Peru: "Who Killed Palomino Molero?" by Mario Vargas Llosa

In my imagination, I see Vargas Llosa and de Recacoechea in a bar sipping pisco and making bets about which can write a better noir novel, or whose novel will be picked up for film rights, or which one does a better job telling a story about his country in less than 175 pages. Since Who Killed Palomino Molero? appeared in 1987, and de Recacoechea's Andean Express came out in 2000, it is more likely that the Bolivian writer paid homage to Vargas Llosa. As a reader in 2013, however, I experienced something similar to double-feature at the movies.

This photo of Talara is courtesy of TripAdvisor

Vargas Llosa's book takes place in the very north of Peru in the early 1950s. The plot revolves around two police officers in Talara seeking the truth behind the grisly murder of a young man posted to the nearby airbase. While some reviews say it is a tightly crafted murder mystery, I have to confess that I knew who did it as soon as we meet the offender -- and I knew why. If you, too, have a deep background in Elizabeth George, Ruth Rendell, or Laura Roh Rowland, this might not be the intellectual puzzle you seek, but it is still worth the time to read as a psychological study of power, if nothing else.

Talara is on the coast near oil fields, with the airbase, and serves as the headquarters for an administrative district, all of which play a role in the story. Descriptions of life of the time appear sparingly amidst the dialogue that moves the tale along. Here, the police lieutenant and his assistant head to a cafe for their dinner.

"They walked out, locking the station door...There was a full moon. The bluish light of the sky illuminated the street. They walked in silence, waving and nodding in response to the greetings shouted to them from the families congregated in the doorways. Off in the distance, above the throbbing surf, they could hear the loudspeakers from the outdoor movie--Mexican voices, a woman weeping, background music." (p. 115)

While the author might or might not have intended commentary on gender relations, women are depicted as victims and as manipulative objects of men's desires: a grieving mother, a child-like waif, a voluptuous cafe owner. To be fair, the male characters, except for one, also have very little independent agency, being molded into specific roles by their place in the social hierarchy and their degree of authority over others.

For a glimpse of life in mid-20th century Peru, for the reality of the social divisions between "purebloods" (those presumably of 100% Spanish descent) and everyone else, and for some descriptions of the landscape, this is a good, quick read. The book contains subtle political commentary, as one expects in Vargas Llosa, about the abuses of power and the pure-heartedness of the common people. One summary says it is about the difficult life of an honest man in a corrupt society. Indeed, the lieutenant is a cop who insists on paying for his meals and in the end, he pays for that integrity.

Cuba: "Singing from the Well" by Reinaldo Arenas

Many of the books I get for this project come from the clearance shelf at Half Price Books. Perhaps they are affordable because they are so depressing that no one else wants to read them?  Singing from the Well is a now-recognized classic of Cuban literature, an example of magical realism in the Latin American style, and the first novel of a writer, Reinaldo Arenas, not much honored in his lifetime for his genius. It is, as most reviewers acknowledge, not for the faint of heart.

Arenas, who was born in 1943, wrote the first version of the novel in his early twenties. He revised it after landing in the U.S. on a boat from Mariel in 1980. It is thought to be at least semi-autobiographical. This book is also the first of five that Arenas wrote depicting the "secret history" of his country. Some commentators have said that the novel is an allegory for the Batista regime (overthrown, with Arenas' full participation, in 1959 to put Castro in power).

In this work a boy lives with his mother, grandparents, and an aunt in rural Cuba, in a region frequently shrouded in mist. Subsistence farming is the only way to get by. They all work the corn field; he is charged with rounding up the cattle at milking time and carrying water. The lyrical passages that mark Arenas' style describe the countryside and the boy's interaction with nature. This is not the most lyrical example but it give you some sense of the voice of the boy.

