Ethiopia - The Shadow King

Country: Ethiopia
Book: The Shadow King
Author: Maaza Mengiste
Publication Year: 2019
Genre: Historical Fiction

We have spoken before about the tendency to see Africa as a continent of war, disease and famine. Few African countries embody this mindset quite so powerfully as Ethiopia.

For anyone growing up in 1980s, the images of emaciated children are hard to forget. They filled news reports night after night for months on end. They led to Band Aid and Live Aid and a plethora of similar charity events that came in the thirty years afterwards, from Comic Relief to Live 8.

Yet Ethiopia has a long history beyond the events of the 1980s. The word ‘Ethiopia’ is believed to come from Greek, which translates as ‘burnt skin’ (the Greeks, of course, had a whole mythology to explain this). Originally, it was used to describe the people of Nubia, which stretched from southern Egypt into the Sudan and parts of modern day Ethiopia. The word is found in  Homer, although he(?) uses it to refer to both Africans and the people of Asia.

For centuries, the name was used as a stand in for Africa and for dark skinned people in general. Romeo describes Juliet ‘like a rich jewel in an Ethiop’s ear’ when first laying eyes on her. It is a word with a problematic history to be sure. And yet it is one that has been reclaimed and re-appropriated by the people of the modern state.

Ethiopia holds the distinction of being the only African country, other than Liberia, that was never successfully colonised. Liberia was created as a nation for former slaves, so it doesn’t really count in this regard. Despite concerted efforts by a number of countries, most notably the Italians, Ethiopia has remained relatively independent. Which brings us to Maaza Mengiste and The Shadow King.

The Shadow King takes place during the Italian invasion of Ethiopia in 1935. The Italians won the war and occupied Ethiopia until 1941, when the British defeated them and managed the country until 1944. The Shadow King focuses on two characters on either side of the conflict: Hirut, an orphan in the employ of an Ethiopian officer and Ettore, an Italian solider and photographer of Jewish heritage.

Mengiste’s novel is somewhat stylised. Narrative passages are broken up by the Chorus, who tells us something of the history of the characters depicted. For women like Aster, the wife of Hirut’s employer, Kidane, it general involves sexual violence. Other pauses in the story give descriptions of photos taken by Ettore. Some pastoral scenes. Others of acts of violence committed by the invading army (Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze).

There are also regular, ‘Interludes’, which focus on the real life figure of Haile Selassie. Selassie was Emperor of Ethiopia from 1931 until 1974, when he was deposed (The Shadow King begins and ends in the time of the Emperor’s removal from office). These interludes are for the most part fictional accounts, but the events are real enough. As when Selassie fled into exile following the Italian victory and lived, of all places, in Bath in South West England.

As my own kind of Interlude, I would like to note that The Shadow King makes no use of inverted commas or dashes to denote speech. It’s a little strange at first, but you quickly get used to it. It makes me wonder why we bother with these antiquated methods to identify direct speech. Ninety nine percent of the time it is quite obvious from context clues. Anyone who has ever read a book in Spanish, where dashes indicate not only direct speech, but breaks in speech for information on and about who is speaking, will know how confusing this can become. You end up counting dashes in order to work out where the dialogue ends and recommences. At least French novels only use one dash per instance of direct speech and leave the reader to work out the rest. Yet as Mengiste shows, none of this is necessary. We use these speech markers through convention rather than any kind of utilitarian function. 

And now back to our regularly scheduled programme:

The Shadow King of the title is a peasant boy who bears a striking resemblance to Haile Selassie. At Hirut’s suggestion, he is dressed up like the Emperor and placed on a horse to both inspire Kidane’s troops and frighten the Italians.

The Shadow King is a variation on the idea of The Mock King. As James George Frazer outlines in his flawed but influential work of comparative mythology, The Golden Bough, the Mock King was someone of low status who temporarily took over the role of king or village chieftain during festivals or religious events. Often the person chosen was someone with severe mental impairment (what, in less sensitive times, would have been called the village idiot). Often they were killed at the end of festivities as a ritual sacrifice in place of the chief or king (hence, The Mock King). The practice, according to Frazer’s review of such ceremonies, took place everywhere from India to the Inca civilization. For reasons we don’t have time to get into here, James Joyce repurposed the Mock King as the Prankquean in Finnegans Wake. 

As we saw with Nicaragua (see: Nicaragua), things like this rarely go according to plan. Hirut is captured, along with Aster, and imprisoned by one of the most notorious officers in the Italian army, known as the Butcher of Benghazi. They are stripped semi-naked and photographs taken by Ettore are turned into postcards and widely distributed to goad Kidane into a second attack.

Again, one thinks of the postcards of lynched black men sold, until depressingly recently, throughout the United States. “They’re selling postcards of the hanging[.]” as Dylan sings at the beginning of Desolation Row,. He probably saw such gruesome items for sale growing up in Minnesota.

The ploy works, but the resulting bloodbath benefits no-one. It is a small, fictional event in a much larger war. Hirut disappears into anonymity. Ettore is unable to return to Italy because of the unfolding genocide taking place across Europe. His own parents are taken away for slaughter by the Nazis. What few mementos he has of them are placed in a box and buried. Later, Hirut assumes guardianship of those items. They stay with her for thirty years as Ettore remains in Ethiopia, looking for her.

The Shadow King is a book about war and women’s role in it, both as victims and combatants. It is about a pivotal moment in the history of Ethiopia. The Italian invasion, like The Spanish Civil War, offered the first glimpse of what the rising tide of Fascism in Europe had in store for the world.

It is also, curiously, a book about the end of Haile Selassie’s reign as Emperor. It would see Ethiopia become a Marxist country and a client state of the Soviet Union. It would suffer more than most with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of Russian communism (with the possible exception of Yugoslavia – see: Croatia). Africa always seems to bear the brunt of such global events.

