Pre-departure reflections

I have a confession: I have a thing for early- to mid-20th Century poetry. And I'm confessing to you that my favorite poet is a lifelong insurance salesman, Wallace Stevens. He is a man of imagination, and I am man of big dreams. Sometimes big dreams confound people, especially those who retain their Midwestern sensibilities. This is why so many people ask me, "Why Africa?" My immediate and specific answer is part-white guilt and part-Human Development Index statistics. The larger answer is, a la Occam's Razor, simpler: Africa is a land of imagination. Ancestral worship and boabab trees. King Solomon's Mines and "the clicky language." 

My hope in going to Africa is to stretch my imagination, to allow me to dream even bigger, as big as the setting sun over the Kalahari desert. Of course, I realize that painful and deadly realities face the people of Africa, but there is always "new news". This is what Charlayne Hunter-Gult calls the stories of Africans shaping their own futures and remaking their continent, or in other words, the stories of imaginative minds tackling reality. So I now give you the goal of my semester in Botswana: I, Michael Arnst, hope to return to America wearing a sombrero. That's right, a sombrero. A figurative sombrero. 

"Rationalists, wearing square hats,

Think, in square rooms,

Looking at the floor,

Looking at the ceiling.

They confine themselves

To right-angled triangles.

If they tried rhomboids,

Cones, waving lines, ellipses -

As, for example, the ellipse of the half-moon -

Rationalists would wear sombreros."

From Six Significant Landscapes, Wallace Stevens.

A brightly colored, rhythmic and extra-round sombrero. That's what I'll be wearing on May 15th, America, so get used to it!