Books in 2010 : A Personal Selection

Despite what at times seemed like an endless schedule of travel (a situation to be remedied by settling down to write my third book in 2011), I still found time over the past year to get quite a bit of reading done. Some of the more notable examples appear below.

Feliz Año Nuevo,

MD


The Country Without a Post Office by Agha Shadid Ali

I was first made aware of the writing of Kashmiri poet Agha Shadid Ali by the Indian journalist Dilip D’Souza when I was living in Mumbai (née Bombay) in early 2007. This was the same era I paid my first visit to the disputed yet achingly beautiful swathe of Kashmir currently administered by India. It was a trip that left of deep impression on me, as I was welcomed with great hospitality by the Kashmiris whom I met and saw first-hand how, in the words of the Jammu Kashmir Liberation Front’s Yasin Malik “the government of India in Kashmir is existing in bunkers, and running their democracy through the barrel of a gun." When protests swirled throughout Kashmir this past year, I purchased this 1997 collection of poems by Ali, who passed away prematurely in 2001. The book is a moving meditation on the costs of Kashmir’s ongoing conflict and the pain of dislocation and exile, musing on “blood sheer rubies in Himalayan snow.” In doing so, it rises to the level of Irish Civil War-era Yeats in its blending of the personal and political.

Alice Lakwena & Holy Spirits: War In Northern Uganda 1986-97 by Heike Behrend

A fascinating and disturbing book that looks at the roots of one of Africa’s most destructive and frightening rebel groups, Uganda’s Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), and the strange milieu, part military organization, part ethno-regional cult, from which it sprang. Details definitively how the LRA’s leader, Joseph Kony, emerged as a rival to, rather than a disciple of, the mystic Alice Lakwena and her Holy Spirit Mobile Forces movement.

Murder City: Ciudad Juárez and the Global Economy’s New Killing Fields by Charles Bowden

An unflinching account of the violence currently ravaging the eponymous Mexican city across the border from El Paso (which I myself wrote about here), Murder City is written in impressionistic, minimalist vignettes. Bowden writes that he wants “to explain the violence as if it were a flat tire and I am searching the surface for a nail. But what if the violence is not a kind of breakdown, but more like a flower springing from the rot of the forest floor?” A sobering subtext to the war on drugs.

When a Crocodile Eats the Sun: A Memoir of Africa by Peter Godwin

Not the world’s most effective writer or perceptive analyst, but still has a relatively interesting story to tell of the disintegration of what was one of Africa’s post-colonial success stories: Zimbabwe, under the delusional, tyrannical grip of Robert Mugabe and a small cadre of corrupt party loyalists. Godwin’s memoir would have been better served by a greater willingness to actually spend more time in Zimbabwe during the period in question, and to expand his view beyond the relatively insular world of white Zimbabweans that serves as his focus, but the brief, strobe-light flashes of a country imploding are useful case-studies nevertheless.

Another Day of Life by Ryszard Kapuscinski

Set amidst the chaotic, violent scramble for post-colonial Angola, Kapuscinski, taking a different tack from his elegantly restrained portrait of Ethiopia’s Haile Selassie in The Emperor, brings about in this book the feeling of what it is to be a journalist covering armed conflict in one of the forgotten corners of the world as well as any writer I have ever read.

Parentheses of Blood by Sony Labou Tansi

This scathingly brilliant dramatic satire of tyranny follows a group of soldiers searching for a rebel leader who is already dead, and was penned by perhaps Africa’s most under-appreciated writer. Favorite passage:

Rama: What’s a deserter?

Mark: A deserter is a uniformed soldier who says Libertashio is dead.

Rama: But it’s true. Papa is dead.

Mark: That’s merely civilian truth.

Between Terror and Democracy: Algeria Since 1989 by James D. Le Sueur

An important chronology of events before, during and beyond what the author at one point calls “an endless season of hell on earth,” this book by University of Nebraska history professor Le Sueur examines the political, cultural and religious elements that sent Algeria spiraling into civil war in the 1990s, a conflict from which it has not yet fully extracted itself. Though relying heavily on an authoritative and even-handed marshaling of secondary source material more than original first-hand interviews, the book nevertheless should prove to be an important work for those seeking to understand the internal politics of North Africa’s most tumultuous country.

Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell

One of the best and least-romanticizing chronicles every written about war, examining in minute detail the mud, blood, propagandizing and naked political chicanery that accompanies armed conflict, this book chronicles the ideological disillusionment of its author into the liberal humanist who would later write Animal Farm and 1984.

