Gurnah is especially dense. I doubt he can be read quickly. Definitely not an airplane or beach read. But for careful readers like myself, he might beGurnah is especially dense. I doubt he can be read quickly. Definitely not an airplane or beach read. But for careful readers like myself, he might be just a thing. Literary fiction. I really liked his most recent novel Afterlives, too.
A fan of coming of age novels I am not. I have long loathed books about children. Proust’s Marcel among them. But it has just occurred to me: a miserable child telling his or her story? Yes, I’m there!...more
Why isn’t this exquisite writer being read more hungrily by my Goodreads fellows? Especially now that half of America is marching in the streets for BWhy isn’t this exquisite writer being read more hungrily by my Goodreads fellows? Especially now that half of America is marching in the streets for Black Lives Matter. This is the man whose work you want to read—in addition to James Baldwin et al— for his subject matter is the African Diaspora. Absolutely outstanding work!
This nonfiction account is not so much a history of the violent global dispersion of those of African descent as much as it is an inquiry into it. It begins with Phillips’s crossing to Britain from the New World on a banana boat. As so many Africans were ripped from their lives and forced to make the middle passage to America or the Caribbean in chains, so Phillips wants to make his own sort of counter crossing now. He wants to be on the water, perhaps to help him imagine the fate of his ancestors. The book is travelogue, memoir and a few specific historical moments chosen to illuminate his theme of the historic travails of Africans and their present day psychology. In elegance of style the book reminds me of the nonfiction of V.S. Naipaul, which is high praise.
The narrator swerves from the story of his own crossing to tell the story about the son of an African merchant who is sent to Liverpool to follow up on a deal gone sour in the 1880’s. The theme being the avariciousness of the white man, his collective impacts on Africans, for it’s clear the money invested has been embezzled. Then we’re back to first person narration again as the author travels to Liverpool, the former European capital of the slave trade. All the grand decaying buildings of Liverpool were “rewards” for the trading in human flesh. That they still stand—“a truly spectacular repository of marble, statuary, oil paintings and gilt”—is detestable.
In Ghana the author meets with the playwright, poetaster, academic and former politician Mohammed Ben Abdallah to explore the idea of Pan-Africanism. It is in this discussion with Dr Ben Abdallah that Phillips seems to hew closest to what Naipaul did in his nonfiction, in which the interview was paramount. Both writers share an interest in post-colonialism, but Naipaul never took any interest in Africans or those of African dissent, not even when he was touring the American south (See A Turn in the South). Phillips on the contrary embraces the topic. I feel as if I’ve come across a vital resource on the subject.
Then Phillips visits an African-American, Dr. Lee, who grew up in the south and emigrated to Ghana in 1956 to establish a dental practice. Their discussion of the “castles,” or slave forts, and how they’re misunderstood by locals I found surprising.
“‘The African doesn’t really understand the slave trade,’ says Dr. Lee. ‘To bring it up causes him embarrassment. If they can make money out of it by turning these places into shrines of tourism for Africans in the diaspora to come back and weep and wail and gnash their teeth, then so be it. They’re businessman. But to go deeper into the psychological and historical import of the slave trade is not what most Africans wish to do.’” (p. 153)
The Panafest Phillips then attends, meant to be a joyous coming together of members of the African diaspora, is ham-handed and sparsely attended. It is also moving and darkly funny. Phillips is able to evoke all of these emotions at once. Fascinating is the story of Philip Quaque, an African who in 1754 was sent from Cape Coast Castle to England for his education and ordination as a Anglican deacon, who then returned to Africa ostensibly as a missionary. Never once, the author notes, in his voluminous correspondence spanning 1766-1812, did the good father ever write about the slave trade; though over that period Africans in their tens of thousands went through Cape Coast Castle on their way to bondage in the U.S. south and Caribbean.
Phillips travels through the American south to tell the story of a white federal judge and his wife who were ostracized for his decision in a civil rights case that went against the ruling white politburo there. The cruelty that still is the American south!
