Book 235: Tatarstan (English) – Zuleikha = Зулейха открывает глаза (Zuleikha Opens Her Eyes) (Guzel YAKHINA)

He is striding through the taiga. Spruces float past him, their broad boughs pillowed in snow and bent toward the ground, resting against snowdrifts. Bushes swell like steep white boulders, and golden trunks of pine trees flash with a coating of thick hoarfrost. He goes down to the familiar clearing, where the giant skeleton of a lightning-charred birch tree stands in the corner, and he crosses a frozen stream where mounds of rocks are frosted with drifted snow. The camp is already close and the faint, bittersweet smell of smoke touches his nostrils.

The Republic of Tatarstan is one of the constituent republics of the Russian Federation. After conquest by the Mongols, it became an independent khanate. So it is one of the Muslim ‘countries’ in Europe, although, being surrounded by Russia, and with almost as many Russian inhabitants as Tatars now, it would seem to have zero chance of becoming independent again. Putin has pretty much stripped it of any of the autonomy it regained after the end of the Soviet Union. (Its capital is Kazan – as a little bit of trivia, St Basil’s in Moscow’s Red Square was built to celebrate its capture by the Russians in 1552). One good thing is that Kazan’s Kremlin has been beautifully restored, it was very decrepit when I visited in 1992. The Tatar language is fairly closely related to Turkish.

Not long after the Russian Revolution, timid Zuleikha is suffering a hard life, made worse by a husband, Murtaza, who is 30 years older, and a nasty acid-tongued mother-in-law who she thinks of as the ‘Vampire Hag’. When the Bolsheviks come, Murtaza is shot. Zuleikha is accused of being a kulak (any peasants slightly richer than the others were persecuted by the Communists as exploiters), and expropriated under commandant Ignatiov (the young cadre who had killed Murtaza). Their lives and fates are to be intertwined from then on, and neither is truly in control of their fate or trusted from above.

Like so many other ‘class enemies’, Zuleikha is put on a prison train heading east. It is not easy for Ignatov (who is charged with looking after the transport, and doesn’t want his charges to die – at least not too many of them) to find food for the train (it interesting to see the logistical problems from his side, something we don’t usually see in accounts of the deportations by the Soviet Russians and the Nazi Germans, of which there are so many, such as our Lithuanian book).

One of the transportees, Gorelov, is an ex-criminal, and a master sucker-up.

When they finally arrive on the Angara River in the far north of Siberia, Ignatov is charged with setting up a gulag, with effectively no help from the authorities. He rescues Zuleikha from drowning from a sinking barge.

Kuznets (the local potentate) doesn’t come to resupply camp as promised.

Life is very tough in this bleak landscape, and camp life forces her to break her cultural and religious rules. There is no privacy for her, even when giving birth.

It’s a long novel, and sometimes drags on a little, but the descriptions of the snowy wilderness and the mental torture of all the characters is amazing. If you enjoyed Doctor Zhivago, for example, I’m sure you will like this one.

Meek she may be, but Zuleikha is a survivor.

The author, who based the story on her grandmother’s experiences, is reported to have opposed the Russian invasion of Ukraine of 24th February, 2022. It would make a great movie, in fact according to the Wikipedia article she originally wrote it as a screenplay. Here’s hoping that it does, and we humans can finally banish the cruelty of the callous from our hearts.

Yakhina, Guzel (1977 – ), Zuleikha, translated from Russian by Lisa C. Hayden, London, Oneworld, 2019, ISBN 978-1-78607-684-7

Book 232: Bermuda (English) – A Fall from Aloft (Brian BURLAND)

They were just passing out of the harbour now and there, not seventy-five yards away, was his uncle’s house – pink with a white roof. And there too was the dock and the bathhouses and the diving board. The tender was sucking up a great wave behind her as they entered Two Rock Passage – they always did, tenders and tugs and sometimes a big ship. James and his brothers and cousins would jump in and ride the waves; you could be lifted clear back onto the dock, the wave acting as a billowy elevator. The game then was to keep your feet on the slippery surface as the wave sucked down and away sometimes even exposing the harbour floor: white coral sand, black sea-puddings, purple ferns, brain stones and a few old pop bottles they should have dived up, before tea, last week. Afterwards his aunt always gave them iced tea – with mint leaves, from her garden, green against the yellow, itself smoky with sugar. It was delicious was iced tea with mint; he could remember the first time he’d tasted it.

For Bermuda I found only slim pickings. It came down to a choice between Peter Benchley’s The Deep, which I was sure would be a great read (if it is anything as good as Jaws), but while I’m sure Benchley must have visited Bermuda often, I couldn’t confirm if he had lived there; or A Fall from Aloft  by Brian Burland (an undoubted Bermudian, though the story doesn’t really spend any time on the island – but then again, The Deep no doubt spends most of its time at sea as well). In the end I chose the latter, and didn’t regret it.

I ended up acquiring another ex-library book, from Bolton Public Libraries in Massachusetts, US, as these second-hand books increasingly are. The title comes from a 13-year-old sailor’s tombstone from 1777 in Bermuda.

Although the protagonist of this story is a boy, it’s definitely not a junior fiction novel. Warning, adult themes!

In 1942, James Berkeley, who is 13 (or at least claims to be), is being sent by his estranged parents from Bermuda across the perilous, U-boat-infested Atlantic to England for boarding school. (I assume that a lot of this is autobiographical for Burland, who would have been the same age – the descriptions are so realistic that I don’t think it could have been written otherwise).

Little James can’t have been a very nice boy and his parents were no doubt relieved to have found a way of getting him out of their hair – he was always lying, stealing, bullying (especially Jews), lazy and a delinquent – and sexually precocious. But he has come to feel guilty about all of this, and by the time he sails off is convinced that he’s a bad person and a coward. The voyage becomes a literal ‘rite of passage’ for James.