Red and Black in Haiti: Radicalism, Conflict, and Political Change, 1934-1957 by Matthew J. Smith

In this book by a young Jamaican historian, Haiti, which has often been the literary and intellectual playground of a host of pampered foreign arrivistes, poseurs and pseudo-radicals, receives what it deserves: Genuine scholarship. Covering the period between the departure of the U.S. Marines after a 20-year military occupation of the country and the coming to power of François Duvalier, Smith’s book demonstrates how the dysfunctional nature of Haiti’s politics cannot be blamed on a single source, but is rather the product of decades of political and economic miscalculation and ill-intention on the part of both Haiti’s leaders and the international community.

Between Two Armies in the Ixil Towns of Guatemala by David Stoll

In this revelatory book about the experiences of indigenous Guatemalans during the height of that country’s civil war, noted anthropologist David Stoll examines in detail the effects of insurgency and counter-insurgency in the pueblos in and around the Triángulo Ixil of the department of Quiché. We see a population defenseless against a brutal government but also against rebel pressure, and watch as a power struggle between Catholicism and evangelical Protestantism underscores the military struggle on the ground. A must read for anyone who wants to understand Guatemala’s present-day situation.

Children of Heroes by Lyonel Trouillot

First published in French as Les enfants des héros, this 2002 book by the man who is probably Haiti’s greatest living author traces the paths of two children fleeing a Port-au-Prince slum after murdering their abusive father. Unflinching and stunning.

Taslima Nasreen forced into hiding

News reaches me via an article in The Guardian and via a rushed instant message conversation with the author herself, who is in hiding, that the Bangladeshi writer Taslima Nasreen has been driven from her home in Calcutta (Kolkata), India, by the violent protests of the Jamiat Ulema-e-Hind group, claiming that she had insulted Islam in here new book, Dwikhondito (Split in Two).

Readers of this blog and my other writing will recall that, this past August, Ms. Nasreen - a recipient of the Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thoughts from the European Parliament (1994), the Hellman-Hammett Grant from Human Rights Watch (1994) and the UNESCO Prize for the promotion of tolerance and non-violence (2004) - was physically attacked at a book release event in Hyderabad, India by members of the Majlis Ittehadul Muslimeen (MIM) party, including Indian lawmakers.

It is a depressing development of intolerance in a region of India that has always prided itself on being on of the great intellectual bastions of that great nation, birthplace of the poet Rabindranath Tagore and the film director Satyajit Ray, In response, Narseen has consented to delete the controversial passages in her book, something that I am sure any writer is loathe to do under public pressure

The decision must be doubly bitter for an author who, in her home country of Bangladesh, saw her books banned, her passport seized, her life threatened and was eventually forced to seek exile in Europe and the United States before settling in Calcutta. Criticizing the victimization of her country's Hindu minority and of women, and calling for a more moderate, humanistic and less extremist approach to faith in South Asia in general, is evidently not a path not endorsed by all.

Though Maulana Mahmood Madani, general secretary of the Jamiat Ulema-e-Hind, has called on protests against Nasreen to stop if she withdraws the “objectionable” passages, the Milli Ittehad Parishad, an umbrella alliance of 12 Muslim groups including Jamait Ulema-i-Hind, still intends to meet on Sunday to discuss their further plan of action.

Events such as this in India, whether coming from the camps of Hindu extremists or Muslim fundamentalists, make a mockery of the concept of free speech and minority protections, when mob rule and violence become an accepted mode of public discourse and addressing one’s grievances.

The reaction the Indian government to all of this? In a statement, India's External Affairs Minister Pranab Mukherjee said the following: "We have never refused shelter to those who seek our protection, and the same applies to Nasreen...(But) those given shelter in India have always undertaken to eschew political activities in India or any actions which may harm India’s relations with friendly countries. It is also expected that the guests will refrain from activities and expressions that may hurt the sentiments of our people."

What kind of a defense of freedom of speech is that? In effect, it tells writers “Say what you want, just nothing too challenging,” when the purpose of writers, if they have any purpose, is to always challenge, push and provoke beyond merely entertaining.

“If liberty means anything at all it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear,“ said the British author George Orwell said in his preface to Animal Farm, a book that got him mercilessly vilified by the British left for its scathing satire of the Stalinist Soviet Union, Those words ring as true in our polarized world today as they did in 1945.

Hopefully, despite the increasingly shrill minorities on the right and the left; among the Christians, Hindus, Muslims; Americans, Indians, French, Russians et al, the bravery of genuine free thought and the wisdom of moderation will prevail and, I hope, that writers like Taslima Nasreen will continue to challenge and provoke us through these dark and difficult times.

Homage to Catalunya

Having just stepped off the plane in Paris from several days spent visiting my old reporting buddy Gerry Hadden and his family in Barcelona, I was yet again impressed by the artistic brilliance, creative energy and general welcoming friendliness that infuses both the Catalan and “foreign” population of this area of Spain. The city that was passionately Republican and so opposed to Franco’s fascist forces that it did not yield to the rightist onslaught until early 1939 during Spain's Civil War, also served as fertile ground for artistic and intellectual endeavor, a tradition that counties to this day.

