The Truth about Mangoes

Shelagh Shapiro did an interview with me not long ago on her radio show Write the Book. One of the subjects we discussed was the significance of the title for one of my books of poetry, The Truth about Mangoes, an odd one to be sure. Like most writers of poetry and fiction and creative nonfiction, I don’t start my poems and essays with a particular theme in mind. I start with a story or an event or a memory that won’t let me alone and try to share that as clearly and meaningfully as possible. My work becomes a translation of sorts and what I translate is human experience into words, often with the inherent bias of my personal perspective. The unifying or dominant idea that threads its way through the work is developed by the telling itself. A pattern emerges that becomes recognizable and shared by readers. This forms what critics and scholars call themes in literature, a motif that is relatable no matter if the physical experience itself is familiar.

Certainly, that seems the case with The Truth about Mangoes, a single poem that began with the memory of a frequent argument between my mother and me. Our disagreements were rare, almost nonexistent, not because I was a reasonable person and not because I lacked confidence in my opinions as a young man. It had more to do with my mother’s personality. She was physically beautiful, demure, and even aloof at times. Her moral compass pointed toward sobriety, integrity, and loyalty as well as an inherent goodness and an empathy for all God’s creatures. She would not raise her voice, nor would she engage in a protracted disagreement over politics, religion, sexual mores, or my father’s gin drinking. Things were what they were and she handled each circumstance with a stoic resignation common to women of her Post World War II generation, except for the subject of green bell peppers.

In rural southern Indiana as a child I never heard bell peppers called anything but mangoes. If my mother stuffed them with rice, diced them for chili, sliced them for salads, or sautéed them with sausages, they were mangoes. When she shopped at the grocery store, she would ask for fresh mangoes and be directed to a produce section full of bell peppers by the clerk. If we visited one of her friends for lunch, we all ate mangoes. This remained a constant in my life until I left home at the age of eighteen. I was at a restaurant somewhere with a buddy who happened to order stuffed peppers. When they arrived I said, “Those aren’t peppers. They’re mangoes.” He replied, “Are you fucking crazy?” We argued considerably over the next half hour or so and then went our separate ways. I must confess that I was disturbed by his stupidity.

Over the next several years, I traveled the world courtesy of the military and ultimately my immersion in a nomadic hippie lifestyle immediately after my discharge from the Marine Corps in 1969. The subject of peppers never became a focus again until I found myself on Stock Island near Key West, Florida, snorkeling one spring in the early 1970’s. Three of us had set up a tent on a sandy beach near a tangle of scruffy looking shrubs. Their roots were more like stilts holding them above the water in loose sand.

“What are those?”

I asked a guy named Mike who was our resident trivia expert.

“They’re mangroves.”

“Mangroves as in mangoes?”

“Yeah, except these Florida bushes don’t grow the real fruit. There’s about eighty different types of mango trees and the best fruit comes from Southeast Asia. Weren’t you just in Vietnam?”

“Yeah, but I wasn’t paying a lot of attention to vegetation, except as concealment.”

“You should’ve tried one. They’re excellent.”

“My mom stuffs them with hamburger and rice,” I said.

Mike wrinkled his nose and rolled a joint. “She does what?”

“Stuffs them.”

“Those are bell peppers, you fucking lunatic, not mangoes.”

As it turns out, Mike was correct. One of my childhood delusions shattered on the spot, like many did during the nineteen sixties and seventies. But, it was also the beginning of a constant, albeit minor, conflict with a woman who I dearly loved and who went out of her way to never have a conflict with anyone. On my next trip home, I began trying to convince her that what she stuffed was actually a bell pepper. I made absolutely no progress on this point for the next thirty years.

I realized something as I worked on this poem and from that realization other poems grew. What I understood wasn’t particularly profound and was something that I had probably known instinctively all along. But, that’s the great thing about poetry. It often reminds us of important aspects of the human condition that we never take time to examine ordinarily, and if you believe Socrates, an unexamined life isn’t worth living. Each of us in our own way does exactly what my mother did. We assign value to objects and ideas through language based on our perspective and through that emphasis create our reality. That reality doesn’t have to be real, however, and therein lies the difficulty we often create for ourselves. Imagine if my mother had made a mango juice smoothie with bell peppers or stuffed peppers with a mango. The result would be a really bad tasting concoction that no one could enjoy. Now, imagine further that my mother never acknowledged this and forced her recipe on us at every opportunity.

We see the world as we want it to be or think it must be. In many instances this is a benign trait and one that comes with a free will and the ability to choose. In some cases it even makes the world a better place. But often, the external reality conflicts violently with the internal reality we’ve created and while those encounters make for good dramatic writing in both poems and stories, they can also make for chaos and pain in actual life circumstances.

One of the great joys in creative writing is that we don’t have to resolve those conflicts. We have omnipotent choices because we are the creators. A conflict can be resolved for the reader and something learned, or a point reached where the reader realizes a conflict is unresolvable and—you guessed it—something learned. This makes for good literature, or what we like to label as art. On the other hand, if we refuse to recognize that these two realities co-exist and attempt no reconciliation between them, we risk creating a work that is either too obscure or too fanciful for a willing suspension of disbelief. That makes for mediocre, even bad, literature.

Unconsciously, the poems in this new collection turned into an examination of that flaw in the human character—our inherent stubbornness to admit unpleasant facts or evidence that challenges our belief systems. It became a central motif running through them. As it is with many thematic issues, I didn’t understand this till I actually read the book as a whole, but it’s one I hope readers will appreciate as well. It seems in this day and age that we’ve reached a point in society where we’ve become unwilling to change perspective, consider a bigger picture of reality than our own, to admit that something may not be real simply because it’s our opinion or that opinion is not more important than facts in evidence. Agreeing that what we believe doesn’t always have to be right, or even what is—a truth both terrifying and liberating at the same time—might allow us to raise living to the level of art. Or, if you want to quote Hemingway’s last line in The Sun Also Rises, “Isn’t it pretty to think so.”