New and Selected

Wandering Star and Onitsha

2009-03-29T10:12:00.000-07:00

2 novels by Jean-Marie Gustave LeClézio

J.M.G LeClézio’s Nobel award may have been a deliberate snub of the solipsistic American literary world, but it is also a triumph for French literature, unrecognized with the prize for twenty years. Of course, LeClézio cannot be reduced to an icon of national pride. He links his own identity to Mauritius, the Indian Ocean Island where his British father was born and where LeClézio holds joint citizenship. Even French President Nicholas Sarkozy has admitted LeClézio is a son of the world, rather than merely of France. LeClézio spent portions of his childhood in Mauritius and Nigeria. On his own, he has moved persistently around the globe, living in England, the United States, and even for several years with a tribe in Panama.

As can be expected, LeClézio’s writing reflects this nomadic element of his life. In Wandering Star, the last of his novels to be translated into English, he grapples with displacement and loss. "Is it ever really possible to retrieve what you've left behind?" his character Esther wonders when she is young and her mother still calls her Hélène to hide her Jewish heritage. It is World War II and the two women are forced to pack quickly and flee over the mountains toward Italy and across the sea toward Jerusalem. The terror of war and homelessness is not just experienced by Esther and her mother and the thousands of others on the same path through hostile Europe. LeClézio exposes also the hunger and heat of the refuge camp where Nejma, a young Arab girl, is confined after being similarly forced to flee her home right as Esther arrives in the newly formed and already conflicted state of Israel. As the two women pass one another on the dusty road, Esther approaching her new home, Nejma being turned out of hers, they come face to face and exchange names. This encounter manages to strip away the ideology of war and show us instead the human faces, inspiring each of the women to tell her story.

In his Nobel lecture LeClézio stated that, “if there is one virtue which the writer’s pen must always have, it is that it must never be used to praise the powerful, even with the faintest of scribblings.” As a model post-colonial author, his work has closely followed this prescription. He is concerned with the human lives caught in the power struggle. His semi-autobiographical novel Onitsha outlines the complicated balance of European guilt and paternalistic tribal envy expressed by the colonial family. The young and resilient boy narrator, Fintan, describes his acclimation to life in Africa, seeded with the country’s own embodied resentment of white men. Fintan’s mother, an untamable Italian, is trapped between propriety and her spirited nature. She, like the land and the native people, is dominated by the colonial rulers. Fintan’s father is a hesitant member of the ruling British business class. More shadow than presence in his family’s lives, he spends most of his energy pursuing an obsession with a mysterious queen and the savage Niger River. The three are bound together by their fascination for the wild and captivating native girl, Oya, who is as silent as the country they inhabit. LeClézio’s characters spend less time impacting the place than being impacted by it. In Fintan’s startling reaggregation to life back in Europe, he is haunted by Africa and affected by how remote the country is to his own sister, who has lived her entire life in the South of France. He wonders, “Is Africa, for you, no more than a name, a land like any other, a continent one talks about in newspaper and books, a place that is mentioned only because there is a war going on? In Nice, in your room at the university with its angel’s name, you are cut off; there is nothing to keep the thread intact.” It is no surprise that LeClézio should be duly praised for how clearly he speaks to the condition of our time.

Tears of the Desert: A Memoir of Survival in Darfur

2008-09-06T14:44:00.000-07:00

A review of Halima Bashir's memoir

for The Scrambler

By now, we all know something about the deadly conflict in Darfur. We have seen television broadcasts and documentaries or read reports from journalists who have visited Sudan’s northern region. This information is valuable, but remote. We now know that around 200,000 to 300,000 people have lost their lives and two million have been forced to flee their homes, but the reality of those numbers and the faces behind them are hard to comprehend. Halima Bashir offers us an intimate memoir of life in Darfur, from childhood in her Zaghawa village, through years of medical schooling and the increasingly difficult prospect of survival in her home country.

I was intrigued by the opportunity to read a personal account of life in Sudan, but was compelled to continue with Bashir’s book because her storytelling is engaging and straight forward. Co-written with journalist Damien Lewis, the book is less crafted than compiled. The account is linear and reads a bit like the adjusted transcripts of Lewis and Bashir’s interviews. While developing this slightly more novelistic tone may sacrifice the objective details of current events reporting it also offers striking personal accounts of female circumcision, and harrowing escape across a country plagued by violence. There are scenes from Bashir’s primary school that at once resemble all the coming of age stories you have ever known. But the adolescent rivalry of Bashir’s world is more Lord of the Flies than Judy Blume because it belies the malignant ethnic tension the children’s lives are steeped in.

