2013. Cuban actress Sheila Roche, his partner at the time, was the one who made him see reason during a visit to the prison. “Didn’t you screw our relationship? Didn’t you want to be in prison? Now it’s not the time to die, do what you came here to do. Didn’t you say you wanted to condemn the abuses you see every day? Then do it. That’s what Sheila said to me and I listened.”
An old woman who walks with a stop approaches the table, holding a bunch of peanut pacakages. Santiesteban buys 10 and calls the waiter over. He asks me what I want to drink and we both decide on malta. This writer, without whom the map of Cuban literature could not be fully drawn, has yogurt, fruit, natural juices and crackers for breakfast. He can’t touch coffee, beans or soft drinks. The dietary tyranny his doctor has imposed on him is so arbitrary that, if he followed it literally, he’d bore himself to death eating the same thing over and over again, which is why he is constantly breaking the rules.
“I can’t even eat this,” he says while opening up a peanut package. He pours half the peanuts inside into his mouth and starts chewing. “Lucky it’s just a routine check-up today, none of this business of swallowing up a hose so he can go scuba-diving in my stomach.” He looks at his watch on his left wrist. “I don’t like being controlled, which is why I never liked being a kid. I detest being governed by someone. I never got used to getting orders, I could never stand anyone controlling my life and setting routines for me. Even if freedom led me to failure, I would continue to choose it.”
He opens the can of malt, takes a sip and remains focused and serious, as though it were irritating for him to rummage through a childhood that could be summarized as seeing his mother support five kids in a bad neighborhood with her hairdresser’s job. His mother never read him stories and was burdened by the guilt of having given birth to an epileptic child after suffering a fall during her pregnancy. “Since she spoiled him every way she could, she would even let my brother hit me. He was very violent. I had to wait till adolescence to make him respect me. One day, I told my mother she’d done the most damage, not by falling, but later, in his upbringing.”
He waves away a fly that tries to land on the can of malt and it seems as though he were waving away those childhood memories, wanting to leap in search of his teenage years, when he entered adulthood prematurely that day in 1984, when he went to say goodbye to his sister and brother-in-law, on a boat headed for Miami. As fate would have it, the Cuban coast guard surprised them and he, Angel Santiesteban, would be imprisoned for the first time for the crime of concealment. “They told me I had the right to turn my sister in. I waited 14 months for trial and was finally absolved. She and my brother-in-law had to wait ten years for attempting to leave the country illegally and the crime of robbery. The boat was State property.”
Now, he smiles for the first time. He thinks back to his days as a student at the Camilo Cienfuegos Military School, when he was 17. He had sent a letter to his brother, serving in an internationalist mission in Ethiopia, telling him he was ready to take over for him in Africa. “They liked the letter so much and so many soldiers wanted to copy it that they pinned it up on a bulletin board, next to the board showing the different holidays. He wrote me to tell me I should study philology. I thought that was a medical career. When I found out it was in the humanities, I felt offended. At the time, I thought literature was for weaklings and homosexuals. I sent him another letter, telling him not to underestimate me; that I was made for weapons, the military.”
His calling as a writer and voracious appetite for books would assail him in prison. He would read Iulian Simionov’s Seventeen Instants and a Spring to learn how to narrate a story, write dialogue, describe things. He was stifled by the story of how several Palestinian students had confronted the Iranian army from the rearguard and had ended up sacrificing themselves. “When I got out of prison, I met Heras and gave him the novel for him to read. He suggested I found a literary workshop to learn narrative techniques. He told me it was a diamond in the rough, that I was literally in diapers.”
Between workshop sessions and books Eduardo Heras Leon lent him, he began to compile testimonies from different soldiers who had taken part in internationalist missions and wrote his first book of short stories: Sur: latitude 13 (“South: Latitude 13”). “It’s the other side of Angola. Some veterans would ask me to turn off the recorder when they began telling of overwhelming experiences. Many who read the book think I was in that war.”
His voice sounded a bit coarse. He spoke with some difficulty, as though I’d gotten him out of bed. And I had. He was working through a literary hangover from writing from midnight to four thirty in the morning, his favorite time for writing. He had been working intensely for weeks. He usually wakes up at eight in the morning, rereads and corrects what he writes in the early morning and submerges himself in the world of his characters, who demand more life.
No smoking, no drinking, no music. Alone with his demons, he sits in front of his computer every day and starts to write the film that plays out in his mind. “That’s how I get my ideas. First there’s an image, then a moving picture. No notes or drafts,” he says, mentioning how busy he is. He must send Cuban writer Amir Valle, who lives in Germany, one short story every week, for a book to be published by Fischer. He would have preferred to publish Dios no juega a los dados (“God Does not Play Die”), a novel about prison, a testimony of his recent experiences in prison, but Amir, who is also his friend and agent, has recommended he let the story rest for now.
