Latvia - Soviet Milk/Life Stories

Country: Latvia
Book: Soviet Milk (Mātes piens)/Life Stories (Dzīves stāsti)
Author: Nora Ikstena (Translator: Margita Gailitis)
Publication Year: 2015(2018)/2004(2013)
Genre: Fiction/Short Fiction

To Latvia. Middle of the triptych of Baltic states with Estonia to the north and Lithuania to the south. Latvia was invaded and annexed by Russia in 1940 and remained under its iron fist until declaring independence in 1991, following the dissolution of Soviet Union.

Soviet Milk takes place during those years. It is told in alternating narratives, switching  between an unnamed mother and her daughter. The mother is sent to Leningrad (St Petersburg) as part of her medical training, but an incident there leaves her medical career in ruins. She is sent into exile to run a clinic in the Latvian countryside. Her daughter remains with her grandmother in Riga, visiting her mother at weekends and during the holidays.

The title refers to the daily milk all children were given in Soviet run schools (although the original Latvian title, Mātes piens, translates as Mother’s Milk). The mother disappears for five days after giving birth. When she returns, her milk has dried out. The daughter develops an aversion to milk as a child. The metaphor is there for all to see. The daughter rejecting the symbol of her mother as her mother has rejected the daughter. The mother in turn has rejected her own mother after her father was taken away and died in a Soviet prison. Daughter and grandmother form a bond, skipping the middle generation in a familiar trope of fiction and real life.

 As the daughter studies hard at school, enduring the propaganda she is forced to learn and memorise, her mother’s mental state slowly unravels as her exile continues without end. The daughter is almost a metaphor for Latvia itself as she secretly becomes more militant towards the communists. Her schooling progresses through the 80s and into university as  the end of Russian communism on the horizon for all who know how this era of history ends.

Ikstena, like the daughter, was born in 1969 and in fact much of Soviet Milk is autobiographical. Which make the denouement all the more affecting, reflected as it is by real life events. The book ends with the fall of the Berlin Wall. All of us who were alive that night in 1989 can never forget it. Like the fall of the Soviet Union itself, it all seemed to happen so remarkably quickly. For some, though, it came too late.

Life Stories is an earlier collection of Ikstena’s short stories, but many of the same themes from Soviet Milk, especially the autobiographical elements, are present throughout the eight tales. Tales of the city and tales of the countryside. Tales of Latvia and tales of Latvian immigrants living in the United States. Tales of life and tales of death.

Nora Ikstena has written more than 20 books, novels, short stories, essays and biographies, and although much of this work is not as yet available in English translation, she is another writer to whom I will return long after I have finished this reading project. Soviet Milk is considered the final part of a trilogy of novels that began with 1998’s Celebration of Life and continued with 2012’s Besa. So there’s two more books, if translations can be found.

Latvia is one of the countries for which this sort of literary journey is made to discover. It is perhaps a little reductive to resort to a book which focuses on the Soviet era, but with so many former Soviet states, the Russian occupation is a large part of recent European history, in the same way it is impossible to consider many African nations without recourse to the impact of English, French and German colonialism. Or turning to Latin America without thinking about the Spanish and Portuguese impact on those countries (in many of those countries I am literally reading those books in Spanish).

So many smaller, or less powerful nations are impacted by the incursion of larger powers and these ‘interactions’ (to use a decidedly Orwellian phrase) influence how a country develops in its language, its culture, its self-image and its self-belief. Much of Latvian culture and folk tradition was suppressed under the Soviet regime. The reemergence of those traditions served as a symbol and a bellwether for the end of Russian dominance in the region. In the case of Soviet Milk, reflected by the real life events that inspired the novel, the familial is a microcosm of the global. The passing of one era. The emergence of another.

Besides, Russia’s invasion and bombardment of the Ukraine reminds us that former satellite states like Latvia are not out of the woods yet. If Ukraine falls, who will be next on Vladimir Putin’s radar? The era of Stalin, Khrushchev and Brezhnev is not ancient history. It is as much part of living memory as the fall of the Berlin Wall. Like the man said, those who forget the lessons of history are doomed forever to repeat them. Soviet Milk is part of the canon that informs that remembrance.