Ethiopia today seems as unstable as ever. We saw when we looked at Eritrea (see: Eritrea) how Ethiopia has been in conflict with the smaller country for decades (Eritrea became an independent state in 1991). The Tigray War, 2020-2022, killed hundreds of thousands. There always seems to be a new war; a new famine for the people of Ethiopia (and Eritrea) to endure. For Africa’s second most populous country after Nigeria, this seems intolerable.

Is there a solution? I don’t know. I read books and I write about them. This is all just a bunch of unfiltered opinion.

Which is the problem. Everyone has opinions. Few seem to offer anything in the way of concrete solutions. Band Aid was the perfect name for what happened in the 1980s, because that's all it really  was: A sticking plaster over a much larger wound. A wound that continues to fester long after the plaster came unstuck and sailed into to the dust.

The weather changes, the wind shifts. All we can do is move on.

Maaza Mengiste

 

Rwanda - The Girl Who Smiled Beads

Country: Rwanda
Book: The Girl Who Smiled Beads
Author: Clemantine Wamariya, Elizabeth Weil
Publication Year: 2018
Genre: Memoir

We have to talk about Rwanda. In doing so, we have to talk about genocide.

We’ve talked before about the tendency in western media to think of Africa only in terms of war and famine. However, the murder of 800,000 people over a ten month period in 1994 is important. We can’t and we shouldn’t avoid talking about it any more than we can avoid talking about other acts of mass murder: the Holocaust, the Belgian Congo (see: Sweden), the Balkans and the Killing Fields of the Khmer Rouge. None of these events are unconnected. If we talked about them more, we might prevent them happening with the depressing frequency with which they still occur.

The Girl Who Smiled Beads is Clemantine Wamariya’s memoir about surviving the Hutus slaughter of the Tutsis; of fleeing Rwanda with her sister and being driven through slums and refugee camps in Burundi, Zaire (now Congo), Malawi, Mozambique, Tanzania and South Africa; of gaining refugee status and making a life for herself in the United States.

We have, of course, been here before. Individuals who survived unspeakable horrors in Afghanistan (see: Afghanistan), Cambodia (see: Cambodia), Vietnam (see: Vietnam) and Zimbabwe (see: Zimbabwe), and found refuge in the United States. We will see this again and again before the end of this project We can only hope that by the time we end, America will return to being a place of safe refuge.

The Girl Who Smiled Beads takes a dual narrative structure. Alternating chapters describe Wamariya’s life growing up in America from the age of 12. The other half recounts fleeing Rwanda from the age of 6. The latter is a tale of survival. The former is a tale of survivor’s guilt.

There is hope amongst the horror. The book opens with Wamariya and her sister, Claire, being reunited with their family on The Oprah Show. That appearance makes them famous enough in Rwanda to be able to secure visas to bring their family to America. Wamariya goes on to talk about her experiences at other events organised by Oprah and later working for the Obama administration.

At the other end of the spectrum is the trauma of Wamariya's early life. Walking past innumerable bodies she was too young to understand were dead. Being upended countless times, just when her life seemed to be achieving some kind of stability. Experiencing even more conflict and the selfishness of her sister’s husband; a Congolese aid worker who pursued the teenage refugee until she agreed to marry him. Of attending school sporadically when not looking after her sister’s children or being on the move to yet another country.

One can only imagine what such early trauma does to a child. Or to a grown adult. It is only when she achieves relative stability in America, spending the week with a foster family and staying with her sister at weekends, that Wamariya starts to understands what she has survived.

 
At school, she reads Elie Wiesel’s Dark (an author we will very much be talking about when we come to Romania) and comes to see his experiences at Buchenwald as inseparable from her own. Writing an essay on Dark brings her to the attention of Oprah. It is as one of 50 young essayists chosen to meet Wiesel on The Oprah Show that she is reunited with her family. We really do make our own luck.

What separates The Girl Who Smiled Beads from other memoirs we have looked at in this series is that Wamariya doesn’t seek to underplay her experiences or present herself as a stoic survivor. She goes through perfectly understanding feelings of anger and anxiety; of shutting herself off from her family and the world at various points. The frustration at being treated as some sort of side show is relatable. Her admission that therapy didn’t help is refreshing.

One of the most important chapters (Chapter 6) is the one in which Wamariya talks about the word genocide. She hates and reviles the word, she says. It is a clinical, dehumanising word. A neat, tidy thing for a sprawling, monstrous series of acts. When people dismiss what happened in Rwanda as being like the Holocaust, she writes:

“No, I want to scream, it’s not like the Holocaust. Or the killing field in Cambodia. Or ethnic cleansing in Bosnia. There’s no catchall term that proves you understand[…] You cannot line up the atrocities like a marching set. You cannot bear witness with a single word.”

She is right, of course. Language is imprecise. Language is a dull instrument with which to carve out our experiences. Two hundred and seventy five pages isn’t enough to describe a life, especially one that has seen such things. One word isn’t enough to describe the murder of millions of people.

A single death, as Stalin’s psychopathic saying goes, is a tragedy; a million is a statistic. It is also predicated on who are the victims and who are the perpetrators. You only have to look at the differing coverage of Russia’s bombing of Ukraine and Israel’s bombing of Gaza to see this. The difference in language. Active and accusative in one case. Passive and negative in the other.

What I didn’t know before reading this book is that the distinction between the Hutus and the Tutsis isn’t tribal, like much of the rest of Africa, but arbitrary. The Belgians, who, as Wamariya notes, did incalculable damage for such a small country, brought the full force of 19^th  century race theory to bear upon their central African colonies. They measured the skin tone and facial features of the people and divided them into three groups, the majority Hutus, the minority Tutsis and the even smaller Twa peoples.

Depressingly, Rwanda has tried to use this as an excuse to downplay the killings. It wasn’t our fault, they say: it was the Belgians who did this. Belgium and the rest of western Europe have more than enough for which they deserve condemnation. It is estimated Belgium killed 10 million Congolese during the colonial era and we will certainly discuss those atrocities again when we come to the Republic of Congo and the Democratic Republic of Congo. 