Santiesteban’s cell phone vibrates. It’s his girlfriend. He answers. “She’s just reminding me I have a doctor’s appointment at three. I had completely forgotten it. She reminded me before I came here.” We’ll only have twenty short minutes for the interview, if nothing else urgent comes up. He seems exhausted, he can’t conceal this even though he wants to. He rubs his eyes in circles with the index and thumb. “This heat is overwhelming, it puts you to sleep. But don’t worry. Even though this horse seems taciturn, tired, don’t believe it, he works with his mind. So, don’t worry. Let’s continue.” A Leo, who was born on August 13, the date of the horse in the Chinese horoscope, suffers from chronic gastritis, a hiatus hernia and a bleeding ulcer on the walls of his stomach. Days before, they detected a blood clot in his intestine that makes his condition even more delicate. It’s no wonder he’s lost weight.
“I got all this during my last stay in prison. I went on two hunger strikes, one lasted 16 days and the other 18. I wanted to see if I could teach a lesson to this totalitarian regime that barely lets you breathe. That’s what I wanted. To sacrifice myself and use my death to try and damage this dictatorship, make it accountable.” It was 2013. Cuban actress Sheila Roche, his partner at the time, was the one who made him see reason during a visit to the prison. “Didn’t you screw our relationship? Didn’t you want to be in prison? Now it’s not the time to die, do what you came here to do. Didn’t you say you wanted to condemn the abuses you see every day? Then do it. That’s what Sheila said to me and I listened.”
An old woman who walks with a stop approaches the table, holding a bunch of peanut pacakages. Santiesteban buys 10 and calls the waiter over. He asks me what I want to drink and we both decide on malta. This writer, without whom the map of Cuban literature could not be fully drawn, has yogurt, fruit, natural juices and crackers for breakfast. He can’t touch coffee, beans or soft drinks. The dietary tyranny his doctor has imposed on him is so arbitrary that, if he followed it literally, he’d bore himself to death eating the same thing over and over again, which is why he is constantly breaking the rules.
“I can’t even eat this,” he says while opening up a peanut package. He pours half the peanuts inside into his mouth and starts chewing. “Lucky it’s just a routine check-up today, none of this business of swallowing up a hose so he can go scuba-diving in my stomach.” He looks at his watch on his left wrist. “I don’t like being controlled, which is why I never liked being a kid. I detest being governed by someone. I never got used to getting orders, I could never stand anyone controlling my life and setting routines for me. Even if freedom led me to failure, I would continue to choose it.”
He opens the can of malt, takes a sip and remains focused and serious, as though it were irritating for him to rummage through a childhood that could be summarized as seeing his mother support five kids in a bad neighborhood with her hairdresser’s job. His mother never read him stories and was burdened by the guilt of having given birth to an epileptic child after suffering a fall during her pregnancy. “Since she spoiled him every way she could, she would even let my brother hit me. He was very violent. I had to wait till adolescence to make him respect me. One day, I told my mother she’d done the most damage, not by falling, but later, in his upbringing.”
He waves away a fly that tries to land on the can of malt and it seems as though he were waving away those childhood memories, wanting to leap in search of his teenage years, when he entered adulthood prematurely that day in 1984, when he went to say goodbye to his sister and brother-in-law, on a boat headed for Miami. As fate would have it, the Cuban coast guard surprised them and he, Angel Santiesteban, would be imprisoned for the first time for the crime of concealment. “They told me I had the right to turn my sister in. I waited 14 months for trial and was finally absolved. She and my brother-in-law had to wait ten years for attempting to leave the country illegally and the crime of robbery. The boat was State property.”
Now, he smiles for the first time. He thinks back to his days as a student at the Camilo Cienfuegos Military School, when he was 17. He had sent a letter to his brother, serving in an internationalist mission in Ethiopia, telling him he was ready to take over for him in Africa. “They liked the letter so much and so many soldiers wanted to copy it that they pinned it up on a bulletin board, next to the board showing the different holidays. He wrote me to tell me I should study philology. I thought that was a medical career. When I found out it was in the humanities, I felt offended. At the time, I thought literature was for weaklings and homosexuals. I sent him another letter, telling him not to underestimate me; that I was made for weapons, the military.”
His calling as a writer and voracious appetite for books would assail him in prison. He would read Iulian Simionov’s Seventeen Instants and a Spring to learn how to narrate a story, write dialogue, describe things. He was stifled by the story of how several Palestinian students had confronted the Iranian army from the rearguard and had ended up sacrificing themselves. “When I got out of prison, I met Heras and gave him the novel for him to read. He suggested I found a literary workshop to learn narrative techniques. He told me it was a diamond in the rough, that I was literally in diapers.”
Between workshop sessions and books Eduardo Heras Leon lent him, he began to compile testimonies from different soldiers who had taken part in internationalist missions and wrote his first book of short stories: Sur: latitude 13 (“South: Latitude 13”). “It’s the other side of Angola. Some veterans would ask me to turn off the recorder when they began telling of overwhelming experiences. Many who read the book think I was in that war.”
- tsukoui
- Regular Contributor
- Posts: 1063
- Joined: Thu Sep 30, 2010 9:10 pm
That should give you lots of new ideas to write about!
Re: Eagle
by repulsewarrior » Sat Apr 23, 2016 9:41 pm
...interesting tsuk, i hope there is more to this story.
...interesting thread.
...interesting thread.
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repulsewarrior - Leading Contributor
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- Location: homeless in Canada
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