Bob Lucky

Two Favorite Haibun: On Going a Journey

Image by Miguel Á. Padriñán/Pexels

Why did I agree to do this essay? I hate the idea of picking a favorite anything because there seems to be a finality to it, a set-in-stone cloud of dust in the air, and I know as soon as I put down my chisel, I’ll remember that great haibun by so-and-so that means so much to me and want to smash that slab of stone and start over. I’m catholic in my tastes, but they change with the seasons, location, and my mood.

As for a favorite haibun by another writer … well, who have I been reading lately? There are certainly haibun writers I admire and look forward to seeing in tables of contents and on book covers, but that admiration is based on the respect I have for a body of work, not the love of a single haibun. And when I think about it, as I have been, it’s more than likely that one’s favorite anything—song, movie, painting, novel, bottle of wine, ex-spouse, dog, poem, or haibun—isn’t necessarily the best in its category. Take dogs, for example; I’m likely to pick a mutt that resembles a miniature Irish Wolfhound over a pedigreed Peruvian Inca Orchid. There’s no accounting for taste.

One way around this, I thought, was to pick something out of Basho’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North and Other Travel Sketches¹, which may have been my first introduction to haibun long before I knew what a haibun was (although I had been writing haibun-like things in my journals for a while). Gary Snyder may have had something to do with that. And then I remembered Jim Kacian’s Border Lands^2, a chapbook travelogue of haiku and haibun I like to reread from time to time. And then I remembered Stanley Pelter’s multivolume autobiography-in-haibun³. What bigger journey do any of us take than the life we ride to the end? And then I couldn’t stop remembering the many great books I’ve read, and I realized that most stories are really travelogues. We may not go around the world, but we go around the block, to work and back, between relationships, in search of the best heirloom tomatoes, in search of ourselves.

For now, for this essay, I will say my favorite haibun by another writer is Elizabeth Searle Lamb’s “Santarem, Brazil, No. 1.” First published in 2002, it relates events that occurred in the 1940s. It was included in Journeys 2015: An Anthology of International Haibun⁴, an anthology for which I wrote the introduction that I’ve not reread in years because of something I would like to change. I described Lamb’s haibun “In the Peruvian Andes” as a mix of prose, haiku, and free verse. Either my definition of haiku a decade ago was very rigid and narrow or I mistook the last three haiku as free verse. I suspect when writing that introduction, probably in a hurry, I somehow blurred Lamb’s haibun with haibun by Gary Snyder. He has a lot to answer for. Consider this a correction.

Santarem, Brazil, No. 1⁵

I wake very early. It is still cool. I sleep in a hammock and my back aches. One cannot turn over, even in a “matrimonial hammock.” I crawl out from under the mosquito net and open the shutters. There are no screens.

In a little partitioned-off space at the back of the house, I stand, naked, on the slatted floorboards. With a large hollowed-out gourd, a cuia, I dip water from a barrel, and sluice it over myself. Early morning bird song from the backyard trees.

José Maria has filled our two barrels with water from the blue Tapajós River. Ocean tides affect the Amazon here, some 500 miles from the Atlantic. At high tide muddy Amazon water flows up into the mouth of our river. He watches for low tide. He brings the water in two kerosene tins hung on a stout pole across his shoulders. This is all the water we have.

Rufina comes back from market. Her basket is filled with fruit, just-caught fish for dinner, vegetables, and a small loaf of heavy dark bread. Now she brings me abacaxi, the sweet fresh Amazon pineapple, along with toast, guava jelly, and a large cup of Brazilian café com leite. It is made with powdered milk. I long for fresh milk, for thick cream from a Kansas dairy farm.

A clapping of hands at the little front gate of Floriano Peixoto #4. Visitors. Two ladies in long black dresses come in. They speak little English. I speak almost no Portuguese. They ask if I have children— shaking their heads when I say no. They already know the tall Americano, Senhor Bruce, is my husband. They know he oversees collection of wild rubber to be shipped to America for use in war production. They know he travels upriver in a small red launch, the Jangará. They know he is away. They ask how much rent we pay—$7. Way too much!

