July-September 2019: Turning the tables - Postcolonial Writers on the Colonizers

...but the turbaned bearer never lost his bearing
and nothing shook the bottle off his tray.
Through all infinity and almost down to zero
he holds out and can't die or fade away
loyal to the breakfasting Scots hero.
Tony Harrison, "Old soldiers"

I don't think we can call the West Riding a postcolonial country, so Tony Harrison is probably off-topic for this theme read, but his famous poem very clearly point out how colonialism relied on the expectation that the people subjected to it were not entitled or equipped to speak for themselves. Something the manufacturers of the coffee recognised when they later changed the label to show the Sikh sitting down with the Scotsman...

(You can spend many happy hours deconstructing that label, working out how "traditional" the uniforms really are, or how relevant that Sir Hector MacDonald of the lovely knees and moustache has posthumously been claimed as an LGBT icon...)

Turning the Tables

So, this theme-read is about what writers from postcolonial countries have to say about the experience of colonialism and about the people who colonised them. I deliberately kept the terms broad when I proposed it, and the aim is that we should try to read them in that spirit: fiction and non-fiction, old and new, historical and contemporary, Africa and Asia, America (South and North if you want), Ireland and Greenland if you think that's relevant, books set in the colonised world or in the colonising countries (diaspora in Britain, France, Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands, etc.).

I'll set out a few examples that strike me as relevant in the posts below, but I hope each of us will feel free to carve out their own path through postcolonial writing, and share thoughts on writers and ideas that might be new to the rest of us.

On being colonised:

For obvious reasons, there aren't many contemporary accounts of the transition to colonial status from the colonised people's point of view, but there's plenty of historical writing, fiction and non-fiction.

Things fall apart (1958) by China Achebe (Nigeria) - probably the most famous African novel ever, with the other to volumes in the trilogy it forms an account of the way the arrival of Europeans destabilised a traditional society.
If you haven't done a course where this was on the syllabus, it might be time to consider reading it for pleasure...

Paradise (1994) by Abdulrazak Gurnah (Tanzania) - a novel that explores the complex society of East Africa around the time of the transition from Arab to German colonialism.

Sudden Death (2013) by Alvaro Enrigue (Mexico) - via the not inconsiderable detour of a game of real tennis between a Spanish poet and an Italian painter, Enrigue explores some of the ways European and Mexican culture interfered with each other in the early days of the Spanish conquest.

The kingdom of this world (1949) by Alejo Carpentier (Cuba)
The black Jacobins (1938) by CLR James (Trinidad)
- Haiti has a good claim to be the first "post-colonial" state in the world these are two quite different (but both essential) accounts of the Haitian revolution by great Caribbean writers, one a magic-realist novelist, the other a Marxist historian and cricket-writer.

Foe (1986) by J.M. Coetzee (South Africa) - postcolonial, feminist reading of the Robinson Crusoe story and The Tempest (and various other things...). (See also the Tempest readings mentioned in >9 spiphany: below)

The good hope (1964) by William Heinesen (Faroes) - not an obvious choice, perhaps, but this is very much a novel about the abuses of colonialism, even if the setting is in the North Atlantic.

The fatal shore (1986) by Robert Hughes (Australia) - This is a nice example of what I mean when I say we shouldn't get into arguments about terms. There's only a very limited sense in which you could class Australia as a postcolonial country, but this is an incredibly powerful (non-fiction) account, written from the perspective of the people on the receiving end, of the terrible things that can happen when a country on one side of an ocean decides that it can do what it likes with a piece of territory on the other side of the ocean.

...more to come

On decolonisation and the postcolonial state:

Midnight's children (1981) by Salman Rushdie (India, UK) - Rushdie's big novel graphically takes us through the traumatic events of independence and partition before moving on to tell us what he thinks of Mrs Gandhi...

The interpreters (1965) by Wole Soyinka (Nigeria) - a group of motivated young people come face to face with the challenges of building a new society after the end of colonial rule.

A grain of wheat (1967) by Ngugi wa Thiong'o (Kenya) - a classic political novel about the end of British rule in Kenya, a book that often seems framed as an angry response to the "classic" colonial novels by European writers.