Yet Belgians did not carry out these killings. Rwandans did. It was a premeditated act. It was planned for years through propaganda and the stockpiling of weapons. The careful dehumanising of the Tutsi people by describing them as cockroaches and snakes. How could Clemantine Wamariya not find an analogue for what happened to her and her people in the writing of a Jewish concentration camp survivor? Rwanda is not the Holocaust. Yet the language on which both atrocities were constructed is the same.

Rwanda would like the world to think that everything is better now (with its 'Visit Rwanda' slogans plastered on the shirt arms of various European football teams'). Human rights organisations and electoral monitoring agencies tend to disagree. Rwanda is a de-facto one party state. The British government spent millions of pounds trying to set up a camp there to which to send asylum seekers. The change of government (ours, not theirs) thankfully ended the plan. No doubt much of the money ended up in back pockets at both ends of the transaction. 

One would hope an acceptance of the facts of the (with apologies to Wamariya) genocide, if not the responsibility for what happened, means the cries of ‘never again’ will be repeated, as they were after the liberation of the concentration camps . Though we continue to use that slogan in Europe, even as it happens again and again with our knowledge, consent and support.

As for Clemantine Wamariya, she seems to have come to terms with her experiences. No one ever gets over death, whether it be the loss of a parent, a sibling or a nation. We just grow accustomed to them not being here. ‘Time heals all wounds’ is an offensive cliché. Some scars never heal. They only harden.

Clemantine Wamariy

 

Nicaragua - La mujer habitada/El infinito en la palma de la mano

Country: Nicaragua
Book: La mujer habitada/El infinito en la palma de la mano
Author: Gioconda Belli
Publication Year: 1988/2008
Genre: Fiction

For people above a certain age, mention of Nicaragua stirs up memories of the Sandinistas, the Contras and the Iran-Contra scandal. Punk fans came to know the Sandinistas through The Clash album (Sandinista). For people on the left, Nicaragua was a rare example of a Latin American country standing up to the aggression of the United States and winning.

The reality, as so often, is less clear cut and Nicaragua is a sad reminder that revolutions rarely change anything for the vast majority of the population who engage in them. Often all that happens is that those in power are replaced with the social strata immediately below them. Little else changes.

We see this in the revolutions of France, America, Russia, India, as well as countless smaller countries. The same disparity between rich and poor remains. Only the faces at the top table change. George Orwell’s brilliantly parodies this in his political fable, Animal Farm.

For anyone who wasn’t alive or self-aware in the 1980s, the brief history of Nicaragua is as follows. Like most Latin American counties, Nicaragua was colonised by the Spanish in the early sixteenth century after Columbus first explored the coastline in 1502. Nicaragua became an independent republic in 1838.

Between 1912 and 1933, Nicaragua was occupied by the United States as it looked to build a canal through the territory, before it switched its focus to Panama. The withdrawal of US Marines was followed by military dictatorship under the Somoza family that lasted from 1937 until 1979 with the victory of the Sandinista National Liberation Front.

Although the new government was initially supported by the United States under the administration of Jimmy Carter, the election of Ronald Regan changed matters. The Regan administration supported the Contra rebels, funnelling millions of dollars into their activities, in which they committed the usual kinds of atrocities one finds in guerilla warfare (the Sandinistas also committed such acts). The CIA provided much logistical support.

The murkiest, yet most well known, episode in this story came in 1983, after Congress voted to cease funding to the Contras. Individuals within the US government, most famously Colonel Oliver North, clandestinely sold weapons to Iran and used that money to continue funding the Contras.

Although many believed the Regan administration, and even Regan himself, was directly involved in the scandal, no link was ever proven (if you want to find evidence, you have to actually look for it, which was never going to happen). What is perhaps less well known is that the CIA then continued to support the Contras by helping them traffic crack cocaine into the United States.

The tragedy of Nicaragua is perhaps best exemplified by Daniel Ortega. A member of the Sandinistas, he became President of Nicaragua in 1985. He was voted out of office in 1990 in favour of the United States preferred candidate, Violeta Chamorro.

In 2007, at the age of 61, Ortega became president for a second time. He has been President ever since through corruption and the dismantling of Nicaragua’s democratic institutions. Since February 2025, he has shared the presidency with his wife, Rosario Murillo, an act which itself speaks volumes. It should be noted that despite being opposed by the United States during his first stint as President, America has broadly supported Ortega’s administration since he became a dictator. Como siempre. 

Nicaragua is a lesson in how damaging the polarisation of politics can be and how naïve people on the left tend to see things. After all, Ortega was problematic from the start. The land reforms instigated by the Sandinistas in the 1980s resulted in the forced expulsion of 10,000 indigenous people from their ancestral lands. There have been several accusations of sexual abuse against Ortega, including from his own step daughter. And as we have already noted, the Sandinista National Liberation Front committed atrocities, even if not on the scale of the Contras (the Contra war is estimated to have killed 30,000 people).

It is perhaps a fact of the post 9/11 world that those on the left are now less inclined to support armed opposition groups like the Sandinistas: A recognition that Mau’s pronouncement that political power grows out of the barrel of a gun is dangerous nonsense. Countries with a history of revolution often develop into more equitable societies as a result (compare France with the UK for instance), but at what cost? It’s a basic principle of physics that things which undergo a rapid change in one direction are likely to swing back the opposite way just as fast. Lasting change happens incrementally, because democracy, real, actual democracy, happens at a glacial pace.

Now, I know what you’re thinking. What does any of this have to do with Gioconda Belli? Well, nothing. And everything. Belli become a member of the Sandinista movement in 1970. She was forced into exile (not for the last time) in the mid-70s before returning to Nicaragua shortly before the Sandinista victory in 1979. She became their press liaison officer in 1982 and Director of State Communications in 1984.

In the 2010s, Belli became a vocal opponent of Ortega’s dictatorship, which resulted in her being stripped of her Nicaraguan citizenship in 2023. She currently lives in exile in Madrid. She is not the first Reading the World writer forced into exile in Spain (see: Afghanistan and Uruguay).