I am astonished when one of the women tells me her mother was born in Louisiana. Later, I learn of a group of southerners who came here after the Civil War. They hoped, naively, to re-establish plantation life. But now we drink cafezinho, the tiny cups filled almost half full with brown sugar before the coffee is added. We shake hands. They leave. I never see them again. It is 9:30 a.m.

the air, heavy 
my neighbor’s toucan calling
for the daily rain

There’s something Basho-like in Lamb’s prose, or at least similar to the prose of Nobuyuki Yuasa’s translation:

…. I stopped overnight at Iizuka.

I had a bath in a hot spring before I took shelter at an inn. It was a filthy place with rough straw mats spread out on an earth floor. They had to prepare my bed by the dim light of the fire, for there was not even a lamp in the whole house. A storm came upon us towards midnight, and between the noise of thunder and leaking rain and the raids of mosquitoes and fleas, I could not get a wink of sleep.⁶

Lamb’s haibun is also in first person and uses everyday vocabulary and straight-forward description providing sufficient detail to sketch an image—but not paint a picture—which leaves room for the reader to enter the haibun and enhance the image with her own experiences. Who hasn’t dealt with uncomfortable beds and mosquitoes? There’s no need to burden the reader with the color of the hammock or the size of the mosquitoes. The use of short sentences and the clarity of detail quickly sets up a backdrop for the next stage of the journey, the next incident. (In Basho’s case, a day on horseback while suffering another bout of dysentery; in Lamb’s case, ultimately, the arrival of visitors.) The difference between Basho and Lamb, in these examples, is verb tense. Lamb uses present tense, which, in English-language haibun, has long been the recommended verb tense, perhaps to replicate haiku-like immediacy. This is, generally speaking, what was once referred to as “haiku-like prose.”⁷ Perhaps it still is.

Since most haibun are about or based on personal experiences, it’s not surprising that first-person is the most common voice. Out of the nine sentences in the first two paragraphs of Lamb’s haibun, four have “I” as the subject of clauses. “I” is the engine of all journeys and experiences, but by the end of the haibun it is clear that the repetition of “I” also underlies a sense of isolation. As the haibun progresses, we meet the household staff, who complete their tasks and exit stage left, and two unexpected visitors who vanish after a social call. We also learn her husband is away and that she has no children. When the visitors depart, Lamb remarks, “I never see them again.”

The sense of isolation is also reinforced by the use of anaphora, highlighting what little she knows about her new environment. The locals seem to know everything. Of her visitors, Lamb says,

They speak little English. I speak almost no Portuguese. They ask if I have children—shaking their heads when I say no. They already know the tall Americano, Senhor Bruce, is my husband. They know he oversees collection of wild rubber to be shipped to America for use in war production. They know he travels upriver in a small red launch, the Jangará. They know he is away.

It’s only 9:30 in the morning. What’s next? Fish for dinner. In short, like the neighbor’s toucan, Lamb has some time to kill.

the air, heavy 
my neighbor’s toucan calling
for the daily rain

The sense of isolation may be partly due to culture shock. There are numerous small complaints throughout the narrative: the sore back she has from sleeping in the “matrimonial hammock” (I believe the quotation marks are to signify the irony that her husband is not there to share it); no screens on the windows; her only water collected from a river and transported in kerosene tins; her longing “for fresh milk, for thick cream from a Kansas dairy farm” instead of powdered milk in her coffee. And then there’s an epiphany. Later, having learned about the Americans who moved to Brazil after the U.S. Civil War, she comments: “They hoped, naively, to re-establish plantation life.” And there it is, the realization that life in a new place can’t be, shouldn’t be, like life in the old place. Acceptance. From what I know of Lamb, she was resilient and adaptable.

It’s fine to analyze voice and verb tense and rhetorical strategies, but it’s impossible most of the time to know how conscious a writer was about such choices, what was intentional and what was intuitive, or what was merely habitual. I’ve read this haibun many times over the years. I admire it, the way it’s crafted. I identify with the situation. And the last three sentences are always a pleasant surprise to me. I’ve spent an inordinate amount of time puzzling over the order of those sentences. “They leave. I never see them again. It is 9:30 a.m.” Why not It is 9:30 a.m. They leave. I never see them again, or, They leave. It is 9:30 a.m. I never see them again? The latter seem more natural to me, but the original is clearly the best order because it’s not about when the visitors leave but about how long the day is going to be waiting around for the rain with the neighbor’s toucan.

