I am utterly intrigued …
I am utterly intrigued.
It is the raucous four-note call of the Hadeda—a species of ibis native to Sub-Saharan Africa—that always alerts me to the fact that I am truly home, back in Africa. The cacophonous calls are uttered in flight, especially in the mornings and evenings when the birds fly out or return to their roost trees, and all conversation has to cease until they have passed overhead because of the racket.
Turn the sound up on this video I recorded when I was last in Africa, and take a listen!
Now, just today, I’ve learned about The Hadada (subtly different spelling) Award, which is the Paris Review’s annual award for lifetime achievement. This year, 2023, it goes to Vivian Gornick, whose book, The Situation and the Story: The Art of Personal Narrative, I pored over when I was a candidate in the University of Baltimore’s MFA in Creative Writing and Publishing Arts program. The Situation is the “this happened and then that happened” nuts-and-bolts of a narrative, and the Story is the subtext, the reason for telling it. At its most simplistic, the Situation is the plot and the Story is the emotion.
So, two strands of my life intersect in an intriguing, serendipitous way. But why would the Paris Review, a quarterly English-language literary magazine established in Paris in 1953, name its award for a Sub-Saharan bird?! The Guardian gave me the answer in an article published in April 2010.
“The Hadada was dreamed up in 2003 by the Paris Review's founder George Plimpton to honour a writer, reader, editor, publisher or organisation. The statuette is of the Paris Review bird which appears on every issue, an eagle perched on a pen. Because doubts have been raised over the image's resemblance to an eagle, it was decided to name the award after Plimpton's favourite bird, the hadada – an ibis.”
Our lives often seem so random and chaotic. I think that is why, when threads connect in sometimes random and serendipitous ways, it is so deeply comforting. It helps me to find a pattern and a reason for things—even if the connection is as obscure as a lifelong aural memory reaching over time and place to something that I adhere to now in my writerly life in America.
Huge congratulations to Vivian Gornick for joining the ranks of John Ashbery, Joan Didion (someone else I pored over during my MFA), Paula Fox, Norman Mailer, Peter Matthiessen, George Plimpton, Barney Rosset, Philip Roth, Norman Rush, James Salter, Frederick Seidel, Robert Silvers, and William Styron in being a recipient of the Paris Review Hadada Award!