Nora Ikstena

 

Cambodia - First They Killed My Father

Country: Cambodia           
Book: First They Killed My Father
Author: Loung Ung
Publication Year: 2000
Genre: Memoir/History

Often on this literary trip around the world, I find it hard not to conclude that the human race is a collection of despicable specimens. From the current desolation of Syria (see: Syria) of the previous entry, we turn to Cambodia and the Killing Fields of the Khmer Rouge.

Loung Ung was 5 when Pol Pot’s forces entered Phnom Penh in 1975. Her father was a policeman and the family were relatively comfortable compared to many other Cambodians living in the city at the time. With the arrival of the Khmer Rouge, the family were forced to flee the capital, first by car and then on foot. In a journey vaguely reminiscent of the Joads in Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, they stumble from one disaster to the next.

Eventually they arrive at a camp and what is advertised as a safe haven. Yet like every work of fiction ever written, the dream soon turns to nightmare. The family are forced to work 12 to 14 hours a day growing and harvesting food. Little of this produce is shared with the workers and their rations are quckly reduced to little or nothing

Loung describes the single rice dish that becomes less like rice and more like a thin broth. How she’d drink the liquid first to reveal three tea spoons worth of rice at the bottom of the dish. Savouring every last grain, even if they fell in the dirt. It was the only food they would receive each day, although they were able to buy extra supplies with gold and jewels sewed into their clothing before the exodus from Phnom Penh.

Yet there can be no doubt what will happen in this story. The title tells all and hangs over Loung’s memoir like the shadow of the Grim Reaper. As a government official and de facto supporter of the previous regime, the family live in constant fear that Pa will be identified and liquidated. As we hear in tales told of every cowardly regime throughout time, no formal sentence of death is pronounced. Two soldiers arrive to ask Loung’s father to help them free a vehicle from a ditch. He is never seen again.

Life limps on. Eventually Loung’s mother tells her and two of her siblings to escape and find a family willing to take them in. Instead Loung and her sister, Chou, end up in a children’s camp, where Loung is recruited into the army as 7 a year old child solder to fight the Vietnamese. Loung manages to get a pass to visit relatives and returns to the camp to see her mother one last time. After a premonition, she next leaves without permission and finds the family tent empty. Like her father, her mother is never seen again.

The Vietnamese army took control of Phnom Penh in 1979 and pushed westward. Loung’s camp is hit with mortar fire and many of the children are maimed and killed. She is reunited with two of her surviving siblings and they once again find themselves walking. They are taken in by a number of families, some kind, some cruel, but with the Khmer Rouge mostly in retreat, they are able travel back towards the capital, now reunited with two more of their brothers.

Through a series of adventures, Loung travels with her brother to Vietnam to stay with his wife’s new family. The three of them are then smuggled into Thailand to a refugee camp and are then sponsored to travel to the United States, where they settle in Vermont. Loung went to school, graduated from college and became a campaigner and activist for veterans of the Vietnam War and the abolition of landmines. In 1997, the Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation, for which Loung worked, won the Nobel Peace Prize.

First They Killed My Father has been criticised by many in the Cambodian community. There are a number of alleged inaccuracies in the book and the main objection raised is how a 5 year old child could have remembered these incidents so clearly. This kind of misses the point. The book is deliberately framed through the eyes of a child and what seem like relatively minor errors feed into the rose tinted view we all have of our childhoods. Memory is a fickle thing. Whether Cambodians put mint in their noodle soup or whether the family really did visit Angkor Wat in 1973 or Wat Phnom in Phnom Penh is neither here or there.

It does seems like there is a certain amount or racism and classism in these accusations. Loung’s mother was Chinese and ethnically she is half Cambodian. The sad irony is that this is exactly the kind of eugencism that were central to the rule of the Khmer Rouge. Loung describes using dirt to darken her pale skin for fear she would be identified as half Chinese and killed. Apparently the same level of xenophobia survives in certain corners of the Khmer population.