This is not a solipsistic memoir of overcoming great obstacles and achieving personal enlightenment. Bashir is writing for the particular purpose of raising awareness about Darfur’s crisis. It is a difficult story for obvious reasons. Bashir presents us with the violence, rape, confusion and helplessness we would expect in the memoir of a Sudanese woman. Luckily, she also manages to inculcate a sense of hope through accounts of her willful perseverance. Having become a fierce voice against the atrocities she both witnessed and experienced, Bashir’s book is not only her personal story but also a call for global action against the humanitarian abuses in Sudan.

Return to The Scrambler, Issue 22

Something to Tell You: A Novel

2008-08-06T14:11:00.000-07:00

A review of Hanif Kureishi's novel

From The Scrambler

By the end of the novel, when the London Underground is shaken by suicide bombers, we are already expecting an explosion. The tension that Kureishi has built in the secret lives of his characters, the social unrest of Britain at war and the paranoia of a violent past cannot be settled with anything less than cataclysmic.

Everyone is hiding something: a new penchant for kinky fetish clubs, a stolen painting, a history of child abuse and a murder. Many of the character’s secrets won’t keep, but you never know when or how they will break or what kind of repercussions will result. Our narrator, Jamal, is the catalyst of this mounting pressure. As a Freudian psychoanalyst, Jamal deals in people’s secrets, but he has managed to keep his own masked. We follow him as he delves into the nostalgic and volatile world of repressed memories. He copes with his impending middle age, a recent divorce, and the confusion of fathering a teenager while simultaneously sorting through the past, which surfaces suddenly when faced with his lost lover and a violent incident he has tried to forget.

Kureishi does not shy away from difficult subjects; we get characters’ analyses of Thatcher and Blair, the debacle in Iraq, and the social tension of ethnic conflict and sex. His writing is sharp and engaging and by using semi-autobiographical experiences of a Pakistani-British citizen’s life Kureishi develops a story that is full and honest.

My idea of a great summer read may be far from the norm, but I find this summer release a welcome addition to the sunny day picnic blanket. Because Kureishi’s book merges the suspenseful engagement of a mystery novel with provocative socio-cultural critique, the reader suffers neither brain drain nor an over-achiever’s guilt.

Bitter Business

2008-07-29T12:57:00.000-07:00

Do you know who picked the cocoa beans for your chocolate bar? Historically, beans picked by Mayans were treated like currency and were a deeply valued food source. When Cadbury and Hershey were growing business empires, plantation slaves picked beans without pay. We’ve learned that this slavery has not been entirely abolished. Browsing your local market, you will find that chocolate bars are dressed in labels with checklists of consumer concerns. Whether your chocolate is organic, GMO free or packaged in recycled paper, the most important information on the label may be that iconic Fair Trade Certified stamp.

Knowing the importance of Fair Trade certification (fair pay for labor) has become more common, but information never spreads fast enough. That is why Bitter Chocolate: The Dark Side of the World’s Most Seductive Sweet by the As it Happens radio host Carol Off is so valuable. Released in the United States this spring, Off’s book is a smart and captivating investigation of the chocolate trade, from ancient Mayan uses of cocoa though the rise of big chocolate business and the human lives compromised or out-rightly destroyed in its wake. Fortunately, Off closes with a more promising chapter that brings us back again to the Mayan cocoa farmers today and the efforts of chocolate makers who are helping transform workers’ living standards by choosing a Fair Trade business approach.

Off’s book provides a gruesome history of international chocolate trade, but she also offers encouragement that grass-roots activism and purchase voting for Fair Trade products can make a difference.

