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 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

Book 130: Eritrea (English) – The Fighter’s Letter (Paulos NATNAEL)

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But who could forget the comedian Semere Dagnew. Wedi-Dagnew had small but penetratingly intelligent eyes, which disappeared when he laughed. Semere loved to tell morbid jokes about death and those who had died, the martyrs. He would wonder aloud if the martyrs remembered him now that they are in their graves. “What do you think they are saying now?” he would say without apparent irony. Making such jokes was his way of remembering them. It was also his way of talking about what it meant to be alive and what it’d mean to leave this world – life and death. He liked to question and to debate the meaning of life and specifically the life of a tegadalai [fighter]. Tegadelti [freedom fighters] used to say in those days that if there was heaven at all, it belonged to the tegadalai, especially after living such a terrible life in the wilderness and dying for his country!

 

This novel takes place during Eritrea’s ultimately successful struggle for independence from Ethiopia in the early 1990s. The fight was carried on by several guerrilla groups of various sizes; this book is written from the point of view of the smaller Eritrean Liberation Front (ELF), though it seemingly tries to be fair to the larger Eritrean People’s Liberation Front (EPLF), which was ultimately victorious and whose successor party now runs the country’s dictatorship. There is deep suspicion and fighting between the two (though this weakens the effort against the Ethiopians) until the EPLF forces the ELF to join it – its failure is blamed on dissentions within its leadership. 

Stefanos’ group – rather bravely if not bizarrely to my way of thinking – goes on a ‘tour’ to a rival liberation camp to get a different sides of the story. Despite the obvious awfulness of war life, he decides to join the ELF. But there isn’t as much description of the grittiness of fighting as you might expect; the author is obviously more interested in the party politics.

When a deserter is shot ‘by accident’, it seemed pointless to pretend that there was any doubt about deliberate intent.

Unfortunately, I found the writing pedestrian; the author obviously had trouble deciding whether he wanted to write a fiction or non-fiction book. You would think that a war book would at least be exciting. The author doesn’t really explain why life in Eritrea is so bad – seemingly everyone wants to go to the US (as does the protagonist, and as did the author). There are lots of acronyms, not all of which are explained, and lots of interesting Ava (Afar?) and Tigrinya words, most of which are. So, while it’s not bad, I feel it could have been much better.

 

NATNAEL, Paulos Micael (1956 – ), The Fighter’s Letter: an Eritrean revolutionary story (based on true story), Trenton NJ, The Red Sea Press, 2015, ISBN 978-1-56902-411-9

 

 

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

Book 96: Czech Rep. (English) – The Good Soldier Švejk = Osudy dobrého vojáka Švejka (Jaroslav HAŠEK)

The members of the commission… were remarkably divided in their conclusions about Švejk. Half of them insisted that Švejk was a ‘half-wit’, while the other half insisted he was a scoundrel who was trying to make fun of the war.
’It’ll be a bloody miracle,’ roared the chairman of the commission at Švejk, ‘if we don’t get the better of you.’
Švejk looked at the whole commission with the godlike composure of an innocent child.
The senior staff doctor came up close to Švejk:
’I’d like to know, you swine, what you’re thinking about now?’
’Humbly report, sir, I don’t think at all.’
’Himmeldonnerwetter,’ bawled one of the members of the commission, rattling his sabre. ‘So he doesn’t think at all. Why in God’s name don’t you think, you Siamese elephant?’
’Humbly report, I don’t think because that’s forbidden to soldiers on duty.’

The commission’s dilemma about the good soldier Švejk is also our dilemma. It’s impossible to know which Švejk is the real one. What is beyond doubt is that he became one of the greatest and most lovable characters in literature.
I don’t think there’s any need for a spoiler alert that the Austro-Hungarian Empire lost the First World War and was soon to be no more; and after reading this hilarious account of its wartime activities there’s no need to wonder why.
It always remains ambiguous as to whether Švejk is a pure idiot or hard at work sabotaging the war effort.
He spends the war ‘trying to catch up with his battalion’ – or is he evading the war? And the same goes for his people – the Czechs were marched off by their Austrian and Hungarian masters to a war they had no interest in winning; it was not their empire. A lieutenant compares being Czech to being a member of a secret organisation. Czechoslovakia was one of the many captive nations that escaped when it disintegrated in 1918.
Švejk is always loitering around the periphery of the war, but that doesn’t stop him from changing its course.
Like Catch-22, the novel satirises the ridiculousness of the army system, if anyone should actually try to take it seriously. And I wonder if he inspired Forrest Gump?
Some of my favourite moments were the ciphers debacle, the blown up chauffeur who goes to army heaven, the army poster that Švejk takes literally, the woman whose every whim he obeys… No matter what the situation, Švejk has a story to tell and at one time even when asleep answers ‘Present!’ and starts to tell another tale, like that other great Czech invention, the robot…
Hašek died before finishing his masterpiece; but I like to think the war would have finished just as Švejk finally rejoined his batallion.