Some readers might be offended by the vulgarity of the sailors’ speech – and the sexual descriptions. But these are not gratuitous but real. Burland also captures onomatopoeia of ship’s noises, such as the overrunning propeller out of the water, and the sailors’ argot, and ends with one in the refrain of ‘lost-at-sea, lost-at-sea’.

James is brave but haunted by quite reasonable fears – of drowning at sea after ‘falling from aloft’ (he has to perilously load blankets onto a lifeboat each time there is an attack threat), or from the ship being torpedoed – or maybe even the precarious pre-fab ‘Liberty ship’ just coming apart at the welds (there were no rivets). Burland perfectly captures the uncertainty and fear of the Atlantic convoy passengers and sailors. For secrecy’s sake, they don’t even know where they are, and have no real idea about when or where they might be attacked by the German submarines lurking like sea monsters beneath the waves. They’re also uncertain about what protection, if any, they have – is the destroyer escort still actually there? Burland’s description of life at sea is very realistic.

There is also the theme of class and race distinction – James is privileged and white, considered above the ‘blacks’ and seamen.

In the end, I felt that this forgotten gem might just be one of the best coming-of-age novels ever written. Another one that deserves to be read!

Burland, Brian (1931 – 2010), A Fall from Aloft, London, Barrie & Rockliff, the Cresset Press, 1968, SBN 214.66722.7

Book 229: US Virgin Islands (English) – Land of Love and Drowning (Tiphanie YANIQUE)

I am one of those woman love being big with child. It easy for me. I is at my best. When I pregnant, everything have me happy. I pick mangoes from Mrs. Smalls’s mango tree and they taste sweeter than sweet. I walk to the grocery store at the head of pave Street and my legs feel strong and my belly feel tight as a muscle. A milkman and a fisherman come down our street every morning carrying icebox on their backs and they always come to me early, so I get the fish and milk freshest. People rush to help me even with a bag of plums. Man run down the street to open a door. Me and Gertie liming and though she belly flat, is still me getting watch. Everybody serving me, even the trees bending to me with their fruit and flowers.

Unlike my British Virgin Islands novel, which ticked all the boxes for me, I couldn’t quite make up my mind about this one. This family saga is the story of two very different sisters, Eeona and Anette, who relate their own chapters of this story, and their half brother Jacob (by their captain father’s mistress Rebekah McKenzie). Eeona is beautiful and fairly sensible but not very lucky in life, perhaps at least partly her own fault. Anette is wilder and harder (ultimately impossible) for her older sister to control; she grasps life to the fullest and is totally unapologetic. They even speak very differently – Eeona in fairly ‘normal’ English, Anette in Creole (as in the excerpt above – a bit hard to follow at first but I got used to it) and is given a brilliant voice. When their father drowns in a shipwreck, they are left orphans. (He had had an incestuous relationship with Eeona, but she doesn’t seem to have suffered much from this, in fact she looks back on her childhood as some sort of golden age. You might have noticed that many of the Caribbean islanders often have what other places might consider ‘irregular’ relationships – marriage is often a low priority). 

The story is set from the time of the USVI’s transition in the early 1900s from being a Danish colony (yes Denmark used to be a major colonial power – still is if you include Greenland!) to being a US one, and continues into the 1970s.

I couldn’t really like any of the characters. The Eeona turns out to be a bit too choosy about suitors (and determined to socially climb), and ends up alone. On the other hand, Anette goes for it and cycles through a series of men, sometimes at the same time. I couldn’t like her for the way when, during Hurricane Mary, her devoted husband Frankie goes to help and she hopes that he will be killed so she can marry (also married) Jacob.

As girls they were constantly warned about the dangers of getting involved with Jacob’s family, but strangely were not told why; when they do, nothing much seems to ensue in the way of consequences (apart from more incest – yuck!), which seemed like a bit of a let-down! In the end Anette has children by three lovers.

Eeona is in love with the island of Anegada (the ‘drowned land’ of the title), where we spent our last adventure in the British Virgin Islands.

Their half brother joins the US military in the Second World War and experiences racism in the US south. He eventually returns to the USVI as a doctor.

One thing that resonated with me was the beach apartheid. When I was at university I was shocked when a Mauritian friend told me that the locals were banned from their beautiful beaches in Mauritius – they were reserved for the tourists. The same thing happened in the USVI, which provokes a colourful protest from the locals. No doubt this happens in many tourism-dependent places around the world – and the tourists are in blissful ignorance of this dispossession in their name. I suppose you could argue that the beaches are the only resource here and need to be ‘protected’ – just as other countries protect their vital resources (e.g., Namibia forbids anyone – locals or foreigners – from entering the diamond-producing zone). But it seems very cruel to me that locals should be banned from enjoying their own beautiful land for the sake of foreigners.

The pace is slow, and because so much of the plot has already been telegraphed through flashes into the future, is not very exciting. It’s a bit flat, like Anegada. There are some minor elements of magic or obeah. In the end, all of the relationships in this story seem to be wrong or inappropriate. Very sad. I feel that characters in novels should be (and are) flawed but should develop, these ones don’t, they just keep making mistakes.

I can’t say this was one of my favourites on the reading marathon – not that there was anything wrong with it (except that the age timelines didn’t quite make sense to me), just that it didn’t seem outstanding in any way. I have to say that the incest, and the way it was handled, upset me and I couldn’t get past that to like the book. Not that ugly things don’t happen in the world, and that people shouldn’t write about them – it’s important that they should – but Eeona’s favourable reaction to it spoiled the whole book for me. On the other hand, there is some great writing and, like other novels written by a poet, I can be sure that much of what was behind the story went over my head.  

