Book 228: British Virgin Islands (English) – Sun, Sand, Murder (John KEYSE-WALKER)

In the past, I never devoted much thought to what it took to be a good policeman. Now I understood that, just as an unused machine rusts until it binds and becomes a useless mass of metal, a policeman in a place that lacks crime stops thinking like a policeman. The rituals of police work become a kind of Kabuki theater, elaborate and stylized, but devoid of content. The uniform is worn, but without pride. The patrols are completed, but without vigilance. The policeman appears to be there but in actuality has ceased to be a policeman.

On the small, crime-less island of Anegada, it would seem to be very easy to seduce the entire police force. After all, it consists of a single policeman (cum customs officer) – who is becoming estranged from his wife. Whether because of the lack of crime or not, Special Constable Teddy Creque is rather amateurish (not to mention distrusted and despised by the main island police, and under-resourced). He is apparently quite out of his depth when a regular visitor, biologist Paul Kelliher, who says he is studying endangered iguanas, is found shot in the head on the island’s remotest beach, surrounded by strange excavations. Another murder attempt soon follows.

Of course, nothing is as it seems.

The arrogant main island police, not trusting him with anything else, give him the apparently harmless drudge task of notifying the dead man’s next-of-kin – which leads to his discovery that ‘Paul Kelliher’ never actually existed. Later, there is a rather terrifying (but also funny in its over-the-topness) drug raid by the DEA (a bit like Monty Python’s Inquisition). There is also a lot of ‘woman trouble’, especially for Teddy! It’s also funny how he seems to spill the beans to all the likely suspects. How do you keep anything secret on a small island anyway? Nevertheless, he gets there in the end.

This being a Caribbean novel, you probably won’t be surprised to learn that there is buried treasure, the left-over of some past piratical behaviour, along with a rather sketchy map with X’s (as is rightly pointed out, why on earth would a pirate make a map pointing to ‘his’ treasure?) and some decoding fun.

I thought that Creque’s flaws, faux pas and difficulties made him and the story seem much more real and easy to identify with.

I wasn’t expecting much from this one, given the banal title, but it was actually very enjoyable and even thought-provoking. I loved the self-deprecating, cynical and honest voice of Creque. It gave me what I felt like was an authentic feel for policing in a place with (normally) nothing to police and nothing to police it with – and no help from the locals, or other law enforcement. The ending was a big surprise for me. Absolutely perfect beach reading, especially if you’re lucky enough to make it to the BVI!

Coming up: the US Virgin Islands, but we’re not quite done with Anegada yet!

Book 122: Libya (English) – In the Country of Men (Hisham MATAR)

Ustath Jafer rarely stood chatting with any of the neighbours. He wasn’t unfriendly, but kept conversations to a minimum and always assumed the air of the sort of man I would later come to recognize, one who wanted to make the burden of his monumental responsibilities clear; that he was a man who was thrust by fate’s people with a sort of inverted modesty that seemed designed to make them feel humble. He was always dressed in a suit and tie, his hair blow-dried and parted to carefully conceal the receding line. He wore gold-rimmed sunglasses which he rarely took off when shaking hands with others. He didn’t have to seem outwardly eager to prove his loyalty. He was a senior member of the Mokhabarat, trained in Moscow by the KGB, concerned with the larger picture, with the mechanics of security, calculating who was to remain in front of the sun and who to be fixed firmly behind it. Most of us as children were led to fear him. Most of us secretly admired his power in comparison with our parents. Not one of us didn’t want to be in his shoes.

This is a novel set in 1979 in the fear-laden prison of Qaddafi’s dictatorship. It is the story of 9-year-old Suleiman told through his adult eyes. Much of what he sees is beyond his comprehension (maybe beyond our comprehension…)
It is a country where the public executions are broadcast live on TV – and ‘The Guide’ can use his remote to change the program not only on his TV, but for the whole country, according to his whim. Parents are forced to lie to their children to protect them (on today’s news there was a report that some parents in the rebel-held area of Syria feel they have to tell their kids that the regime’s bombing is actually a game…) The description of the state of the returned torture victim (the father) is truly harrowing. This same man had beaten his own girl, a much more ambiguous act for her than I would have thought, since she has no doubt of his love yet he feels himself bound to carry out beatings by the cultural and religious pressure, “perhaps due to an ancient failing that kept father and child from ever being reconciled”.
I wasn’t sure why the title In the Country of Men. The regime seemed to be just as much a hell for the men as for the women… What I was sure of was that this was a very good read.

Matar, Hisham (1970 – ), In the Country of Men, London (etc.), Penguin, 2012 (first published by Viking, 2006), ISBN 978-0-241-95707-3.

Book 89: Tunisia (French) – La Montagne du Lion = Lion Mountain (Mustapha TLILI) (مصطفى التليلي))

That happened one especially torrid summer Saturday. The embers of the afternoon had died down. The setting sun, red and immense, sank slowly but inexorably behind the Mountain, in a farewell full of passion and infinite sadness. The entire universe was engulfed in a light of dusty ochre and blood.

