Portraits: Of a young Rebecca Solnit finding, and fending for, herself; of the nature of dictatorships and revolutions by Ryszard Kapuściński; of Eastern Turkey under the veil of its dramatic landscapes by Zülfü Livaneli; of Paris and the poet through the vantage point of Henri Cole; of the unfortunate visage of Skylark by Dezső Kosztoláni. These are some of the extraordinary faces I met on this month of May.
It is not nearly celebrated enough, says Solnit: “The sheer pleasure of meeting new voices and ideas and possibilities, having the world become more coherent in some subtle or enormous way, extending or filling in your map of the universe…this beauty in finding pattern and meaning,” this thing called Reading.
Even so, here we are. The readers (ironically, the ones least concerned about faces), the ones who, by turning each page, celebrate best these encounters, these awakenings, these flights.
“At least I had books. Closed, a book is a rectangle, thin as a letter or thick and solid like a box or a brick. Open, it is two arcs of paper that, seen from the top or bottom when the book is wide open, look like the wide V of birds in flight.” — Rebecca Solnit, Recollections of My Nonexistence“I’ve always believed that poetry exists in part to reveal the soul’s capacity for compassion, sacrifice, and endurance. For some of us, this satisfies a basic human need, like air or water, but a poem must also have music, imagery, and form. Because there is a kind of nakedness or authenticity in poetry that is associated with truth, on many days I haven’t got the guts for it, and I fail. But when I succeed, there is nothing in life — except love — that equally verifies my existence.” — Henri Cole, Orphic Paris
“As a journalist, I say: Long live the magic. Kapuściński is an advocate for all who have chafed in a straitjacket called the house style, seen their lyrical phrases slashed for space, cursed the whole pedantic army of editors and fact checkers… he is a journalist’s writer, an example of what so many of us would love to be — if only we had the nerve.” — Christopher de Bellaigue
When one has had their fill of different accounts of the 1979 Islamic Revolution, fiction and nonfiction, Iranian and foreign; when an ample idea of its unfolding and its chronology has finally taken root; when details and events have been repeated enough and begin to sound redundant unless they are written with an exceptional voice and perspective; it is time to read Shah of Shahs by Ryszard Kapuściński — my personal cherry on the top of an Iranian Revolution literary stack.
It is not the book to read if one prefers a sequential list of events, a full cast of characters, an emotionally-charged dramatization, or a detailed portrayal of the Shah. This is not a portrait of the last Shah of Iran, neither is it a consummate portrait of a nation. From the collected clutter on Kapuściński’s hotel room desk in Tehran emerges a portrait of the nature of dictatorships and revolutions.
I can only wish he elaborated on that extravagant celebration that the Iranian despot held in Persepolis in 1971, which contributed to the flames of revolution, and in which the first guest to arrive at the event was Imelda Marcos. I would have loved for Kapuściński to have written a book about the Marcos family and our own EDSA Revolution!
For a Filipina reader and albeit dormant journalist, the writing method is illuminating and the subject hits close to home. There are too many passages that feel as if he were describing my own nation’s recent history. But then again, “The rather small arsenal of political tricks has not changed in millennia,” observed Kapuściński, who reported on twenty-seven revolutions during his illustrious career as a journalist.
Within a corrupt government, “Whoever tried to be honest looked like a paid stoolie.” “The higher up, the fuller the pockets,” and in that world, “development” has an entirely different meaning. “Any dictatorship appeals to the lowest instincts of the governed,” “A despot believes that man is an abject creature. Abject people fill his court and populate his environment.”
That a fed and entertained populace does not always signify a free society is a truth that burns: “A terrorized society will behave like an unthinking, submissive mob for a long time. Feeding it is enough to make it obey. Provided with amusements, it’s happy.”
And this is what he says about truth: “It takes a long time for a truth to mature, and in the meantime people suffer or blunder around in ignorance.” I’d like to believe, however, that reading the writings of Kapuściński speeds the process.
At the back of my mind, this question: Is Iran in the cusp of another revolution?
“Maybe I’d been captivated by a story. Yes, I’d been captivated by a story, by a culture, by a history; can a person be smitten by a story? Clearly it does happen…”
Indeed. That is why this book found me. Friends probably know by now that I am drawn to the stories, the cultures, and the histories encompassing what used to be called the Fertile Crescent and the lands that have carried the veins of the Silk Route.