Over the years, Catalunya nurtured such talents as that of the surrealist artists Salvador Dalí (born in Figueres in 1904) and Joan Miró (born in Barcelona eleven years earlier), and the experience of fighting there alongside the Republican forces (during which he was shot in the neck and nearly killed) proved deeply influential to the British author George Orwell, whose memoir of that time, Homage to Catalonia, is among his most moving works ( I opt for the traditional Catalan here, as opposed to Spanish, spelling, no disrespect to Orwell). And even the quintessentially modern Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar, whose movies often seem to run on the pulse and throb of Madrid, chose Barcelona as the setting for what I think is his greatest film, Todo sobre mi madre.

It is a vibrancy that remains, in neighborhoods such as Gràcia and Poble Sec, and in institutions such as the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Barcelona, where I went to peruse an exhibition that included among its components, screenings of Jordi Colomer’s disorienting film Les Jumelles and the Italian Pier Paolo Pasolini’s deeply strange Che cose sono le nuvole? Something of the winding, narrow streets and bright plazas of the old city reminded one of similar spaces in the Americas, including Santo Domingo, the city in the Spanish-speaking Caribbean with which I am most familiar. If one wonders through them long enough, sooner or later one arrives at a place in the Barrio Gotico bearing the name Plaza George Orwell, in tribute to the author.

It was my second visit there, and I could easily get used to it.

Palabras Prohibidas

The closer they came to the promised land, the more they felt the net tightening around them.

So writes perhaps Haiti’s greatest author, Jacques Stephen Alexis, at the conclusion of arguably his finest novel, Compere General Soleil, translated masterfully into English as General Sun, My Brother by the American professor Carrol F. Coates.

Alexis was depicting the struggles against tyranny, both political and economic, of a desperately poor worker and former restavek (a child from a poor family who goes to work in rich households as a kind of indentured servant) named Hilarion Hilarius, his lover Claire-Heureuse, their young baby and their friends and relatives in 1930s Haiti and the Dominican Republic, as they are preyed upon by the ravenous opportunists of the political and economic classes that control both countries.

Alexis knew of what he wrote. A committed left-wing activist during the dictatorship of Haitian dictator Francois Duvalier (and indeed, long before), Alexis helped form the Part d'Entente Populaire (Party of Popular Accord) in Haiti 1958, serving as the country's representative to the Thirteenth Congress of the Union of Soviet Writers in Moscow the following year, as well as traveling to the Conference of Communist Worker's Parties in Beijing in November 1960, where he met the Chinese Communist leader Mao Zedong. Setting sail from Cuba with a group of supporters on an ill-fated expedition to oust Duvalier on April 22, 1961 (the writer's thirty-ninth birthday), once ashore in Haiti, Alexis and his group were seized by Haitian soldiers, with the writer was eventually stoned to death by a group of peasants and street children at the urging of the local army and Tontons Macoutes, Duvalier's feared paramilitary henchmen.

Francois Duvalier succeeded in silencing the voice, if not the legacy, of Jacques Stephen Alexis.

In the present day, there are still those who, if perhaps not disposed to immediately take the step of publicly, physically murdering their opponents, seek to do as much through vilification and character assassination.

I have seen this first-hand in India, where supporters of that country’s hegemony in the restive Kashmir region have often sought to cast independence activists there, and indeed, most of the population, in the role of some sort of quasi-Taliban because of the unconscionable acts of a handful of violent jihadists. And, of course, I have seen it in Haiti, where individuals who have risked their lives to build a better country than the one that Jacques Stephen Alexis left behind are still regularly maligned by a privileged few with little knowledge and even less ethical and intellectual integrity,

As such, freedom of speech, especially when it’s the freedom to speak words that the powerful or the intolerant don’t want to hear, has always been an issue near and dear to my heart. And so, in that spirit, I ask you to read and meditate on a recent article I wrote for the Inter Press Service about a new film called The Price of Sugar, and a Paris conference, which deals with the state of Haitians laboring in the sugarcane fields of the Dominican Republic. It is a film that has sparked considerable controversy, and one whose message it would appear is very unwelcome in certain quarters in the halls of the powerful of Haiti’s’ neighbor to the East.

“Body blows wear them down,” a pugilistically-inclined friend once wrote to me, of those who would seek to scuttle an open and honest discussion of what transpires under cloaks of plotting and dissembling surrounding places such as Haiti and the Dominican Republic. “Though not as glamorous, they’re better for real challengers. Work the ribs. The arms will drop!"

While less inclined to view any discussion in terms of a take-no-prisoners kind of combat, I would just suggest that, as George Orwell once wrote in his preface to Animal Farm (which saw Orwell vilified by the British left for daring to criticize the Stalinist Soviet Union), if liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.