"...I can't see anything. Not even myself. I just squint into the big fog that splits open once in awhile and then closes right back up again, thicker and whiter than ever. And all I can hear is the sound of the birds singing uncertainly and flying off in lord knows what direction... The sound of the birds and Celestino whacking on the trunks of trees. And I don't worry anymore about how long it might take Celestino to write that poetry. Sometimes I don't want him to ever finish. I wish both of us could die and the poetry could keep going on and not ever finish." (p. 126).

Celestino is described as the boy's cousin, but might be his alter ego. We never know for sure. He writes poetry, actually carves it, onto the trunks of trees and later scratches it onto leaves because the grandfather has chopped down all the trees with of his grandson's crazy, suspicious words on them. The boy wishes for death because the brutal grandfather rules the family with a switch, sexually abuses his own daughters and the farm's draft animals, and shows no concern for anyone but himself. He is also the only adult male character in the novel. The neighbors know he is loco and avoid the entire family, further isolating them.

The grandson(s)--the boy and Celestino, who might actually be one person--live for poetry and nature and the pure freedom of being off on their own in the almost magical woods and scrub. They encounter or imagine witches, ghosts of their dead cousins, and real animals, birds and flowers. They build a "castle" of red mud and populate it with kings and queens made of the jars and containers they filch from their grandmother's storeroom. They swim in the river, pick the flowers and watch the clouds. It sounds like an idyll, except for that grandfather.

The grandfather exists to keep existing. His entire focus is on food production.The grandfather severely beats the boy for failing to be attentive enough at herding cattle, weeding corn, or hauling the buckets. His wife and daughters, the boy's mother and aunt, follow suit. They yell at the boy, throw boiling water at him, and commit other forms of emotional and physical abuse. His mother says several times, "I should have died before I was born rather than have a son like you."

In one of the very few examples of human tenderness in the novel, the boy's mother strokes his hair after he falls in the mud while carrying water from the well.  He treasures that memory and lies in the mud again just to recreate it. He so desperately wants nurturing in his life that he cares (repeatedly) for baby birds, either those nesting in the thatch roof of the house or a tree, or one he "rescues" from its nest to bring home and keep in his bed. Suffice it to say, that none of the adults around him notice anything about the boy other than an extra pair of hands to abuse and an extra mouth to feed.

If this is autobiography, then Arenas' departure to attend school in the city must have been an overwhelming relief. He went on to study literature and work in Havana before being condemned for his sexuality and later exiled to the U.S., where he committed suicide in 1990 rather than die from AIDS (with which he had been diagnosed). The 2000 movie Before Night Falls is based on his autobiography of the same title.

Belarus: "Colours of the Native Country: Stories by Byelorussian Writers"

This edited volume of stories translated from Byelorussian appeared in 1972 and spans roughly 1920 to the late 1960s.  It is not available commercially now, although interested readers might be able to request it via Inter-Library Loan. The copy I borrowed came from Harvard U.

The authors of these stories played by the rules in force in the Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic of their time. The men are all strong, the women virtuous, the children above average. Men work in honest jobs on the railway, as official soldiers against the fascists (Germany in WWII) or later, as guerrilla forces ready to take a stand against the "capitalists" (Western Europe in the 60s). Women are left behind to bear children, toil the fields, grieve, or be killed by the enemy of the moment.

The tales read like fables, with stock characters played by people, not animals, and tidy, moralistic endings. The first story is an actual fable, with a not-so-wise crow and some migrating storks who really know something about arboriculture (the issue is a dying oak tree). A story about soldiers is one of the few with character development: A stolid big fellow reacts quite logically (if passive aggressively) to the continual sharp criticisms of his much smaller, impatient commanding officer. Near-disaster ensues but the big guy triumphs through his dedication to the well-being of the team.

Significant portions of the stories focus on Belarus's natural assets, including several major rivers. In a nation not much larger than the state of Kansas, two of those major rivers are separated by less than 200 km (about 125 miles), yet flow in opposite directions. The Pripyat near the southern border flows eastward to join the Dnieper, on its southward journey to the Black Sea. From roughly the center of the country, not too far from Minsk, the capital, the Neman (also called the Nyoman) starts a journey westward toward Lithuania and ultimately connects Belarus to the Baltic Sea.