The classist jibes are equally reductive. The accusation that, well your family were well off before the Khmer Rouge, so how can you claim to represent the Cambodian community is a ridiculous as saying, well you were a professor in Warsaw before the Germans invaded, so how can you speak for the Polish Jews who survived Auschwitz?As we saw with Saudi Arabia (see: Saudi Arabia), no one voice is more worthy or representitive than any other. Life is not a single data point but a scatter chart of many such points.

No one person represents the whole. In order to get a balanced view of any historical event, we must read from a wide variety of sources, even those that do not conform to our ideological view of the world. No one account can give a definitive assessment of Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge or the concentration camps of the Nazis. First They Killed My Father is no less an objective view of the time and place than Roland Joffé’s 1984 film, The Killing Fields. Yet the latter seems to receive less of a backlash. Sadly in reviewing a female author, we always have to suspect that sexism and basic misogyny play a part in these criticisms.

Of course, I am equally to blame here in choosing one writer and one book to represent the whole of Cambodia. I do not claim Loung Ung to be the be all and end all of Cambodia literature, any more than I claim Clarice Lispector to represent (see: Brazil) or Waris Dirie to encompass all of Somalia (see: Somalia). Sometimes though, I have to be ruthless. There are 197 countries to cover in this project, as well as their various dependencies.

Some places hold my interest longer than others, usually because of their unfamiliarity to me. As someone who has thought and read about Cambodia, on and off, for a very long time, I am reasonably well acquainted with the events of the time. I am, for instance, less knowledgeable about Laos, which is a gap I will certainly plug at some point. There are only so many hours in the day.

Later, when this project is completed, there is no telling to which countries' literature I will return. For now, First They Killed My Father will have to do. Time to hoist anchor and raise the sails. Time to be moving on.

Loung Ung

 

Syria - Woman in the Crossfire/ Planet of Clay

Country: Syria         
Book: A Woman in the Crossfire/ Planet of Clay
Author: Samar Yazbek
Publication Year: 2012/2021
Genre: Journalism/Fiction

Before the start of the Syrian Revolution in 2011, Samar Yazbek was already something of a household name in her country. As well as a novelist and journalist, she had appeared on several programmes on Syrian State TV and presented her own series, Library Story.

Yazbek was also something of a controversial figure for being a woman living in a conservative Islamic country. She left home at 16, very much out of kilter with traditional values. She was also raising her daughter alone, without living with the father.

All of this might have given someone else pause when the series of demonstrations against President Bashar al-Assad began in March 2011 Being a face known to many, not to mention a woman, was bound to put her in harm’s way. But Yazbek is not anyone. Throughout the first 100 days of the demonstrations and retaliations by the security forces, she recorded her experiences, as well as firsthand accounts of those witness to massacres and of the victims of the beatings and torture.

A Woman in the Crossfire is the result of those recordings. If we want to get highbrow and overly effete about it, we can compare A Woman in the Crossfire to Goya’s Disasters of War, the series of sketches Goya made depicting the atrocities carried out by Napoleon’s forces following their invasion of Spain in 1808. Yet the two have a lot in common. Quick, vital sketches that describe the daily indignities committed by the aggressors on the general population. 

A scene from Goya's Disasters of War

From the start, Yazbek was recognised by the police and military officers. She received countless death threats and not just from the authorities. As an Alawite, a minority Shīʿite Muslim sect, of which Bashar al-Assad and his family are members, Yazbek was considered a traitor by many of her own people.

Bravery comes in many forms. Yazbek does not portray herself as some stoic, impassive observer. She took Xanax to be able to sleep at night. She often had crying fits and worried most for her daughter, who, as teenager, was most in danger from the kinds of sexual violence committed in all wars and conflicts. As the demonstrations begin, she witnessed her first dead body. It was far from the last.

But bravery is not about action without fear. It is about action in spite of that fear. Yazbek was threatened and intimidated but kept writing regardless. The authorities frequently appeared at her door and, hood over her head, took her to be shown the mutilated bodies hanging in the cells of the Syrian torturer chambers. They made her strip to the waist at one point, but a combination of defiance and a fainting fit prevented (perhaps) the sexual assault that was to follow.