A major theme of the book is the romanticization by black and brown people of the Return to Africa movement. Phillips seems to think it’s all quite ridiculous, though he makes no judgments. He simply show us the people and describes what they’re doing. That is more than sufficient. Now he is in the Negev desert of Israel where many returnees live. It’s hot! He is being fed vegetarian food, which he can’t stomach. Meanwhile a woman serving him speaks of coming out of “the great captivity” in Chicago in 1978 to live in the promised land, for she believes she and her fellows are the “...descendants of Isaac, Abraham, and Jacob. We are the true children of Israel.” (p. 269)
I have ordered Crossing the River, a novel. It should be here in a few days. What a stunning new find Phillips is for me! Read him, friends....more
Fascinating and repugnant by turns. In India Battutah reports on the ancient Hindu rite of sati (also suttee), in which the widow burns herself to deaFascinating and repugnant by turns. In India Battutah reports on the ancient Hindu rite of sati (also suttee), in which the widow burns herself to death on her husband’s pyre. This is the first such description of the practice I’ve read. Usually, in my reading, sati is referred to as a superseded barbarity and universally deplored, but here Ibn Battutah describes its active practice.
When these three women...made a compact to burn themselves, they spent three days preceding the event in concerts of music and singing and festivals of eating and drinking, as though they were bidding farewell to the world, and the women from all around came to take part. On the morning of the fourth day each one of them had a horse brought to her and mounted it, richly dressed and perfumed. In her right hand she held a coconut, with which she played, and in her left a mirror, in which she could see her face. They were surrounded by Brahmins and accompanied by their own relatives, and were preceded by drums, trumpets and bugles. Every one of the infidels would say to one of them, ’Take greetings from me to my father, or brother, or mother, or friend,’ and she would say ‘Yes,’ and smile at them. I rode out with my companions to see what exactly these women did in this ceremony of burning. After traveling about three miles with them we came to a dark place with much water and trees with heavy shade, amongst which there were four pavilions, each containing a stone idol. Between the pavilions there was a basin of water over which a dense shade was cast by trees so thickly set that the sun could not penetrate them. This place looked like a spot in hell--God preserve us from it! On reaching these pavilions they descended to the pool, plunged into it and divested themselves of their clothes and ornaments, which they distributed as alms. Each one was then given an unsewn garment of coarse cotton and tied part of it round her waist and part over her head and shoulders. Meanwhile, the fires had been lit near this basin in a low-lying spot, and oil of sesame poured over them that the flames were increased. There were about fifteen men there with faggots of thin wood, and with them about ten others with heavy baulks in their hands, while the drummers and trumpeters were standing by waiting for the women’s coming. The fire was screened off by a blanket held by some men in their hands, so that they should not be frightened by the sight of it. I saw one of them, on coming to the blanket, pull it violently out of the men’s hands, saying to them with a laugh, ‘Is it with the fire that you frighten me? I know that it is a blazing fire.’ Thereupon she joined her hands above her head in salutation to the fire and cast herself into it. At the same moment the drums, trumpets and bugles were sounded, and men threw on her the firewood they were carrying and the others put those heavy baulks on top of her to prevent her moving, cries were raised and there was a loud clamor. When I saw this I had all but fallen off my horse, if my companions had not quickly brought water to me and laved my face, after which I withdrew. (p. 222-223)
But I rush ahead. We are at the start in the early 14th century traveling through the Holy Land with a Sunni Muslim gentleman who calmly describes the cities he comes to and their inhabitants. He’s good at pointing out fine examples of architecture, like the Umayyad Mosque in the Old City of Damascus (715 CE), still standing today. But I also like it when he points out a kindness, as when he came down with fever and the Maliki professor Nur al-Din as-Sakhalin kept him abed in his home while doctors treated him. He makes two trips to Mecca in the early pages, tours Yemen, where we learn something of the cities of San’a, and Zafar, then it’s on to Mogadishu, Somalia, where the fare is: “Rice cooked with ghee, which they put into a large wooden platter, and on top of this they set platters of kushan. This is the seasoning, made of chickens, flesh-meat, fish and vegetables. They cook unripe bananas in fresh milk and put this in one dish, and in another they put curdled milk, on which they place pieces of pickled lemon, bunches of pickled pepper steeped in vinegar and salted, green ginger, and mangoes.” (p. 124)
Interesting here is Ibn Battutah’s account of how much of life in the Islamic world went on despite the Crusades. He is in the Holy Land for only a portion of his travels. So occasionally it impinges on the periphery of his world, but mostly it goes unremarked upon. I’m astonished by the tradition of hospitality of the Akhi, who work by day solely that they may board and feed travelers by night. From Wikipedia: “The men of the brotherhood were generally very well-mannered and generous as they ascribed to the ideas of chivalry and virtue put forth in the Futuuwa. Ibn Battutah described them as ‘men so eager to welcome strangers, so prompt to serve food and to satisfy the wants of others, and so ready to suppress injustice and kill [tyrannical agents of police and the miscreants who join with them].’ Many of the brotherhoods formed their fellowship through documents similar to a ‘futuwwatnames' which preached virtues like modesty, self-control and [self] denial.” Interestingly, Ibn Battutah never describes the fellows he travels with. “We used to buy a quarter of fat mutton for two dirhams and bread for two dirhams— this would satisfy our needs for a day, and there were ten of us.” (p. 164) This seems to suggest the casual clubbing together of travelers for purposes of mutual self-protection and purchasing power.