The nation also has extensive forests, and several of the stories related directly or indirectly to woods. One of my favorite sections describes the trees the narrator observes along his walk to visit an unusual woman:

"There is a great deal in the autumn wood that interrupts one's quiet flow of thoughts...The leaves of the beautiful birch tree lay scattered around it in the shape of a remarkable fan, shining like tiny gold coins on grass still green...The leaves of the oaks make a soft dark-brown bed under their parent trees....A maple leaf, sparking like a star from out of another universe suddenly appears in front of me on the road...How did it get here? Ah! Over there--a little maple tree..." (p. 45, in a story called "A Plain Woman" by Ivan Shamyakin).

Modern Belarus is described by some as the last hold-out of the Soviet republics. Alexander Lukashenko is the strong man in power (since 1994) and various indexes put the country last among European nations for democracy and personal freedoms. In addition, the southeastern portion of the country remains severely affected by fallout from the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. The curious might want to check the blog of world-reader John Brookes, describing  The Trace of the Black Wind, his book of choice for Belarus.

Pakistan: "Moth Smoke" by Moshin Hamid

Given a choice, I will typically pick a first novel as my introduction to any writer. Moshin Hamid is well-known now in the U.S. for The Reluctant Fundamentalist but I skipped that book (and later movie) in favor of his first novel, Moth Smoke. 

Many first novels are assembled like furniture from IKEA; they have all of the parts but the edges show and things seem a bit wobbly when you are done. This book is nothing like that. It is like a very fine piece of furniture, with dovetail joints tightly interlocked and the finish perfectly smooth.

This level of craftspersonship is seldom achieved these days in furniture -- or in writing -- and it is a deep pleasure to see it in this book, first published in 2000. Here, the joinery is the intersplicing of a main narrator, Daru, and various "witnesses" to his immediate crisis. The narrative voice changes with every chapter, and while some commentators found that confusing, I reveled in the challenge and admire the inventiveness.

The action occurs from April through mid-summer of 1998, as Pakistan conducts its first nuclear weapons tests, following hard on "the neighbors." (India also conducted tests in spring 1998.) The metaphor of moth smoke arises from the inevitable "moth to flame" attraction between Daru and Mumtaz, whose stories are as interlocked as is the joint above -- and who share another kind of joint  as well, hash mixed with tobacco cigarettes.

With so much smoking going on, ash "fallout" is everywhere in the story, whether real ash from the joints; a simulacrum of ash, from the scales of smashed wings as Daru invents a game of "moth badminton"; or metaphorical ash, from the dangerous liaison Daru establishes with Mumtaz, his best friend's wife. In the end, there are no winners, only mutually assured self-destruction.

The story is a Fitzgeraldian (as in F. Scott and Gatsby) look at what Hamid calls "the soft underbelly of the upper crust, the ultimate hypocrisy in a country with flour shortages" (p. 214). It is also a musing, possibly even an allegory, on the overall disintegration of Pakistani society in the 20th century. There are scenes of political corruption, rise of the "fundos" or fundamentalists, and general lawlessness, including thefts during the long-awaited monsoon and a brawl in the middle of a cinema, all of which draw Daru's not-very-critical eye.

Most noticeable is Daru's own descent into a drugged stupor, including pain-killers after serious injury and ultimately heroin, no longer just hash, mixed into the cigs.  One wonders if the "everyman" middle-class, locally educated, Daru is standing in for masses of Pakistanis who are caught, as he is, between a powerful, economic elite with almost no conscience and a rising, revolutionary sentiment.

If that is part of Hamid's message, Pakistan is likely to be in for wrenching social change, painful for its own citizens and, with its current standing in world politics, for many, many others as well. Given the prologue referencing a war of succession following the death of a Muhgal emperor, and the closing section about that war's winner and the struggle for succession at his death, I suspect much more than a story of adultery and drug abuse is at the heart of Moth Smoke. 