A Woman in the Crossfire is a reminder how important female voices are in such moments of revolution and conflict. It is a snapshot of what was happening in Damascus and elsewhere in the country at the moment when the revolution began. At the end of July 2011, Yazbek left the country, more for the protection of her daughter than any regard for her own safety. 

It was perhaps a fortuitous escape. From July and into August 2011, members of the Syrian military started to rebel (Yazbek records instances of whole units being massacred for refusing to serve or fire on civilians). New factions formed, hostile to Bashar al-Assad. The Syrian Revolution was over. The Syrian Civil War had begun. It has been in progress ever since.

More than 600,000 are estimated to have been killed in Syria in the last 13 years, including 55,000 tortured to death in the same cells to which Yazbek was taken. It is a war in which all the usual global political suspects interfere and make political capital. From the UK, USA, France, Russia, Iran and Israel. no one comes out of it well. Only this week as I write, 5 SAS soldiers are being investigated for potential war crimes committed while on active service in Syria.

War, as Smedley Butler once said, is a racket (see: War is a Racket). It is also a business. Since the end of the Second World War, many of the world’s major economies have been dependent on their arms manufacturers. Syria is just the latest country allowed to go to rack and ruin to feed the cannibalistic war machine.

Bashar al-Assad is culpable for much of this of course, but the consequences of the 2003 invasion of Iraq and the unleashing of Isis and other Islamist forces is as significant to what has happened to Syria in the last decade. And like the 8 year Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s, in which both sides were kept well armed by the same global cannibals, Syria lies in ruins as much from external interference as internal strife.

Samar Yazbek has returned to the Syrian conflict in her writing multiple times since leaving the country. I have not read all of the works, so I can't comment on which is the most impactful. Yet her 2021 novel, Planet of Clay, must be near the pinnacle of what she has written in that time.

Planet of Clay is told through the eyes of Rima, a girl unable to speak. In reading A Woman in the Crossfire, one can’t help but think of Rima as an analogue of Yazbek’s own daughter at the time of the initial Syrian uprising. Although from Yazbek’s descriptions of her daughter, she was far from silent at the time. The landscape in which Rima travels is also not the largely intact Syria at the beginning of the crisis. No time is specified, but the wholesale destruction suggests we are closer to 2021 than 2011.

The plot is Kafkaesque in its outlook. Rima is dragged from one basement and safe house to another by a series of relatives and other actors. First her mother ‘disappears’ (an Orwellian tern for ‘shot’). She ends up in a hospital filled with torture victims. Her brother rescues her and drags her from pillar to post, until he also ‘disappears’. It is then the turn of her brother’s friend to bring her to safety.

Anyone who’s ever read Kafka or Orwell knows how this ends. Yet as we have said before during this project, fairytale endings are a myth. There is no restoration of the status quo for Syria. A tentative ceasefire has been in place for the last couple of years, but not much of Syria remains standing. The west and its media have long since moved on to other conflicts, because in a world financed by arms sales there are always new flames to fan with bombs and bullets. It doesn’t seem like we will ever learn.

Samar Yazbek

 

Iceland - Butterflies in November et al.

Country: Iceland               
Book: Butterflies in November (Rigning í nóvember)
Author: Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir, Brian FitzGibbon (Translator)
Publication Year: 2004 (2014)
Genre: Fiction

Country: Iceland               
Book: Icelandic Folk Tales
Author: Hjörleifur Helgi Stefánsson
Publication Year: 2020
Genre: Folklore

Country: Iceland               
Book: The Prose Edda
Author: Snorri Sturluson, Jesse Byock (Translator)
Publication Year: 1220 (2005)
Genre: Norse Mythology

Country: Iceland
Book: Saga: A Novel of Medieval Iceland
Author: Jeff Janoda
Publication Year: 2005
Genre: Historical Fiction

Iceland is a country which fascinates me. Straddling the Atlantic ridge between the Eurasian and America tectonic plates, it is a land famous for its volcanoes and lava fields. Indeed, over the last few years there have been a number of prominent volcanic eruptions on the island, the live streams for which I have often played in the background while reading.

