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rosywrites · 5 years

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Silent Waves, Chapter 3

Chapter 3: Crashing Waves Fandom: League of Legends Ship: Jhin x Sona

[AO3]

Word count: 4623

Jhin descends the wooden ramp to the stone docks of Piltover. The stones are cleanly cut and precise, just how these machine-tinkering folks love it. The skyscrapers of Piltover are always a sight, drowning in gold, hextech, and a faint air of superiority. He takes one last look at the city before glancing at the nearest clock tower, its bells tolling eleven.

There wasn’t much time. The cabal stated they would be sending a messenger with his gun by noon. If he wasn’t there in time, there would be troublesome consequences he wasn’t willing to risk.

Two hours left. He had to make his way down to Zaun and find the rendezvous point. He swallows a longing sigh when a haggard old man approaches him with a knowing smile. He recognizes the cabal’s mark on the elder’s eye prosthetic. He straightens his back and bows his head.

“Back again, I see,” the old man splutters as he taps his cane by Jhin’s feet. “Y’really have no limitation with the way y’treat our technology, do ye?” He urges Jhin to follow him through the dark alleyways of Piltover.

“On the contrary, elder,” Jhin replies calmly. “It is of the utmost importance that I make sure my gun is well taken care of.” He raises his head to the skies, a mysterious look in his eyes. “It’s just that I had picked up a… stray, and she didn’t seem to take too well to it.”

“Oh gob it,” the elder harrumphs. “What else did y’expect, picking up a stray like that in the sea?” He shakes his head disapprovingly. “I never once took ye fer the type, but whatever y’picked up did quite the damage to yer gun.” After a moment of silence, he asks, “What did y’even pick up, anywho?”

Jhin’s eyes squint, but the elder cannot tell if it’s out of joy or anger. “A feisty and frightening little thing, I assure you.”

“Is that so…” the elder mutters as he takes Jhin deeper into the city, where The Gray of Zaun awaits below. “By the way, y’didn’t run into any trouble coming here, did ye?”

On instinct, his hand hovers over his abdomen but brushes it off like he had touched something filthy. “Not that I’m aware of,” he answers. “Why do you ask?”

The elder cackles quietly. “The sea has quite the terrifying creatures around here, boy. Y’would do well to mind your path when you depart from Piltover.” Before Jhin can ask any further, the elder ushers Jhin into a hexdraulic conveyor. He slaps Jhin’s back as he makes his way inside. “Come now, y’don’t want to be late!”

“Please, elder. I have a sensitive back.” A shame Jhin can’t kill this old man. He’s the only connection between the cabal and the technology of Piltover and Zaun, the middleman, repairman, and analyst of broken weapons. Killing him would send the cabal after Jhin’s head.

“Someone as young as ye? Y’might as well be one of them Chem-punks ‘round here.” The descender dings, and the door opens up to an alleyway much darker than those of Piltover’s. The streetlamps dimly light the path of cobblestones and bridges ahead. The conveyor creaks as the elder sits on the edge of the doorframe. “I’ll be waiting right here. M’sure you won’t take long.”

Jhin hums a non-committal response as he moves on. The stench of Zaun is sickly as always. The chem-fumes wafting out of the dingy chimneys makes him scoff. How vile. The sooner he gets his gun, the sooner he can get out of this place.

“Where the spirit of this land goes, her followers are near,” a voice says from the dark.

“The followers the stem, the spirit the blossom,” Jhin answers back. He turns to the source of the voice. “Do you have what I requested?” he asks.

“Certainly.” A pair of mechanical hands holding a parcel manifests from the shadows. “To deliver a parcel to the infamous Golden Demon himself, it is quite an honor.”

There is a moment of silence as Jhin unwraps the parcel and holds his newly-repaired Whisper in his hand. The feeling of metal against the palm of his hand sends shivers down his spine. He gives the grip a little squeeze and sighs longingly. Oh, how he missed Whisper…

“Now, shall we talk business?” the figure speaks up. With a metallic clang, a man covered in mechanical prosthetics steps out of the shadows. “I have a job I would like you to accomplish.”

Jhin simply stares at the man in silence. There’s another beat, and the man begins to feel uncomfortable under the scrutiny of his eye. “I understand you’re a client, and I am not one to question them.” He pauses. “Usually. What could a Chem-Baron such as yourself need an actor such as me?”

“Isn’t it obvious? I need power.” He scoffs scornfully. “The only things keep Zaun from falling into chaos are the pillars holding it up: we, the Chem-Barons. Unfortunately, one of these pillars has exhausted their use and refuses to step down. What other choice do I have?”

“Interesting,” Jhin can only say. “Normally, I would take up such a request. It would have been a fantastic piece of work, something as organic as a blossom blooming from within its mechanical cage.”

The baron’s face sours at his words and becomes exasperated. “So, will you do it or not?”

“Unfortunately,” he starts as he points his gun towards the baron, earning a small yelp at the cold touch of his gun’s muzzle to his chest, “I cannot comply.”

“W-wait, what are you doing? I can pay you to do this! A-any amount of money you want!” the baron tries to bargain. He dares not move, or else that bullet will go straight through the core of his body and kill him.