China: "Wild Ginger" by Anchee Min

Anchee Min grew up near Shanghai in the 1960s and 70s, and writes in Wild Ginger of the so-called Cultural Revolution that marked (marred) her youth. I appreciated the opportunity to read what amounts to a first-hand account of the stark realities of that era in China.*

Wild Ginger uses personal stories to weave a political theme, but I found the work predictable from the moment we learn that the title character is given an unusual (for its time) name. Her mother sees an inner fire in her, and she does indeed burn fast and hot. She ultimately somewhat consumes her loyal "tree" friends Maple and Evergreen.

In this project, I've read several works that use the trope of blighted love to depict a failed nation. Agamemnon's Daughter and This Earth of Mankind both took that approach. Each clinically describes both the politics and the love story. Kadare, in his first person-narrative of totalitarianism in Albania, keeps an emotionless tone that reflects of the lack of feeling in the country overall. That very lack marks the degree to which the regime succeeded. Toer's account of Indonesia circa 1890 reads like a narrated tale, told from memory, which it was. Both of those works are by men. Perhaps it is coincidence that both are, in some sense, bloodless and clearly more about the political than the personal.

By women, I've read this book, Krik? Krak? about Haiti, and the work about Iran, Children of the Jacaranda Tree. Danticat's prose in the short story called Krik? Krak! is spare and retains the voice of the characters. It is an epistolary tale even though the letters are never sent. It is stark and moving. The imagery remains long after the covers close. This is literature similar to Kadare and Toer.

For my (admittedly somewhat naive) tastes, both Wild Ginger and Delijani's work about Tehran are "overwritten."  It is as if the authors were showing off for peers in a creative writing course. As a trivial example, Delijani uses the word susurrus not once, which would be fine, but three times in a few hundred pages.  More substantively, going back to my flippant depiction of literature as fiction that "ends badly" (see blog about Ireland), Delijani's book does not qualify. It is almost terrifyingly realistic to begin, but ends with two lovers going off hand in hand.

Min's work could have been literature, but she picks up the story of Evergreen and Maple a few decades after Wild Ginger's dramatic final act. There are green shoots from those charred trunks. This is likely realistic. The Cultural Revolution did end, and China has made ever-so-tentative steps toward a state without images of Mao in every household, "re-education camps," and neighborhood snitches. Nonetheless, the book would have been more powerful without the epilogue in which the trees left standing finally lean toward each other. This book SHOULD have been literature. 

I wonder if women writers feel compelled to offer happy endings in order to gain readers. If they do, does that mean women (or at least, women who buy books) find it difficult to cope with the difficulties of life, without having a fantasy close?  Have we been conditioned by Disney, Harlequin, and "chick lit" to lay down our money only when there is a tidy resolution that promises a better future?  Are we really not strong enough to accept reality in the fictional world?

Even more, is the purpose of fiction and or literature to entertain (Disney) or to inform and enlarge our perspective about the world?  I'm increasingly preferring the second choice. I do still read for entertainment, but I'm starting to demand more reality and less fantasy. While the truisms about sun after storms, lights at the end of tunnels, and silver inside of clouds are usually true, I fear that offering such respite from powerful emotions raised in fiction dilutes the impact of the storm itself. If we are to learn and understand, we need powerful emotions.***  Let them happen, good and bad.

* Note 1:  If you are interested in other works about China, and other parts of China, you might want to check out Reading the World by John Brookes. He read a book from each of the country's provinces. He also has a blog.

** Note 2: The official name is Islamic Republic of Iran. I'm using Islamist because it means "moral conservatism, literalism, and the attempt to implement Islamic values in all spheres of life" (The Free Dictionary online). 

*** Note 3: John Dirkx is a leader in this field of inquiry. For one of his takes on the topic, see "Nurturing Soul in Adult Learning." It is a classic academic article but will give you some idea of the issues involved and it is free.

