Not long after Yvonne Pepin turned 13, she lost her mother. Since her father had died back when she was 9, she went to live with cousins, then a friend and then a foster family — “a real fruit cocktail of people,” she recalls.
She spent part of her childhood in Los Gatos, Calif., and moved to White Bear Lake, Minn., after her father’s death; she then attended three high schools in three cities within three years.
Yvonne could scarcely wait to get away, out on her own, to begin a new life.
So when she turned 18, she used a part of her inheritance and bought 80 acres in the wilderness outside John Day, Ore. She saw herself building her own log cabin, living among the trees, writing poetry.
And so she did. With a bow saw bought for 50 cents at a flea market and a carpenter she met at Emery’s Cafe in John Day, the teenager built her forest hideaway.
Emery’s is closed now, but that log cabin — 18 by 24 feet, three stories, big porch — still stands.
The builder admits to catching cabin fever after about a year. She moved to Eugene to study journalism at Lane Community College. From there, she went on to earn a fine arts certificate at the Mendocino Arts Center in California. That’s where she learned of Port Townsend, then a place artists were moving to as it was so much more affordable than California.
Yvonne Pepin Wakefield, 55 and still a Port Townsend artist, is at work on a memoir. It’s about those Oregon log-cabin days, when she skied, hiked, then drove her pickup truck two hours into town whenever it was time to do laundry and check out a fresh batch of library books.
And that won’t be her first memoir.
Just-published work
Wakefield is also spreading the word about her just-published book about a whole other odyssey.
Suitcase Full of Nails: Lessons Learned from Teaching Art in Kuwait is the story of her six years at Kuwait University’s Women’s College. She’ll do three readings from the book this month: at 7 p.m. Friday at the Port Townsend Gallery, at 10 a.m. Jan. 21 at the Quimper Unitarian Universalist Fellowship and finally at 4:30 p.m. Jan. 27 at Pacific Mist Books in Sequim.
Building a log cabin in the Oregon woods and flying off to the Middle East to teach young Muslims: These two experiences may not sound like they have much in common. But they’re examples of how a woman forged her way through a brutal test of tenacity, to emerge on the other side with heart and mind opened.
Wakefield had a sweet life on the North Olympic Peninsula back in 2004. She was an art specialist in Sequim’s Helen Haller and Greywolf elementary schools and the art director at the Boys & Girls Clubs of the Olympic Peninsula. She showed her own paintings and sculptures in one-woman exhibitions across Washington, Oregon and California.
But Wakefield wanted more. She had earned a doctorate in human organizational systems from the Fielding Institute, and she wanted to use it. When she heard of the teaching position open at the Women’s College, she sent her resume. When the email arrived from Kuwait University telling her she could have the job, it gave her 10 days to decide whether to go.
The idea of going to live and teach in Kuwait was terrifying, Wakefield remembers.
She packed up and went anyway, leaving her husband of 21 years, Tod, behind.
Tod would come to visit his wife several times over the coming years, and the two would travel the world during spring and summer breaks. During the long academic year, Wakefield would undergo a deep culture shock. And though she’d heard about the constrictions placed on Arab women, the art professor was to undergo an education of her own in Kuwait, a schooling beyond what she could have imagined.
The facts
In Suitcase Full of Nails, however, Wakefield analyzes neither the politics nor the religion of the desert state.
“It’s just the facts, ma’am. I report it as I lived it,” she says.
But these are facts through the eyes of an artist — and an athlete. She’s devoted to running and believes in the adage about marathons, and other major challenges, being 10 percent physical effort and 90 percent mental.
In Kuwait, Wakefield was plunged into a kind of parallel universe, a place that each day called upon every piece of her stamina — mental, emotional and physical. The 130-degree temperatures were just the beginning.
Like a runner, Wakefield kept on keeping on, putting one shoe in front of the other.
The finish line, if it can be called that, came in the way her students became artists. Even as they adhered to the strict rules of their culture and Islamic religion, the women learned to express themselves, in vivid hues and iconic images.
Their stories are told, in Suitcase, alongside Wakefield’s many struggles with the men in charge at Kuwait University.
In a chapter titled “Staying the Course,” Wakefield writes about going back to work in Kuwait after her first long break.
“I have learned not to question the differences. Nor do I expect wrongs to be righted . . . I return not because I love where I work, or the conditions . . . but because I love the job I was hired to do.”