His discussion of his purchases of slave girls and boys is disconcerting, but then one thinks, well, we are in the 14th century after all. But when the virgin Greek female slaves grow heavy with his own child one gives a shudder. These were reprehensible practices. They still are. The Muslim world is well known for its ongoing slave trafficking to this day. (See Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn’s book Half the Sky, specifically the chapter “Emancipating 21st Century Slaves”.) Moving on, I enjoyed Battutah's description of the Greek Orthodox Hagia Sofia before it was turned into an Ottoman Imperial mosque. Of Constantinople, he writes “Most of the inhabitants of the city are monks, devotees, and priests, and it’s churches are numerous beyond computation. The men of the city, both soldiers and others, carry over their heads great parasols, both winter and summer, and the women wear voluminous turbans.” (p. 187) The chapter titled “Account of the sultan of Transoxiana” may be the most interesting to me so far. I was curious to see which of the antiquities written about by Robert Byron in his The Road to Oxiana were extant at the time if Ibn Battutah’s peregrinations. He was then in the Persian Empire, now Turkmenistan and Afghanistan. I know they both visited Samarkand (now Uzbekistan) 600 years apart.
He’s raised to the office of qadi (judge) by the sultan of Delhi. I find the largesse of all the Muslims he visits dazzling. He’s good at his various catalog of goods. Slave girls are often bought or exchanged. He signals his frank pleasure in fucking them. He must marry and leave a dozen women during the course of his travels. They are chattel. In the Maldives one can marry temporarily while in town, and then divorce the women when it’s time to leave. He goes to China which he traverses by way of an elaborate system of canals. He’s robbed by pirates on the Indian Ocean. He escapes catastrophic shipwreck. He returns home to Tangier, and then decides to join the fight against the infidel in the Iberian Peninsula, part of the reconquista. He describes the death of Alphonso IX of Castile from the Black Death while besieging Gibraltar, which must have felt like a big win.
This is an abridgment, 401 pages long, based on the Gibb-Beckingham translation, 5 volumes, Hakluyt Society. ...more
Enjoying this. Only problem is the dialect, incomprehensible to this non-African. Thankfully not much of it, so far. The story is set around a new AfrEnjoying this. Only problem is the dialect, incomprehensible to this non-African. Thankfully not much of it, so far. The story is set around a new African dictator, an ostensibly enlightened one, and the men of his cabinet.
The humor is not registering with me. There's an ostensibly madcap scene with a white Englishman, Mad Medico, and it just falls flat. Character development, but the newcomers feel one dimensional. What am I missing? I just want to get back to the dictator and his cabinet.
I'm going to try this again some other day. No rating for now. ...more
A few things. First, I have read widely about Mao's Cultural Revolution and Great Leap Forward (40 to 70 million dead), Stalin's purges and programs oA few things. First, I have read widely about Mao's Cultural Revolution and Great Leap Forward (40 to 70 million dead), Stalin's purges and programs of collectivization (20 million dead) and Hitler's genocide (11 million dead). I am largely unshockable. However, the avarice and deceit of King Leopold II of Belgium in the Congo (15 million dead) has been something of a revelation. I hereby enter his name in my Rogues Gallery roster. It is important that we remember what he perpetrated for his own personal gain. Adam Hochschild's book does an excellent job of registering these crimes in the collective memory. The book has been justly praised. Let me add my own.