Iran: "Children of the Jacaranda Tree" by Sahar Delijani

This work, by an Iranian woman born in prison in 1983, depicts what could be only a small slice of the traumas the people of that country have experienced in my lifetime.  Children of the Jacaranda Tree presents, literally, the birth of a generation of people seeking a positive future for this long-embattled land. Some of the children in the novel--born in the early 1980s--participate in the roughly six-month Green Movement in the latter half of 2009 and into early 2010.

Delijani writes viscerally of the realities of daily life, from child birth through death, and always from a woman's point of view. She describes tactile sensations, scents, tastes, visions, and sounds in direct terms. The opening section tells of the birth of the infant Neda in a hospital where her mother has been emprisoned by the Islamist forces that took over the country (from 1979 onward).

Neda brings, for one brief month, joy to the women who share her mother's cell. The women bicker and fight before the infant's arrival, bond to help the new mother, and then to console her when the guards remove the infant to her grandparents' home.

Other women in the cell also have children. Most of the mothers are eventually freed and remain in touch in Tehran. Their lives--and their children--meet. And here is the symbolism of the jacaranda tree, which even I get. The specific tree of the title grows in one family's courtyard, and it is under this tree that many of the women's children play at various times, and where they hear of their parents' struggles and sacrifices for a more liberal, free, even democratic Iran.

We see two children of this generation at the end, in exile in Turin, Italy as they discover how their paths have crossed in the past. The Green Revolution was repressed, but these two, at least, remain hopeful that there will someday be a way to live in Iran. 

The week that I read this book I also read in the New York Times about a new generation of "boat people" escaping through Indonesia to Christmas Island. They are not particularly successful because Australia, which controls the island, sends them to detention centers in Papua New Guinea or the Republic of Nauru. Some people in the article are refugees from Iran -- suggesting that there is still much progress to be hoped for there, whether for religious freedoms, eocnomic opportunity, civil rights, or political expression.

Delijani's work helped me understand the desparation that could drive someone to spend thousands of dollars on a very uncertain voyage to try to reach a better place.

Namibia: "Born of the Sun" by Joseph Diescho

In his novel of Namibian life, Born of the Sun, Joseph Diescho shows a compressed history of colonization and liberation of this southern African nation. He writes in his preface that his intent is, among other things, to "portray a vivid picture of African rural life," in which he succeeds admirably. He also says he has deliberately used some words about that life, such as hut and krall (a small stockaded community, as below) that have become imbued with derogatory meaning.  Maybe in 1988, at the time of publication, that was the case, but for me, neither has negative connotations now (but then, I'm fairly clueless about connotations sometimes).

Namibia is toward the end of the African continent, bordered by South Africa to the south and Angola and a tiny bit of Zambia to the north. It has a long dry coastline--not at all tropical--and an interior desert. Rainfall is sparse and concentrated. As told in the book, people herd goats and cattle and tend small plots, usually maintained by women.

The book starts with a section called "Relations."  We learn of rural village life, from the birth of  Muronga's son, to a council sitting in judgement of a woman accused of adultery when her man was away working in the mines. Village life follow customs and traditions handed down from elders. While he prays to the God of Our Forefathers, Muranga seeks additional powers from the Christian god via the German-established Catholic mission. Being catechized, baptized and married will bring good fortune, he thinks, because baptized people receive favors. As this section ends, the villagers learn they are to be taxed by the white colonizers (South Africa). They have no money and little need for it in their village.

Muronga and a friend apply to work in the mines to the southeast. We follow their journey through newly independent (as of 1966) Botswana, to the gold mines in South Africa. There, in a multi-chapter segment called "Between Rock and Gold--Resistance," he learns of African communities far from his own in Malawi, Zambia, and Tanzania, all of which had become politically independent from Britain. 

He also learns what the white people of South Africa think of him and his fellow mine workers under the system of apartheid.