Jhin clicks his tongue in disapproval. “You see, the cabal has its own discreet way of disposing of their messengers.” His eyes squint in pure bliss when he sees the look of terror and desperation in whatever untouched flesh the baron has. Such skin tarnished by dull metallic parts… What a shame, really. “You are my client’s aim, baron. And I will make sure that your death is not meaningless but beautifully ornate.”

“As if I would let you, demon,” the baron exclaims as his mechanical body begins to hiss with steam and overlap each other with increasing size and parts, the baron disappearing into the suit. Jhin hops backwards and shoots at the chest, but the metal deflects the bullet off-course without a dent. “You really think I would come out here to meet The Golden Demon without preparations of my own?”

“I can’t say I didn’t expect it. After all, even the side character must put some effort into their performance before the final curtain call.” Jhin hops away when the baron slams a giant mechanical fist onto the cobblestone. He slips away into the shadows before the baron can catch him.

“Bastard, you think you can hide from me?”

“I prefer the term ‘observing’,” he replies. He studies the structure of the baron’s body, making the calculations and notes necessary to bring the stage to the grand finale.

“You can find the weak point all you want, but it’s useless! This metal is of the highest grade and can deflect any bullet you shoot at me!”

“Weak point? Oh, no, no.” Jhin’s eyes lock onto the tank pumping chemicals into tubes that weave around the mechanical suit. “What I look for is completely different, baron.” He assembles his gun into a rifle and takes a deep breath. Four shots. He shall free this baron from his rusting cage with his art. He shoots.

A tube shatters at the leg. A sickening green chemical sprays everywhere like a spring shower.

Another shot, and another tube shatters at the fist. As he thought, the tubes acted like hydraulics as well as a power source.

The baron’s body creaks into a slow stop, but the baron remains unfazed. “You can stop me, but you’ll have to drag me out of this suit in order to kill me!”

“You seem to lack understanding in your own creation then, baron.” Jhin carefully aims, not at the body but at the gauge tank at the neck of the suit. When the bullet strikes the ring connecting the tank to the neck, a high-pitched hissing noise escapes from the broken tube. Within a few seconds, a pained cry comes from inside. “No matter what and how many walls you construct, there will always be a breaking point.”

The baron screams grow louder as the green chemical empties out from the tank. There’s a loud clang when the baron bursts out of the suit, his flesh and prosthetics practically melting from the acid. He tumbles down the suit and attempts to escape. He hears a dull sound of thunder, and he feels vines of flowers sap away his strength as they constrict around him and the alleyway. The baron’s outstretched arm falls like a tree branch pruned to ensure its healthy and beautiful growth.

Jhin sighs in joy at his work. Or, so he thought it would be the result.

Odd. He doesn’t feel the bliss he’s always felt with every finale. His brows furrow in confusion, unnerved by this feeling. He only feels… dissatisfaction… and a numb pain coming from the wound in his abdomen, like it’s pulsing against his skin to remind him of its existence. Of the siren’s existence.

“Even at these brinks of euphoria, that blasted siren continues to pull me back like a tide,” he mutters. He sighs helplessly. He can only wonder why the siren holds this kind of power over him.

“What took y’so long?” the elder asks.

“Just appreciating my work, elder,” Jhin lies. “It was one of my best work yet.”

The elder grunts in amusement. “Sure, whatever get y’going. How’s the gun? Did it do the job?”

“Absolute perfection, if I say so myself.” He tries to ignore the elder’s dissatisfied face at Jhin’s lack of enthusiasm. “Forgive me, I am still caught up in that moment of bliss.”

“Y’always were an oddball, eh? Come. Y’got the job done, so we need to head up top.” The elder pushes Jhin back into the conveyor and ascends beyond The Gray back to Piltover. They watch the murky atmosphere of Zaun turn golden like the setting sun as they approach the top. “Did y’know? This ol’ thing belonged to that Chem-Baron back there.”

For once, Jhin’s brows raise up in surprise as he slightly turns his head to the elder. “I don’t suppose you were my client this time around, elder?”

The elder taps his cane on the floor of the conveyor at the beat of his cackle. “The baron’s been going ‘round without a goddamn care about the other factions and his own tech!” His cackle slows into a hum. “Did he mention anything ‘bout another Chem-Baron, by any chance?”

“He did.”

“Mm, ain’t it interesting how putting a single idea about themselves into their heads can become so distorted that they become out of touch with their own reality?” the elder says. “The human mind is a fascinating thing.” He shoots Jhin a mysterious look. “Wouldn’t y’agree?”

He doesn’t answer. He feels like he can’t. Jhin feigns an amused chuckle as he turns back to the overview of Piltover. “You are quite the frightening one, elder. I don’t suppose all Piltovans are as mad as you.”

“Not mad,” the elder corrects with a crazed look in his eye. “Just passionate.”

Sona lies in the bottom of her tank, stretched out atop one of the several rocks they placed on the sand. She listlessly gazes up at the tarp covering the top of the glass. Faint streaks of sunlight filter through from above. Her lips purse into a straight line.

How can these creatures produce such… sounds?

