Arrernte rain ceremony, Alice Springs, Central Australia, c. 1895-1901.
During this very strange year, these are some of the books the made the biggest impression on me.
Père Goriot by Honoré de Balzac
A panoply of Bourbon-era France set in a Paris boardinghouse, this book introduces a cast of characters ranging from the devoted father Goriot to the aspirational law student Eugène de Rastignac to the cynic and fugitive convict Vautrin. Balzac casts a sceptical eye on the French capital and its moneyed inhabitants alluding to “the horror under the gold and the jewels” and that “at the bottom of every great fortune without apparent source, there’s always some crime, a crime overlooked because it’s been carried out respectably.”
The Great Terror: A Reassessment by Robert Conquest
This sprawling book, by perhaps the greatest historian writing in English on Joseph Stalin’s totalitarian Communism, is the story of how, through a thousand small compromises and miscalculations, the political class of a society allowed themselves to preside over the building of a concentration camp above ground and a mass grave below. Using the 1934 murder of Sergei Kirov as a pretext to begin mass purges and executions, Stalin was, as Conquest writes, “a monster who, while adhering to abstratct and fundemntally utopian ideas, in practice had no criterion but success – and that meant violence, and physical and spiritual extermination.” He was also a master at tricking his opponents into underestimating him, as “they could - and did - frequently delude themselves into thinking that he had submitted to the will of the politburo majority, and would henceforth be possible to work with.” Given the totalitarian flirtation the United States - through the skin of its teeth - is hopefully about to exit, it is good to remember Conquest’s observation that “Stalin required not only submission, but also complicity” in relation to all those who serve an authoritarian and are then smeared with a stain that will never wash off. Also, at a time when the hammer and sickle - a symbol that ought to be every bit as repellent in modern usage as the swastika - is thrown around by the Western pseudo-radical left as a kind of unlettered shorthand, this book is a good reminder for the grim human toll the disgraced fanaticism behind it exacted on the vulnerable.
Assad or We Burn the Country by Sam Dagher
This book by a veteran Lebanese-American journalist paints a convincing portrait of Syria’s ruling family as little more than a remorseless criminal enterprise pillaging the Syrian state and picking its bones clean. The supposedly initial reformist instincts of Bashar al-Assad and his wife Asma al-Assad were nothing more than “the beautiful and shiny wrapping paper around what remained a regime of lies and terror on the inside.” A regime that exported terror abroad - almost certainly playing a role in the murders in Lebanon of former Prime Minister Rafic Hariri, journalist Gebran Tueni and academic Samir Kassir, allowing the rump of Saddam Hussein’s Baʽath party sanctuary in Syria after the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq and allowing fighters of what was the Al-Qaeda in Iraq to flow freely through the country - at home Assad Inc. became increasingly subservient to the empire-building designs of the mullahs in Iran after the 2006 Lebanon Israel War. Though the recollections of the book’s main source – former Brigadier General of the Syrian Republican Guard and Assad confidante Manaf Tlass, who defected from the regime in July 2012 – are clearly self-serving, they still give a fascinating window into the inner working of the corrupt, ruthless and deluded system that currently squats over Syria
In terms of the international community, there are the by now customary assortment of demented, regime apologists and hangers on - the Carmelite nun “Mother” Agnes Mariam, the French conspiracy theorist Thierry Meyssan, Assad and Hezbollah defender Nir Rosen and the right-wing French politician Valérie Boyer - but there are also the United Nations officials and staff sitting breezily at the Four Seasons in Damascus as civilians are gassed and murdered by the regime merely miles away. United Nations official Yacoub El Hillo actually helps coaxe desperate, besieged civilians out of hiding in Homs only to have them disappeared by the regime, blithely dismissing criticism by saying “the UN is not the protector of Syrians in Syria.” There is the often-malevolent role of Qatar and Saudi Arabia. And finally there is the administration of former U.S. president Barack Obama, whose Syria policy - if it can even be called a policy - proved nothing short of disastrous.
The failure of the U.S. to act following Assad’s chemical weapons massacre in Ghouta in August 2013, a military response to which had serious Turkish and French support but which died on the vine due to the Obama administration's feckless vacillation - remains a turning point in the war. The French especially, were also ready to support an American military punishment of Assad but Obama blinked. Many saw Obama’s indecisiveness in Syria as interpreted by Vladimir Putin as a sign that he could invade Ukraine at little political cost the following year. And in Syria itself, once the full measure of Obama’s weakness on the issue was assessed, regime atrocity followed regime atrocity and ISIS completed its takeover of Raqqa in January 2014 and took over Iraq’s second-largest city, Mosul, only six months later.
The book’s sharp analysis rather falters when confronted with the personality and highly questionable motives of Donald Trump - which it treats with far too much credulity - but overall it is a useful contribution to the literature chronicling a uniquely awful world leader. The regime did not derive “its strength from the army, government and other institutions found in normal states,” Dagher concludes. “In fact the underpinning of this regime were the family and clan, more than two million Alawaites, the Mukhabarat system, the Hezbollah militia in Lebanon and Iran. Tens of thousands of soldiers and officers, a prime minister and other government officials ultimately defected, but all were peripheral to the regime. They were not part of its nerve center.”