Yanique, Tiphane, Land of Love and Drowning, Thorndike, 2014, ISBN 9781410472786

Book 207: Guam (English) – Mariquita: a tragedy of Guam (Chris Perez HOWARD)

Mariquita was a lovely girl, shapely and petite, a pleasing mixture of several of the races that comprised her native culture. She was part Spanish, Filipino, Chinese and a direct descendant of the last full-blooded Chamorro, the original inhabitants of her island. Her skin was warm brown, smooth and unblemished. and her shoulder-length shiny black hair, curled in the latest fashion and pulled back from her temples and held in place by tiny white barrettes, framed a face which held all the beauty and mystery of the Pacific. But it was her eyes which were most interesting. In her eyes one could detect that she was not the stereotyped island girl depicted in romantic literature – uncomplicated and submissive.

Guam is an “unincorporated territory” (whatever that means) of the US. The author was born in Guam and, after a long stint in the US, returned to live there. This is his story of Mariquita’s, his mother’s, tragically short life. The details are no doubt fictionalised, apart from being based on what facts the author could find. Nevertheless, it is very readable.
Mariquita is a vivacious woman who falls in love with and marries an American sailor. The tale recounts her apparently idyllic life under the US occupation before the war, and the suffering of her, her family and the other people of Guam during the Japanese occupation.
In his epilogue, the author concludes,

The sadness I feel for those who suffered injustice at the hands of the Japanese is deep, but I do not hate. The wanton bombing of the island by the Americans, especially the city of Agana, which had to be bulldozed to restore any semblance of order, to the extent that he old Spanish bridge now only points to where a river once existed, is to me equally unjust.

However, this equivalence does not come across at all in the book. The description of Guam before the Second World War under the Americans seemed to me very idealised, but from my limited knowledge I can’t find fault with any of the facts in the book. The unfailingly exemplary behaviour of the American sailors (apart from one incident of racism – which led to Mariquita marrying her sailor husband) also seemed suspicious to me. The author contends that before the war US sailors had higher standards. (After the war, the US military confiscated a THIRD of the island).
As to the cruelty that natives and Allied soldiers and civilians suffered from the Japanese military, and as portrayed here, that has been well documented from the lands they occupied.

What I loved about the book was that despite its slimness I learnt so much about Chamorro culture and Guam’s history before and during WWII. When elephants fight, the ants get trampled… I was reminded of the similar suffering of the native Okinawans from both sides (about which we were told nothing, and which I wouldn’t have known about if I hadn’t visited that island), and so many other native peoples (the Burmese to name but one) who suffered from the clash of the giants. Lest we forget them too.

There is an expanded edition entitled ‘Mariquita – Revisited’.

Howard, Chris Perez, Mariquita: a tragedy of Guam, Suva, Institute of Pacific Studies of the University of the South Pacific, 1986 [no ISBN]

Book 200: Barbados (English) – In the Castle of My Skin (George LAMMING)

It would have been easier if I had gone to live in a more respectable district, but that was beyond my mother’s resources. She would have done so without hesitation, but she saw it was impossible and consoled herself with the thought that it didn’t matter where you lived. The mind was the man, she said, and if you had a mind you would be what you wanted to be and not what the world would have you. I heard the chorus every day and sometimes I tried repeating it to others. The mind was the man. I remained in the village living, it seemed, on the circumference of two worlds.

Barbados is traditionally the most anglophile of the West Indian countries, so it was a bit of a surprise when the country replaced Queen Elizabeth as its head of state last year, on the road to becoming a republic. Here we are at an earlier stage of its history (the 1930s) as it transitions towards independence (1966) from the UK.

This is an autobiographical novel of Lamming’s young life (as ‘G.’) from 9 to 19. (He was not much older when he wrote this classic).

It was rather slow and not particularly easy to read. The dialogues were sometimes rather impenetrable. But there is a great deal of beauty in the writing. There is a lot of repetition, short sentences and lyrical description (especially of crabs…), which creates tension as you wait for something to happen.

The village and plantation where he grows up is effectively owned by the ‘white’ landlord Mr. Creighton, who later sells it from under the people’s feet (even though they were saving up to buy their houses, they couldn’t own the land). Despite his paternalism he had a strong feeling of noblesse oblige and they were mutually dependent. The villagers end up having to move. There are in fact multiple betrayals in the story, but as a great writer Lamming enables us to see different sides of the issues and to some extent to empathise with everyone. Multiple viewpoints in narrating the story also complicate the reading.

No one is totally bad here – not Creighton, nor the investors who want to build their own houses without necessarily wanting to oust anyone else.

In all, it was not an easy or thrilling read but very worth persevering with for its insights into betrayal, racism, class struggle, colonialism and adapting to changing times.

Lamming, George (1927 – ), In the Castle of My Skin, UK, Penguin Modern Classics, 2016, ISBN 978-0-241-29606-6 (First published 1953)

Book 199: Guadeloupe (French) – Victoire, les saveurs et les mots = Victoire, the flavours and the words (Maryse CONDÉ)

How different were the circumstances of this departure from the one from Marie-Galante, sixteen years earlier when the mother had tried to protect the daughter. This time, it’s the daughter fleeing from the mother. She goes in front, dressed in the elegant uniform of Scottish cloth, pleated dress flapping at her heels, blouse buttoned up to her neck, half-heel patent leather pumps, and wearing the coquettish white panama as demanded by her sisters.

[my translation]

Maryse Condé won the 2018 Alternative Nobel Prize (the official one wasn’t originally awarded to anyone that year). From this historical novel I’m not sure why – not that there was anything wrong with it, just that it didn’t seem anything special to me. But she has written many other works which are apparently better – this is the only one I’ve read.  

