His father, Venancio Jakosalem Fernandez, was always a bit of a poet. In the course of his son’s artistic career the good son was always asked who among his ancestors was an artist. He always answered, none. And yet, if he were asked now where he got his artistic genes, his best most honest answer would be, my father!
To be sure, his father’s poetry and art was always of doubtful quality and provenance. He remembers him typically drawing a profile of a man looking much like Dick Tracy, sharp lines and all. But he drew just this face. Nothing else. It was not much of a “body of works.” But he drew it everywhere. On walls with chalk, on paper with ball pen and pencil. And once, with his brand new Parker fountain pen. But always that same face. He grew up with it. And for all that the father achieved with it, he at least made sure drawing was not alien to his children. And all the more so poetry.
In the light of Shakespeare, Neruda, all the way to his two favorite Dylans and Paul Simon, the good son might say it wasn’t all that much as poetry. And yet, the son now does wonder: Where did his father’s poetry come from? Did he invent it all himself? Or was he quoting folk literature he had learned from drunken gatherings with friends as all poetry most likely derives?
Of these, he remembers only two. One on Leon Kilat and another one about a mysterious anti-heroic figure called Noneng Soler. He cannot recall the whole piece but he does remember it as a long piece which ended: “..Turns the paper into money; The leaves into money; The stones into money; But where is Noneng Soler now? In the parobinsyal jail.”
It was meant as a comic piece. And always when he orated it to his children his endings were marked by a loud chuckle perhaps to recall a mirth of memory these last lines raised in him. It was a mirth which always infected his audience, none the least, his own children even if they heard it repeatedly. It was the look and the thought of him that got them all the time. And they laughed with him. His father was not a bad performer himself. He danced like Fred Astaire though in totality, he might not have been much a perfect man.
But we digress. The son recalls the ditty on Noneng Soler only in the course of a question raised in the papers about what to do with the infamous contraband elephant tusks. Do we burn it? Do we pulverize it with a steam roller? Or do we save it for other things?
Noneng Soler was always meant to remind us all of the roots and inevitability of corruption. Corruption was and is only a tool for making money everywhere, using anything and by whatever means. The moral being that anything can be turned to money not the least of which is the ivory tusks of elephants.
Give it away and it’s bound to find its way into the market. Grind it into fine powder and somebody along the way is bound to make money. Mix the ivory with a bit of resin or any binder and that ivory would still be fine useful material. Bury it into the ground and somebody is bound to dig it up. Which leaves us all in a fine quandary. What to do?
One could go about it logically, rationally if you will, and still we do not solve the problem of keeping it away from the clutches of Noneng Soler and homegrown corruption. The problem stems from looking at it from a human perspective. We are better off to ask, How would Venancio Jakosalem Fernandez look at the problem? How would the poet solve it?
The good poet would of course look at the problem by speaking through the most unlikely persona. Why not view the problem from the view point of elephants? Do you know elephants pay sacred respect for their dead? As National Geographic repeatedly shows to us through countless features it almost seems as if elephants pray over the bodies of their fallen. They go always if they can to a particular place to die.
Which brings us to the best thing that can be done to the elephant tusks. They are best buried as in a cemetery with a tombstone over it to remind us of the sacredness of that which is contained under the earth of this particular place: an elephant graveyard on an island never visited by living and free elephants in their lifetimes.