The Meursault investigation (2014) by Kamel Daoud (Algeria) - the story of Camus's L'étranger, seen from the point of view of the Arab Meursault kills.

...more to come

The (former) colonisers at home:

Travel writing and migration literature:

A passage to England (1959) by Nirad Chaudhuri (India) - sounds more fun than it is; Chaudhuri, on a trip to England in the fifties, is more interested in being fair to his hosts than in satirising them. But there are a few entertaining insights into what British behaviour looks like to an Indian.

The lonely Londoners (1956) by Sam Selvon (Trinidad)
The enigma of arrival (1987) by V S Naipaul (Trinidad)
- the "Windrush generation"; what England looked like to the first big group of Caribbean workers to arrive in the fifties.

Brick Lane (2003) by Monica Ali
The buddha of suburbia (1990) by Hanif Kureishi
- two classic (fictional) accounts of life for South Asian families in London

...more to come

Reserved for something or other

I would add to the above the colonial history of the Balkans and Eastern Europe under the Ottomans, a history that has been at least as damaging to the indigenous populations as that of Western European colonialisms on other continents.

>6 LolaWalser: Definitely! Lots more reasons to read Kazantzakis, Ivo Andrić, Ismail Kadare and the rest if we didn't get round to them in Q1.

>7 thorold:

Absolutely, although for my part I'm hoping to get mostly to some of the non-fiction I've accumulated over the years. Be prepared for an earful on the topic of one of my favourite terms-to-hate, "balkanisation"... ;)

So the thread is open for business? I might as well kick off with a few words about two books I read recently...

Alain Mabanckou's The tears of the black man collects a dozen, shall we say essays, in 80 slim pages--extremely high ratio of food for thought per page... The pieces go in different directions but if there is an overall tone, it's set by Mabanckou's conviction that what matters the most is the present and individual disposing of the energies and opportunities at one's command. He is not afraid to point out the various separations within the category of people called "black", for example the conflicts between Africans and African-Americans (Mabanckou is from Congo via France but has been living in the US for years), or to discuss such potentially embarrassing characters as the Malian author Yambo Ouologuem, accused of plagiarism in the 1960s. (Mabanckou, whose novel Verre Cassé employs a narrative stitched of great many allusions to, pastiches of and direct quotations from French classics, suggests that some misunderstanding of Ouologuem's technique may have been at the heart of the scandal.)

The appendix to "The road to Europe" reproduces the letter found with two Guinean boys (about 14-15 years old) who were found dead on the plane to Belgium they stowed in--they had frozen to death. You can read the letter here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yaguine_Koita_and_Fod%C3%A9_Tounkara

Therefore, if you see that we have sacrificed ourselves and risked our lives, this is because we suffer too much in Africa and that we need you to fight against poverty and to put an end to the war in Africa.

Wole Soyinka's Of Africa echoed some of Mabanckou's opinions, or maybe stance would be a better word... Not to beat about the bush, he too evinces frustration and disappointment at the way things have gone--in Nigeria, specifically, and a few other countries discussed--since decolonisation. More than that, he is bewildered and terrified by the rise of Islamic fundamentalism (the collection dates from 2012), and in an extended essay gives a picture of what a real, or indigenous, pre-colonialisation by Arabs or Europeans, African religion was like, is, and still could be. There are germs here for a system of an African philosophy, based on a relativistic and tolerant attitude, a disposition that proposes placating, communicating, and working with rather than against something.

In another similarity, Soyinka, like Mabanckou, brings up the explosive topic of the role of Africans and Arabs in enslavement of Africans to the Europeans. It's very difficult to comment on. These things--African and Muslim oppression and collaboration with the white oppressors, African corruption, African contribution to ongoing wars and devastation of Africa--are not to be disentangled from the role colonialism and historical and current Western politics played in the genesis of the current situation. There is no question of "excusing" or justifying white oppression. And there is every reason to decry the ongoing failure of the West, Europe, whites, to engage with Africa's problems generously, away from economic calculations that, planned or not, leave it at the mercy of creditors, or simply leave it, abandon to despair.