Also, it turns out the first great unmasker of Leopold was an American, George Washington Williams. He was a lawyer, minister, popular author and activist. He wrote an open letter to Leopold that was published in the Times in 1890 and which might have saved millions of lives had he been listened to. Williams was a man of considerable intellectual acumen and courage. Largely because he was black, however, he was ignored. I had always thought that that great whistleblower was Roger Casement. And certainly Casement's key contribution is recounted here, as is that of the great popularizer of the Congo cause, E.D. Morel, but Williams' audacious early warning was a surprise to me. I hereby enter his name into my book of latter-day Cassandras, and decree he be given greater emphasis in all relevant texts and courses....more
Astonishing. Subtly madcap. An endearing, charming book. My 2nd or 3rd reading.
His name is Eugene Henderson. He's a mountain of a man, and all existeAstonishing. Subtly madcap. An endearing, charming book. My 2nd or 3rd reading.
His name is Eugene Henderson. He's a mountain of a man, and all existential angst. He is from a storied family, owns an extensive estate in New Jersey, where he has raised pigs, and has been left $3 million (1958 US) by his neurasthenic, violin playing father. He's an Episcopalian or something, a blowhard and a bully. He's quite a talker, a sojourner in life, possessed of the remarkable gift of being able to externalize his feelings — and he is unhappy.
He is "rash and unlucky and acts without sufficient reflection" (p. 88) He seeks purpose. At 63 he's too old to become a doctor, but he gives it considerable thought. When he tells his first wife what's on his mind, she laughs in his face and he divorces her. Ultimately he goes to Africa with a friend, this travel another kind of externalization, of his lostness.
His speech to Queen Willatale of the Arnewi — he's deep in the interior of Africa now — sums up his mindset.
"Oh, it's miserable to be human. . . Just another vehicle for temper and vanity and rashness and all the rest. Who wants it? Who needs it? These things occupy the place where a man's soul should be. But as long as she [the queen] has started I want her to read me the whole indictment. I can fill her in on a lot of counts, though I don't think I would have to. She seems to know. Lust, rage, and all the rest of it. A regular bargain basement of deformities ..." (p. 78)
A few keywords. One is rash and the other is blow. Henderson is hasty and rash in his actions. Life and suffering are like blows which constantly assail him. Shuddering under the blows, however, he can be very funny and not infrequently annoying.
After he destroys the frogs in the Arnewi cistern he hightails it on foot to the far less hospitable Wariri, who put him up for the night in a room with a corpse, which he deeply resents. He decides to move the corpse. Lest, he be blamed for killing it.
"I rose and tied a blanket under my chin, a precaution against stains. I had decided to carry the man on my back in case we had to run for it. . . First I pulled the body away from the wall. Then I took it by the wrists and with a quick turn, bending, hauled it on my back. I was afraid lest the arms begin to exert a grip on my neck from behind. Tears of anger and repugnance began to hang from my eyes. I fought to stifle these feelings back into my chest. And I thought, what if this man should turn out to be a Lazarus? But this dead man on my back was no Lazarus. He was cold and the skin in my hands was dead. His chin had settled on my shoulder. Determined as only a man can be who is saving his life, I made huge muscles in my jaw and shut my teeth to hold my entrails back, as they seemed to be rising on me. I suspected that if the dead man had been planted on me and the tribe was awake and watching, when I was halfway to the ravine they might burst out and yell, 'Dead stealer! Ghoul! Give back our dead man!' and they would hit me on the head and lay me out for my sacrilege. Thus I would end—I, Henderson, with all my striving and earnestness." (p. 134)
Then he meets the Western educated Wariri king with whom he becomes fast friends. Henderson takes part in a tribal ritual, demonstrates his extraordinary strength, and becomes the Rain King. He admits to the king his longing for personal meaning in his life. But all is not well in Wariri-ville. There is politics here, too. Henderson learns of a cabal that is set against the king, who, the cabal believes, has become too westernized, too cut off from the traditional beliefs. Toward the end, the enlightened King helps Henderson to work through his emotional issues by introducing him to Atti, an immense tigress. I'll say no more. Read it, please....more
