The Book Club Reflection: Chocolate by Joanne Harris
From the land of chocolate origin to my homeland
Reading 'Chocolate', tasting chocolate: bitter, sweet, alive
Reading 'Chocolate',
tasting chocolate,
bitter, sweet, alive.
I can see them,
the Mayan farmers
in southern Belize,
harvesting
their precious black gold,
the only mean of their survival
and then
blending rich, dark chocolate
in centuries old secret ritual
among some renmaints
of the ancient wall
in their long lost kingdom,
blending the richness
with a refreshing twist of orange
that is perfectly
balanced by the warmth
of cinnamon,
nutmeg and vanilla.
Have you been there,
Joanne Harris?
Your book tastes just like that.
Tasting chocolate,
reading 'Chocolate',
page 1 to page 39
February
Shrove Tuesday
the Carnival
maybe their final destination
in this old French little town,
for a mysterious woman..
A wanderer,
who calls herself Vianne Rocher,
and her precious daughter,
Anouk
with an invisible grey rabbit
Pantoufle
under her arm.
Vianne Rocher
meets her 'black man'
Cure of the local Parish,
Francis Reynard.
And whatever you might think,
he is not unique,
with his unaswerable voice
of authority,
a specious logic,
which keeps you frozen,
obedient and fearful.
You want to break free
from that fear,
to run in hope and despair,
to run and to find that
all the time
you were carrying him inside.
Who is your 'black man'?
Who stops you to dream?
Who force you to worry
about how things
are supposed to be or
have always been?
The Black Man
full of hate
The Black Man
you can not love.
Just remember,
start running away
from him
and you'll be on the run
forewer.
Vianne tells you fiercely:
' Stay and fight'.
On February 14th
St Valentines Day
you meet Guillaume
a retired master of the local school
sad and miserable
but full of love
for his dying dog
Charlie.
Can you apprehend
so much despair,
so much devotion?
It smells too strongly
of wasted hope.
Vianne believes that
being happy
in spite of everything
is the only important thing.
Old Armande Voizin knows...
knows the wind they blew in on,
she felt it herself,
she likes magic,
just like Vianne's Mum,
used to...
I have found out
on page 49
I wish to see the world
through Armande's eyes,
before they turned blind...
a sense of wonder,
openesss to inner feelings
her art of turning bad luck
into good,
her appreciation of those
others,
abandoned by everyone.
She understood Gypsies,
their wonderlust,
which took them all over Europe,
deported countless times,
arrested but released without charge.
People without home and without jobs,
languages and names constantly changed.
Life was a fine adventure,
but not for long,
Reynard, the black man,
preaches against them,
he plans to chase them out.
Reading Chocolate,
I thought of my own Father
in those last months.
His pallor,
the way the flesh melted from him,
revealing a delicate beauty
of stripped bone,
bleached skin.
His bright and feverish eyes
begging:
"Find me a doctor to cure me,
I don't want to die."
His furtive cries in the night.
After a while,
you just want to stop
to look after the decaying body
and feverish mind
and go on with your own life.
After a while,
it's the lack of dignity
that hurts more
than anything else.
Reading Chocolate,
I thought about my own Mother,
who has to have control
all the time.
Always correcting me,
always carrying on,
about meeting my Father
first time when I was 22 year old.
It surprised me a little to see us,
so alike,
circling each other
with the caution of friends
reunited after long years
of separation.
" Pretty face has your mother,
no strength of its own."
He sighed
looking me in eyes:
"You know mistletoe,
invasive and poison,
everything,
it touches.
It's not her fault.
It's a fact of life."
Reading Chocolate,
I thought of my homeland,
about my own life,
Since I left places
I knew
15 years ago,
haven't the winds
blown less hard,
less often?
Hasn't there been
a kind of regret?
I find myself
looking at the sun
and wondering
what it would be like
to see it rise above
the river Danube
again?
The river Danube
is mostly brown now.
I dream to float
down the stream
from Budapest,
seeing ashore
a team of Hungarian cowboys
perform thrilling horseback stunts,
my cousin is there among them.
Next day I awake in Vukovar,
Croatia,
my forebearers came from there,
to settle in Slovakia.
The following day,
I explore Belgrade
in Serbia.
A part of my family reseatled
in a nearby village
a hundred years back.
The Danube scenery is
always changing,
with forests giving away to cities,
then villages with onion-domed churches.
At the little Bulgarian town of Arbanassi
I visit an astonishing 16th century church
where I find my 80 years old uncle
dusting its 2000 frescoes and icons
and talking about good old times.
After the chasms known
as the Iron Gate of Romania,
my Danube family adventure ends
with a day in Bucharest,
I do not intend to visit the grave
of Romania's national hero,
Count Dracula.
I used to live in this city
in my childhood
with my Mother and her boyfriend,
a wellknown Romanian Soccer player,
my stepbrother lives somewhere here.
The river Danube is mostly brown now,
can you ever forget,
who you really are?
On Friday 7th of March,
on page 173
the Gypsies are leaving Les Marauds,
they have nowhere to stay
and no one to befriend.
Guillaume asks Vianne
what
she believes in.
Josephine Muscat leaves her husband,
the violent and abusive man.
" I'd like to be an adventurer,"
Josephine whispers:
" to follow the sun with nothing
but a single suitcase,
to have no idea at all
of where
I might be tomorow."
"Believe me, you get tired,"
Vianne shakes her head:
"And after a while,
everywhere
starts to look the same.
I want to stay here,
forever.
My fears are gone.
I need no longer
be afraid
of my face.
I have a home,
I have friends."
How many times
we dream,
just like Vianne or Josephine did,
to be free,
free to run,
cut loose
like an untethered balloon
on the changing winds?
How many times
the reason
and duty stops us.
Listen to Vianne's words:
"Are you ready
to give up your safety
in exchange for a little knowledge,
a glimpse of an ocean,
and what then?
The wind always brings you back
to the foot
of the same wall."
I know she is right,
wherever I go,
the banks
of brown river Danube
will always be my home.
For a second
I hesitated
with Vianne,
the story heroine,
on page 186,
Josephine's abandoned husband
and Reynard, the black man,
left covered by darkness.
There have already
been too many men
bad and good,
left behind.
Roux, the redhed Gypsy
another one,
she met along the road,
he and Josephine belong together,
" What might this do to them?"
Vianne wonders,
and yet,
Roux and Vianne have one night stand.
But then I understand,
Roux is just a man,
she cares for but not love.
" Please, what would I do without you?"
She cries out for her child.
With a sudden overhelming clarity,
she saw her child,
growing, changing,
the adolescent, the adult,
the stranger she would one day becomes,
but nothing can lessen her love for her child.
There is nothing stronger than woman's love for her child.
Reading 'Chocolate',
tasting chocolate,
bitter, sweet, alive.
can you ever forget,
who you really are?