Kurdistan is no exception. Accessible literary works from or about this region is so scarce that I value every volume I can get my hands on. While I have yet to experience books set in Iranian and Syrian Kurdistan, which I imagine must be breathtaking, I have been fortunate to have read about Iraqi Kurdistan [The Beekeeper of Sinjar by Dunya Mikhail (Serpent’s Tail), The Last Pomegranate Tree by Bachtyar Ali (Archipelago Books)] and Turkish Kurdistan [The Wounded Age and Eastern Tales by Ferit Edgü (NYRB), Every Fire You Tend by Sema Kaygusuz (Tilted Axis Press), and Disquiet by Zülfü Livaneli (Other Press)].
The Beekeeper of Sinjar, The Last Pomegranate Tree, The Wounded Age and Eastern Tales, and Every Fire You Tend are all beautifully written books that have led me to believe that the sorrows of this place are too profound, they can only be expressed through metaphors, silence, or poetry.
Disquiet tells the story of Ibrahim, a journalist based in Istanbul, who is drawn back to his hometown of Mardin to investigate the death of Hussein, a childhood friend. As Ibrahim digs deeper, he becomes enmeshed in Hussein’s past, haunting stories of Yezidi Syrian refugees fleeing ISIS, and recollections of his city’s more harmonious days: “Those were the festive days when Assyrians, Muslims, Zoroastrians, including Parsis, mingled in the marketplace and at school and celebrated one another’s holy days… But now the atmosphere was closed, the city had been darkened by the shadow of a sterner, angrier Islam… Now as I walk the streets they seem darker… this was a city living in fear, caught in the middle of conflicts between ISIS, the PKK, and the state security forces.”
Among the aforementioned books, Disquiet has the most direct prose; and therefore, a good introduction to this region that also allows a worthy glimpse into the Yezidi faith and the painful plight of its adherents. I suspect that what I think are weak spots in the novel owe to the translation but which thankfully do not distract the foreign reader from the eye-openers; from the call to be disquieted about the atrocities; the reminder that Turkey is not a single entity and that even Turks from the westernmost cities cannot always identify with the languages, beliefs, traditions, and cultures of the Mesopotamian lands of eastern Turkey.
And for some reason, I love how the narrator still refers to this grand swathe of land as Mesopotamia — the birthplace of literature.
“I asked him why, if there are faiths in every corner of the world, those that emerged from the Middle East had spread throughout the world. Did we commit the most sins, were we in more need of salvation than anyone else?
I detected a faint smile beneath his grizzly mustache. The answer to this is kalam, he said, the word. In this world nothing affects people as much as the word. The Middle East is where the word reached its zenith — no other region’s poetry, legends, or fairy tales are as powerful, none other have this much power to influence the human heart. That’s why the poets here are classified as magicians.” — Zülfü Livaneli, Disquiet
“You want us to form a friendship built on disregarding the past, on ignorance and forgetting. Like all rulers, you want to burn your secrets so nobody can look at them after you die… We are not on the same path.”
How fittingly this line can be addressed to our current leader, and how I’d love to take some of Bachtyar Ali’s allegories to take a jab at the state of our politics!
But I doubt if railing against authorities was the main intent of this novel. Bachtyar Ali, injured in 1983 during a protest against Saddam Hussein’s Ba’ath Party and author of the first Kurdish novel to be translated in English, surely knows about unjust leaders and speaking out against them.
This story of a peshmerga fighter who is released after being detained in a desert prison for twenty one years and goes on a quest to find the son he left behind is told with the magical realism of A Thousand and One Nights, but with a more discernible moral aim, which also weaves in its tale the sufferings and the violent history of the Iraqi Kurds.
The Last Pomegranate Tree, with its moments of breathtaking lyricism, seems to me more of a profound contemplation on freedom, on what it means to be really free, and on what it is we should seek and hold on to when all seems lost.
“Only one thing has been left to us, the one thing they can’t reach: our hearts, our inner worlds.”
“Do not travel to Yemen due to terrorism, civil unrest, health risks, kidnapping, armed conflict, and landmines. Avoid all travel to Yemen.”
I was constantly met with these words when, during lockdown, I made itineraries for the places I hope to visit in the future. If you know me well enough, I’ll probably be one of the first people you’ll think of whenever you see photos of the architecture in the old city of Sana’a, that stone house in Wadi Dhar, and the otherworldly trees and landscape of Socotra.
The hostile travel advisories did not prevent me from coming up with an itinerary, but my rational side knows it would be safer to travel to Yemen through literature for the time being.
Unfortunately, authors writing about, and especially those from, Yemen are hard to come by. You can imagine my eager anticipation when Fitzcarraldo Editions announced the launch of this book!
Warning: Do not read this in public. Unless you’re okay with weeping in public.