I rarely go back and read my work once it’s published so my favorite haibun is often one I’ve recently published, one I can remember. When I do go back and read an older haibun, I often find something I want to change. However, today, I’m going to say that the favorite haibun of my own is “Company in Chiang Mai, Thailand.” Thematically it’s related to Lamb’s haibun. There are stylistic similarities. There are sentimental reasons as well. It’s the first or second haibun I ever published. Also, there’s a “chronology” issue I sometimes have an urge to revise.

Company in Chiang Mai, Thailand⁸

Having company is a kind of travel. A friend from Japan is visiting. Tonight we plan to go down to the Ping River for the Loi Kratong festival. The river will be jammed with flickering candles adrift in their banana-leaf boats, the sky above lit with thousands of airborne lanterns: prayers and gratitude going up and going downstream. Yesterday we went to a khao soi restaurant I’ve been meaning to check out for months. Afterwards, at the market, we bought an assortment of crickets, grasshoppers and silkworms to nibble on as we strolled home.

tropical twilight…
the chicken griller
fans her coals.

What have I done here with the chronology — present to future to past; today before yesterday — and did I do it on purpose? I could have done something like this:

Having company is a kind of travel. A friend from Japan is visiting. Yesterday we went to a khao soi restaurant I’ve been meaning to check out for months. Afterwards, at the market, we bought an assortment of crickets, grasshoppers and silkworms to nibble on as we strolled home. Tonight we plan to go down to the Ping River for the Loi Kratong festival. The river will be jammed with flickering candles adrift in their banana-leaf boats, the sky above lit with thousands of airborne lanterns: prayers and gratitude going up and going downstream.

It seems more natural in this order. My friend is here. Yesterday we did that. Tonight we’ll do this. Perhaps I wanted to end on the image of munching crispy critters and not on the idea of prayers drifting away. I don’t know. It was a long time ago. I hope it was intentional. It is 1:06 a.m.

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Notes

1. Basho. The Narrow Road to the Deep North and Other Travel Sketches. Nobuyuki Yuasu, trans. Penguin, 1966. Click here to see a PDF available on The Haiku Foundation website.
2. Kacian, Jim. Border Lands. Red Moon Press, 2007.
3. Where to start with Stanley Pelter? If you’ve read his works, you know. If you haven’t, you should. Click here to read one of his books available on The Haiku Foundation.
4. Journeys 2015: An Anthology of International Haibun. Angelee Deodhar, editor. There were three anthologies and another in the works when Deodhar passed away. She was a champion of haibun and haiku.
5. Lamb, Elizabeth Searle. “Santarem, Brazil, No. 1,” Dreamcatcher of Light. Santa Fe Poetry Broadside, 2002. Click here to read Charles Trumbull’s biographical essay about Lamb (posted in The Haiku Foundation).
6. See note 1, page 110.
7. In an earlier draft, I went off topic about changes and innovations in prose in haibun. Haiku, of course, has undergone enormous change, so much so that defining the form/genre has become more and more complicated. Imagine being an elementary school teacher and dealing with the fallout when your students go home and tell their parents haiku doesn’t have to be 5-7-5 and multiple that by 100. You get the picture. I would call in sick on parent-teacher conference day. Between the changes in haiku and the expansion of prose possibilities, English-language haibun has been enriched, but it’s also drifting away from its meaning, or at least its definition in Japanese. The idea of a haiku-less haibun a while back seems to have disappeared — it was a topic for a time in Haibun Today. However, the idea of a prose-less haibun — form poetry + haiku, free verse + haiku, etc. — terminology (俳文) be ignored or damned, is likely here to stay. I’m among the many who’ve published such prosimetric pieces in haibun journals, but under oath in the Court of Poetry, I would say they aren’t haibun, except in spirit. And the spirit, weak or not, often breaks down on cross examination.
8. Frogpond 30.2, summer 2007.

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About the Author

Bob Lucky‘s books include My Wife & Other Adventures (Red Moon Press, 2024), My Thology: Not Always True But Always Truth (Cyberwit, 2019), and Conversation Starters in a Language No One Speaks (SurVision Books, 2018), a winner of the 2018 James Tate Poetry Prize. Lucky lives in Portugal, where he’s working his way through all the regional cheeses and wines.

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