Naturally, when it comes to 1930s African memoirs we first think of the Baroness von Blixen-Finecke's Out of Africa and her stories. Both women have cNaturally, when it comes to 1930s African memoirs we first think of the Baroness von Blixen-Finecke's Out of Africa and her stories. Both women have created exceptional works and the one by Beryl Markham (or is it by her husband Raoul Schumacher?) stands the comparison very well. In fact, at least in this work, she seems the writer with the sharper, leaner diction. She also possesses a sense of humor you will never find in such abundance in Dinesen, who works from a far darker palette. Markham's humor--and her penchant for compression--is evident from the first page; however, it is not until I got to the chapter "Why Do We Fly" and its successor "He Was A Good Lion," that the narrative becomes almost magical. I can see why Hemingway (see his Selected Letters: 1917-1961) raved about West With the Night, calling it "...a bloody wonderful book." When Markham comes to the description of her father's farm in Njoro one is struck by the similarity with another frontier narrative, Willa Cather's My Ántonia. I felt it particularly keenly in the description of the growth of the farm and its ever increasing "productivity." Today we would call that sort of growth rape of the land. Today, reading such an account of colonial "progress" it's hard not to think of the the loss of biodiversity and the impact on indigenous peoples. Writing in 1940, however, this was not a perspective the author was even minutely aware of, and so the book becomes darker for the present day reader in a way it could probably not have been for Ms. Markham's first reading public....more
An exquisite novel about the transportation of Africans across the Atlantic to bondage in the United States and the Caribbean. It won the National BooAn exquisite novel about the transportation of Africans across the Atlantic to bondage in the United States and the Caribbean. It won the National Book Award three years before Barry Unsworth’s fine and similarly themed Booker Award-winning Sacred Hunger was published. Belongs in the same league with Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man and Toni Morrison’s Beloved and William Faulkner’s Light in August. A vital American document. I must reread it soon....more
Things Fall Apart - Okonkwo is an emotionally stilted African tribesman. He beats his wives, confounds (aStar rating refers only to Things Fall Apart.
Things Fall Apart - Okonkwo is an emotionally stilted African tribesman. He beats his wives, confounds (and beats) his children, has taken human skulls in intertribal warfare. He has what we in the West would call massive gender hangups. Every act of his life is about reaffirming his manliness and shunning womanliness. He has no feminine side. He has no education. He is inarticulate. He is a brute. Achebe gives us a look at a world completely outside the bounds of the reader's experience. In this world there is nothing but the clan. There is no police authority, no government, no tax agency, and so on. Important decisions are made by the clansmen collectively, with certain more highly ranking individuals having a disproportionate say in what is to be done. For example, when a clanswoman is killed in another village, it is decided that unless the other village wants war it must provide a young virgin (given to the man who lost his wife), and a young man. This young man, Ikemefuna, is taken by Okonkwo into his compound until the tribe determines what is to become of him. He is a bright young man. The entire household comes to value him. For Okonkwo's elder son, Nwoye, Ikemefuna becomes a valued older brother. Even the vindictive Okonkwo comes to like the boy. He spends three years in Okonkwo's house. Then it is determined by tribal authority that he must be killed. He is, what, 17? He is taken deep into the forest by the clansmen and cut down with machetes. He calls to Okonkwo in his death throes: "My father, they are killing me." Okonkwo, who has so far hung in the back of the crowd, runs up, unsheathes his own machete and joins in the slaughter. The primitive logic here being that someone had to die to avenge the dead woman, and a young man is of greater value than a woman. Women, in fact, are chattel in this culture. The clan's "rules" can be appalling. Twins are considered evil and are routinely killed, left to die of exposure in what is known as the Evil Forest. Child mortality is very high. To deal with the trauma of child mortality the clan has developed a myth: It is believed that some women whose children repeatedly die are in fact bearing what is known as ogbanje. The glossary in the back of this edition defines an ogbanje as "a changeling; a child who repeatedly dies and returns to its mother to be reborn." When the child dies, if it is suspected of being an ogbanje, the tribal shaman multilates its body before tossing it into the Evil Forest. If the woman later bears a child with the same mutilations then the suspicion of the ogbanje is confirmed. So, massive is the ignorance here that it takes the breath away. There is universal inarticulateness, and no form of written language. People act out in the most appalling way. The reader does come to think of the Igbo here as a primitive and bestial people. But then the white man comes. And the white man, the colonizer, British in this case, brings with him his religion, his government, his law and most notably his readiness to condemn the clan cosmogony as pure evil, a product of the devil. The Brits waste little time instilling their