Every page is drenched in heartache and death. It’s the kind of book that Scholastique Mukasonga would call “a paper grave”. A book to put my puny troubles into perspective.
But I think my task as reader is not to highlight how this book made me feel; it’s to sound the sirens and ask others to take time to look into what is happening in a country that hardly enters the fringes of our consciousness.
Inspired by the work of Belarusian journalist and 2015 Nobel Prize laureate in literature, Svetlana Alexievich, Bushra Al-Maqtari traveled across her own war-torn country for two years to document the lives and deaths of civilians caught in the crossfire of the civil war that erupted in 2014 and which persists up to this day. But unlike Alexievich, Al-Maqtari lived, and continues to live, through the war of which she writes.
This war has claimed hundreds of thousands of innocent lives, only to serve the greed for power of a few. The least we can do is listen, read, encourage others to do the same, and allow the power of fearless journalism and literature to achieve its goal.
Exceptionally written, it is an essential education and addition to a journalist’s shelf, or any human being’s shelf for that matter. It is a precious but painful work of journalism that makes me wonder at how difficult it must be to gather, to write, and to live these stories — especially as a woman.
The book is the result of one woman’s courageous initiative: “…to ward against forgetting, against feigning ignorance, against indifference,” to emphasize that the Yemeni people “are not voiceless, they are unheard.”
The best of Nawal El Saadawi’s books are nonfiction: They reveal the devastating truth that her works of fiction are, in fact, nonfiction.
A vital textbook for the study of women in the Arab world, The Hidden Face of Eve has a more academic structure compared to A Daughter of Isis, Walking through Fire, and her numerous memoirs that are deeply personal. But all her writings perfectly demonstrate how the personal is political, and there is not a hint of the tedium that we might encounter in textbooks.
The delicate preface alone is worth mulling over and digesting; and the book, thorough in the history and status of women in Arab society from pre-Islam days until the present, often enlightening or enraging, should be read in its entirety. Whether one agrees or disagrees with any of her views, no one will close this book without having learned anything substantial. Reading this showed me what a shallow understanding I have of the matter despite years of delving in books from Islamic nations.
Nawal does not launch into an angry tirade against religion, however, but against those who use religion “as an instrument in the hands of economic and political forces,” those who use religion to deprive women of knowledge and suppress the search for truth by intimidation and obscurantism, and those who misinterpret religion and utilize it as an instrument of oppression and exploitation. She challenges that religion, if authentic in the principles it stands for, “aims at truth, equality, justice, love, and a healthy wholesome life for all people, whether men or women.”
She criticizes feminism that is merely an instrument of a specific class, or a feminism that is fanatical and superficial, stressing that fanaticism of any form should be opposed, whether it be religion, political, or social. Interestingly, she even remarks on the “modern” woman, “who thinks that progress is manifested by a tendency to show more and more of her thighs,” but remains mentally and emotionally suppressed under the surface.
She therefore makes a stand for the education of the female child, the strengthening of the mind, a free mind, and a heightened level of consciousness, pointing out that a girl who has lost her personality through the throttling of her mind will lose the capacity “to think independently and to use her own mind,” and “will do what others have told her and will become a toy in their hands and a victim of their decisions.” Thus, “the emancipation of Arab women can only result from the struggle of the Arab women themselves, once they become an effective political force.” As we all know, this does not merely apply to Arab women. There is also the acknowledgement that “progress for women, and an improvement of their status, can never be attained unless the whole of society moves forward.”
Can you see why I wished to greet Women’s History Month by reading someone like Nawal El Saadawi? But because there is no one like Nawal El Saadawi, I read her.
“…with liberation they stand to lose nothing else but their chains…”
Mira, keep this close to Luis Sagasti’s A Musical Offering, close to Olga Tokarczuk’s Flights.
It is, after all, a musical offering — golden threads of western music’s entwining with the orient, of Liszt’s recitals in Constantinople, of how Nietzsche wanted to Mediterraneanize music, of the narrator’s replica of Beethoven’s compass that insisted on pointing east, but most of all because it reminds you beautifully that “music is a fine refuge against the imperfection of the world,” one that describes music as “time thought out, time circumscribed and transformed into sound… time domesticated, reproducible time, time shaped,” and cautions that “life is like a Mahler symphony, it never goes back, never retraces its steps…” but also that “this feeling of the passing of time is the definition of melancholy, an awareness of finitude from which there is no refuge.” Take note of how there is a metronome on the cover instead of a compass. Perhaps because a metronome goes back and forth between directions whilst keeping the music in time.