It’s faint, but it’s constantly there like in the back of her head. She presses her palms to her ears and tries to shut out the cries and voices of the merfolk of this region. Even their songs sound so cacophonous.

A new siren. A girl.

She’s not from here. She’s come to our home.

This is her home.

She belongs here.

She belongs here. She belongs here. She belongs here.

What a dangerous place this is, and yet the landfolk of this region are oblivious to the creatures that they’ve created. And worse, these creatures have caught wind of her presence. They know she’s here. They will come to take her away. To make her one of them.

She hears two of Jhin’s crew, tasked to guard her tank from any intruders, talking to themselves outside of the tank. In an attempt to relieve her mind of the voices, she swims over to the guards and taps the glass gently. They’re cautious, but for good reason.

One of them glances at the other with a questioning look. The other returns the look with a helpless one as she approaches the tank. “Can we help you?” They watch her point up and slide her hand up to the lower half of her face, as if she’s putting on a mask. “The captain? He’s not back yet, or at least, we haven’t heard anything from the deck yet.”

Sona makes an impatient face and nods. She sits on the sand and leans back against the nearest rock with her arms crossed.

“Excuse me?” the other guard speaks up. “If you don’t mind, would you like to join our conversation?” Seeing Sona tilt her head in uncertainty and glance up at the deck cautiously, the guard shakes his head. “The captain’s not back yet. I don’t think it’d hurt to try.”

“We’re the more curious of the bunch here,” the first guard joins in. “We’ve never really seen a siren before, or any sea creatures like the merfolk, so we’re really interested in what you see down below.” She shoots an accusatory glance at the other guard. “Unfortunately, some people don’t really believe that there are certain creatures in the sea.”

“Listen, I gotta see it to believe it. There aren’t such things as krakens the size of a battleship. I’ll believe that there are krakens the size of smaller ships like ours, sure. Bilgewater ain’t full of crazy folks, so I have no reason not to believe them.”

“What!” she exclaims. “You’ll believe them but not me, when I’ve heard those stories from the people who’ve seen it themselves?!”

“They’re just stories!”

“So you’re saying the Bilgewater folks are fibbing?”

“I didn’t say tha —” A knocking on the glass catches their attention, seeing Sona smile sympathetically. They watch her point to the female guard before nodding. The male guard pales with wide eyes. “Y-you mean they’re real?”

Sona nods. She brushes her hand over the sand and makes an even bigger gesture with her hands, saying there are even bigger and more terrifying creatures in the abyss of the sea. She can’t help but laugh when the other guard pales as well.

But their conversation is cut short when there’s a commotion from above. The door leading to the cargo hold opens, another crewmember poking his head out the door. “Captain’s here! To your posts!” he whispers urgently.

The two guards scramble away to their posts and wait for Jhin’s arrival. Sona, on the other hand, rolls her eyes and swims to the farthest side of the tank and sits atop the bigger rocks. She waits for that iron door to open. But it never opens.

Strange. She had expected him to come by with that foolish squint in his eyes as he gazes at his prisoner in amusement. Her shoulders, which she notices had become stiff and tense, relax. No matter. The less he shows his face in front of her, the better.

Suddenly, the iron door to the cargo hold opens, and Sona tenses up again. But instead of Jhin, it’s the same crewmember who had told the guards to be at their posts. “We’ll be heading back out to sea. Captain won’t be coming down here until we’re out of Piltovan borders.

One of the guards furrows her brows in confusion. “Is there a reason why?”

The crewmember grimaces. “We’re being tracked. Someone found out about the siren.”

Immediately, a heavy atmosphere crashes upon those in the cargo hold. Dread pools in Sona’s stomach. She feels like something much worse will occur out at sea.

The voices of the merfolk that were only whispers in the back of her head just a few minutes suddenly grow in numbers and intensity. She winces at the overwhelming amount of voices and hunches over with her palms against her ears.

They’re going. They’re taking our sister!

How dare they take our new sister!

This is her home!

Come back!

She belongs here!

The voices die into silence as sudden as the next words are uttered altogether in one distorted voice:

We’re coming for you, sister.

Sona gasps in horror when the voices then spill over like a tsunami in her mind. It’s too loud. It’s too intense. She shoots up to the top of the tank, banging the glass lid and catching the attention of the crewmembers guarding the cargo hold.

This is about to become a battle. The crewmembers are preparing themselves to fight whoever is tracking them. But she’s not up there to warn them of the creatures in the sea that are coming for the ship. For her.

Jhin had been careful. He had never mentioned the siren directly in his conversation with the elder. But he supposed Zaunites have eyes and ears everywhere, even in Piltover. Zaunites were known for their experimental demeanors. Some are even passionate enough to steal test subjects for their work.

Mercenaries… are likely. The experimenter themselves wouldn’t go out of their way to face an entire ship of pirates.

He brings out a golden stopwatch from his pockets and opens it up to his eye level. In the reflection of the glass, he spots a ship in the distance that’s slowly sailing in the same direction as them. The ship flies a Piltovan flag, but he can see Zaun’s technology built into the ship. He hums in thought. He had guided the ship towards Freljord, a region that has no need for Piltovan or Zaunite technology.