As usual I am still trying to work through books I have lined up for last quarter (or at least finish the ones I started), but in the meantime, a couple of quick thoughts:

There was a book published a number of years ago called The Empire Writes Back which I believe has been influential in literary scholarship on postcolonialism; obviously the title captures a similar idea as the descriptor "turning the tables" of this theme read.
The authors of the book, as it turns out, have also put together a website Postcolonial Web which is a useful portal for finding authors who write from a postcolonial perspective.

One way that writers from the colonies have "turned the tables" to challenge the narratives of the colonies is by revisiting canonical literary works: a well-known example of this is Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys, which responds to "Jane Eyre"; there have also been a couple of works responding to Shakespeare's "Tempest" from a Caribbean perspective: Prospero's Daughter by Elizabeth Nunez and the short story Shift by Nalo Hopkinson.

(This reminds me to my great chagrin that I still have an e-book version of a friend's dissertation -- on "writing back" and magical realism in Canadian First Nations writing -- which I have yet to get around to reading, and I've been meaning to read Dipesh Chakrabarty's Provincializing Europe for ages, so maybe I'll use this quarter as a motivation to work on some of my non-fiction backlog.)

>10 thorold: I should have remembered The Empire Writes Back - we used excerpts from it in the postcolonial lit course I took 25 years ago. Looks as though it's been updated a few times since then, but not for a while.

Other countries whose colonising efforts we tend to forget include Russia (the Baltic states, the Stans, the Caucasus, Siberia...), China (Tibet) and the USA (the Philippines, Hawaii...)
I can't think of any relevant titles for the USA and China off the top of my head, but I've read a handful of novels that fit the bill on the Russian side:
Chukotka: Unna by Juri Rytcheu, and probably everything else he's written, but Unna is my favourite and it describes very well what cultural alienation does to people.
Uzbekistan: Nuit (only available in French translation, AFAIK) by Tchulpân, an anticolonial author who was given the death penalty for his "counterrevolutionary activities"
Estonia: The Man Who Spoke Snakish by Andrus Kivirähk

I'll be starting this quarter with The Poor Christ of Bomba by Mongo Béti, a classic novel from 1956 about missionary work in Africa.

ETA: It might be time to revisit Frantz Fanon, especially after having just read Politiques de l'inimitié (it looks like there are Dutch and German translations) by Achille Mbembe, whose second part reads like a book report on Fanon's work.

>11 Dilara86: Probably not the best example for China, but one I happen to have read a few years ago, was Vikram Seth’s first book, From Heaven Lake, where he writes about visiting Sinkiang and Tibet during his time as an Indian student in China.

>12 thorold: I've just read your review, and I'm definitely interested!

On the non-fiction side, there are so many classics that deserve to be read:

Frantz Fanon: The Wretched of the Earth and Black Skin, White Masks (no introduction necessary)
Edward Said: Culture and Imperialism (classics - Austen, Kipling, Conrad, Camus - viewed from the side of the Colonised and authors from former colonies: Achebe, Rushdie, Césaire, Ngugi Wa Thiongo), Orientalism
Assia Djebar: Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade (interconnected memoirs and essay - personally, I found it far from engrossing but others loved it and it is a classic, and available in English!)
Gayatri Spivak: Can the Subaltern Speak? (theory-speak heavy and hard-going, but a classic) and anything tagged "subaltern studies"
Albert Memmi: The Colonizer and the Colonized
Aimé Césaire: Discourse on Colonialism

Books I haven't read yet but want to read:

Sara Suleri: The Rhetoric of English India
Ngugi Wa Thiongo: Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature

>11 Dilara86: "the USA (the Philippines, Hawaii...) . . . I can't think of any relevant titles for the USA and China off the top of my head,"

I think that perhaps When the Rainbow Goddess Wept by Cecilia Manguerra Brainard might fit this category, at least kinda sorta. From my review . . .