Querelle by Jean Genet
An atmoospheric novel about a bisexual sailor, thief and serial killer in the French port city of Brest, this book provides a rich description of Brest and the carnival of the damned that inhabit Georges Querelle’s world. Brest is “heavy yet luminous...A hard, solid city, built out of gray Breton granite... If Brest ever seems more lighthearted, it is when a feeble sun gilds the facades which are as noble as those of Venice, or when its narrow streets teem with carefree sailors – or, then, even when there is fog and rain.” Through such turns of phrase as describing a thug’s hand, festooned with rings, as “armored rather than ornamented,” Genet displays his ability to bring the denizens of the underworld to life for the reader in original and striking ways.
Broken Song: T.G.H. Strehlow and Aboriginal Possession by Barry Hill
A finely-researched and beautifully-written biography of Australian anthropologist Ted Strehlow, this 800 page book examines the dramatic story of his iconoclastic life along with some very important questions about the role of outsiders in vulnerable communities, how they interact with those communities, who has a right to knowledge and the nature of academic research.
In 2009, I spent several weeks traveling around the Northern Territory of Australia, which forms the basis of the book and much of Strehlow’s work, and it made a deep impression on me, from the intense physical beauty of the place, to the difficult circumstances which many local people lived in to the, to me, at least to me, extremely complex and hard-to-grasp cosmology of spiritual belief and language.
Strehlow, on the other hand, was not an “outsider” to this region in the sense of many historians or anthropologists. He was born in Hermannsburg, also called Ntaria, and grew up trilingual, the son of a German Lutheran pastor and, in addition to German and English, Strehlow also became fluent in Arranda, the local indigenous language. After spending a decade in Adelaide, more than 1,500 miles to the south, he returned to Central Australia, His father had itemized hundreds of Aranda myths and recounted them by their aboriginal names and sometimes the places to watch the stories were connected.
Only a few years before Strehlow’s father arrived, a pogrom had been launched against indigenous Australians in nearby Barrow Creek and where the remains of the Kaititya people could be uncovered in and around a locale dolorously named Skull Creek for decades. Press coverage of the violence, often instituted by marauding whites, verged on genocidal, referring to indigenous Australians as “wolves'' and “inhuman monsters'' who were “unfit to live.” In researching the history of this part of Australia, one comes across many Outback versions of Joseph Conrad’s Mister Kurtz.
Strehlow, on the other hand, treated the indigenous culture with great respect, spending years transcribing Arranda songs and poems from older, initiated men that he feared might be lost and acquiring, in the process, hundreds of ceremonial objects known as tjurunga that the men, he insisted, had passed on to him in formal surrender ceremonies. He witnessed and recorded around 200 sacred ceremonies.
As Hill writes
The whole life of the region was, in a sense, conducted according to song, the secrets of which was central to the laws of the culture, so that existence was made to pivot on a stark contradiction: On the one hand a bare, elemental life; on the other one that thrived on an elaborate use of language. The whole region was animated by song that gave almost everything – fauna, flora, much of the typography - meanings. The train was a narrative, and songs, like rain, united the sky with the earth, and day with the stars of the night. The songs were important among the deeds to the land. To sing a song with the transmit proprietorial responsibilities to others. A song serves to locate men and women in totemic terms, and this in turn mapped individuals with regard to birthplace and place of conception. A man or a woman, and the clan to which they belong to, owned the song as they owned the land, rather in the spirit of copyright as it is understood today. They belong to the song and it’s country, as much as the singer’s voice belongs to his or her body. Everything in the scheme of things was vitally, metaphysically connected. Spirit animated earth: the ground of life was valued as spirit.
In 1971, nearly 40 years after he began his initial research, Strehlow published his study of Aranda ceremonial poetry, Songs of Central Australia. Though mocked at the time by publications such as the Times Literary Supplement, it has since become seen as one of the great works of anthropology to emerge from the continent.
Towards the end of the Strehlow’s life the question of ownership of the ceremonial objects he acquired became more complex, with younger indigenous representatives calling for the objects to be returned while Strehlow resisted, saying they had been entrusted to his care. As the book makes clear, Strehlow had strong grounds for distrust of any type of officialdom.
After protracted negotiations that went beyond even Strehlow’s death in 1978, the objects are now housed at the Strehlow Research Centre Alice Springs in the Northern Territory of Australia. All in all a bracing biography about a compelling figure that raises many important questions.
Dubliners by James Joyce
For me, one of the great short story collections of all time and somehow redolent of the fading light and low shadows of autumn, these finely-observed, tender portraits of the working class of Ireland in the early 1900s remain powerful even today.
Clasp by Doireann Ní Ghríofa
The first English-language collection of poems by the Irish poet Doireann Ní Ghríofa, who had previously written exclusively in Gaelic, this is a volume that alternates between lyrical musings and a sometimes jarring attention to the corporeal world, often in highly musical languages Though many lines concentrate in issues of domesticity, just behind the veil there is a rustling of something more. “I’ve never been so far from home,” writes the narrator of the poem Maeve in Chile. “No, I’ve never been so close.”
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