Belli’s first novel, La mujer habitada, published in 1988, harks back to the era of the Somoza dictatorship. Part magical realism, part political intrigue, the main narrative takes place in a thinly disguised Latin American country under the dictatorship of the ‘Gran General’. Lavinia, an architect, is hired to redesign the General’s country home. She is a somewhat reluctant member of the National Liberation Movement (Movimiento de Liberación Nacional). As work on the house progresses, so does a plot to assassinate the General.

They say write about what you know. As well as being a member of the Sandinistas, Belli trained as an architect. Maybe there is a whiff of wish fulfilment here. Though the book was written a decade after the fall of the Somoza regime. The assassination plot doesn’t go according to plan. Given how much build up occurs to its execution, this should come as little surprise to the reader.

The book is framed through the narrative of an indigenous spirit. This is where I'm afraid my intermediate Spanish comprehension, which, while good enough to understand and appreciate the novel’s broad strokes, is too unsophisticated to appreciate the subtleties of this character, breaks down. Though I do also wonder whether Belli, as the daughter of a well to do Nicaraguan family, isn’t guilty of cultural appropriation, especially given the forced expulsions of indigenous peoples by the Sandinista government. I honestly don’t know the answer to that question.

With that caveat, it’s a good book that captures the era and the fear in the streets of the military government. It is also a study in how people get drawn into the causes and criminal activity of family members. Lavinia’s husband is the one who is involved with the National Liberation Movement, but when he hides a compatriot shot by the police, Lavinia is drawn into their web. Her boss at the architectural firm is also part of the movement, who strong arms her into helping plot the General’s assassination.

La mujer habitada was Belli’s first novel and it should be treated as such. However, comparing first novels we have considered during this project, it’s a strong effort. And unlike, say, Yambo Ouologuem (see: Mali) or William Conton (see: The Gambia), Belli did go on to write further novels.

Skipping ahead twenty years, the second Belli novel under consideration, El infinito en la palma de la mano, is a different beast altogether. Taking its title from William Blake’s poem, Auguries of Innocence, the book is a retelling of the Garden of Eden story:

To see a world in a grain of sand
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand
And eternity in an hour.

As someone who has written about William Blake in the past (see: Bruce Dickinson: The Chemical Wedding), I appreciate the reference. Blake himself took Biblical stories and contemporary events and reimagined them out of all recognition. See, for instance, his narrative poems, America: A Prophecy and Europe: A Prophecy, which are mythologised accounts of the American and French Revolutions, in which giants like Albion, Orc and Enitharmon fight for supremacy.

Belli does something similar, taking the story of Adam and Eve and their expulsion from the Garden of Eden and reintroducing elements that were edited out of the Biblical version. The story, of course, predates the Bible by centuries and, like many tales found in the book of Genesis, ultimately comes from Sumerian myth, filtered through the Babylonian empire to much of the Mediterranean world. The creation story where God makes man out of mud or clay, for instance, is a Sumerian tale found in both the second chapter of Genesis and in the Greek myth of Prometheus.

With El infinito en la palma de la mano, Belli essentially take Eden and moves it from the fertile crescent between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, all the way to the jungles of Central America. It becomes less a suburb of Baghdad and more a national park in Costa Rica.

This gives a different flavour to Adam and Eve’s expulsion from Eden, where instead of wondering through the desert, they instead find themselves in dense, verdant jungle. The Eden story at the end of the day is a coming of age tale. The God who watches over Adam and Eve and walks with them in the garden is a thinly veiled parental figure, raising his charges to maturity. The expulsion, which the more zealously religious see as the greatest injustice to befall mankind, is in fact a perfectly normal part of becoming an adult and starting out on one’s own. It is one more version of the hero’s journey, as outlined in Joseph Campbell’s landmark work, The Hero With a Thousand Faces.

Again, my Spanish is perhaps too unsophisticated to appreciate all of the references and it is definitely a book I want to revisit once my comprehension improves a little more. I think I picked up on most of the themes.

The Garden of Eden story, of course, does not end with the expulsion, but with Cain’s murder of Abel and that act too is played out in the jungles of Central America. Adam and Eve had other children and they are implicated in Abel’s death. Rather like John Steinbeck’s version of the Genesis story in East of Eden, the story is fleshed out considerably from the thin gruel found in the Bible. Having read the book in the last year, it is surprising to find how many of its most famous and most widely propagated stories are narrated in no more than a few sentences. It takes writers like Belli and Steinbeck to make them seem compelling.

There is another line from Blake’s Auguries of Innocence, that perhaps appealed to the author of El infinito en la palma de la mano:

A dog starv'd at his master's gate
Predicts the ruin of the state.

Indeed, the poem is filled with lines of condemnation for Blake’s age and for ours. Perhaps El infinito en la palma de la mano is not so much about the expulsion from the Garden of Eden, and more an escape from our crumbling civilisations: to return to the wilderness and begin the process once again, free from the corruption that has befallen the state.

Men like Ortega promise change and invariably bring more of the same. There is nothing new or special in that. He is one more revolutionary using the mass of the people to get himself elected and then turning around to take a flamethrower to the ladder on which he ascended. There are simply too many like him to list here, but we can guarantee that for each new country we visit it, we will find history littered with their crimes and broken promises.

On the other hand, men like Ortega are mortal. Eventually they die and their power dissipates. Their hand picked successors are rarely able to consolidate power (North Korea being an exception). Nicaragua will survive Ortega. Then, like Belli’s Adam and Eve, it can step from beneath that paternalistic hand and remake itself. 

Gioconda Belli

 

Guinea Bissau - The Ultimate Tragedy

Country: Guinea Bissau
Book: The Ultimate Tragedy (A Ultima Tragédia)
Author: Abdulai Sila, Jethro Soutar (Translator)
Publication Year: 1995 (2017)
Genre: Fiction

We have already encountered the small, former Portuguese colony of Guinea Bissau when we looked at The Gambia (see: The Gambia). Guinea Bissau is small only in terms of being an African country. It is actually the size of Switzerland.