" . . . a coming of age story told through the eyes of a 9-year old girl growing up in the Philippines whose life is shattered by the onset of WW Two and the Japanese invasion of the country. Her family literally heads for the hills so that her father, an American-educated engineer sure to be targeted by the invaders, can join and help lead the guerrilla resistance forces. Mixed into this tale (and the story does not spare the horrors of war) are many Filipino folk tales, as told to the narrator (and then recounted by her) by the family's old retainer, who learned them at the feet of an old folk master."

The reason I bring the book up here is that within the narrative, Brainard, who was born in the Phillippines, discusses all the reasons the Filipino guerrillas have to distrust the Americans who are there to try to help liberate them from the Japanese, including all the many ways the Americans had betrayed the Filipinos' trust and worked to subjugate them (often murderously) during the days of the American colonization of the country. As mentioned, the book is written by a native Filipina, but it is written in English.

>15 rocketjk: Thank you! When the Rainbow Goddess Wept looks very relevant to the theme and a very good fit to what I like to read. It's gone into my ever-expanding wishlist.

This is in French, so of limited use here, sorry about that, but I thought it's worth at least noting, given the above recommendations for Fanon and that the topic of the programme refers directly to decolonisation... "Algeria, from trauma to denial: when will the spirit be decolonised?"

Alger, du trauma au déni : à quand la décolonisation de l’esprit ?

This is really a leftover from the Caribbean theme read - but it also fits in very nicely with the current postcolonial theme:

In the castle of my skin (1953) by George Lamming (Barbados, 1927- )

  

George Lamming is one of the generation of exciting young writers who established Caribbean literature as a serious force in the early 1950s, and was involved in projects like the Caribbean Voices radio programme with people like Derek Walcott, Sam Selvon, and V.S. Naipaul. He has taught at the University of the West Indies and at various British and American institutions.

Lamming's first, and best-known, novel is the essentially autobiographical story of a boy, G., growing up in a small village on Barbados before and during the Second World War. But it's also an account of the history of the Caribbean, of the peculiar social structures and confused loyalties and identities left behind by slavery and colonialism. Lamming uses an experimental narrative style that allows him to treat the village almost more as a collective organism than as a collection of individual characters. The villagers struggle to make sense of their place in the wider world through the limited information they have access to and the distortions in the Anglocentric, imperialist curriculum of the village school, where most of the teachers have had no education that goes beyond what they are supposed to be teaching.

The village has grown up as a quasi-feudal dependency of the landlord and employer, Mr Creighton, in the aftermath of the end of slavery. And although there are still one or two old people who grew up as children of slaves, the village as a whole has no capacity for grasping what that meant. And they are even less aware of the way their lives are locked into the feudal relationship with Creighton: the anti-colonial agitation in the island that persuades him to sell up to members of the rising black middle class also allows him to decide that he has been absolved of his responsibility for his former tenants, and they are suddenly left facing homelessness and the destruction of their community.

This is a political novel, but it's also a very poetic one: there are long, beautiful passages of observation of the island world in which nothing important seems to happen (the headmaster looking out over the silent school, three crabs walking up a beach, a boy being bathed by his mother in the back garden), but at the same time we learn an astonishing amount about what it must feel like to live in such a setting. The narrative viewpoint switches around disconcertingly between the "I"-narrator, G., and various other characters, and we are launched into unfinished storylines that may or may not be picked up later. It's a book you need time and leisure for, but a very rewarding one to invest them in.

No post in the last ten days? Is everybody outside enjoying the sun ;) ?

Having said that, I'm not sure any of my recent reads fit the theme... I finished The Poor Christ of Bomba ages ago but never got around to writing a post about it. I would definitely recommend it for this quarter, however.

I also read Grégory Jarry's three last tomes about French colonialism: Petite histoire des colonies françaises, tome 3 : La Décolonisation, Petite histoire des colonies françaises - Tome 4 : La Françafrique and Petite histoire des colonies françaises, Tome 5 : Les Immigrés. They're satirical comic books and good for a chuckle or two, but because they mix real history/politics with made-up facts that are not always easy to spot, they're better if you already have a good grasp of the topic. You also need a reasonably high tolerance level for the n-word and other racist tropes used ironically. They're clearly written from the point of view of an anticolonial white French author addressing anticolonial white French readers: there is no turning of the tables and non-white people are very much "they".

