Ben East

The gift from my aunt and uncle before I left for Malawi carried a weight beyond the device itself.

The camera, a simple Fuji 35 mm point-and-click, suggested: “Now you’re doing something interesting. Now you’re involved in something I’d like to see.”

They didn’t make this explicit, a sacred trust to live up to. They never said, “Send us pictures.” And though I intuited the weight as I dropped in the batteries and advanced the first roll, I lacked the ability to articulate the significance it held.

Even in his advanced stage of cancer Uncle Charlie stood among the strong and adventurous models of my youth. His old bedroom in my grandparent’s house provided an outline: faint whiff of stogie in the fabric of his armchair; ballgame ticket stubs pinned to the wall like entomological specimens; bookshelves informing what became my sense of the world—Helter-Skelter’s true-crime grit, Catch-22’s emasculation of traditional authority.

Dodging small talk between grownups downstairs, I lounged in the room, imagined a young Uncle Charlie reclining with the Mets on TV. I found an olive drab military tunic in the closet, put on the soft, faded thing, pictured myself out doing something in the world.

He’d served in Vietnam, a short duration call-up somewhere at the tail end of his draft eligibility, much of it ship-bound. Finally ashore, he volunteered for chopper runs above the action to stem back-office boredom in the cipher room. I don’t mean to glorify the warfront, just to speak in terms our public is trained to understand: war, not peace, gets headlines.

With that gift from Uncle Charlie and Aunt Scarlet I set out to capture a version of the world. Living off the grid during a period of rustication, I sent home letters, written by hand on blue onionskin aerograms. A little pop of photographic color might add to the story.

Except in my case. I’d never owned a camera, had no training in picture-taking. It was a time before the ubiquity of cameras, each snap rare and exotic, unseen for days, weeks, months. Each developed roll presented a surprise, and I couldn’t get the knack for what made good light, good framing, memorable detail. Writing today about a bike trip up Lake Malawi, I refer to 12,000 words across fifteen days of journaling.

I found one picture of my bike, there in the corner of a shot.

To photography I brought no intuition, developed no skill. I forced myself to be camera shy, and I don’t mean in front of the lens. Every villager wanted their photo taken. Remove a camera from your bag and hear a catcall demanding a “snap.” They readily posed, stern or dramatic, striking Hollywood styles.

I’m sorry I couldn’t rely on photography. Many did, and did it well. For me, I like this passage from Paul Theroux’s “The Cerebral Snapshot.”

“No camera is like no hands, a feat of skill. And if you know that sooner or later you will have to explain it all, without benefit of slides or album, to your large family, then as soon as you see something you start searching the view for clues and rummaging through your lexical baggage for the right phrase.”

I can write you thousands of words but forget about a single good picture to sum it all up.

Uncle Charlie didn’t outlive my time in Malawi. It’s one of the more tragic turns, his passing just as my parents came to visit. My mother missed her brother’s funeral, with his blessing. We held our own memorial service at the base of Mt. Mulanje, at a quiet pool fed by the thundering falls thousands of feet above.

My parents, my sister and brother in law, we hung a Rosary on a sapling, uttered a few words of remembrance, then held a moment of silence. I have no picture of this, only the memory.

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