Abdulai Sila’s 1995 novel, The Ultimate Tragedy, takes place during the colonial era. Ndani, a young girl, becomes a house girl for a Portuguese administrator and his wife. She is said to be marked for tragedy. Over the course of the book’s hundred and eighty odd pages, the tragedy of her life plays out.

The Ultimate Tragedy is itself marked by features we have seen before. The narrative is progressive, moving from one character to the next before finally resolving back to Ndani. There is Dona Linda, Ndani’s mistress, the typical self important European, who can’t pronounce her name and so calls her Daniela. She inevitably seeks to Christianise Ndani and from there set up a Mission school to Christianise the country.

The Regulo, an appointed Guinean chief,  is engaged in a vendetta against the Chief of the Post, a Portuguese bureaucrat. His grand plan is to build a house every bit as grand as his rival and take a new, young wife to run the household. Ndani is given to him by Dona Linda after her husband, a serial rapist, forces himself on her. The Regulo’s circle of friends and advisers tell him the girl is cursed, but he marries her nonetheless.

The project is completed, but it is doomed from the start. The Regulo soon abandons the house, while Ndani becomes the lover of the teacher (Teacher) of Dona Linda’s mission school. They have a child and move to a different part of Guinea Bissau where they can escape the glare of suspicious eyes.

However, tragedy soon follows and following a violent dispute with the now former Chief of the Post, who later dies from unrelated injures, the Portuguese authorities convict Teacher on trumped up charges and deport him to São Tomé and Príncipe. Ndani longs for his return, waiting each year at the docks, imaging him returning once a year to listen to her news from the previous twelve months. In the end, even this fantasy is denied to her and all she sees is the image of the pipe smoking man who said her life would be a series of unrelenting tragedies.

Is it the ultimate tragedy? Well that depends on your definition of ‘ultimate’. In English it tends to carry the sense of the greatest or most potent form of something. However, in romance languages, ‘ultimate’ (ultima in Portuguese, última in Spanish etc.) is used to mean the last, latest or most recent example of something. In the context of the novel, it carries the sense of one tragedy after another, as was meant by Djambakus, the man who told Ndani her life would be a series of tragedies.

There is a tendency amongst western commentators to see things like curses, the evil eye or other indigenous folk beliefs as primitive and uncivilised. And yet how are such things any different from the sort of tales found all over Greek myth? Ndani is a tragic character in the same way as Oedipus or Medea. Christianity is predicated on the idea that Jesus Christ had to die in order to absolve humanity of its sins. He too was doomed from birth.

All these stories are equally as silly as one another and yet they are weighted differently in the western mind based on purely arbitrary and subjective value judgements. While we can desire the end of such things as the killing of women accused of being witches, which are still sadly prevalent in much of the developing world, it is easy to forget that some of the biggest economies in the world still cling to beliefs which are equally at odds with the modern world.

Ndani can of course also be seen as an avatar for Guinea Bissau and for West Africa and the former colonies at large. Forced to Christianise and to conform to western ideas of education (see: Zimbabwe). Abused and subjected to punitive punishment (cf. Haiti, a predominantly black country still being punished for daring to abolish slavery two hundred and fifty years ago). Waiting, expectantly at the dock for its long exile to end.

At another level, The Ultimate Tragedy carries the markers of other West African novels. The structure is similar to Search Sweet Country (see: Ghana). The narrative that moves from one point of view character to the next before returning to the beginning. Yet Sila’s uses a more fluid form of the technique, the point of view shifting within chapters, rather than the demarcated borders between them that other authors use like doorways between rooms.

Like The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born, there is also the main character moving inevitably towards their unavoidable end. It is not quite The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (see: Dominican Republic) or The Perfect World of Miwako Sumida (see; Singapore) where our character’s tragic ending is revealed in the opening sentence. However, Ndani is shown as helpless from the very beginning in the face of the white man’s world.

I think this is one of those books where I don’t feel I have learned very much about Guinea Bissau as a country. The relationship between the colonisers and the indigenous population is one we have seen countless times in this project and will see many times again, especially as we travel further into Africa.

Portugal itself is a country that remains somewhat of a mystery compared to Spain, France or the Netherlands in regards to its colonial history, despite being the first European country to visit nations and regions across the world (see: Mauritius for instance). The Ultimate Tragedy is a good novel, but perhaps not representative. Reading, for example, Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (as I recently did) will tell you far more about Nigeria and the Biafra War than The Ultimate Tragedy will reveal about the history of Guinea Bissau.

The old problem returns that we can’t read five books from every country we encounter on this literary journey. Some, like The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, turn out to be the perfect one shot novel. Others, like The Ultimate Tragedy represent their home country simply as ambassadors for good writing. Sometimes that is all we can hope for.

Abdulai Sila

 

Special Edition: France - Le Rayon-Vert

Another piece that was originally published on my other blog (with slight edits), The Eponymist: 

History, as historian, Howard Zinn, noted, is an infinite series of events. In order to tell any story, real or imagined, one must cherry pick from those individual moments to form a coherent narrative. How one decides which events to depict and which to omit is ultimately a choice based on demographics and the background noise of commonly held mythologies in which our tribe is placed at the very centre of things. There are no objective voices. All of human existence and experience is subjective (something Kierkegaard recognised). Or as Zinn reflected in the title of his memoir: You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train.

Yet as Douglas Adams remind us in one of his typical aphorisms masquerading as comic wit: if life is going to exist in a Universe of this size, then the one thing it cannot afford to have is a sense of proportion.  Or perspective. In a chaotic, non-deterministic world, it takes a sentient mind to find patterns amongst the randomness. We create meaning in the meaningless. We find shapes in signal noise like faces seen in clouds.

Such cherry picking can bring purpose or it can send us chasing shadows of conspiracy. All of us at some time lose our sense of proportion and our sense of perspective. It can be humiliating and disheartening when a long held belief is shown to be erroneous: When the fleeting cloud-face deforms into a new shape, or the grotesque in the shadows resolves into something benign and mundane: To realise that the Universe never thinks about us and will neither mourn or even notice our passing. Our relevance is limited to the time in which we exist. It is fleeting and when it is over it quickly fades, like an afterimage of the sun.