So here we are in Guadeloupe (with brief excursions to Martinique, France and the US). As an aside, I have a complaint. Guadeloupe is shaped like a butterfly. The smaller part is called Grande-Terre (Big Land), the bigger and higher part is called Basse-Terre (Low Land). Someone’s idea of a joke, or just perversity?

The story concentrates on the life of Victoire, Maryse Condé’s grandmother, whose one great skill is her cooking although she never really gets the benefit she deserves from it. Both she and her daughter Jeanne have hard lives. Her mother (Caldonia) adores her but is not good at raising her – Victoire always remains illiterate. It is uncertain as to who was her father (presumably some white soldier). Her skin is surprisingly white. She suffers humiliation and detestation from her youth.

As his servant Victoire has ambiguous relations with Boniface Walberg, but they certainly involved sex – something a master could still expect from his servants as a hangover from the time of slavery. Nevertheless, she is at least fond of him. Similarly ambiguous is her relationship with his wife Anne-Marie, who becomes a great friend.

Her relationship with her prickly daughter Jeanne is always difficult, and they are total opposites (Jeanne would struggle to boil an egg). In the racist local terminology Jeanne is born “mal sortie”, in other words blacker than her parents. Because of this her social class rejects her and she has a hard life. She disapproves of her mother, especially of her relationships. Victoire had however made sure she got an excellent education.

Unfortunately, the novel had no glossary, and although it is written in standard French, the Creole words and phrases are not clarified. Some were obvious but most were obscure to me.

The character of Victoire is based on Condé’s real grandmother. In all I found the story unexciting but pleasant enough.

CONDÉ, Maryse (1937 – ), Victoire, les saveurs et les mots, Folio, Mercure de France, 2006, ISBN 9782070355259

Book 191: Chechnya (English) – Я – Черченец! = I am a Chechen! (German SADULAEV)

 

It’s hard to be a Chechen. If you’re a Chechen, you must feed and shelter your enemy when he comes knocking as a guest; you must give up your life for a girl’s honour without a second thought; you must kill your blood foe by plunging a dagger into his chest, because you can never shoot anyone in the back; you must offer your last piece of bread to your friend; you must get out from your car to stand and greet an elderly man passing on foot; you must never run away, even if your enemy are a thousand strong and you stand no chance of victory, you must take up the fight all the same. And you can never cry, no matter what happens. Your beloved women may leave you, poverty may lay waste to your home, your comrades may lie bleeding in your arms, but you may never cry if you are a Chechen. If you are a man. Only once, once in a lifetime, may you cry; when your mother dies.

 

Chechnya is the stillborn Caucasus nation under the Russian Federation. Under the USSR the Chechens were bundled with their western Ingush brothers into the snappily named Chechen-Ingush Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic. (’Autonomous’ is as meaningless in the Soviet as in the Chinese context). Of course the Russians (both Tsarist and Communist) were famous for exiling unwanted individuals to Siberia, but during WWII Stalin (born in nearby Georgia) exiled the ENTIRE Chechen and Ingush peoples to the USSR’s dumping ground, Kazakhstan. They eventually found their way home and when the USSR fell apart found themselves under the Russian Federation. The idea was that the SSRs (such as Russia, Ukraine and Georgia) would become independent and inviolable (a principle that Putin obviously no longer recognises), while the ASSRs had no such luck, even though the Chechens would seem to have nothing in common with the Russians. Split from Ingushetia, they declared independence from Russia in 1991 but the Russians sent in troops to crush them in 1994, destroying much of the capital, Grozny (which ominously means ‘terrible’ in Russian – who call Ivan the Terrible Ivan Grozny). The fighting ended in a ceasefire in 1996 and peace treaty in 1997, so Chechnya gained de-facto independence as the Republic of Ichkeria. In 1999-2000 Russia invaded again, after the Chechens had meddled in neighbouring Dagestan, again destroying cities and killing many civilians. After the formal end of this Second Chechen War, Chechen guerrillas continued to fight and terrorists spread the war into Russia itself. This, along with many kidnappings and much corruption, didn’t promote much sympathy for the cause even outside Russia. Chechnya is now ruled by Putin’s amazingly corrupt henchman Ramzan Kadyrov, perhaps a foretaste of what he foresaw for Ukraine.

So, on to the novel, I am a Chechen! It begins with an apology for the narrator’s absence to his native land (the author, too, now lives in St Petersburg). The land is good and is so closely personified as the narrator’s mother that it is often not possible to tell which of the two is actually meant. On the other hand, the sky, from which the Russians rained death, is the enemy.

We then follow the stories of a series of innocent victims of the war, including those of two childhood friends, perceived as a Chechen and a Russian, who both turn out to be half of each, but who end up on different sides in a devastating final encounter.

There is some of what might be considered anti-Russianism, which might be expected in the context, but not total (in any case, some of the major Chechen characters are half Russian). But there is also some unprovoked anti-Semitism – whether this reflects the author’s view, or just that of some of his characters, I don’t know.

The Chechen ‘code’, as summarised in the quote above, reminded me of the traditional ethos of some other mountain peoples, like the Albanians and the Afghans. The long-standing love of weaponry, including the claim that Chechen men love their guns more than their women, wouldn’t seem to win them many friends. 

The description of some of the (banned) weapons used by the Russians, such as cluster bombs and vacuum bombs, are graphic. The sick minds who are responsible for the “supply chains” for these inhumane things, in Russia or other countries, from the scientists to the soldiers, really should be put convicted for crimes against humanity. The thought of a vacuum bomb being used on the civilians sheltering in the subways in Ukraine doesn’t bear thinking about.