"Muronga has always known and appreciated discipline. He is not afraid of hard work, but this work isn't so much hard as it is demeaning--deliberately demeaning...How can one man treat another with such contempt?  Didn't Pater Dickmann say God expects people to love one another...and treat one another as they themselves would like to be treated? Perhaps, though, the supervisor has a different God from Pater Dickmann's?...To Muronga, this is the only logical explanation for the [mine] supervisor's behavior. Certainly he couldn't wish to be treated as he treats others!" (p. 182)

After the miners organize a work-stoppage that is ultimately unsuccessful, Muronga participates in a mostly peaceful protest. He and his fellows are arrested and taken to Pretoria. An Afrikaaner policeman yells at them and "Muronga does not understand . But he sees that the words coming from the white man's mouth carry anger and hatred, and his eyes convey a sense of thirst to kill and destroy." (p. 236)

He is brutally interrogated and beaten in the South African prison and deported, via Botwana, to South West Africa (as Namibia was known then). I won't tell you the tale's end but the last section is called "Difficult Decisions."  In it, Muranga tells his colleagues in the struggle,

"We must tell our people how other black people have shaken off the yoke of oppression by the white people. We must motivate our people to unite...in our struggle for freedom. But we must also tell our people honestly that the road to freedom will be hard. We have no guns, we have no cars, we have no airplanes. But we have the will. And with this will, this strong will to be free,  one day we will be free...free to determine our own future and free to rule ourselves." (p. 267-268).

In fact, it took decades from the time this story was set. Namibia gained independence in 1990, in a protracted guerilla-led war against South Africa.

Gabon: Contes du Gabon/Tales from Gabon (French edition)

I last used French regularly circa 1990. This project seemed like a chance to reinvigorate some languishing skills. As it happens, my choice of this book in French coincided with media announcements that bilingualism delays the onset of ...oh, you know, that disease that affects your memory....

Gabon is in western Africa, just south of the equator. It is forested near the coast then rises to an upland area and has savannah in the eastern and southern portions. The site I consulted for geographical details says the country is a little smaller in area than the U.S. state of Colorado. In looking for images for this post, I decided I need to practice some eco-tourism and visit someday (although I'd have to avoid the bush-meat trade - but that is a different issue).

The tales in the book, said to be based on Gabonais folklore, have been adapted by French and Gabonais teachers for use in French language instruction in Gabon. This particular copy of the book belonged to a middle school in Libreville, the nation's capital, although the copy came to me from a seller in Paris that I found through amazon.fr.

Most of the tales follow the format of an Aesop's fable, with talking animals who interact and then present a moral lesson. There are genies and some magical transformations.  I cannot tell if the Aesop's form is original to the stories or adopted for classroom use. I'd love to hear from anyone who might be familiar with some of these stories before their translation into a school text.

In the stories, the animal actors range from gorilla and elephant to python and a kind of bird with a long tail. The moral lessons are elegant.  In one, a boy has caused havoc in the jungle; he calls himself the hurricane. The animals decide to teach him a lesson, and while the elephant fails through brute strenth, the clever tortoise uses a little guile. She (tortoise is a feminine noun in French) offers the boy palm wine then, when his head is spinning, tells him to climb aboard for a ride home. She tells the boy to place his hand in the small space between her shell and body, so he will stay on. Then she retreats into her shell and the boy is trapped. When the youth calls out for help, none of the animals will go to his aid because he has been so destructive of their forest home. The message is "Without friendship, even the strongest will fail."

A particularly poignant tale is about a young mother, with a baby still in arms. The woman has trouble cultivating her garden because the baby is fussy. A female gorilla speaks to the woman and offers to cuddle the baby, telling the maman that she must keep it a secret. Well, the woman tells her husband, and the consequences are tragic.  The lesson is that keeping secrets is vital. To that, I would add that thoughtless use of firearms is a really bad idea.