Books that I read more recently and that are tangential to this quarter's theme in that the authors come from former - or at the time current - British colonies:
Luck is the Hook, a poetry collection by Imtiaz Dharker, a British-Pakistani poet. The poems are gorgeous and describe places and experiences in both Britain and the subcontinent.
Efuru by Flora Nwapa, the first female African published author. I'm about half-way through, and so far, the reality she describes predates decolonisation.

>19 Dilara86: Is everybody outside enjoying the sun ;) ?
Guilty! I’ve let myself get sucked into what has turned out to be a rather lengthy (but very enjoyable) sailing trip. Should be back home and able to visit the library sometime next week.

Alain Mabanckou's name caught my eye in the library as someone who's been mentioned on this thread (>8 LolaWalser:). This particular novel certainly isn't the most relevant to the theme, but it does engage with the way postcolonial culture is inextricably tangled up in metropolitan traditions - lots of references to Victor Hugo, Georges Brassens, Rimbaud, the San-Antonio crime novels and Le petit prince, as well as Bollywood and Hong Kong martial arts movies...

Also ties in with George Lamming in odd ways, including a guest appearance by some crabs on the last page!

Demain j'aurai vingt ans (2010; Tomorrow I'll be twenty) by Alain Mabanckou (Congo, 1966- )

  

It's 1979 in Pointe-Noire, second city of the young and flourishing People's Republic of Congo, and ten-year-old Michel is having a hard time dealing with the pressures of growing up. His friend Caroline has made him commit to two children, a white dog and a red car with five seats before deserting him for a more glamorous boy who plays number 11 for one of the local teams, his wealthy Uncle René keeps lecturing him about Marxism, his parents clearly have complicated problems of their own, there is confusing news on the radio about the Shah, Idi Amin, Bokassa, and Giscard d'Estaing, and it's tricky attempting to fly under the radar at school without prejudicing your chance of a good grade in your primary certificate. Fortunately Michel has his best friend Lounès and his brother's girlfriend Geneviève rooting for him, not to mention a bit of unofficial support from Georges Brassens, Papa Wemba and the lovely Arthur Rimbaud...

This is the corny old trick of looking at the adult world through the naïve and (accidentally-on-purpose) ironic gaze of a child narrator, something that can soon become irritating if handled clumsily, especially in a book of this length. Mabanckou is obviously aware of the pitfalls of the technique, and dances around them with supreme confidence. The book leaps from mood to mood and topic to topic unpredictably, with characters and storylines coming and going, bits of backstory or inserted narratives hopping in from nowhere when we're least expecting them. We scarcely get a chance to complain that we're fed up with Michel's voice, there's so much else going on around him, and - until it's too late to do anything about it - we don't even get the idea that we are in a carefully constructed narrative that's heading for a pre-planned conclusion. Very clever.

One of the important threads in the book is Michel's attempt to work out where he is in the world, culturally and politically. How does his modern urban experience tie into the stories of traditional village life he hears from his elders? how to resolve the communist rhetoric he hears from his teachers and Uncle René with the culture of buying and selling he lives in? how does all that fit into the francophone culture he's been told he has a stake in as well? and why is everyone being so nasty to the poor Shah when the nasty Idi Amin is living in comfort in Saudi Arabia? None of it makes very much obvious sense, and some of it is there mostly to give Mabanckou scope for faux-naïve jokes about world leaders (like Pompidou and Brezhnev, who have "beaucoup de sourcils" to deal with), but Michel is growing up, and he starts to find some tangible threads to follow in all the mess. Whether or not he makes it to the white dog and the red car with five seats, we have the feeling when we leave him that he is going to find some kind of a purposeful way through the world.

(Afterthought: I was wondering how Mabanckou managed to resist the temptation to make Sylvester Stallone jokes in a book where decadent French poets play such an important role - it turns out that the first Rambo film was only made in 1982. Full marks for historical accuracy!)

I haven't been pulling my weight around here these last few months because I'm working very long hours at the moment and I don't have enough functioning brain cells by the end of the day to write anything cogent. I'm still following this thread, however, so I thought I'd link to this Guardian article: The best books to help understand race in Britain.