Yet what can we do? We must find meaning in order to thrive; in order to survive. The following history (apt, given the double meaning of histoire in French) is of no significance or importance to anyone but me. Which is exactly the thing that gives it meaning.

I grew up on naval estates. Eight of the first twelve years of my life were spent living in and around Helensburgh in the west of Scotland, down the coast from the Faslane Naval Base where my father was stationed. We lived there on three separate occasions, as well as stints in Plymouth, Birmingham and Barrow in Furness, where my brother was born.

Helensburgh

I began my life in this area, born in the Vale of Leven hospital in Alexandria by the banks of Loch Lomond. Years later in Balloch, next to Alexandria, we would take our dog, Boomer, for long walks in the park where he could tire himself out. And, inevitably, throw himself into the waters of the loch at every opportunity.

This is where many of my formative experiences took place. I first read the Hobbit here. I first heard Queen here. Owned my first computer here (a Spectrum 48k+). Here I watched Live Aid. I watched Raiders of the Lost Ark at one friend’s house and saw pirated copies of Ghostbusters and Gremlins at another’s. I learned about new films from watching Film ’84, Film ’85 and all of its subsequent incarnations.

At the beginning of 1986, my father left the Navy after more than twenty years and we found ourselves in Eastbourne, on the south west coast of England. More formative experiences. Sea Cadets. Sailing. Visiting Herstmonceux Observatory with Astronomy Club. Seeing the Hobbit play at the local theatre. Discovering the Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy for the first time. Also discovering Jules Verne.

It happened because of watching Film ’86 or Film ’87: Barry Norman’s review for a film called, Le Rayon Vert. The film came out in 1986, but it might not have been released in the UK until the following year. The film itself was of little interest to me. What did interest me was the background details. The film was named after the Jules Verne novel of the same name.

The title was what fascinated me. Le Rayon Vert. Translated as, The Green Ray, it refers to the very final particles of light that radiate out from the sun at sunset. The phenomenon is rare and can only be seen under certain conditions and in certain parts of the world. On very calm stretches of ocean or incredibly flat stretches of desert. From high and dry mountain planes or in flight with no cloud cover obscuring the view.

There is an old legend that anyone who sees the green ray will start to make sense of their life. The idea beguiled me. I went to the library to try and find a copy of the book, but it is not regarded as a major work from the dozens Jules Verne wrote and our small, local library was unlikely to carry a copy. What I did find was a copy of Five Weeks in a Ballon, which I withdrew and took home.

Jules Verne has been with me from that time until now. I don’t remember if I even finished Five Weeks in a Balloon. The text was small and in a book that fitted easily in my squat palm. I remember struggling through it and the memory is clouded as to whether I finished it or not. I think it’s likely that I kept renewing the loan period in the hope of completing it, but gave up at some point and returned it to the library in favour of something less challenging.

What I did have was a collection of abridged versions of the classics, cut down for adolescent readers. The Old Curiosity Shop. Tom Brown’s School Days. Ivanhoe. There were many others, as well as what are perhaps Jules Verne’s three most famous novels: 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Journey to the Centre of the Earth and Around the World in Eighty Days.

These books I did complete. There was a sponsored reading week or fortnight in which they formed the core of the books I read in that time. It was a struggle. I was not a natural reader at that time. Amazing when you consider that as an adult I read three or four books a week across a breadth of genres. But if any writer laid the foundations on that long journey from faltering to accomplished reader, it was Jules Verne.

Verne was for a long time considered a children’s writer in the English speaking world. This is mainly the fault of terrible translations from the French in which he wrote. Yet if one considers for instance, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, there is much scientific detail included. It doesn’t quite go to the extent of Moby Dick, where Melville was essentially copying out, verbatim, oceanic and biological passages from textbooks, but it’s not far off. The abridged, children’s edition I read in Eastbourne obviously excised much of these technical passages. Which is probably for the best. They’re hard enough to understand as an adult.

I guess the light soon faded on my interest in Jules Verne, as do all such fleeting childhood obsessions. It was only as an adult, inspired by Michael Palin’s Around the World in Eighty Days TV series, that I returned to Jules Verne. Yet by this point in my life, I had become a literary magpie, fascinated by every new shiny object. Graham Greene novels. George Orwell’s fiction and non-fiction. Maya Anjou's autobiography. Frankenstein. His Dark Materials. Jane Eyre. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy books read again and again and again.

As such, my re-acquaintance and deep dive into Jules Verne’s novels has been slow. I reread 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Journey to the Centre of the Earth and Around the World in Eighty Days in their unabridged versions. I read From Earth to Moon and Around the Moon in a single edition. I struggled through the overlong The Mysterious Island. But there wasn’t much else to choose from. Despite writing many novels during his lifetime, very few are commonly available in English translation. Even once popular books like Une Ville Flottante, or A Floating City, are these days hard to find. So I did the only thing I could do. I turned to versions in their original French.

Actually, it was the other way around. My French has always been middling, despite studying it on and off since Eastbourne. But I had started trying to read more in French, having hoarded second hand Folio editions since university. Satre. Camus. Zola. All far above my level, but you can’t expect to go any higher unless you’re prepared to climb. So I read them. And reread them. And looked up the words I didn’t know. Which in the modern world, with access to resources like Wiktionary, is easier than ever.

In the meantime, I acquired other French language editions. Flaubert. Simone de Beauvoir. More Zola (I love Zola). A translation of Ulysses (difficulty level: God) brought back for me from France. I found online resources. I recommend ebooksgratuits.com, which has open source copies of many copyright expired books, including Verne, Zola, George Sand, Alexander Dumas and many others in a number of different formats.

Somewhere online I found a download of more than fifty Jules Verne novels and short stories and dove in. At the beginning I decided to go though them in order of publication. Which meant the first book on the list was, ironically, Cinq Semaines en Ballon, or Five Weeks in a Balloon. Nearly twenty five years later, I finally finished reading it. And in French too.
 