 

[my translation]

 

Strong-willed, religious Horïa lives alone and isolated with her old black servant Sââd, getting her only consolation by contemplating the view of Lion Mountain above. Her eldest son has gone to an America she can’t begin to imagine, her youngest is off fighting somewhere for who knows what (he is accused of being a terrorist). As she comes to discover, his letters had not been delivered to her for years. But she is about to lose her view of the mountain to a planned tourist centre (the concept of tourism is equally foreign to her). What right do they have? In a scenario familiar to people all round the world (such as the Amazon Indians having their land stolen right now), how do you stop ‘development’ from taking your land and destroying your way of life, when everyone knows that it’s your land, but you have no legal document to prove it according to the interlopers?
In the novel, tourists discover the mountain, and make a film and an illustrated book about it. When the President hears about this, he is ashamed and wants to develop a tourist complex there. Everyone else blames Horïa for hindering prosperity; even the imam avoids her. She is an ‘obstacle to progress’, considered a fool and senile.
Sââd had undergone torture for not wanting to join the Party. Horïa is equanimous and tries to keep to her own life, and concentrates on weaving her qilims, asking him to stay silent. Nevertheless, it all ends in a blaze of violence.
This is a simple but great and passionate novel. It was banned in Tunisia.

 

TLILI, Mustapha (1937-2017), La montagne du lion, Mesnil-sur-l’Estrée, Gallimard, 1988, ISBN 2-07-071395-4

Book 43: Morocco (French) – La Nuit Sacrée = The Sacred Night (Tahar BEN JELOUN)

This is a beautifully poetically written novel about a woman who was brought up as a man due to the bias against girls (as recounted in L’Enfant de sable – The Child of Sand), who escapes the past, as if ripping a curtain, and dramatically changes back, at the death of her father. She enters into a rather strange and fraught triangular relationship with an eccentric sister and (blind) brother. It centres on a rebellion against the sex and gender roles set in a traditional Islamic society.

The novel begins in Marrakesh with a fading storyteller (one of that sadly disappearing breed).

The narrator first encounters the sister in a hammam:

 

Only the main hall of the hammam is dimly lit; the other two are in darkness. In the penumbra someone blessed with good sight could just manage to make out a piece of white string from a black one. If the ambiguity of the spirit had a light, it would have to be like that. Steam clothes the naked bodies. Humidity, flowing in little grey droplets down the walls, feeds infinite discussions that continue endlessly in the chamber.

[my translation]

 

After committing a murder, she ends up in prison, quite contentedly, and voluntarily herself joins the lonely world of the blind and makes peace with the crazy mixed-up world.
By the way, the Sacred Night (Night of Destiny), during the holy month of Ramadan, is when believers’ fates are supposed to be sealed.

I was reading these words of the protagonist on the day of the Charlie Hébdo massacre in Paris and was moved:
‘… But you see, I’m like you, I love the Qur’an as superb poetry, and I’m horrified by those parasites who exploit it and who limit freedom of thought. They’re hypocrites.’

The book has strong elements of magical realism and/or mythology, and was sometimes hard to follow. But, apart from the intriguing tale, I loved its poetic language. Yet another great writer who deserves to be better known by the world at large!

 

BEN JELLOUN, Tahar (1944 – ), La Nuit Sacrée, Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1987, ISBN 978-2-02-0-25583-7

Book 38: Algeria (French) – Nedjma (Kateb YACINE)

Lakhdar has escaped from his cell.

At dawn, his silhouette appears on the landing; everyone lifts their heads, without any great emotion.

Mourad stares at the fugitive.

“Nothing out of the ordinary. You will get caught.”

“They know your name.”

“I don’t have any ID cards.”

“They’ll come and nab you here.”

“That’s enough. Don’t discourage me.”

[my translation]

 

The first book I ever read in French was “L’Etranger” (“The Stranger/Outsider” by the pied-noir (Frenchman who lived in Algeria) Albert Camus, a rather existentialist novel about another pied-noir who kills another man. My teacher chose it as a fairly easy read, and its shock lives with me to this day. Later I read his “La Peste” (about an outbreak of the plague in Oran.)

But this time I wanted to read something by an Arab Algerian. In a way Nedjma is both a complement and an antidote to L’Etranger. In Camus’ work the Arabs are a mere background effect, like the heat, and if one of them gets shot it seems almost meaningless there, just as today a terrorist couldn’t care less whether he is killing Christians or Muslims. In Yacine’s mythologised story of Algeria, on the other hand, it’s the French who are almost irrelevant.

It’s possible to get a feeling of why the Algerian war for independence was so brutal and callous on both sides. The war seems almost forgotten today but it was a seminal event. France treated Algeria very differently from most of its other colonies – it was to become part of La Métropole, north of the Mediterranean, and its départements were just like those of the mainland; and it was heavily colonised. The struggle for independence was very long and bloody until President De Gaulle shocked the French by giving in and granting freedom.

This major work of Algerian literature is set during the time of the French colony. The novel centres on the métisse (mixed-race woman) Nejma (’Star’), as a symbol of Algeria, and the dangerous lives of the four lovers who revolve around her.

I have to admit that I found the free-form French very difficult. Sometimes a single sentence will run over two pages! I was beginning to despair of my French, but now I feel a bit better after reading my much easier book from Burkina Faso. ‘Nejma’’s circular plotting, ending back at the beginning, also makes it hard to follow – sometimes I felt like a caged animal. (The snappy beginning which I quoted above is not typical!) Even though it was hard work, I know it would well repay reading again, and it is written in beautiful French.

 

YACINE, Kateb (1929 – 1989), Nedjma, Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1996 (originally published 1956), ISBN 978-2-02-028947-4