superior thought in the clansmen. The reader is torn. Are the tribespeople better off losing their indigenous culture to imperialist usurpers? That would certainly mean less disease for them, reduced infant mortality, an increased rational understanding of certain natural phenonmena they would otherwise mythologize. It's clear there's much to be gained from the white man. But in the end the tribespeople can't pick and choose. They have Western culture thrust down their throats. It is, in the end, what amounts to a wholesale cultural annihilation of the Igbo by the whites. The Igbo try to strike back by burning down the Christian church. This reader found this scene a wonderful moment of the old tribal resolve reasserting itself. But Okonkwo and the men who do it are arrested by the colonizers. They are jailed. During their incarceration they are beaten, starved, not treated with the respect their tribal status warrants. They are released only when the tribe pays a ransom. The next morning they meet to decide what is to be done. During the meeting, five of the white man's native (and pusillanimous) clerks arrive to tell the Igbo that they must break up their meeting. In his frustration Okonkwo lashes out and kills a clerk. But his clansmen do not respond by killing the other four clerks, who escape. I don't want to reveal the end. Suffice it to say though that Okonkwo, in an act of desperation, undertakes an act that is the negation of all he has ever believed in and stood for, no matter how problematic that might be viewed. It's a devastating moment driving home some of the points earlier expressed here. The book is gripping. It carries the reader along with a seeming effortlessness and never lags. It's a beautiful book and perhaps a great one....more
An oneiric epic. Phantasmagoria in the bush. One is reminded of Achebe's Things Fall Apart in which the Yoruba myth of the abiku, or spirit child, is An oneiric epic. Phantasmagoria in the bush. One is reminded of Achebe's Things Fall Apart in which the Yoruba myth of the abiku, or spirit child, is so much more darkly rendered. The Famished Road is not so dark a book. It is scary in its way, surely, loaded as it is with its cast of frighteners, but it can also be oddly reassuring in its vivid depiction of the afterlife. Heaven may indeed be a place where nothing ever happens, yes, but as intimated by Okri it is also beautiful, in a Daliesque way, without strife and full of high joy.
Azaro, short for Lazarus, another abiku, and his mum and dad, live in an unnamed city in a modern African state. The community is ensnared in grinding poverty. There has been virtually no education among those in the community. The residents are without the richness of language that might allow them to talk through their problems. Instead there is much acting out, violence, aggression, theft.
Azaro travels back and forth between the spirit world and reality. There is never any doubt in the reader’s mind as to which is which. There might be moments of periodic ambiguity, but Okri always cures these before too long. Is our narrator reliable? Do we believe him? No matter the flights of fancy, his dalliance with the spirit world, we believe that he believes what he experiences is real. Is he self deluded? Maybe. Or perhaps just subject to a too vivid imagination? That is suggested in the last line.
The story is set on the cusp of independence for an African nation like Nigeria, which historically occurred in 1960. The machinations of the newly formed parties are nothing short of criminal. Many, including Mum, a peripatetic seller of common household items, are intimidated to vote the “right way” by the Party of the Rich. Dad, who must work carrying loads on his head (apparently cheaper than forklifts?) grows simultaneously more compassionate and more insane. In desperation he goes from role to role as a means of finding sustenance for his family. First he is a menial worker, then a boxer, a fine one, fighting opponents whose imperviousness depends upon bad magic. Then he is a politician embracing a clan of beggars he cannot support.
There is the local ambitious barkeep, Madame Koto, whose political involvement gradually improves both her fortunes and the decadent offerings she is able to provide her increasingly well-heeled clientele. Her bar becomes an intersection between the living an the dead. She becomes massive, corrupt, physically grotesque. The narrative is sustained almost entirely by way of action. Every sentence describes. We see vividly. The novel has a marvelous cohesion. Is it too long? I think it is. One wishes Okri could have done the task in 400, or even 375 pages, but that was not to be.
Please don't take the bait and read The Famished Road solely as an allegory on the newly independent state of Nigeria. To do so will be to diminish a wildly imaginative and astonishing book to the level of mere parable. The narrative works on many levels. I enjoyed especially as a creative take on the enabling spiritual myths of a people. It provides insight into another world, the primary objective of all great fiction. Highly recommended....more
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