HAŠEK, Jaroslav (1883 – 1923), The Good Soldier Švejk and his fortunes in the world war, translated by Cecil Parrott, London, Penguin Classics, 2000, ISBN 978-0-140-44991-4
(originally published in Czech, 1926)

Vietnam (English) – The Sympathizer (Viet Thanh NGUYEN)

Then the guitarist began strumming the chords of another song. They do sing songs like this, Man said. It was Yesterday by the Beatles. As the three of us joined in singing, my eyes grew moist. What was it like to live in a time when one’s fate was not war, when one was not led by the craven and the corrupt, when one’s country was not a basket case kept alive only through the intravenous drip of American aid? I knew none of these young soldiers around me except for my blood brothers and yet I confess that I felt for them all, lost in their sense that within days they would be dead, or wounded, or imprisoned, or humiliated, or abandoned, or forgotten. They were my enemies, and yet they were also brothers-in-arms. Their beloved city was about to fall, but mine was soon to be liberated. It was the end of their world, but only a shifting of worlds for me. So it was that for two minutes we sang  with all our hearts, feeling only for the past and turning our gaze from the future, swimmers doing the backstroke toward a waterfall.

 

I posted on Vietnam back in October 2014, on the long poem The Tale of Kieu, but since then I decided to limit myself to novels, so I had to re-read Vietnam. No hardship, for I discovered this wonderful book which deservedly won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

It begins with the chaotic US evacuation as Saigon fell to the communist North Vietnamese in 1975, the end of the Vietnam War as it is known in the West. The protagonist, a captain, flees to the US with his general, who little suspects that the captain is spying for the communists. He becomes enmeshed in and apparently enjoys the American way of life. The captain is split in many ways – half French half Vietnamese, a communist who lived under capitalism in South Vietnam and the US, a Vietnamese and an American. In fact he is a symbol of the split personality of Vietnam itself – North/South, Communist/Capitalist, not to mention of the US, whose double standards of the time are also on full display. There are some unforgettable scenes – the desperate last snafu days as the US fled South Vietnam, the murder, the interrogation, and the Hollywood war movie for which the captain is a reluctant and ignored consultant, and which ends up like a mini war in itself.

Nguyen’s writing is spectacular, dripping with all the irony the situation begs for (his handler is literally a ‘faceless man’, and I’m sure that a ‘sleeper’ agent would find it difficult to sleep!) It was maybe the hardest book so far to choose just one quote to showcase, I wanted to share so many! I can’t recommend it too highly.

 

NGUYEN, Viet Thanh (1971 – ), The Sympathizer, London, Corsair, 2016, ISBN 978-1-4721-51360 (first published 2015)

Book 84: South Sudan (English) – Beneath the Darkening Sky (Majok TULBA)

But Priest’s blood is on my hands and under my fingernails, and his cord has been severed. I told myself that those cords would be cut by me or another. It didn’t matter who, because it was going to happen. We are mere instruments of fate, we soldiers. All those people were shot and would have been shot and we were the walking, running, screaming dead, but it matters that I killed them. The cup must be passed and the poison must be drunk, but that doesn’t mean you have to drink it. The cup was in my hands and I could have cast it back in their faces and died. That would have been better. Oh God, that would have been better. But I drank it. And I passed it and I took the communion of devils. What kind of God would listen to my prayers? Not in this field, not among the blood of devils. I have lived. I have been spared. There’s still time to escape.

 

We have all heard of countries terrorised and traumatised by the nightmarish, upside-down world of child soldiers, but to experience what it is like in reality – and to be one – you must read this book. Beneath the Darkening Sky covers many of the same ugly themes that we have seen (e.g. in Cambodia) and will see again in some other countries, but like them turns them into compulsive reading through the beautiful language of great literature.

South Sudan became the world’s newest country but has had little peace or good news even since then. The interminable (civil) war of this Christian/Animist south, with the oil resources, against northern, Muslim, Sudan for independence both devastated the land and prevented any development. But no sooner did it finally win freedom than the various ethnic groups started fighting among themselves.

The author was nine when rebel soldiers attacked his village and kidnapped all the children taller than an AK47 to become child soldiers. Tulba was an inch shorter; he eventually fled the country to live in Australia. But he wrote this brilliant first novel of what might have happened to him if fate had made him an inch taller.

 

Like the Khmer Rouge for example, the rebels claim to be creating Utopia but actually make only hell on earth. Obinna’s new life is a daily nightmare interspersed with dreaming. It is soaked in casual, self-defeating brutality. The most mercy people can expect (like his friend Priest, in the quote above) is a quick death. Obinna grows down, instead of up.

Among other horrors, the boys are used by the cowardly soldiers to walk in front of them through minefields. When one of them does step on a mine, the scene is described in movie-like slow motion (which felt like watching a crash test dummy flailing about in a car).

 

Like any great novel about a horrible time (similarly to In the Shadow of the Banyan, for Cambodia), the tragedy is not unrelieved. I found the fake ambush especially funny.

 

Traumatising as it is, I highly recommend this novel. It is narrated in short staccato sentences like machine gun fire. I can’t wait to read his second book, “When Elephants Fight”, and hope Tulba will be able to write more books.

 

While I was reading this, there was a documentary series on the Vietnam War on TV. I was struck by what one American Vietnam veteran said: “I only killed one person in Vietnam; the rest were objects.” This novel gives a devastating portrayal of the desensitisation of the killers, of the deadening, dehumanising objectification of death. As Obinna says: “They don’t get to choose to live and I don’t get to choose to kill”.

 

 

TULBA, Majok, Beneath the Darkening Sky, London, Oneworld, 2013 (first published by Penguin Australia, 2012), ISBN 978-1-78074-241-0