by Philip Graham

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The Adventures of Tintin starts off with a sly reference as Tintin is having his portrait drawn and the finished product looks like Tintin from the books. Then he finds a model boat called the Unicorn which he purchases and will lead into the main plot as it is highly sought after by the villain Sakharine who at first tries to buy it from. The Adventures of Tintin is the most impressively looking animation feature I have seen since Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence (2004), which from a technical point of view, it's an honor.

Since 1979 the writer Philip Graham and his wife, the cultural anthropologist Alma Gottlieb, have lived off and on in small villages among the Beng people of the West African country of Côte d’Ivoire, which they first chronicled in the award-winning Parallel Worlds. Now a second volume of their memoir, Braided Worlds (University of Chicago Press), has just been published. Through interweaving narratives, Gottlieb and Graham recount unexpected dramas of cultural contact, including a religious leader’s declaration that the authors’ six-year-old son Nathaniel was the reincarnation of a revered ancestor, Graham’s late father being accepted into the Beng afterlife, and the deepening and increasingly dangerous madness of a villager.

The following excerpt, from one of Philip’s sections in Braided Worlds, takes place on the first evening of their third extended stay among the Beng, this time with their young son.

The royalties from Braided Worlds are dedicated to the Beng people.

The Adventures of Tintin

Under a quickly darkening sky we ate our first village dinner at the wooden table that Alma and I had donated to Amenan’s compound eight years ago—and that we apparently now had on loan for the remainder of the summer. Nathaniel picked bravely at the meal of rice and dried fish with a thin tomato sauce, and I wondered what must be going on in his head, with the myriad details of this new world bombarding him from all sides: the constant chatter in the competing soundscapes of two unfamiliar languages, Beng and French; the scads of people entering, lingering, and leaving the compound; the unfettered wanderings of sheep, goats and chickens; the crowds of whispering children that hovered near him, eager to touch his skin, his hair, and yet afraid to do so.

I’d forgotten how fast the sun sinks itself near the equator—soon a few kerosene lamps lit Amenan’s compound. I’d also forgotten to unpack our own lantern, which remained buried somewhere among the boxes of gear in our mud brick house.

“Hey, kiddo, want to help me find that lamp?” I asked Nathaniel, guessing he’d jump at the chance of a break from the circle of curious eyes.

“I know where it is,” he said, and I didn’t doubt him. My mechanically inclined son had eyed it with interest when we bought it in an Abidjan market, and I’d promised that when the time came I would show him how the thing worked. Nathaniel trailed after me into the house, holding a flashlight, and he lifted the lantern from a box in the corner.

“See?” he said, grinning in triumph.

Back at the table, Nathaniel trained the flashlight as I took the lantern apart, explaining as I went along. “If you pull at this top part here, you can ease out the glass —I think it’s called a glass chimney—and then you can get to the wick here at the bottom, and light it with a match.”

Nathaniel wore his serious face, nodding as I spoke, as if I were a real authority, an uncommon position for me, since even at six my son had already found his position in the family as the handyman. Back in Illinois, he’d spend hours paging through the pictures of a do-it-yourself home repair manual.

“Okay, but that’s not really the bottom. See, if I unscrew the base, you can see it’s hollow—that’s where we put the kerosene in.”

Kerosene. I’d forgotten all about that.

Alma caught my frown and said, “I’ll check to see if Amenan can lend us some for tonight.” Off she went, and I filled the pause with more patter. “Here, you can see how the end of the wick dangles down into the base. It soaks up the kerosene, so that when we light the wick on top the flame keeps going. That’s why we’ll have to keep filling up the base with the stuff every week or so. Okay, now why don’t you put the pieces back together, to see how it’s done. Then you can take them apart again.”

Nathaniel set to work with his usual concentration, and Kofi came by with a plastic bidon sloshing inside with kerosene. “Ah, look at him, the little man is already in charge.”

Half-suppressing a prideful smile, Nathaniel watched as Kofi filled the lantern’s basin. I screwed the lid back on, ready to strike a match, but stopped. The wick needed time to absorb the kerosene, otherwise it would burn to a crisp, and that little spectacle would certainly undermine my temporary expertise.

“We’ll have to wait a bit,” I said to Nathaniel’s disappointed face, “the wick is still dry.”

Just then Amenan’s daughter Esi arrived with a plastic pail steaming with hot water. The emperor%27s new groove game. Something else I’d forgotten: bath time, ritually observed by the Beng each morning and evening. I turned to Alma. “Why don’t you go first,” I suggested, “while Nathaniel and I wait for that wick to moisten up? He and I can wash later.”

“Are you sure?” she asked, but it really wasn’t a question. After this long day, pouring cups of hot water over her head from that pail in the new bathhouse would be a welcome treat.

Xforce keygen autocad 2010 32 bit free download for windows 7. As Alma gathered a towel, soap and shampoo, Nathaniel gave me a very specific look—half-plaintive, half-insistent—which meant he was ready for some bedtime reading. For the past few months, bedtime reading meant Tintin.

I’d been working my way through the twenty-odd books in the series with him since February, almost immediately after he’d made it clear, with his “Can’t we just look into the window of Africa?” comment, that he had no idea what he was in for. I’d searched through the children’s section of our local bookstore for something, anything that might prepare him for an Africa much larger than a storefront. Then I came upon a revolving metal rack filled with Tintin books.

I’d never read these books when I was younger, barely knew what they were about, but as I paged through one of the adventures, I felt I might have hit the mother lode. Tintin was this little Belgian-French fellow, much older than Nathaniel but exuding enough of a childlike air to be in the ballpark for my son to identify with. From what I could see from cover after cover of the books in the series, Tintin traveled from Scotland to Tibet, the Middle East to the Andes, even to the moon.

And inside those covers, what narrow escapes! Tintin—a young journalist adventurer—survived arson and ball lightning, car chases, explosions large and small, poison darts, kidnappings—what wasn’t thrown at him from page to page? And through it all Tintin prevailed, nothing seemed to faze his unflappable bravery. This, I’d hoped, might help prepare Nathaniel for his summer in Africa, give him a role model who shrugged off any trouble and kept moving forward. So I bought three in the series—optimistically more than one, but pessimistically not the whole shebang.

Nathaniel loved the books and all the main characters—Tintin and his dog Snowy, Captain Haddock and his creative cursing, the stone-deaf Professor Calculus, and the incompetent gumshoes Thompson and Thompson. As I pointed at the word balloons to let him know where we were on the page, Nathaniel followed the movement from panel to panel with such intensity that I suspected he was teaching himself how to read. We’d go through each book at least three times before he let me continue to the next. Soon enough, though, I grew leery of the colonialist assumptions and dodgy ethnic stereotypes of some of these books, many of them written in the 1930s and ‘40s. The possible take-away was more complex than I’d imagined, but what could I do, now that Nathaniel was already hooked on these adventures? And so I periodically paused and entertained my six-year-old son with a political critique.

Here we were in the Africa that I’d tried to prepare him f

The Adventures Of Tintin