I felt that the side trip into New Orleans, with some rather nauseating excursions into violence and porn, was irrelevant to the story, unless the point was that so many Chechens are living in exile. I thought it could well have been cut. And I felt the ending was weak.

But on the whole, while the novel is totally depressing and fatalistic, it is very beautifully written and it was well worth reading as the missiles were hitting Kiev.

 

Sadulaev, German (1973 – ), I am a Chechen!, translated from Russian by Anna Gunin, London, Vintage, 2011, ISBN 9780099532354

Originally published in Russian as Я – черченец!, 2006

Book179: Comoros (French) – Le Kafir du Karthala = The Kaffir of Karthala (Mohamed TOIHIRI)

The beach was full. The Blacks were almost all in swimming costumes. The Whites, having kept their clothing on, looked rather perplexed. They were visibly wondering when they were going to awake from this nightmare. The blacks, unrestrained, yelling, laughing, provoking, bathed with a sort of artificial pleasure. It seemed as if they were much more intent on displaying their presence than in deriving any pleasure from bathing. In fact they forced themselves to enjoy it.

[my translation]

A kaffir is an ‘infidel’ in Arabic, in the Comoros context it means a ‘marginal’, and in apartheid-era South Africa it was an ugly epithet for a ‘Black’. The ‘marginal’ of the story is Dr. Idi wa Mazamba, who finds himself at odds with many of the traditions of his homeland. Mazamba finds that he is dying of cancer in less than two months, and tells no one, but this gives him courage to live his life as he thinks proper, regardless of norms that he rejects. He falls in love with Aubéri, a Jewish French literature teacher. This is the story of their struggles against the prejudices they find everywhere. (Karthala is a volcano – perhaps a symbol of Mazamba’s new volatility?)

Each of the Comoros islands turns out to be biased against the others, as well as against outsiders, which seems comically petty. Likewise, the Europeans are racist against the Comorans, and amongst themselves.

Of the local traditions, the most prominent seems to be the ‘grand marriage’ (’anda’), which Mazamba despises, yet he can’t boycott it himself. Basically, everyone is expected by society to have a huge, ruinously expensive wedding once in their life (the fact that they may already be married to someone else, via a more modest ceremony, doesn’t exempt them). The expense causes endemic corruption and theft. (Mazamba gives a hilarious pompous wedding speech in French, using as many words as possible ending in -ique, including many which don’t exist! He makes a seditious speech that goes over everyone’s head.) The hajj to Mecca (the Comoros Islands are Muslim) is another very expensive expectation.

There are still many French living here since independence in 1975 (except for the island of Mayotte which opted to stay with France), and they have a better life and their own prejudices, which doesn’t stop them taking ‘black’ Comoran wives. The opposite (as here with Idi and Aubéri) is hypocritically seen as scandalous.

Sometimes it is quite funny (”In France… not even my concierge would be afraid of me.”) Still, I couldn’t help feeling that sometimes Toihiri was using situations that were a bit over the top. Would a mixed-race couple really choose to travel to apartheid-era South Africa – were they naïve, ignorant or just asking for trouble? I also felt that the sex in church scene was labouring his point a bit too much. It could have been made a bit more subtly. Also the villains were a bit too comic-book. But it was a very enjoyable story which covered some very serious issues leavened with humour, and taught me a lot about these almost unknown islands, and a definite recommendation.

Toihiri, Mohamed (1955 – ), Le Kafir du Karthala, Paris, L’Harmattan, 1992, ISBN 2-7384-1501-6

Book 167: Hawai’i (English) – House of Many Gods (Kiana DAVENPORT)

Lightning season came, the air so electric the fillings in their teeth hummed. Everything they touched just sparked. There were flash floods, the seas gave off a yellow glow. For days, lightning zigzagged up the valley. It hit a wild pig that rolled into their yard completely roasted. One night, herringbones of ions, lightning striking everywhere. no one saw Ava leave the house. But they heard her awful scream, and found Ben standing over her, his hair electrified a gaseous blue.

Some books prove hard to find a single good quote (which doesn’t mean that they’re necessarily bad). Not this one – it was hard to choose!

It is set in Hawai’i and Russia – at first blush it is hard to imagine two lands more different, but the parallels soon become obvious – destruction by respective militaries, horrible consequences of the nuclear cycle, and poverty. (Even so, while both this part of Hawai’i and Russia are poor and polluted I can’t help thinking Hawai’i must be a much nicer place to live, for its climate and natural beauty if nothing else.)

Both suffer environmental degradation and nuclear pollution and sickness from rampant militaries. The beautiful island (home to some of the world’s most unique and endangered creatures) is used for target practice.

Sadly Hawai’i is no longer among the ranks of independent countries. It was deceitfully taken over by a kleptocracy of greedy American businessmen, and handed over to the USA (few Americans seem to be aware of this shameful episode in their history). Since then, the Hawai’ians’ tradition of aloha was taken advantage of by the US military and the Polynesians have been overrun by immigrants and tourists, so that they are only a small minority in their own country now.

The story is set mainly on the poverty-stricken Wai’anae coast of O’ahu. Ana was abandoned when she was a child by her mother Anahola and feels extremely resentful because of this. She meets Nikolai, a Russian who makes films about ecological catastrophes in his home country and in the Pacific, and they come to share common feelings. Having let him go, she heads to Russia to try to track him down.

Meanwhile her mother has thrown herself into the horrible trauma of working in ER departments, and tries fruitlessly to reconnect with her daughter, dying of cancer.

One thing I’d take issue with – having lived through the time of Chernobyl and its aftermath, I don’t remember individual Russians being blamed for it in the West. We saw them as being victims of the system. And another thing – Kazakhstan is not in Russia.

