Goat Manure

"A bad one," Finola says. Khian Ee's finger still lingers in the direction of Tesco. "In every town, they build." Finola responds with a troubled sigh.

I pick up her English-Irish hybrid accent in my inner dialogue (a subconscious internalization of the American inferiority-complex narrative? of pop culture romanticizations of the linguistic motherland and its reservoir of native whiteness? or childish delight in stumbling laughing over nasally-elongated vowels?). She has long blonde hair tangled by the wind whipping through Khian Ee's ancient white van.

We whip up, bump up, up, left and right down a road through the Titiwangsa mountains on our return to GreenWish Veggie Garden. I feel refreshed, recharged by mental food in the form of Time and Fortune 500 articles and by world news and worldy facebook news afforded by my one and a half hours in a real cafe with real cafe. I spent most of that time reading in relative solitude, but, when I had just finished pouring over the word-bites of journalistic narrative, Matt had slipped into the chair beside me at the cafe table. He had his own cup emblazoned with the logo "espresso yourself" warming his already-tropically-warmed fingers. A fellow coffee lover, his drink unsweetened and un-iced.

Matt's name is actually Ben, but with that perfectly curly hair and those gray-green eyes, he's Matt in my head. (I pray that I don't slip up and call Matt by his given name—by me, I mean—out loud.) He sits now, quiet as is the general standard for us volunteers, in the front passenger seat. Finola sits beside me, her mocking blue eyes oscillating between Khian Ee's waved hair and the adolescent mat rempits* dotting the roadside.

For the past three days, I have been working like I've never worked before: chopping the hell out of big-ass weeds, pulling unwanteds from the soil, learning too much about soil to ever call it dirt, laying down heavy mulch, pretending my arms are fat with muscle like Arnold, silently groaning because they're not, still insisting that yes, I can load and push that wheelbarrow, planting fruit and rice and corn crops, harvesting banana and papaya and guava, learning a shit-ton about compost (which, incidentally, involves a ton of shit**), learning a wheelbarrow-full of things about organic farming (which, incidentally, involves... okay, I won't), feeling every muscle in my body, sweating out every pound of my body weight, eating so fucking well, and not cussing out loud even though I'm on vacation because I'm working alongside a Malaysian Buddhist pacifist who preaches harmony over lunches of noodles and uncooked vegetables.

I've had moments here, up in the isolated reaches of Malaysian mountainside—where, it's rumored, tigers roam the rainforest—in which I've thought, "My god, this is America," or, "Holy fuckin' shit—Amurrica!" A ridiculous notion, I know. But even as the ninety-degree rain washes the ninety-degree sweat from my body, the dirt in my eyebrow feels like a piece of history I've only just now turned to face. Pastoral America, image of my country's past and countries past, the claim to everything holy and dirty about our godforsaken land of the free. Slavery, poverty, abundance, liberty and pursuits of happiness or hell, the mythos of ladders and achievements of hate—everything built from the literary majesty of the countryside. The soiled hoe that built our backbone, our real and imagined lifeline, in sickness and in health. The farm—the place my father's father and his mother and their fathers and mothers in turn sweated out a life, the place where their envious eyes looked to close relatives who owned rather than labored, in turn watching my grandfather's sweat in fanned disdain. The plantation, the farm, the garden. The growth of those United States.

I feel American as hell, and I baffle my host and fellow volunteers when I walk to the field with a baseball cap on my head, dropping words like "wassup" alongside "confounding." They don't know what to make of this Amurrican gurl. I can tell I'm confounding their stereotypes. Then we go to an Indian restaurant and I realize that even my claim to Amurrica's mainstream images has become complicated as I dip my fingers into the rice and scoop it to my mouth. The volunteers try not to stare.

"You eat well with your hands," says Khian Ee. I can tell he thinks it's gross, and he spoons his curry delicately to his lips.

This, when an hour before he was digging his own hands into goat manure.


*"Mat rempit" technically means "illegal motorbike street racer," but Malaysians use the term colloquially to refer to anyone who does dangerous things on a bike.
**The recipe the farm uses actually requires only 10% goat manure.  But when you're makin' lots of compost...