The Words, February 2016
Ping Travels to Venezuela
Kevin Xiong ‘16
Last November, Professor Ping took a week off of classes to travel to Valencia, Venezuela as the International Poet of Honor for the Poesia Festival. During the four-day poetry festival, she constructed kinship of rivers flags, gave poetry readings, and received an award from the University of Carabobo. She also visited Saint Augustin—a slum neighborhood in Caracas—in her free time. This is the second time the Poesia Festival has invited Ping to speak in Valencia. Her first visit occurred in 2007. Following her latest trip, Ping wrote a collage poem based on her visits. An excerpt from her poem is included below:
Ping, why do you want to visit St. Augustin, slum of Caracas? Maria asked again.
I don’t know why. I’m drawn to its light and colors, its hum from the hillsides.
Mud huts in rainbow colors, forming barrios, shantytowns, slums… In 1999, after three days of torrential rain, the hills collapsed. Thousands of homes were buried.
In the torrents of 2007 riot, I arrived at Caracas. Nobody was there to pick me up. I had no address or phone for my host, no internet, no language, no money, no food. As the night went deeper, I became desperate with hunger and panic. People at the airport surrounded me with advice. A Chinese businessman invited me to his palace home in Guatemala. I thanked him and took a rain check. A man brought in a taxi driver, who offered to drive me into Caracas. “I’m willing to take the risk for you,” he said through the interpreter. “You can pay me when you find your host.”
I was about to take the taxi into the heart of Caracas when a man showed up at the airport, cardboard on his chest: Wang Ping. I approached and asked, “Poesia?” His eyes lit then fired up when he saw the taxi driver. “No no no!” he shouted, wrenching my baggage away from the driver’s hand. “You’re not going to Caracas with the hoodlum. You’re coming to Valencia with me.”
My hotel room is small. The door opens against the bed, and there’s no hot water. Sometimes no water at all. But it offers magnificent aripa for breakfast, along with eggs, ham, cheese, fruit, and best coffee and espresso. Its waiters wear tuxedos.
“The light, Ping, look at the light,” cried the driver and opened the window. I woke up from my slumber. A big bang of lights exploding through the ink dark sky, in the shape of a womb. A constellation? A galaxy? Too bright for the eyes, too close to the earth, and too beautiful for the mind. Was it a dream? If so, I wanted to be in.
“It’s Caracas, Ping,” shouted the driver. “It’s our barrio, our slum.”
Ready? asked Santo Clever.
Yep! I hopped on the back of his motorcycle. From the hilltop of St. Augustin, we crashed into the belly of Little Hell, into Caracas.