>22 Dilara86: I enjoyed the way he dispenses with the hypocritical convention of ending the article with a footnote saying “Nikesh Shukla is the editor of The Good Immigrant” and just gives it a straightforward plug himself :-)

I spent a couple of sunny afternoons on the balcony reading my new copy of The empire writes back and I'm fairly sure I got all the way through it without falling asleep. But, unlike last time I had to read parts of it, there wasn't an essay deadline involved...

The empire writes back (1989) by Bill Ashcroft (Australia, 1946- ), Gareth Griffiths (Wales, Australia, 1943- ) and Helen Tiffin (Australia, 1945- )

  

Taking its title from an article by Salman Rushdie in the Times in 1982, this classic of literary theory was the first proper undergraduate-ready guide to post-colonial literatures. And it's still in print - and therefore presumably still on the syllabus - thirty years after it originally came out in 1989.

Like many famous books, it turns out to be much thinner than you expect - just over 220 pages of text (plus bibliography, index and notes) in the 2002 second edition. After setting out what post-colonial literature is and going through the main issues it has to deal with, the authors look in more detail at the ways post-colonial writers in English have tackled the tricky problem of their relationship with the language of the former colonial power. Then we get a chapter of case-studies of half a dozen very different post-colonial works, and two chapters on theory, one dealing with the ways post-colonial critics have applied indigenous theoretical models (old, e.g. the Indian tradition of Sanskrit scholarship; and new, e.g. Fanon's négritude) to post-colonial writing, the other with ways post-colonial writing fits into - or undermines - western literary theory (marxism, poststructuralism, feminism, ...).

The second edition concludes with a new chapter responding to problems readers raised about the original book in 1989, and also bringing us up to date on some of the new ways post-colonial theory has been applied since then, e.g. to environmental problems in the developing world (Arundhati Roy, Ken Saro-Wiwa).

The Australian authors insist on a very wide definition of "post-colonial": "all the culture affected by the imperial process from the moment of colonisation to the present day". And they spend a good page and a half defending that hyphen - these things matter (to the sort of people who earn their living writing books about literary theory, if not to the rest of us...). But it is important to know that they think of that "post" as being rather different from the "post" in postmodern. As far as they are concerned, colonialism has started to exert its effect the moment someone plants a flag on your beach and says "we are more important than you are", and it keeps on doing it indefinitely. As long as the experience of having been colonised is relevant to the work we're discussing, we are free to discuss it as a post-colonial work, even if it's from one of the famous borderline cases, like Ireland or the USA or Mexico. Slavery is definitely on-topic, and so is oppression of indigenous peoples or minorities within (post-)colonial places. But obviously, we're most likely to be applying the lessons of The empire writes back to writing from Africa, South Asia, or the Caribbean (the explicit coverage of the book is limited to writings in English, but they acknowledge that writings in non-European languages and in the languages of other colonial powers, especially Spanish, would be very relevant).

Because of its concise and sometimes rather dense format and its focus on sometimes quite abstract theoretical issues, this is more likely to be a book you turn to when writing essays than something you would choose to read for pleasure. But it is clearly a very influential book in its field. If you haven't heard of it, you probably don't need it, and if you have heard of it then you know what you're getting into...

In the spirit of that definition of "post-colonial", I realise that another book I read recently is quite relevant to this thread, albeit by an author who is now so mainstream it's difficult to think of him as fitting into the framework of Reading Globally any more:

Quichotte (2019) by Salman Rushdie (UK, 1947- )

  

- I won't repost my full review here, but what is relevant for the purpose of "turning the tables" is that Rushdie's latest is a book about characters from a privileged Mumbai middle-class background (that clearly owes a lot of its cultural values and status to the influence of the former British colonial presence) finding themselves at odds with the culture of the US, dealing with things like the status of South Asian "Indians" vs. Native American "Indians", post 9/11 xenophobia, Hollywood vs. Bollywood, etc. And a lot of other important stuff as well, of course, about quests and stories and the apocalypse and the transformative power of imagined realities...