The tale of the green snake echoes some of the story of Diata from Mali. A king has two wives and favors one. That wife's son is lame. The other wife is jealous and spiteful. One day when drawing water, the favored wife discovers a green snake in her calabash. The snake seems to be communicating to her with its eyes: Trust me. So, she carries it back to the village. There, others are frightened by the snake and want to kill it but she says, "no, stop."  The snake then pierces the skin of her son. By not stopping the snake, the young mother performed the one act that would break a spell and the snake becomes a genie who can heal her son's lameness.

There are other French-language books of tales for parts of Africa once colonized by France - Mozambique, Benin, Togo - and regions of the French "DOM-TOM" such as the Ile de Réunion, Guadaloupe, Martinique and elsewhere (DOM-TOM is Départements d'Outre Mer et Territoires d'Outre Mer, or overseas states and territories).  Maybe my memory will survive 4.5 years longer if I collect some of those as part of this project. I found I really enjoyed trying out my 6th-grade French!

Ghana: "Black Gold of the Sun" by Ekow Eshun

Ekow Eshun traveled to Ghana, land of his parents and where he lived for a short time as a young child. His book Black Gold of the Sun is his memoir, including that journey and the experiences leading up to it. We learn of what he endured as the sole African boy in his suburban London school  and of his family's heritage in Ghana. We all have a family story; his is particularly relevant to life in our times, whether in the U.K. or the U.S.

In the course of his journey, he visits the capital of Accra, coastal communities including Cape Coast and Elmina, and the interior along the western side, including a stop near a wildlife park, and then north to the border with Burkina Faso. He writes directly and honestly of his observations and experiences in city and countryside, resort or uncomfortable lodging. He doesn't sugar-coat his experiences at all nor does he over-dramatize.

Not surprisingly, a main theme in his explorations is slavery. Some examples from the text:

"At twelve years old, my ambition was to become an astronaut. But I had another, less lofty aim. I wanted to be recognized for myself instead of simply as my father's son or, at school, as representative of All the Black People in the World" (p. 91).

"Reading yet another call for black people to 'know their past' made me think of Ghana, where seventy-five different languages were spoken by a collection of ethnic groups who'd spent most of their history at war with each other. Then I tried to multiply those divisions across the fifty-four countries and 800 million inhabitants of this huge continent" (p. 102).

"The oldest and largest of the European forts, Elmina [on the coast], marked the epicentre of the slave trade in Ghana. The castle was the reason I'd travelled to Elmina. I wanted to see the site of slavery for myself." (p. 107)

Centuries before the awful "Atlantic Trade," Eshun writes that in Ghana,

"Owning slaves was a symbol of power. Rich noblemen kept them by the hundred to farm their land, defend their homes and bear their children. In Asante during the eighteenth century, a third of the population was made up of slaves. They provided the army. They worked the fields and the gold mines....Under Asante law, a female slave could marry her master or her master's son....Their children would be born free, and it was forbidden for any citizen to disclose the family background of another....the descendants of slaves could find themselves fully integrated into Asante society."  (p. 137)

"Africans sold Africans by choice, because they stood to gain from it. For centuries they'd practised a trade between themselves that was similar to serfdom. Perhaps, when the Europeans arrived, they imagined that Atlantic slavery was just an extension of that system." (p 140)

And for me, a thought-provoking statement that will spur me to do more research about slavery in various culture. Eshun writes,

"The advent of white people introduced the ideology of race to slavery. Europe justified its brutality on the basis of its 'natural' superiority to black people. In doing so, they set in place a notion of genetic inequality that still remains central to white self-belief."  (p. 141)

I despair some days about the extent to which so many people still believe in genetic inequality, despite repeated demonstrations from science, humanities, philosophy, religion and other fields that the notion is just flat wrong. I am curious about whether it is only a European notion. I've read hints that there might be beliefs in genetic superiority in at least some Asian cultures. More reading ahead.

Black Gold of the Sun is a fascinating combination of travelogue and consciousness raising book. I recommend it to anyone.