Even before then, my awareness of Iceland as a place of wonder begins with the 1959 film adaptation of Journey to the Centre of the Earth, staring James Mason, and later the book, which began my love of Jules Verne (see: Le Rayon Vert for more).

In Journey to the Center of the Earth (Voyage au centre de la Terre), German Professor, Otto Lidenbrock finds a note written in runic script in an old book of Icelandic saga. When decoded, the note gives the reader coded instructions on how to gain entrance to the centre of the Earth.

Lidenbrock, accompanied by his nephew, Axel, travels to Iceland, to the stratovolcano of Snæfellsjökull in the west of the island. On certain days at the end of June the sun casts shadows that point the way towards a tunnel which leads into the bowels of the planet. Many have seen in this, and other plot points, as an influence for JRR Tolkien’s The Hobbit. They initially take the wrong tunnel and have to double back. Once on the right track, the adventures never return to Iceland, finally emerging during a volcanic eruption on the Italian island of Stromboli.

Iceland beguiles with its apparent smallness. Although only 500km at its widest point, the coastline runs for more than 6,500km. Which provides more than enough space for the roadtrip featured in the first Icelandic book proper under consideration, Butterflies in November by Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir.

The unnamed narrator, a translator of more than 11 languages, has been left by her husband for his pregnant mistress. She has ambitions of travelling abroad, but when a friend is hospitalised for several months, she find herself the temporary guardian of their 4 year old, hearing impaired son. And so the two set out on a journey around the 1300km long Ring Road that encircles Iceland.

The novel has certain similarities to Arto Paasilinna’s The Year of the Hare (see: Finland). Just as Paasilinna’s book begins with the winging of the titular hare, so Butterflies in November begins with the narrator hitting and killing a goose in her car. The lives of the protagonists of both books alter or unravel in the immediate aftermath of these incidents, resulting in them journeying through the wilderness of their respective countries.

It’s a decent enough novel in its way and I will return to Ólafsdóttir’s books at a later date. However, as others have pointed out, it does contain some problematic language. Like "a child with a Senegalese father" being identified as being disabled because of their dual heritage. The narrator’s husband is a misogynist and bully of the highest order, with his pronouncements and personal attacks on her going unchallenged. There is even a brief reconciliation between the two at one point. The book is one of those that just kind of ends without any resolution being achieved. I want to read more as I’m interested to see if this is emblematic of Ólafsdóttir’s oeuvre or of Icelandic literature in general.

Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir

For now, let’s move on to Icelandic Folk Tales by Hjörleifur Helgi Stefánsson. The image of traditional Icelandic literature is one of the great sagas and Edda (see below). In turning to Iceland, I knew I wanted to read some Icelandic folklore and found a number of examples. Stefánsson’s short collection of folk stories is a more modern rendering of a number of folklore tropes, but all the familiar characters are here. Demons. Witches. Elves. Sooo many trolls. If ever we needed reminding just how much influence Icelandic folklore had on the shaping of Tolkien’s Middle Earth, we can find it in these pages.

I say this is a modern retelling as Stefánsson’s framing is of oral tales passed down by his parents and grandparents. It is also very much a national collection, with each area of Iceland featuring at least once. Yet the well worn, clichéd language of the fairytale is also present, with all of the usual, ‘There once was a’ and suchlike that we find in Hans Christian Andersen and the Brothers Grimm. The stories are new and old at the same time, reminding the reader just how old a country Iceland really is.

For a sense of how old Iceland is, we turn to the 13^th century Prose Edda. This is the one. The book that inspired Tolkien’s entire mythology, from Middle Earth, the name he took for his mythical world, to names of several of the dwarfs that set out with Bilbo Baggins in The Hobbit, to the name of Frodo in The Lord of the Rings series, who is here a character called, Frodi.

As well as well Tolkien, The Prose Edda was used by Richard Wagner for much of his Ring Cycle, the Black Sabbath album, Tyr, as well as all of those Marvel movies. Indeed, whenever anyone makes reference to the Valkyries, Berserkers. Valhalla, Ragnarok, Yggdrasill, Thor, Odin or Loki, they are ultimately referring back to the Prose Edda.