Even if Piltover wanted to expand their tech to the north, their ship isn’t built to withstand the harsh conditions of Freljord.

A crewmember steps up to the helm and whispers in Jhin’s ear, “Captain, the siren is acting up. We’re not sure what happened. She suddenly swam up to one of the guards trying to say something to her.”

Jhin furrows his brows as he glances at the gate of the cargo hold. What is the siren up to this time? “Do you know what she’s trying to say?” he asks.

“She’s trying to warn us about something. Something in the water? She keeps pointing to herself and then out to the water.” The crewmember looks concerned. “What should we do, sir?”

Something in the water? Pointing to herself… but out there within the sea…

“Hey, do you hear that?” a crewmember standing by the rails murmurs to another. “It sounds like… singing?”

“I don’t hear anything.”

“No, no, I hear it! It sounds like a lullaby my mother used to sing for my brother back home.” The crewmember’s eyes suddenly light up, and he leans over the rails. The crewmember’s eyes glaze over, as if he’s in a trance. “That… sounded like mother.”

“What?”

“That… sounded… like…” the crewmember’s words trail off as he leans closer and closer to hear better. “Mother…!”

“Whoa, hey, what are you doing?!” the other shouts as he pulls him back onto deck.

“It’s her! It’s mother! She’s in there, don’t stop me!” the former shouts back in rage, swatting away the latter’s grip. When the other doesn’t lose his grip, he pulls out a dagger from his belt and slices the other’s arm.

“Agh!” The latter releases the former’s shirt in pain, but two other crewmembers pull them both back onto deck. One of them kicks away the dagger and pins down their frantically pleading mate.

Jhin directs his attention to the commotion happening on deck. Then he hears it. He hears singing coming from the waters. It sounds like an opera. The voices sound muffled, but he thinks he hears them sing of art, of Whisper, of his feats and trophies at sea. That there’s more he can do out there. With them.

His legs suddenly feel heavy, and he feels his foot swing out towards the side of the ship. His mind feels blank like an empty canvas, and the music of the sea is the paint giving it life.

“Captain!” another crewmember runs out from inside the ship and up to the helm in a panic. “It’s an ambush! We’ve been surrounded!”

He snaps back to reality with a hiss, having sunken his nails into the injury in his abdomen. “By who? The Zaunites haven’t even reached us yet.”

“They’re no Zaunites, sir! They’re merfolk!”

Jhin’s eyes grow wide. Sirens. He hadn’t considered this. Could the siren he captured have called these sirens here? No, she is mute. She hasn’t displayed a single ability to be able to communicate to anyone so far. He shakes his head. The merfolk have been around for centuries. Each region has their own kind of merfolk.

Piltover, the City of Progress. Zaun, the City of Iron and Glass. With the advancement of technology, there would be an equal amount of waste filtering into the waters. His eyes perk up in realization. The toxins. For the merfolk who lived in these waters for so long, they wouldn’t notice how far the toxins can be carried by the water. Therefore, they would eventually die to the toxins.

Or adapt to them.

“Prepare yourselves!” Jhin announces. “These creatures can affect any of you to kill you! If you see someone who’s affected, hold them back!” He normally wouldn’t bat an eye if two men or three die, but with enemies coming from both within and out of the waters, he cannot afford to lose that many men at once. “Lookout, keep an eye on that Piltovan ship!” He loads Whisper with four bullets and cocks the hammer. “This show isn’t over yet.”

---

The sounds of gunshots and shouting from the deck alerts Sona of the sirens’ arrival, her banging against the glass becoming stronger and louder. The lid refuses to budge. She swings her arms down in frustration and swims over to one of the guards who had spoken to her.

“Miss siren, isn’t there anything you can do?” she asks in a panic.

Sona nods as points at the lid of her tank. She makes the same gesture to refer to Jhin and then the instrument he had taken.

“Your, your instrument? Can you help if you have it?” When Sona nods firmly, the guard purses her lips in hesitation. She chews the tip of her thumbnail in thought until they hear a metallic clang of the cargo hold’s gate above Sona’s tank.

As they look up, they watch in horror as one of the crewmember’s body is torn apart by a siren that had managed to jump on board. His blood pours onto the top of the tarp covering Sona’s tank.

The guard swallows a gag, looking away. “Okay,” she says. She turns back to Sona. “I’ll get you your instrument from his quarters. I, I don’t know if I might make it, but I’ll try.” The guard runs out of the hold, ignoring the other guards’ protests, and makes her way up to the deck. She glances at the helm, the captain now replaced by another hand.

“What are you doing?” the navigator hisses when she runs past her to Jhin’s quarters. “You’re a dead sailor if he catches you going in there.”

“It’s for the sake of this ship. The siren can help us.” The guard sneaks into Jhin’s quarters and searches the room for the golden instrument. She spots it sitting atop a dresser in the corner of his room, where the siren’s old tank once remained. “There!” Grabbing the instrument and stashing it in her satchel, she runs out of the quarters and back to the deck.

The heavy stench of blood and sea water penetrates her senses as soon as she steps outside. She gags at the sight of dead human and siren bodies littered all over deck. She takes a deep breath, forces herself to look away from the scene, and rushes back down to the hold.