And since she is an animal lover, the writer regales us too with her stories of rescued Kuwaiti cats and dogs. These include the tale of K.C., the emaciated feral kitten she cared for — and brought home to Port Townsend. K.C. now weighs 22 pounds.
Wakefield returned home for good in June 2010 and set to writing her book by the first week of July. She rises at 4 a.m., goes into her studio, lights a candle and turns her laser focus onto her story for four hours.
Then she breaks to go to the gym and comes back home for a second four-hour stretch.
Suitcase bursts with detailed accounts — of Wakefield teaching basic drawing to students whose religion forbids them to look at the human body; of starting an extracurricular club of artists called the Outlaws; of navigating the obstacles her male colleagues set in her path.
Show their real lives
With this memoir, the writer hopes to reveal the real lives of women in the Middle East and go deeper than the glimpses offered on television. The students she got to know were exuberant young women, not so very unlike their counterparts the world over.
“A veil of misunderstanding and ignorance, not the veils worn by my students, can really separate cultures,” Wakefield writes in an article in Art Education magazine.
Life for an American woman in Kuwait, Wakefield also found, is confining to say the least. She learns that to stay safe and sane, she must avoid driving, avoid going out at night and avoid asking for help from any kind of government agency.
Rich and fleeting
Yet she also found a few freedoms, fleeting and rich. She found friends to go running and bicycling with. She found a fitness club where she met more friends. And she found something delicious to paint.
Wakefield had always been a landscape artist, one who loved to set out alone, with her brushes, colors and easel. She’d go into the woods, up on a hillside — but in Kuwait, a woman doesn’t go out solo. Besides, Wakefield says, the desert didn’t call to her like the lush landscapes of the Pacific Northwest had.
So one day, Wakefield broke open a pomegranate, a sacred fruit among Muslims. She began to paint its peaks, valleys and crevices — which she realized reminded her of the terrain of home.
“The red color,” she adds, “helped me to vent some of the frustration I was feeling.”
Many of Wakefield’s art students kept themselves covered, in the body-enveloping abaya, the hijab over their hair and sometimes the nigab, a swath of fabric worn to leave only the eyes showing.
Spreading wings
But as she worked with them, the young women began to open their artistic wings.
Among other projects, they applied to be contestants in a graffiti-painting competition at a local shopping mall. And though neither professor nor students had used spray-paint cans before, they were chosen.
“We were out there with 50 guys,” most of whom looked supremely confident in their hip-hop garb, Wakefield remembers.
The Women’s College students created a wild graffiti array and placed third in the competition. Their prize: the building of another graffiti wall, ready for painting, on their own college campus.
Wakefield also won a research grant for another project. In it, she encouraged her students to use nonverbal tools, such as color and symbol, to express their memories of Iraq’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait.
“They were just little kids” when Saddam Hussein’s forces moved in, Wakefield said. But their canvases revealed, in no uncertain terms, how much they remembered on mental and spiritual levels.
As Wakefield notes on her website, www.YvonnePepinWakefield.com, teaching art is an art in itself. She believes, too, that her success as an artist and compassion as an educator center on her appreciation of nature and human nature. Suitcase Full of Nails.
Suitcase provides “an eye-opening look under the veil of young Muslim women that allows readers to see how similar they are to young women everywhere,” author Nina Amir writes on the back cover of the book.
At the same time, Suitcase is “a realistic, and sometimes frightening, view of what one can expect if you live and work in the Middle East,” Amir adds.
Revealing meaning
The meaning of the Suitcase Full of Nails title is explained near the end of the book. Wakefield says it suddenly occurred to her, so she wants it to be a surprise, revealed suddenly to readers the way it was to her.
“It’s a positive metaphor,” she promises.
Wakefield’s experiences in Kuwait still shape her prism on life in the
United States.
“I am so much more accepting and tolerant of other cultures,” she says. “And I am more sensitive to people from other cultures coming in to this culture.”
She recently went to a poetry slam where two immigrants, one from India and one from Mexico, offered poems about feeling voiceless.
“I really identified with them,” Wakefield recalls.
In her experience, help is scarce to nonexistent when someone who is part of the dominant culture mistreats a newcomer.
Yet such trials won’t stop her from traveling, making art and sharing the experience.
“When I travel,” Wakefield says, “I keep my expectations packed away in my bag.”