The book is in one  sense a teaching aid on how to write epic poetry, using references to earlier Norse poems that are mostly now lost (although a second volume, known as The Poetic Edda, does gather many of these verses together.) Here we get the sense of the age of Iceland, in that these stories were already old when they were gathered together and set down by Sturluson in the early 13^th century. It is telling that the Prose Edda is also known as the Younger Edda.

The Prose Edda is also an interesting document in that it straddles the periods of pagan and Christian Scandinavia. The book starts with reference to Adam and Eve and Jesus Christ, but soon spins off into reference to classical mythology. Thor is made a refugee from the Fall of Troy in the same way as Aeneas in Virgil’s Aeneid. He is made commensurate with Hector, although in most renderings of the story, including the Iliad, Hector was killed by Achilles.

This classical framing was perhaps an attempt to preserve Norse mythology in the face of Christian persecution by making it seem less grandiose and more in the vein of Roman mythology. Thor, in other renderings of the mythos, is commensurate with Zeus or Jupiter, all of them gods of thunder. Yet this would place Thor in direction competition with Jehovah. Thor’s powers are therefore dialed down and transferred to a mythical realm that remained acceptable to the Roman Catholic church because of its Latin associations.

In a similar vein, Loki, chief antagonist for Thor, becomes analogue with Odysseus (or Ulysses, to emphasise the Roman version). Which makes sense. Both are tricksters. The Trojan Horse is said to have been Odysseus’s idea, not to mention his many deceptions on the journey home to Ithaca. Though Hector and Odysseus are never really placed in direct conflict with one another in either Homer or Virgil.

Many of our modern English words come down to us from these tales. Earth (as in Planet Earth). Hell (Hel in the original). Not to mention most of our days of the week, which are all named after Norse gods, in the same way that all Latin derived, romance languages use names derived from pagan Roman gods.

Of all the books we have looked at, or will look at on this journey, we are unlikely to find one that has had more influence on western thought than the Prose Edda.

For a modern retelling of other Icelandic sagas, we turn, finally, to Saga: A Novel of Medieval Iceland by Jeff Janoda. This historic novel takes it queue from the Eyrbyggja saga, written by an anonymous writer sometime in the 13^th century. It describes the feud between two Norse clans that settled Iceland, led by the chieftains, Snorri Goði and Arnkel Goði.

Janoda’s retelling (one imagines, without having read the source material) gives the characters more of an inner life than would have been the convention in medieval literature. Like the Prose Edda, there is a blending of Christian and Norse mythology. Odin and Thor never appear directly, but their influence and patronage or disapproval are keenly felt by all. The supernatural elements of the original do feature, but are open to interpretation. Are visions of the dead real or figments of the imagination? It is for the reader to decide.

Like the best historical fiction, Janoda roots the action in the real world. The Eyrbyggja saga was considered semi-historical to begin with and Janoda’s book would seem to iron out some of the wrinkles to make it closer to the historical reality of 13^th century Iceland while playing fast and loose with the narrative elements of the original story. But isn’t his what happens in all mythology? Building on previous versions of a tale to add to the mythos. We see this with Greek and Elizabethan playwrights, Marvel comics, as well as every adaptation of A Christmas Carol or The Hound of the Baskervilles.

Indeed, as this project likes to draw parallels with the countries and authors it has previously explored, we cannot fail to observe that a certain Robert Louis Stevenson, last seen in Samoa (see: Samoa), wrote 'The Waif Woman: A Cue, from a Saga', a story based on certain elements of the same saga. A cursory reading of the story suggests it was largely based on a minor subplot. It was published posthumously in 1916, more than 20 years after Stevenson’s death in 1894.

We, I, have spent more time and covered more Icelandic authors than any country on this journey thus far. However Iceland perches on the edge of a liminal space between many different worlds. The mythological and the historical; the Norse and the Christian; the European and the American. It bestrides the narrow world like a colossus (to borrow from Shakespeare's Cassius).