“What have you done?” a guard asks when she produces the instrument from her satchel. “Are you insane?”

“If the siren says she can do something about this situation, I’m willing to take that risk,” she protests. “Get the other guards. We need them to take her up to the deck.”

“Captain will kill all of us!”

“Then what else is there left to do?! I went up there, and we’ve already lost so many hands! The sirens are climbing up the deck! We need her!”

A guard extends out an arm to stop her from climbing up the stairs. “Some of us don’t want to die because of what you did, don’t you understand that?”

“Would you rather all of us die then?” she asks solemnly. The others fall silent. “And if the captain’s more than willing to kill us after all this, then so be it. He’s only losing more of his crew. I’m still going,” she insists urgently. She lunges up the steps to the top of the tank and unlatches the lid. Sona immediately bursts of the water towards the guard, who shields herself thinking she made a mistake of freeing the siren.

But nothing happens.

Instead, Sona is hunched over the edge with her instrument finally in her hands. She takes a deep breath and looks up at the cowering guard with a grateful smile. “Thank you ,” a voice says with a pluck of the strings.

The guard’s eyes widen for a moment, but she regains her composure. “Y-you’re welcome.” She leans forward and hovers her hands over Sona’s shoulders. “We can carry you up to the deck.” Her heart nearly leaps to her throat when Sona suddenly grabs her wrist while shaking her head and pointing her finger at the guard’s forehead.

Jhin will kill her. All of them.

“It’s a risk I’m willing to take.” The guard tucks her arms under Sona’s and lifts her out of the tank. “Come on, we need to get you up there.” One by one, the guards in the hold come up to help her carry Sona down the stairs onto a stretcher. “I thought you didn’t want to get killed by captain?”

“Better than all of us dying to these things… or worse, getting taken for torture and experimentation in Zaun,” a guard mutters, to which the others chime in agreement.

As they reach closer to deck, the female guard speaks up. “We have enough of us to hold her while joining in the fight. There’s a chance the Zaunites will try to take her too. Two of us need to hold the stretcher while the rest of you surround it and fight whoever tries to come after us, got it?”

“Got it. Ready?” The crewmembers crouch to prepare to run out to the deck. Sona sits up on the stretcher with her instrument at the ready.

“Charge!”

#league of legends #jhin x sona #jhinsona #jhin #sona #fourth tempo #silent waves #siren sona #bounty hunter/pirate jhin #rosywrites

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cashforjunkcarsus-blog · 6 years

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peakwealth · 6 years

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From Kampala: THE BLIND SPOT

Don’t worry, be happy, or is someone to blame for the runaway population in sub-Saharan Africa?

Crowded minibus station in Mbarara, Uganda. (February 2019)

Squeezed into the back seat of a beat up Toyota Corolla with six other passengers (including two small children), it is hard to avoid the issue of demography. Up front, three burly men take up the premium seats while the driver's head is sticking out the window. How he manages to shift gears, I cannot see or imagine. Thus we make it to the next town, two hours away, across the mountains.

At home, I am used to being more or less invisible. Being over sixty-five now, I am part of a rapidly growing demographic. No one pays any attention to me. It's a different story in Africa where the population over sixty-five is vanishingly small. I have curiosity value, all the more so in the back of a shaggy taxi from another century. Even people over fifty are relatively few. The median age in Uganda is just under sixteen years.

Sixteen.

By way of comparison, that figure is almost 27 in India and 37 in China (ageing quickly). Germany is near the top of the European range at 47.1 and Japan maxes out at 47.3. The average for all of Africa is a shade under 20.

What does this mean? It means the majority of Uganda's population is not made up of adults but of children and teenagers, something that is hard for westerners to get their heads around. It means that many girls become mothers at fifteen and grandmothers at thirty. I realized this talking to a young woman in Fort Portal. A five year old boy was wandering nearby. "Is that your son?", I asked. "No, that's Anthony, he's my grandson." I turned around and asked her how old she was: "Thirty-four", she said, giggling.

It means that one generation is piled on top of the previous one, without pause, weighing down society with cascading poverty and a structural lack of prospects. Frustration and inequality go up as ever more young people, connected to the internet as they are anywhere else, see their hopes and ambitions go unrealized.

It also means that pressure on resources and on the land is increasing at an alarming rate. I have no idea what Uganda's ecological carrying capacity might be, but it is an important consideration because most of the population continues to rely on subsistence farming, meaning they need their own plots to grow food. In only ten years’ time the population density has increased from 140 to 230 people/ sq.km. (It stood at 34/sq.km in 1960.) These are not mere 'indicators'. Habitat encroachment is visible to the naked eye as the expansion of housing and subsistence farmland stretches further and further into the distance.

In the end it may not matter if Uganda runs out of resources since it lacks the economic base to support this expanding population to begin with. The economy generates neither sufficient growth nor enough formal, steady employment. Much of the growth is already gobbled up by debt servicing (1). For too many young people there is little real future.