If I can have a little personal rant against American “spell checkers” on behalf of so many non-English writers: Here both the Hawai’ian and Russian languages have fallen victim. In the Polynesian (and Scandinavian) languages ‘i’ means “in”, in the Slavic languages it means “and”. In Polynesian, “a” is a possessive (”of”). Of course, such words shouldn’t be capitalised in the middle of a sentence. But smarty-pants programs like Word assume that they are English words and capitalise them. So despite typing correctly, you have to go back and correct them. Several phrases in both Hawai’ian and Russian have fallen foul of this in this book. Down with cultural imperialism!

This is an amazing novel. Much of the writing is very sensual but there is a lot of volcanic anger seething beneath the surface and often erupting. One that I can’t recommend too highly.

Davenport, Kiana, House of Many Gods, NY, Ballantine, 2006, ISBN 978-0-345-48151-1

Book 157: Namibia (English) – Born of the Sun (Joseph DIESCHO)

“Do you have any questions?”

There are no questions. The men are hungry for more information about what they will soon experience, but how do you ask questions about what you don’t know, have never experienced and do not have the foggiest idea about? In any case, you simply do not ask your mother what she will cook tomorrow, you wait graciously for the food, eat it, and then ask your questions. The future will have its own rules. You do not ask today what you will do to the bridge tomorrow – you will either cross it, or burn it, when you get to it.

This is one that I picked up in the Windhoek. Namibia was colonised by the Germans (as South West Africa), then ruled by South Africa (supposedly on behalf of its people) who tried to impose their own apartheid system. It finally gained independence after a long guerrilla struggle and international sanctions pressure.

Muronga is a (perhaps too perfect?) young man who grows up in an isolated village with little knowledge of the world, and that coming through German Catholic missionaries. The book portrays Catholicism very negatively, which (as author himself remarks in a note) “is more accurate for an earlier period in history than for the time frame in which this novel is placed.” It seems like more of a send-up, with threats to “un-baptise” those who are not good… The natives can’t even remember or pronounce the baptismal names they’ve been given.

When South Africa took over, it made the people pay taxes for the first time. This meant that their young men had to go to work in the horrid conditions of apartheid South Africa’s mines. Their recruitment process was reminiscent of slave processing and they were separated from their family and friends for years, maybe forever. Eventually Muronga comes to fight for the miners’ rights against the exploitation. Yet somehow he still seemed to me rather naive at the end.

Born of the Sun was an uncomfortable read – apart from the horrible conditions and racism suffered by the ‘Blacks’, they themselves came across against ‘Whites’ who are all portrayed as bad (and lumped together as ’the white man’).

Because of the simplicity of the writing, treatment of the issues and the plot, I felt like this first novel by a native Namibian was really a children’s book, although a friend of the author that I spoke with assured me that he didn’t intend it to be. But we need to be reminded of this cruel time in history.

Joseph DIESCHO (1955 – ) with Celeste WALLIN, Born of the Sun, Windhoek, Gamsberg Macmillan, 2002, ISBN 99916-0-386-7 (first published in US 1988)

Book 156: Qatar (English) – Love comes Later (Mohanalakshmi RAJAKUMAR)

            “We need to bring up our own teams in advance of the Cup,” someone is saying, echoing Chairman Ahmed, who wags his head up and down with such enthusiasm his ghutra [male head covering] wobbles.

            Abdulla swallows, his breath constricted by his starched collar. He drinks more and more water as the discussion swirls around him. The world’s fattest nation, planning to integrate sports into society? he thinks. Why not get rid of McDonald’s first?

            “You want to say something?”  Uncle Ahmed’s eyebrows draw together, a ripple of creases rising on his forehead.

            In the growing silence, all eyes turn in the direction of the chairman’s gaze. Abdulla raises his shoulders to shrug but the glowing red light at the base of the microphone in front of him makes him realize he has spoken his criticism out loud.

This one was a bit of a slow burn at first but I came to love it! I was thinking, not another Arab novel about the sad lot of women (perhaps more a comment on what Western publishers think Western readers will expect – I’d be surprised if untranslated fiction from that part of the world isn’t much more diverse than what we get to read). Though I have to admit all these Arabic novels I’ve read have been great, and not as same-ish as I would have expected.

Another thing I love about this one is that it’s not so much about the predictable relationship between the Arab and Western worlds, as between the former and the Indian subcontinent, like some of the novels of Amitabh Ghosh (one of my favourite writers). The similarities and (surprisingly few) differences between the lives and marriage customs of Muslim and Indian women were fascinating. It was great to see the Muslim woman’s lot portrayed as not all negative and unbearable as many Westerners think. Quite a few stereotypes get broken. Qatari women wearing sexy clothes under their abayas?

Qatar is obviously one of those stultifying small countries, which will become increasingly common from now on, where everyone knows everyone else and everyone else’s business. Let’s call it the small country effect. I can’t imagine what it’s like to live in such a large family. And living in one of the world’s richest countries obviously doesn’t make life a bed of roses for everyone.

The plot was far from predictable (for me at least), with lots of surprising twists and turns – even the title (from which I inferred that an arranged marriage eventually would warm into true love). The symmetrical conclusion I was hoping for doesn’t eventuate – and, on reflection, would have been impossible. And everyone seems to like those they’re not supposed to.

It’s difficult to discuss the plot without giving anything away. Abdulla’s wife Fatima is killed in a car accident driven by his uncle Ahmed. Fatima’s vivacious sister Luluwa is rejected by her parents and goes to live with Abdulla’s family. He doesn’t want to re-marry despite unrelentingly heavy familial pressure. Eventually he has to get engaged to Hind (’India’) despite the reluctance both of them – he takes little persuading to let her go to the UK for a year to finish MA before the marriage. There Hind makes friends with fellow Indian-American student Sangita in London, and spontaneously goes on a secret trip to India with Sangita’s brother Ravi – this can’t end well? The imbroglio takes place against the background of the London Olympics and of Qatar gearing up to host the soccer World Cup.