Jules Verne

Along with the next book in the series, Voyages et Adventures du Capitaine Hatteras, you find a key feature of Verne’s writing in Cinq Semaines en Ballon. As much as his novels are about the adventure or voyage being depicted, they are also about the history of adventure and exploration. Cinq Semaines en Ballon is about travelling across Africa in a balloon, but it is also a history of European exploration in Africa (with the destructive consequences of colonial exploration glossed over with depressing predictability).  Voyages et Adventures du Capitaine Hatteras is about the journey to reach the North Pole, but is also about Arctic and Antarctic exploration in general.

I soon abandoned the chronological reading order. Many of Verne’s earlier novels were serialised in magazine form and are long books as a result. My French remains middling and I need shorter books to retain the concentration levels. So I read some of his shorter novels in between Madame Bovary and Le Deuxième Sexe and a couple of books by Senegalese writer, Fatou Diome. At some point I remembered Le Rayon Vert and routed through the download folder but couldn’t find it. It is such a minor story in the canon that it wasn’t even included with fifty nine others freely available for download.

Yet Le Rayon Vert is out there. I found a .pdf copy of the book and downloaded it. I knew I would get around to it, but opened the file to check it wasn’t corrupted. And what did I find on the very first page, but reference to Helensburgh! The damned book that stared my interest in Jules Verne, that paved the way to my love of reading, takes place in the place where I began.

Why I didn’t abandon everything I was doing and read the book there and then, I don’t know. I was reading too much as it was. I was probably already reading something else by Jules Verne. So I closed the file down and forgot about it for a year or two.

When I did read it, a week ago as I write, the book featured so much more than Helensburgh. The bulk of the story takes places in and around Oban and the Hebrides. Yet it opens and ends on the outskirts of Helensburgh, close to Faslane. But more than that, Verne makes reference to Leven, when I was born, and Balloch, where we took Boomer to run himself ragged. Clearly Verne visited the area. People living in Glasgow, twenty miles away, are barely aware of these places. To think Jules Verne came to these places and was inspired to write a novel, even a minor one, is of great significance to me, even, and because, it means so little to anyone else.

The book itself is fine. It contains scattered references to the works of Sir Walter Scott and it seems to be a pastiche of Scott and other early 19^th century romantic novelists. Scott was at one time the most famous novelist in the world, although his influence had declined by the end of the century. He had a huge influence on the likes of Alexander Dumas, who was a contemporary and good friend of Jules Verne.

Le Rayon-Vert is the age old tale of a woman, Helena Campbell, being compelled to marry one man, but the man is a prize tool. She won’t agree to marry him until she has seen the green ray, which is a bit like wanting to find the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. She sets off in the direction of Oban, where conditions might be right to witness the phenomenon. On the journey from Helensburgh, she meets the man who she will actually marry. When the green ray finally appears at the end of the novel, the couple are instead looking at each other, the faint reflection seen in each other’s eyes. They are each other’s green ray, where meaning has been found all by itself.

Le Rayon-Vert is a very different novel from most of the others that Verne wrote (certainly of the ones I have read). Perhaps that’s why it’s not included with his common cannon. There is no race across the world, or balloon ride over Africa, or journey into the bowels of the Earth. There are no futuristic submarines or space rockets shot out of a giant cannon. The journey Helena Campbell makes from Helensburgh to Oban is one that can be made by anyone today. Although Le Rayon-Vert is included in Verne’s Voyages Extraordinaires series, it is as much a romance as it is an adventure novel. The voyage is commonplace rather than being in any way extraordinary.

Moreover, Le Rayon-Vert is rarely mentioned in reference to Helensburgh. The town’s website makes no mention of Jules Verne. Neither does its Wikipedia page. None of the people I know who have lived in Helensburgh or been there had even heard of Le Rayon-Vert until I mentioned it.

Where Le Rayon-Vert is mentioned is in the film of the same name. I did watch it ten years ago by renting it from Love Film during that brief period when receiving DVD rentals through the post was a thing. I watched it again after finishing the novel. 

 

It’s an odd film. Largely made up of scenes of improvised dialogue. It was apparently shot using a crew of four. In several scenes, the actors are caught glancing at the camera, which is impossible to conceal or style out. I haven’t seen any other films by director, Eric Rohmer, but it appears to be typical of his style. Glacial storytelling. Little in the way of scored music but lots of ambient noise. From what little I have read, Rohmer is a love-him-or-hate-him director. Le Rayon-Vert is one of a series of films he made in the 1980s that are similar, thematically. I’d like to watch the others in the series.

Film and book have little in common narratively speaking, but share some of the same themes. Both feature women as their main characters with Delphine the analogue to Helena Campbell. Yet while Helena is a force of nature, Delphine is introverted and defensive against the efforts by her friends to talk with her. She spends the whole film on her own, even as scuzzy men follow her down the street. At Biarritz train station she meets Jacques,  who’s only marginally less sleazy, but the two end the film sat on a hilltop at sunset, waiting for the green ray. Unlike Helena, she sees the ray for herself (a terrible post-production effect), which suggest Jacques will be a fleeting acquaintance.

I’d forgotten the scene where Delphine happens upon a book club sat on a wall, discussing Verne’s Le Rayon-Vert and the phenomenon in general. She sits on a bench beneath them to listen. It might have even been one of the clips Barry Norman showed on Film ’86 or Film ’87. It’s a patchy film, but somewhat beguiling. Ten years after seeing it for the first time, there was much I remembered and even anticipated. It’s one of those films where you look up the actors on IMDB to see where you know them from and it turns out where you know them from is this film.

I prefer the book to the film, but it’s not a fair contest. The film doesn’t feature even one scene set in Helensburgh. Yet without the film, I would never have arrived at the novel. I would certainly have turned to Jules Verne eventually. I am too much of a sci-fi nerd not to have done so. But Le Rayon-Vert would have been a long way down the line. I might have stumbled upon it eventually, having finished all the other Jules Verne novels. Which would have meant missing a novel that is minor to the world, but more significant than the sum of its parts. The film is an essential link in a chain that leads back to the book and into personal history.