Actual output per person has lagged behind the overall expansion of the economy. Per capita GDP now stands around a sobering USD 700 (in current dollars) or roughly USD 2000 at purchasing power parity (assuming such parity can be calculated in a largely informal economy). That is lower than in Zimbabwe. Kenya, the neighbour to the east, is way ahead with over USD 1500 (in current dollars). Rather than progressing towards becoming an emerging economy, Uganda looks more like a structurally stalling country, held back by demographic incontinence.

Back in 1960, before Uganda became independent from Britain, it had less than 7 million people. It was called the garden of Africa. Today it has 45 million and is projected to reach 106 million by 2050. In 1960 its fertility rate stood at around 7 children; in the nearly sixty years of development since then it has declined by only one child (from 6.95 to 5.82) giving Uganda the second highest rate of population growth in the world (2). This year alone Uganda will add 1,4 million new citizens and that number will rise to two million a year, even as the rate of population growth softens. In polite African company, this is still referred to as the "demographic dividend".

Staggering as the figures are, they are fully matched by what can be observed while travelling around the country. Destitution and idleness remain pervasive. Electrical power from the grid is rare in rural Uganda, as is piped water. Even where power lines exist, people don't have the money to pay for the hookup. Children carrying water in yellow jerrycans are still a defining image of this country (as they are in many African countries). It was a nightmare when I first travelled in East-Africa, decades ago. It continues today as new generations get trapped in poverty, rather than being 'lifted' out of it, and human capital goes to waste.

This does not mean all of Uganda is a mess or there is no progress. There is: literacy and life expectancy are rising (as is a measure of contraception through Marie Stopes centres, among others); basic infrastructure is improving. But at 4 to 6 %, the annual increase in economic output is not enough to catch up with the growing population. Millions of people are standing around, doing little or earning next to nothing as they work the land or do such (hard) labour as pushing bicycles uphill loaded with green bananas or bags of cement. Even the official poverty rate, determined by the Ugandan bureau of statistics and set absurdly low as it is (a daily personal income of a dollar or two), is now actually going up. As elsewhere in the world, growth tends not to be inclusive, meaning that wealth creation for the few (mostly in Kampala) precedes poverty alleviation for the many (in the countryside). Stunning inequality results.

It need not have been like this. The fertility rate in much of South-East Asia used to be almost on par with Africa's but has fallen steadily. By now it is only slightly above replacement level. Not so in Uganda. Ever since he seized power in 1986, Yoweri Museveni, now in his thirty-third year as Uganda's president, has shown little interest in limiting the country's population (3). African insouciance? Dereliction of duty? Sleepwalking towards disaster? Museveni is not alone in having this blind spot. Many domineering African leaders have a weakness for large populations. Some are more upfront about it than others. Last September, Tanzania's president John Magufuli urged women to abandon contraception. There was no need for it, he said.

Not only is fertility deeply rooted in African tradition, large families are a matter of prestige, a patriarchal fantasy. Women's education, rapid economic progress, urbanization and female empowerment, generally the keys to containing fertility, have not taken root or not nearly enough to drive home the message: fewer children equals a better life. (4)

Uganda is also overflowing with Christian propaganda, glorifying "the joy of the family". It has been targeted by evangelical fundamentalists from the USA who have poured money into the country to promote their biblical worldview. Eradicating homosexuality has arguably been more part of their agenda than population control.

The results are, by any rational standard, troubling.

Firewood and charcoal market on the shore of lake Victoria in Nakiwogo, Entebbe, Uganda. Both are used for cooking. An orange coloured tray in the foreground sells for 5000 Ugandan shillings (USD 1,36). A small tray costs 2000 shillings. (February 2019)

Rwanda, the tiny neighbour to the south, has a population pushing thirteen million. It prides itself on being the display window of orderly and effective governance in East Africa. And indeed, few if any African countries can match Rwanda for organization, seriousness and just cleanliness. Crawling through Kampala's suffocating traffic jams, the neatness of Kigali is hard to imagine.

Critically, Rwanda has rebounded from the genocide of 1994. Despite being a caricature of colonial, almost farcical Christianity (or maybe because of it?), the country appears to be stable under the no-nonsense presidency of Paul Kagamé. Clever development policies are in evidence. Order prevails. Drivers stop at pedestrian crossings and traffic police hand out fines with printed receipts. Such things are not exactly standard practice in Africa. Yet some of the problems facing Uganda in the future are already perceptible in Rwanda today. The minute you cross the border, you clearly see the much higher pressure on the land. The figures confirm this: Rwanda's population density (520 people /sq. km), is on par with South-Korea's and greater than that of Holland, two of the most densely inhabited (and industrialized) countries in the world. Industrialization is wafer thin in Rwanda, as it is in Uganda.

Progress and sound policies notwithstanding, Rwanda remains a desperately poor country, especially in rural areas. Uncontrolled deforestation, so long a telltale sign of demographic distress, continues as Rwandans (or refugees) cut whatever trees they can get their hands on for firewood or charcoal. As in Uganda, the underlying problem is that Rwanda's economy is not nearly robust enough to provide for all its people. Although the fertility rate has been halved since 1960, it is still a burden. And the gap between the modern, landscaped capital, Kigali, and the shockingly dusty countryside is such that a massive population shift to the big city will be hard to avoid.