Wandering around the Five Books site always turns up something of interest:

The best books on Indian Journeys recommended by Roy Moxham. Don't overlook some of his own books listed in the side-bio.

And, The best books on Africa through African Eyes recommended by George Ayittey

There are plenty more interesting leads you can turn up using the search box on the site, and each posting has related postings.

>26 featherbear: Thanks! There's some interesting stuff there!

We're technically already in Q4, but this is a book I've particularly wanted to read for some time, and an author who loves digging into the contrasts between post-colonial and metropolitan. If you're new to Carpentier, El siglo de las luces/Explosion in a cathedral is another very interesting book for this theme, looking at the failure of enlightenment culture expressed in the way the French revolution dealt with the Caribbean colonies.

Los pasos perdidos (1953; The lost steps) by Alejo Carpentier (Cuba, 1904-1980)

  

Like all of Carpentier's books that I've read so far, this turns out to be about the contrast between the rich, "baroque" post-colonial culture of Latin America and the failed enlightenment rationalism of the Old World. The narrator is a composer, Cuban-born but living in Europe (or possibly the USA - Carpentier likes to keep things unspecified). He has an unfulfilling but well-paid job writing music for advertising films, and is married to Ruth, an actor.

He's just finished work on a film project, and Ruth has gone off on tour, when he gets an invitation from one of his university contacts to make a journey to the South-American rainforest to look for musical instruments used by indigenous people. He's reluctant, but his girlfriend Mouche proposes that they go and spend a couple of weeks together at the university's expense in a nice hotel in the South American capital city and browse the local antique shops for drums and flutes.

Needless to say, it doesn't work out like that, and they have to make the full journey after all, travelling through a succession of zones that illustrate the rich complexity of the local culture, with its intertwined threads of Conquistador, African and Indigenous influence, increasingly dominated as they get nearer to the forest by the astonishing energy of the natural environment. The narrator transfers his affections from Mouche, who turns out not to be sufficiently crease-resistant for up-river travel, to Rosario, a fully-attuned local woman who embodies everything the narrator likes about where he is and, as a bonus, even reminds him of his Cuban mother. And they find themselves in a simple rainforest community, where time seems to have been frozen since the stone age, and where the narrator would have been perfectly happy to spend the rest of his life in harmony with nature.

Whilst the Edenic valley inevitably turns out not to be the escape he thought it was going to be, the journey helps him to see the metropolitan world he's been living in more clearly, and understand how futile and tired its cultural themes are without the enriching elements the post-colonial world offers.

This is a full-on symbolic journey through all the senses, where the impressions the narrator gets from the world around him are more important than the concrete events of the plot: it's a book full of scents and tastes and images and textures as well as language, natural sounds and music. Beethoven, Bach, botany, birdsong, 17th century painters, Homer, Shelley, Goethe and Shakespeare, ... even Alberic Magnard gets a look-in. But Stravinsky and Picasso are conspicuous by their absence: Carpentier obviously doesn't hold with the modernists' way of rediscovering the Primitive. Very interesting!

spiphany has set up the Q4 theme on Mitteleuropa here: https://www.librarything.com/topic/311773

But don't hesitate to carry on posting in this thread if you come across something interesting!

Chant de l'étoile du nord : Carnet de Iboshi Hokuto by Iboshi Hokuto, translated by Fumi Tsukuhara and Patrick Blanche





Writer’s gender: Male
Writer’s nationality: Japanese
Original language: Japanese
Translated into: French
Location: Japan and Hokkaido in particular
Written between 1924 and 1929



This was a chance find on my local library’s poetry shelves. Iboshi Hokuto was an Ainu poet and activist. Ainus are the original inhabitants of the Japanese islands, predating the Japanese majority. Like many indigenous peoples around the world, they were pushed to the less hospitable parts of their country - in this case, Hokkaido - and suffered from the effect of acculturation and discrimination.

Iboshi wrote tankas and haikus in Japanese, some of which were published in various magazines. This was not enough to make a living. He therefore worked as a fisherman and a peddler selling hemorrhoid ointments (yes, really! And he wrote poetry about it.) This peripatetic life means he was able to visit many Ainu villages, collect anthropological data and spread his ideas. He died in his twenties from TB, exhaustion and malnutrition. Despite his short life, Iboshi is considered to be one of the greatest Ainu poets.