American Earth

2008-06-05T14:26:00.000-07:00

Book review for Seattle Conscious Choice

American Earth: Environmental Writing Since Thoreau
Edited by Bill McKibben, Forward by Al Gore
(Library of America)

My mother read aloud to me when I was a child, but not from Rachel Carson's Silent Spring. Al Gore's mother did. In his forward to this new collection, Gore recalls hearing Carson's story and how strongly it influenced him. Writers affect people and people affect change, which is more valuable than the influence of elected officials, he says.
Bill McKibben (End of Nature and Deep Economy) has compiled an inspiringly eclectic primer of environmental writing in America, combining Aldo Leopold, John Muir and Rachel Carson with Philip K. Dick, R. Crumb, Joni Mitchell and Marvin Gaye. McKibben says American writing is distinctly concerned with environment, but environmental writing is directly concerned with finding answers to the collision of people and nature. Tracing the genre's development, he reveals how much we have relied on imagery of wild and pure nature, images that we cannot maintain. By reading recent writers, McKibben hopes we will discover new and productive metaphors for viewing the interconnectedness of humans and the environment.
— Kristianne Huntsberger

Man in the Middle

2008-04-08T15:25:00.000-07:00

on: The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears by Dinaw Mengestu
from: Colors North West Magazine, Gumbo April 2008

It happens all over the country. A neglected neighborhood suddenly becomes prime development property. Lifelong residents are expelled to make room for new homes and businesses. It also happens in Dinaw Mengestu’s latest novel, which chronicles the complexity of a changing neighborhood through the eyes of a man on the margins.

As the Logan Circle neighborhood gets divided, Sepha Stephanos is caught in between. A quiet man who fled Ethiopia as a teenager (after watching soldiers beat his father), Stephanos has separated from the insular community of Ethiopian immigrants and opened a forgettable shop in a rundown neighborhood in Washington, D.C. Though his ethnicity affords him marginal acceptance among his neighbors, the racial tensions that surface when a white woman moves in next door reawakens his social isolation.

Through his troubled involvement with the controversial new neighbor and long drinking conversations with his friends Kenneth from Kenya and Joseph from the Congo, Stephanos realizes that a man caught between two worlds is consequently alone. But, maybe, in being caught between two worlds, like Dante emerging from the Inferno, he might glimpse the “beautiful things heaven bears.”

Born in Ethiopia and raised in the United States, Mengestu brings sharp insight and descriptive finesse to his novel, “The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears,” which was chosen by the Seattle Public Library for its Seattle Reads, 2008 series. With Seattle’s rich Ethiopian heritage and a record of gentrification to scrutinize, Mengestu’s book offers great opportunity for community dialogue.
 Kristianne HUNTSBERGER

Radiohole

2008-01-11T14:09:00.000-08:00

from
On The Boards Performance Blog
Posted in Performance Blog, New Performance Series, Radiohole

Friday, January 11th, 2008

Radiohole’s Fluke was created from an improvisation activity the cast called Bible-Ear, in which a performer is expected to simultaneously listen to and recite back the recorded book playing in his headphones while holding a conversation with a person who is unable to hear the recording. The result in this case is the wild, physically rigorous and darkly hilarious riff on Herman Melville’s Moby Dick.
How do you tell the epic story of that white whale in under an hour and a half with three people and a naked bearded guy on a television? You don’t. But, you have the opportunity to play with some of the rich themes and images of the story and to spin maniacally out of control in a charming and nightmarish descent, remnant of what was either Ahab’s great failure or his supreme accomplishment.
It was immediately obvious that the crowd’s reception would be mixed and so I was compelled to listen to the conversations as I rode home on the bus. “Did you just see Radiohole?” The second rider says yes. “Wow, huh?” the first one asks. “I don’t know what to think, there was so much going on.” That was exactly what appealed to myself and to the first rider, who was effusive about how crazy and loud and crazy the show was. Even when I try to explain the performance to someone I find myself at a loss: well, there were television screens and microphones and mixing boards on stage and they were a jungle gym, no, it was a ship’s rigging! And there are ping-pong balls flying, a dissonant conversation, those creepy eyelids and then the singing fish! Ahab is on Pointe and Starbuck is in a little boat on wheels, rolling in circles around the stage, playing connect four.
A bit like watching a performance art piece enacted in someone’s installation, I was unsure at times where I was supposed to look or what exactly I was hearing while we were shuttled between outrageous noise and startling silence. Being so removed from the stage in classic proscenium seating could be seen as a disadvantage with a show like this. It feels as though the level of intimacy afforded an audience who is able to sit in close proximity to the performers and their curio cabinet set would facilitate a sense of complicity and involvement, permitting a more thorough suspension of disbelief. So, pick up your free beer or glass of grog at the door, sit as close to the stage as you can and be prepared for anything.
- Kristianne H.