In Asia and in Latin America, poverty alleviation converged with a rapid reduction in population growth. One is logically difficult to achieve without the other. This is what facilitated the elimination of extreme poverty in so much of China, in South Korea, Thailand, Malaysia, etc. Unfortunately this is not happening in Nigeria, Chad, Niger, the DRC, Uganda...

The problem is not merely one of firewood, or water supply or electricity. Sub-Saharan Africa seems stuck in the same rut as decades ago. Heavy trucks of the UN World Food Program rumble through the towns, the UNHCR, IOM, WHO, USAID shuttle from one refugee camp to the next; global aid agencies like Doctors Without Borders rush medical crews to new emergencies (where they do save countless lives). Both the African Union and the UN are engaged in peacekeeping missions that seem without end.

As slippery as this terrain may appear, the demographic backdrop to Africa's development ailments is hard to ignore. It is the elephant in the room. And the elephant is unlikely to go very far as long as a significant number of African states show little or no interest in containing their runaway populations.

At different levels, both Rwanda and Uganda prefigure the demographic reckoning that awaits Africa and, by ricochet, the world beyond. The pressures to escape poverty and to migrate will exacerbate other challenges already rising across much of Africa: the competition for resources, food security made unpredictable by climate change; regional armed conflicts; theocolonial interference and the ascendency of religious fanaticism including Islamist insurgencies. Those are a few of the issues that are set to rock Africa's boat and dramatically change the face of our planet as the century unfolds.

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Factual sources: tradingeconomics.com; indexmundi.com; CIA Factbook; Uganda Bureau of Statistics (www.ubos.org); World Bank; UNICEF; PricewaterhouseCoopers: Uganda Economic Outlook 2019 ( www.pwc.com/ug/en.html ); The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Goalkeepers Report 2018.

(1) https://www.reuters.com/article/us-uganda-economy-gdp/ugandas-economy-must-grow-7-percent-a-year-to-service-rising-debt-central-bank-idUSKCN1HD16S

(2) Niger has the youngest population in the world with a median age of 15.3 years.

(3) Museveni's perspective on Uganda's development can be found on the official presidential website: https://www.yowerikmuseveni.com/address-national-state-affairs

(4) In 2015 Uganda's new National Development Plan (NDP II) called for the reduction of fertility to 4.5 children per woman by 2020. Clearly this target is not being met.

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loosejournal · 5 years

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Dwight Garner’s favorite quotations

For nearly four decades I’ve kept what is known as a commonplace book – a bound notebook, and later a long computer file, passed from desktops (1990s) to laptops (2000s) to my cell phone, into which I’ve poured verbal delicacies, “blasts of a trumpet”, as Emerson put it, and bits of scavenged wisdom from my life as a reader. Yea, for I am an underliner, a destroyer of books, and maybe you are, too. Commonplace books are not so uncommon. John Locke kept one, as did Virginia Woolf. W. H. Auden published his, as did the poet J. D. McClatchy. E. M. Forster’s was issued after his death. The novelist David Markson wrote terse and enveloping novels that resembled commonplace books in many regards; they were bird’s nests of facts threaded with the author’s own subtle interjections. For fans of the commonplace book genre, many prize examples have come from lesser-known figures like Geoffrey Madan and Samuel Rogers, both English, who produced books that are notably witty and illuminating. These have become cult items. Christopher Ricks noted about Rogers that, although he may not have been an especially kind man, “he was very good at hearing what was said”.

I use my own commonplace book as an aide-mémoire, a kind of external hard drive. Reading it is a way of warding off what Christopher Hitchens, quoting a friend, called CRAFT (Can’t Remember a Fucking Thing) syndrome. I use my gleanings in my own writing. Like Montaigne, I quote others “in order to better express myself”. Montaignecompared quoting well to arranging other people’s flowers. Sometimes, I sense, I quote too often, swinging on them in my writing as if from vine to vine. It’s one of the curses of spending a lifetime as a word-eater, and of retaining, so far, a semi-reliable memory.

I am no special fan of most books of quotations. Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, the Yale Book of Quotations and the New Penguin Dictionary of Modern Quotations, to name three dependable reference books, have their uses, for sure. They are sturdy repositories of literary and verbal history. (Countless other books of quotations aren’t reliable at all.) But even the best contain a good deal of dead weight. They lean, sometimes necessarily, on canned and overused thought and, more grievously, are skewed to the upbeat. So many of the lines they contain seem to vie to be stitched on throw pillows or ladled, like chicken soup, on the credulous soul. “Almost all poetry is a failure”, Charles Bukowski contended, “because it sounds like somebody saying, Look, I have written a poem.” The same is true of quotations and aphorisms; too many have a taxidermied air, as if they were self-consciously aimed at posterity.

This small slice of the material I’ve hoarded is a sliver of a much larger book project, one that will break with the conventions of commonplace books and volumes of quotations by organizing quotes by feel rather than by category. There are few life lessons except by accident. I must add that I do not agree with everything that is said: retweet does not, as they say on Twitter, necessarily equal endorsement.