It is about flights. A hypnotic trip across east and west, tick tock, east, west, art, love, time, self, other, literature, until they have intermingled and are present in each other, an adventure with Being — of traveling to the lands of your dreams and to your favorite cities, about crossing the borders of genres, art forms, literary forms, and geographical borders, but also flights from sanity, and traversing through memory, history, and dreams, suggesting that “our dreams might be more knowledgable than we.” Flights of flavors, an exotic dish not everyone will love; disturbing at times, an acquired taste with a scent of opium.
But keep this book close to Luis Sagasti’s A Musical Offering, close to Olga Tokarczuk’s Flights, close to your heart. Only you know how much this book means to you. Don’t forget you were constantly wide-eyed with wonder when you read it and you agreed with the following lines. How much you were in need of reading that last sentence!
“Sometimes I feel as if night has fallen, that western darkness has invaded the Orient of enlightenment. The spirit and learning, the pleasures of the spirit and learning, of Khayyam’s and Pessoa’s wine, have not been able to stand up to the twentieth century; I feel that the global construction of the world is no longer carried out by the interchange of love and ideas, but by violence and manufactured objects… You have to have… energy to constantly reconstruct yourself, always look mourning and illness in the face, have the perseverance to continue searching through the sadness of the world to draw beauty or knowledge from it.”
Despite being only approximately two-thirds the length of The Balkan Trilogy, it took me longer to finish reading The Levant Trilogy.
Olivia Manning is not to blame, but rather the awry emotional state I was in when I read the latter. I even entertained the thought of setting it aside for a lighter read, but I was rewarded for pressing on. I’m glad I trusted the recommendation of friends who thought the trilogies are worth experiencing. As I approached the Levant’s third book, my pace finally picked up and I could hardly put it down again; and by the time I turned the last page, I was not ready to let Guy and Harriet Pringle go.
Among other things, I think the second trilogy is a surprising critique on imperialism and British presence in the Levant. (“Lord, the things we do to other people’s countries.”)
And as I re-viewed the six books mentally, it felt to me like the twenty years of writing between the first volume and the last is a peeling away of life’s layers of unrealistic romanticism; so that by the end, one is left with the stark nakedness of reality — of war, marriage, and life.
Is it a bleak depiction of life? Not entirely. Manning seemed to say that it all depends on how you play the cards you’re dealt.
“Mongoloid” as a term for Down syndrome has been considered offensive and obsolete by the time this book was published, and yet it is still being used here to describe a minor character. It is but a small spot in a galaxy of details and I’m not usually one to nitpick on political correctness, because I also tend to be guilty of political incorrectness at times, but this somehow cast a cloud on my appreciation. And although I read this about a week ago, it took some time for me to gather my thoughts.
_ _ _
Jokha Alharthi is the first Omani woman to have a novel translated into English. Marilyn Booth, the translator, has translated works by two favorite authors in my Silk Route & Fertile Crescent Reading Project, Elias Khoury and Nawal El Saadawi.
With that in mind, perhaps I set my expectations too high.
There are elements that I highly value: How each chapter is named after a character, and through these various perspectives from different social strata unfold the story and tapestry of Omani history and society; unique details of traditional wedding preparations through the eyes of the mother; captivating descriptions of Bedouin life; and Abdallah’s musings during an airplane flight that often wax poetic. The historical aspects led me to look into the British-mediated Treaty of Seeb and, hardly ever mentioned in reviews, the master-slave dynamic in such a society that plays a significant role in this novel, reminding the reader that it was only in 1970 that slavery was abolished in Oman.
Orbiting around the lives of three sisters in the village of al-Awafi, I immediately found a favorite in the middle sister, Asma. The reading sister, the one through whom references to the region’s literary traditions are made, the one who has read enough to see through the nonsensical beliefs and superstitions.
These three sisters in the cusp of a modern Oman, although bound to customs, had relatively more freedoms compared to women from other stories I’ve read of the region. And so it was with disappointment that I read how Asma readily agreed to an arranged marriage while the younger sister who spent more time prettifying herself was resolute in refusing hers. It can be argued that Asma did it in the hope of furthering her education and the younger had more foolish reasons for her refusal, but something still did not add up. The strong character that I admired at the beginning seemed to give way to a weaker one towards the end.
On the other hand, there is more to the novel than that. The fact that there is so much to pay attention to borders on both distracting and brilliant, but as far as novels translated to English are concerned, this is still currently the most intimate look into Omani life available to us.
In a way, it makes me look forward to what lies ahead in translated Omani literature — especially those written by women.
The Book-Butterfly 