A lot of thought and care went into this slim book. It’s a collection of Iboshi’s tankas and of some of his haikus, in the original Japanese and in French, preceded by two introductions and a short biography. These were extremely useful and interesting, and I found the poetry moving, but it really is difficult to judge the quality of poetry in translation. There are many political poems, about the mistreatment of Ainus by the Japanese majority, and even about his feelings on westernisation. One quibble: footnotes were replaced by “free” notes placed in the margins, which was not terribly user-friendly.


I am extremely happy to have found and bought this book.

My Garden (Book): by Jamaica Kincaid

The title above appears as it does on the cover; there are no errors in it.

While this is actually a book about a Vermont garden, and various thoughts thereon, Kincaid does present some strong feelings on colonialism in it. While I won't get into the garden aspects of the book, I thought her ideas on the importation of plants to colonies by colonizers (particularly English), their impact on the landscape as they tried to replicate their European ideas of "the garden" (the garden not being an idea shared in all cultures) and the subsequent disappearance of native plants might be interesting in the context of this theme. Writing of her country Antigua, she says seen everywhere there

What did the botanical life of Antigua consist of at the time another famous explorer (Christoper Columbus) first saw it? To see a garden in Antigua now will not supply a clue. The bougainvillea named for another restive European... is native to tropical South America; the plumbago is from southern Africa; the croton is from Malaysia; the hibiscus is from Asia (unfringed petal) and Africa (fringed petal); the allamanda is from Brazil; the poinsettia... is from Mexico; the bird of paradise is from southern Africa; the Bermuda lily is from Japan; the flamboyant tree is from Madagascar; the causarina comes from Australia; the Norfolk pine is from Norfolk Island in the South Pacific; the tamarind tree is from Africa and Asia. The mango is from Asia. The breadfruit is from the East Indies.
...
What herb of any beauty grew in this place? What tree? And did the people who lived there grow them for their own sake? I do not know, I can find no record of it....

She concludes that nowadays The botany of Antigua exists in medical folklore" only.

Most of us are aware of the agricultural devastation wrought by colonizers everywhere, but the idea of what they had done to the surrounding untended landscapes in the way of plant upheaval had not really occurred to me. I have a reasonable knowledge of the plant explorers (thieves in Kincaid's eyes) and their trophies, but had not really followed it through to the disruption to other locales caused by their importation for purely decorative purposes, unless those same plants had morphed into invasive weeds in their new locations.

Since thorold included Alvaro Enrigue's Sudden Death in the introduction to this thread, I thought I'd include my recent review here.

This is a fanciful, inventive novel by Mexican writer Alvaro Enrigue about the twin seismic events in Western history of the Counter Reformation that sought to crush Protestantism under the weight of Inquisition and expulsion and the destruction of the Aztec Empire by Hernan Cortes and creation of New Spain which brought new wealth to Europe. The narrative mostly jumps back and forth between two scenarios. First is a whimsically rendered tennis grudge match played between the Italian artist Caravaggio and the Spanish poet Quevedo. Much is made over the rules of early versions of tennis, the differences in the composition of the balls, as well as the symbolic (and invented) detail of four tennis balls filled with the hair of Anne Boleyn, shorn just before her execution. Second is the progress of Cortes and his relationship with Montezuma, whose world he is about to destroy. The tone of almost all of this is deceptively light, often played for laughs. But the veil is often pulled back, the smile shown to be the grin of a death's head. For both focus also spins out from the tennis game to show us that nobles and religious figures who sponsor and support both artists--and those figures' forebears--men who can at the same time appreciate a revolutionary use of lighting in a painting and condemn thousands and thousands of people to death via the headman's axe and the pyre. The Aztec culture is identified as tyrannical and murderous, and the conflict between Cortes and Montezuma as resulting in a sea of misery and blood. With all that being true, how to reflect accurately how delightful a reading experience I found this? Let's go back to the start and speak of a novel fanciful, inventive slyly humorous and inventive.