The author is herself a South Asian American who has lived in Qatar since 2005. For a self-published book, the quality is high, the main slip-up being that sometimes a line of dialogue is joined with the next character’s reaction, along with some indentation problems, which sometimes confused me momentarily. Romance fiction isn’t usually my thing, but if you like it, or just a fascinating insight into two cultures, I can wholeheartedly recommend this intricate, surprising and often funny novel.

Rajakumar, Mohanalakshmi, Love comes Later, 2012, ISBN 978-0-615-91683-5

Book 142: Kuwait (English) – The Bamboo Stalk (Saud Alsandousi)

If only my parents could have given me a single, clear identity, instead of making me grope my way alone through life in search of one. Then I would have just one name that would make me turn when someone called me. I would have just one native country. I would learn its national anthem. Its trees and streets would shape my memories and in the end I could lie at rest in its soil. I would have one religion I could believe in instead of having to set myself up as the prophet of a religion that was mine alone.

Josephine is a Filipina who comes to Kuwait to work as a maid. (The majority of the population are non-Kuwait-born). In the shadow of the looming Iraqi invasion, she falls in love with Rashid. But under pressure from his family, he has to send her home with their baby, José (the narrator). 

José grows up with a culturally split identity, and goes back to Kuwait to see if he can fit in to a society biased against him. The novel is also split between his life in the Philippines and in Kuwait. Can he be at home anywhere? (One of the most devastating moments is when, despite having a Kuwaiti passport, the immigration officer takes one look at his Filipino face and sends him to the foreigners’ queue). He had never met his father, and Kuwaiti culture is actually strange to him and is something he has to learn the hard way, but he is desperate to fit in and be accepted. His return, which he believed was expected, throws his Kuwaiti family into confusion and conflict. He is reluctantly allowed to live with them but with the servants as if he were a dirty secret. But their hostility is neither universal nor unambiguous. (He is defended, and mentored, by his half-sister Khawla).

Kuwait is a small and claustrophobic place, and you have to be careful what you say, because you can’t really escape from the Arab society’s judgement. His Kuwaiti family would no doubt have been kinder to him if they were not afraid of losing their reputation in their own society.

The Bamboo Stalk is a devastating insight into what it’s like to be one of the ‘guest workers’ from poorer Asian countries in one of the rich Gulf countries where they form the majority of the population and are depended on to keep the economy running, but cannot find acceptance as full members of the community, have little security and are there as if on sufferance. It seems that in the modern world, identity has never been so important, but never so fraught.

While the writing, at least in translation, doesn’t come across as extraordinary, the novel covers a wide range of extremely important themes in a not oversimplified way.

ALSANOUSI, Saud (1981 – ), The Bamboo Stalk, translated from Arabic by Jonathan Wright, Doha, Hamad bin Khalifa University Press, 2016, ISBN 9789927101793

First published in Arabic 2012

Book 110: Papua New Guinea (English) – The Crocodile (Vincent ERI)

The big ships tied up alongside the wharf were very much bigger seen from a close distance. They were made of steel and not wood as Hoiri had previously thought. Only spirit people knew the ways of keeping the heavy steel ships afloat. “That one, anchored in the middle of the harbour, is called Malaita,” said Aravape. “It has just arrived from Setere [Sydney], the big town in the place the white people come from.”
“But why is it staying out there?”
“That’s what all of them do when they arrive here. Actually they stay outside the reef for a couple of days while the goods in the hull are renamed. They change your name and mine on all the goods that our dead ancestors send for us.”


At long last here I am in the first of my beloved Pacific Islands!
After reading about the unsavoury activities of colonialists in other parts of the world, it can be an uncomfortable experience to read about what your own ancestors did while PNG was an Australian colony. Although for me the attitudes of the Australians in this novel seem almost as distant as those of the New Guineans… There is the usual racism, superiority complex, hypocrisy, injustice, theft from the locals, and just plain incomprehension of colonialists everywhere. They are insultingly called ‘boys’.
From life in his village Hoiri has very little experience or understanding of the outside world, and he has to learn fast. This leads to somewhat of a cargo cult attitude, mixing envy and misunderstanding, as in the quotation above.
Eri’s treatment of the white men is not simple-minded. The Australians who come straight from their country as soldiers to fight the invading Japanese when war breaks out (for which the locals blame the Australians) are far more sympathetic than the colonialists, and even these become much more ugly creatures when they are on patrol in the bush than when they are bureaucrats behind their desks.
Limited human contacts can also cause misunderstanding, where one occurrence or the character of one person misleads you into immediately drawing a general rule. Thus Hoiri comes to the (to us strange) conclusion that white people don’t cry at gravesides. On the other hand, Hoiri himself does not seem immediately distressed when he hears his wife has been killed by a crocodile, at least this isn’t described. He is shocked when his white ‘mistress’ from the shower asks him to bring her towel, and appears before him naked. (Of course Europeans made much of the ‘natives’’ nakedness in parts of New Guinea).
I learnt a lot about local culture and attitudes (at least at this time – certainly PNG society will have also moved on since this novel was written!) There seems to be a lot of magic and superstition. It’s fascinating to see something (even yourself) through someone else’s eyes. For instance, I hadn’t thought about the danger of nagging women. The thought process goes like this: Jealous wife accuses husband of always going out at night to have an affair with a young girl. So he stays at home and sleeps with his wife all the time. This causes the ‘debasement’ of having lots of children all of virtually the same height…
This was the first published novel written by a Papuan. Despite the occasionally jerky narrative which sometimes skips over important links, it is a very impressive beginning, and it is a shame that PNG’s bookshelf of novels has not evolved more in the forty-five years since independence. What fascinating voices we are missing.