Haiti: "Krik? Krak!" by Edwidge Danticat

My friend Miriam suggested this author, and when I searched for a title, I learned Ms. Danticat attended the college where my Daughter B is now a student. Do I get extra points for that?

Danticat lived in Haiti until she was 12 and then moved to New York City. Krik? Krak! is a story-telling motif in Haiti...someone calling for a story says, "Krik?" and the response is "Krak!"  This collection of short stories evokes life in Haiti, some of its beauty and some of the gut-wrenching pain. 

Written in the early 1990s, the title story reveals the human consequences of horrific political repression. In the story, a college student who agitates for political change on the radio escapes Haiti on a leaky boat, with 35 others. He writes "letters" in a notebook to his sweetheart back home. He hopes the boat will reach the U.S., or at least a U.S. Coast Guard ship. A girl in Port-au-Prince writes to her lover, whom she hopes escaped...but she just isn't sure. Still she writes, even as her family is menaced by the Tonton Macoutes, the dictator's personal "enforcers."

I put "letters" in quotations because, while each writes to the other, there is no exchange. We see both sides of this epistolary story, made even more compelling by the two distinct voices Ms. Danticat animates in her prose. The student writes of the pregnant woman, who gives birth on the boat; of the old man chewing on an empty pipe; of the tar used to patch the leaks; and of how hot he is and black he is becoming under the relentless sun. He also writes of his political views, how much he cares for the girl, and what he hopes to find in the U.S. The girl (and she is young, so the word is correct) writes of the day the Macoutes murdered her neighbor, how her family escaped, and what her father did to save the them and why. She also writes of the banyan tree where she finds a hiding place, what the house in the country looks like, and the butterflies that bring her messages of hope and despair.

Unlike Masks, in which two central characters obtain their deepest desire, neither one in this story does. The hardest part to read was how each accepted fate when it arrived.

Around the world in 365 days - by book

So, I heard about this project "A Year of Reading the World" last week and decided to give it a go. But of course, it isn't enough to read what Alexandra read ... so I added some additional constraints, or opportunities, depending on how you think about things.  If you want to join me, please do, with your own lists, or suggest things below.

Firstly, I'm in the U.S., so we have different works available than U.K.-based Alexandra found, and possibly more are in translation here.  Secondly, I read in English and French, which opens some doors, especially for works from writers from countries in West and Central Africa and parts of Micronesia. If you  have more than one language, do your own challenge with works available. Thirdly, I'm most interested in works by women, although not exclusively. So I thought I'd try for at least 50 percent by women -- you've heard that we "Hold up half the sky," right?  Then I decided I should stick to things published in my lifetime, so last half of the 20th century until now. Sound fair?

Today I checked out the list of countries at Member States of the UN, but it didn't include places that I think of as having separate cultures, such as Scotland and Northern Ireland.  So instead of 193 nations, the starting list is 195. Perhaps we'll add more, too ...

Also, at our house, we already have books from about 45 of the countries listed, and in the interests of keeping the whole project manageable financially, I set a limit of $5 per additional volume. For titles not on our shelves, I'll see what I can borrow from libraries, then go for used copies, probably from Amazon or similar sites online. Although, I must say I found several works at Half Price Books in the Avon neighborhood yesterday, for $1 or less each.  What a great resource, even if the name ought to be Half Priced Books.

So, here's a global map and four pins to get started. Japan, Albania, Argentina, and Canada. Two men, two women. Mostly older titles, since -- as you might have noted above -- we have these books already at home.

To join, click on the map to open a new tab, showing this week's ideas. On the new tab, click on one of the green pins. A small tab within the map will open with author's last name and title of the book. Under that appears the word "link."  If you click that, you will see the  Amazon.com description of the book. These four are in print and used copies are available online. 



Next week four more titles, with a different color of pin. Maybe I'll figure out how to make an interactive map here, too.  Stranger things have happened.

Even if you don't read the books, please share your thoughts for authors to include!

Are you in?

Melissa