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(small selection)

“It’s only words, unless they’re true.” – David Mamet, Speed-the-Plow

“Why are you all reading? I don’t understand this reading business when there is so much fucking to be done.” – Sheila Heti, How Should a Person Be?

“Better a good venereal disease than a moribund peace and quiet.” – Henry Miller, Quiet Days in Clichy

“Everything that is true is inappropriate.” – Oscar Wilde

“Everyone nodded, nobody agreed..” – Ian McEwan, Amsterdam

“Let’s, as if sore, grab a few things from the flood.” – A. R. Ammons, Complete Poems

“Fragments, indeed. As if there were anything to break.” – Don Paterson, Best Thought, Worst Thought

“He licked his lips. ‘Well, if you want my opinion–’ ‘I don’t,’ she said. ‘I have my own.’ –Toni Morrison, Beloved

“Love poems must be bounced back off a moon.” – Robert Graves, Paris Review interview

“See the moon? It hates us.” – Donald Barthelme, Sixty Stories

“You know where the Beatles got that shit from. You know that’s our shit they fucking up like that.” – Albert Murray, South to a Very Old Place

“How come the Beatles never got busted for statutory rape – because they’re white?” – Eve Babitz, Eve’s Hollywood

“I hope you don’t mind, I’m from the South. We’re touchers.” – Charlie Rose, attributed

“Mick Jagger should fold up his penis and go home.” – Robert Christgau, Village Voice

“Somehow he knew, based on very little experience, that this faux-casualshit spelled money.” – Tom Wolfe, Bonfire of the Vanities

“Being rich is about acting, too, isn’t it? A style, a pose, an interpretation that you force upon the world.” – Martin Amis, Money

“If you want to know what God thinks of money, just look at the people he gave it to.” – Dorothy Parker

“Oh, fuck, not another elf.” – Hugo Dyson, as J.R.R. Tolkien read aloud an early draft of The Lord of the Rings

“I am putting a mental jigsaw together of what a hobbit looks like, based on a composite of every customer I have ever sold a copy to.” – Shaun Bythell, Diary of a Bookseller

“You put your finger in it, and go swish, swish, swish.” – Jane Jacobs, on how to make a West Village martini

“Wasn’t the whole 20th century a victory lap of collage, quotation, appropriation, from Picasso to Dada to Pop?” – Jonathan Lethem, The Ecstasy of Influence

“I suddenly began to realize that everybody in America is a natural-born thief.” – Jack Kerouac, On the Road

“The not paying for things is intoxicating.” – Philip Roth, American Pastoral

“I don’t trust anybody who hasn’t shoplifted.” – John Waters

“Cleanliness might not be next to godliness but it is certainly adjacent to horniness.” – Geoff Dyer, on hotels, in Otherwise Known as the Human Condition

“The assumptions a hotel makes about you! All those towels.” – Stanley Elkin, The Dick Gibson Show

“The meat around my skull can’t stop smiling.” – Catherine Lacey, The Answers

“Let’s have some new clichés.” – Sam Goldwyn

“I need some new attitudes, some new affirmations and denials.” – Lionel Trilling, letter

“Good-bye, and I don’t mean au revoir.” – Christopher Ricks

“Of course it’s all right for librarians to smell of drink.” – Barbara Pym, Less Than Angels

“Edward worried about his drinking. Would there be enough gin? Enough ice?” – Donald Barthelme, Flying to America

“I have no enemies. But my friends don’t like me.” – Philip Larkin

“There was obviously nothing to recommend me to anyone.” – Deborah Levy, Hot Milk

“I have always disliked myself at any given moment; the total of such moments is my life.” – Cyril Connolly, Enemies of Promise

“Talk into my bullet hole. Tell me I’m fine.” – Denis Johnson, Jesus’ Son

“Every time he played a note he waved it goodbye. Some times he didn’t even wave.” – Geoff Dyer on Chet Baker, But Beautiful

“Let us reflect whether there be any living writer whose silence we would consider a literary disaster.” – Cyril Connolly, The Unquiet Grave

“If we did get a writer worth reading, should we know him when we saw him, so choked as we are with trash?” – George Orwell, Keep the Aspidistra Flying

“Book publishing should be done by failed writers who recognize the real thing when they see it.” – Robert Giroux, Paris Review interview

“Books are, let’s face it, better than everything else.” – Nick Hornby, Ten Years in the Tub

“Revenge is the capitalism of the poor.” – Aravind Adiga, Selection Day

“It makes an immigrant laugh to hear the fears of the nationalist, scared of infection, penetration, miscegenation, when this is small fry, peanuts, compared to what the immigrant fears – dissolution, disappearance.” – Zadie Smith, White Teeth

“The face of ‘evil’ is always the face of total need.” – William S. Burroughs, preface to Naked Lunch

“In our deepest moments we say the most inadequate things.” – Edna O’Brien, The Love Object

“How desperate do you have to be to start doing push-ups to solve your problems?” – Karl Ove Knausgaard, My Struggle: Book Two

“The primary object of a student of literature is to be delighted.” – Lord David Cecil

TLS, 2018

#quotes #dwight garner #commonplace book

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