We find meaning in meaninglessness. Find patterns among the randomness. There is nothing mystical about Verne’s Le Rayon-Vert beginning and ending in Helensburgh, nor a chance reference in a Barry Norman program setting me on my literary way. I have witnessed the green ray in two different incarnations, but nothing has been brought into focus or the meaning of the universe revealed.

As with in English, I have become a magpie of French language novels. I will continue to plough through forty or fifty more Jules Verne stories, in between books by Zola, Sand, Rousseau, Camus, Irène Némirovsky, Stendhal, Dumas and a dozen other authors besides. Perhaps the path was always laid out before me. If it hadn’t been La rue Jules Verne, another route would have led me in the same direction. Yet in a world of such complexity, we cannot afford to think about roads not taken. This is where we find ourselves. This is where I am. Le Rayon-Vert has been my guiding star.

 

Mauritius - Eve Out of Her Ruins

Country: Mauritius
Book: Eve Out of Her Ruins (Eve de ses décombres)
Author: Ananda Devi (translator: Jeffrey Zuckerman)
Publication Year: 2016 (2006)
Genre: Fiction

Mauritius is another of those places, like Iceland (see: Iceland) or Morocco (see: Morocco) that straddles the line between two continents. Technically part of the continent of Africa, the tiny island lies a thousand miles east of Mozambique, out beyond the much larger island of Madagascar.  While it is closer to Africa than any other land mass, it could just as well be described as a halfway house between Africa and Asia.

For such a small country (790 square miles) in the middle of the Indian Ocean, Mauritius has ingrained itself into the western consciousness more than other territories in the region. It was here the dodo lived, until the first Dutch explorers arrived and hunted the bird to extinction in six short decades. It is questionable whether such an unremarkable bird would be so famous if it had survived. As it is, it’s destruction has become a cautionary tale about ecology and preservation (one we have stubbornly refused to heed). It has turned up in the writing of everyone from Lewis Carroll to Douglas Adams and Jasper Fforde.

Alice meets the Dodo

Even before the Dutch, Arab records mention the island all the way back in the 10^th century. The Portuguese were the next to arrive at the beginning of the 16^th, but they saw little of interest and the island remained uninhabited until the Dutch arrived at the end of the century. They were the first to transport slaves to harvest sugar and coffee and all of the usual cash crops of European colonialism.

France took over the island in 1715 (nearby Réunion is still a French dependency), but it was captured by the British Navy during the Napoleonic Wars. It remained a British colony until independence in 1968. French continues to be spoken on the island, along with English and Mauritian Creole.

Following independence, the British retained control of the Chagos Archipelago to the north west of the country, which includes the island of Diego Garcia. Diego Garcia has been used as a joint airforce base with the USA since the 1970s.

After decades of dispute and obfustication by the UK government, it finally agreed to return the Chagos Islands to Mauritius in 2025. Diego Garcia is to remain under UK control. A whole entry could be written on this history alone and I might return to the Chagos islands at a later date as part of my Reading the Dependencies sub-project.

In the meantime, the population of Mauritius, as a result of colonialism, slavery and sitting in the middle of the Indian Ocean, has a heady mix of ethnicities. Indian descendents make up the majority of the population, followed by African, Chinese, French and a large Madagascan population. By some measures, it has the highest population density in Africa with 1.3 million people living there. It is also reckoned to be most developed country in Africa.

Statistics, however, rarely tell the whole picture. A dense population usually equals slums and grinding inequality. In choosing Ananda Devi’s novel, Eve out of Her Ruins, to represent Mauritius, we come face to face with these issues.

The titular Eve is named for obvious reasons. A 17 year old school girl, she has used her body to get what she wants throughout her teenage years. The novel is told by Eve and three of her contemporaries in short, dense passages. The consequences of her actions play out like the Garden of Eden story for which she is named. The tale has been retold by everyone from Emile Zola to John Steinbeck.

Eve Out of Her Ruins is another of those books we have seen in this project that are universal. It could be set in any slum or impoverished country throughout the globe. The problem of teenage prostitution and predatory men is hardly unique to Mauritius. What is less common, at least in literature, is Eve’s disassociation from her own body, even when her encounters can in no sense be considered consensual.

Against Eve’s narrative, we have that of Saadiq, poet and gang member, who is in love with Eve, but for whom she is forever off limits. He is the typical male who wants to save the working girl from herself, as seen in countless movies and songs (cf. Roxanne, where Sting mansplains sex work). There is also her best friend, Savita, and Clélio, another gang member who has already committed vandalism and petty theft and is working his way up to murder.

All four are residents of the fiction slum town of Troumaron, which translates from French into Brown Hole, and, by extension, Shit Hole. Subtlety isn’t always needed. They are all trapped; subjected to violent fathers and distant mothers. Each talks about leaving but escape is all but impossible. Clélio’s brother has emigrated to France, but Clélio knows his brother’s tales of prosperity are just that. He is poor even there.

It’s a short book of only about a hundred and fifty pages, but the short three or four page chapters make it seem longer. The second half of the book hinges on the murder of a girl, the reasons for her killing and Clélio’s arrest and imprisonment. Again the issues of prejudice and poverty rear their ugly heads. There is a resolution of kinds, but it is left sufficiently ambiguous to remind us that life is rarely so neat and tidy as it is in Hollywood movies.

A good book and as I have said countless times, Devi is an author to whom I will return long after this project ends. I read this one in translation, but she writes principally in French and I would like to read some of her many other books in their original language. There are also many other Mauritian writers to explore, but we can’t do a deep dive into every country’s oeuvre or we’ll be here until doomsday.

Anyway, it almost seems apt to restrict an island nation to one or two books to reflect its relative isolation. Even if Mauritius is less isolated than its geographical position suggests.

Ananda Devi