Eri, Vincent (1936 – 1993), The Crocodile, Ringwood (Australia), Penguin, 1976, ISBN 0 14003723 3

(first published by Jacaranda Press, 1970)

Book 108: Tajikistan (English) – Hurramabad = Хуррамабад (Andrei VOLOS)

What was the thing called exile?
Where had he met the word before? Only in novels he had read in his youth. There it had had a fine, noble overtone of fortitude and courage. Now it seemed clear enough that neither courage nor fortitude were involved, only fear. One day something had broken in his heart under the sheer weight of fear, and everything that had been dear and familiar to him became foreign and threatening. He suddenly found himself in exile without even having to move anywhere, because that is where you are when everything around is foreign and dangerous. He had become a foreigner. He had sensed that the change was irreversible, and that as a foreigner there was nothing to be ashamed of in being afraid.

When the Soviet Union suddenly disintegrated, a huge number of Soviet citizens who were Russians, or Ukrainians, or Armenians etc. living in other ‘Soviet Socialist Republics’ like Tajikistan, found themselves overnight treated as foreigners in newly independent countries. They were no longer at home in these countries, if not actively discriminated against, and a large number of them felt compelled to go ‘back’ to their home republics like Russia (even though some had never been there). And in their new ‘homelands’ they were also not at home.
After Tajikistan, the poorest of the SSRs, found itself in an independence for which it was totally unprepared, it fell into a long civil war (at the same time as the far better known one in neighbouring Afghanistan) between fundamentalist Muslims and supporters of the secular leftist dictatorship.
Hurramabad is called a novel, so I’ve included it here, although for me it had more of the feel of a collection of short stories (or ‘facets’ as the author called them).
Volos himself was born in Dushanbe to a family that came to live there along with Soviet rule in the 1920s, and had to leave in the 1990s when life in the new land became intolerable for them. Great as this book (and no doubt its translation) was, I finished it feeling the need to read something written by an ethnic Tajik writer, in the hope of some balance or seeing the situation from the other side, or merely hearing a Tajik voice. (Let’s not forget that what is now Tajikistan was conquered and colonised by the Russians, and suffered what any colony suffered). In any case Hurramabad is excellent writing and totally recommendable reading, and gave me a stunning view of injustice from a different perspective.

Volos, Andrei (1955 – ), Hurramabad: a novel in facets, translated from Russian (?) by Arch Tait, Moscow, GLAS New Russian Writing, 2001, ISBN 5-7172-0056-0

Book 107: Palestine (English) – Mornings in Jenin (Susan ABULHAWA)

 

So it was that eight centuries after its founding by a general of Saladin’s army in 1189 A.D., Ein Hod was cleared of its Palestinian children. Yehya tried to calculate the number of generations who had lived and died in that village and he came up with forty… Forty generations of living, now stolen. Forty generations of childbirth and funerals, weddings and dance, prayer and scraped knees. Forty generations of sin and charity, of cooking, toiling, and idling, of friendships and animosities and pacts, of rain and lovemaking. Forty generations with their imprinted memories, secrets, and scandals. All carried away by the notion of entitlement of another people, who would settle in the vacancy and proclaim it all – all that was left in the way of architecture, orchards, wells, flowers, and charm – as the heritage of Jewish foreigners arriving from Europe, Russia, the United States, and other corners of the globe.

This is a novel of bewilderment and betrayal.
In the year of the creation (or recreation) of Israel, 1948 – called here by the Palestinians the ‘year without end’ – the Abulheja family is bombed out of their home and village, and forced to live in the squalid Jenin refugee camp. One of the Israeli soldiers, Moshe, steals their baby Ismael (a name as close as you can get to ‘Israel’) for his infertile wife, renames him David, and they lovingly raise him as a Jew.
His mother goes crazy. As the hopelessness of the Palestinians’ cause drags on, Jenin becomes more permanent with the years. Youssef meets and is abused by the Jewish soldier who is his brother (now David), and his outrage leads him to join the PLO though he later leaves it, cuts himself off from his family and becomes more radical. Will he become a terrorist?
Most of the story is related through the eyes of the third child, Amal, the daughter born in Jenin. She later moves to the US where, although appreciative of the more comfortable and peaceful lifestyle there, can’t help feeling somewhat resentful of those born into a luckier world free from suffering.
Understandably, there is a lot of resentment expressed at the Palestinians’ unfair treatment. Why should they have to pay for the Germans’ sins against the Jews? Why should the latter treat the people living there so cruelly, throw them out and not even let them visit their ancestral homes?
Like in any good novel, the characters measurably change during the story. It’s a sign of hope that real people can change too, for the better.
The novel is interspersed with quite a few quotes from non-fiction sources documenting the history.
I only noticed one typo, but it was a whopper. On page 285 the azan (Muslim call to prayer: I proclaim that there is no god except Allah) is quoted in Arabic, but ‘illa’ (except) is left out which leaves an unintentionally blasphemous remainder!
Despite the roles the characters seem to be forced into by the political situation, there is still hope that they can recover their humanity and empathy. And for me both of these are what is most absent in the region at the moment and the only hope for the future. And thankfully Mornings in Jenin, which is mostly but not entirely seen from the Palestinian side, ends with a glimmer of hope for reconciliation. It is a beautifully written, powerful novel which won’t leave you as a bystander.

Abdulhawa, Susan (1970 – ), Mornings in Jenin, London, Bloomsbury, 2010, ISBN 9781408813553