One figure absent from Jeff Janoda’s version of the Eyrbyggja saga is Eric the Red, the Viking explorer who ‘discovered’ Greenland and established the first settlements on the island. The Icelandic Edda and Sagas tell us so much about the Vikings who influenced European society far beyond the height of their powers, from trading across Europe and into Asia, to founding the city of Dublin, amongst others, to  ruling the Danelaw across North East and Eastern England for more than two centuries.

Yet while Iceland exists in that liminal space, it is a country in the here and now. Since beginning to read these books, the latest volcanic eruption has begun on the island and has already been going on for more than a week, with no sign of ending just yet. Iceland has given us Björk and Sigur Rós (amongst others), for which I am personally very grateful. It is one of those places that seems to punch above its weight, but also has the same kind of successful social democracy as other Scandinavian countries. A reminder that you don’t need to be the richest nation in the world to provide a high standard of living for your citizens. Indeed, the two things might be mutually exclusive.

As such, you will excuse me writing two thousand words on such a small country, when a behemoth like Argentina or Congo might receive half that word count (*might*: I cannot say what rabbit holes I will stumble into during this project). Iceland exists in that liminal space between the mythical and the real. Its tropes and archetypes flow into western literature into a dozen other places besides. Other than Rome, Athens and Jerusalem, there is nowhere else that has influenced us more.

Jeff Janoda

Liechtenstein - Seven Years in Tibet

Country: Liechtenstein                 
Book: Seven Years in Tibet
Author: Heinrich Harrer
Publication Year: 1952
Genre: Travel

Ok, so I have to admit this one is a bit of a cheat. However, it is one that is pretty standard for those of us seeking to read the world, especially in English. When turning to the tiny, doubled-landlocked European country of Liechtenstein, there are few if any national writers whose work has been translated into English. We either have to learn German, or make alternative arrangements.

Heinrich Harrer was an Austrian born mountaineer who was part of the first team to scale the north face of the Eiger mountain in Switzerland in 1938. Later in life Harrer moved to Liechtenstein and was resident there when he wrote Seven Years in Tibet. It’s not ideal, either in terms of the writer or their subject material. If I ever find someone more relevant to Liechtenstein (or learn German), I will return here. There are apparently a number of celebrated crime writers and in other genres amongst the literati of Liechtenstein. For now, Harrer will have to do.

The other issue we run into when considering Harrer and his work is his associations with the Nazis. Of course, anyone born in Germany or its neighbouring states during that epoch of history could not avoid being tainted by the stench of German fascism. Despite being a Nazi Party member and holding the rank of Sergeant in the SS, Harrer insisted he only wore his uniform once, on his wedding day, and came to regret being a member of the Nazi party.

You get the sense from reading Seven Years in Tibet, as well as Harrer’s biography, that the man had a single minded devotion to mountaineering and exploration in general. After Hitler's annexation of Austria in 1938 (Anschluss) , Austrian nationals had to play the game and make a good impression if they wanted to pursue their own personal interests. We should of course never forget than many in occupied Europe did not have that option. 

That said, Harrer used the options available to him to get as far from Nazi Germany as possible. The attempt to climb the north face of the Eiger was partly a publicity stunt with his real aim being to bring him notice and be selected for an Himalayan expedition. It worked. It also resulted in being received by Hitler following his return from the Eiger expedition.

The comic irony is that upon reaching Karachi in modern day Pakistan (then still part of India), Britain declared war on Germany and Harrer and his colleagues were arrested and put in an internment camp. They seem to have been treated rather well by the British, but Harrer made a number of unsuccessful attempts to escape.

On his penultimate escape, Harrer and his fellow escapee got really quite far, well into the Himalayas, but they were eventually caught by the Indian army and placed in two weeks solitary confinement. He was, however, able to leave a bag of supplies that were to become essential during his ultimate escape.

It is perhaps a final irony that when Harrer did finally escape the internment camp and make it all the way to Tibet, it was April 1944 and D-Day was just around the corner. By the time he was attempting to gain entry into inner Tibet, the war was over.

Seven Years in Tibet is in many ways a fairly standard travel book, in the vein of The Adventures of Marco Polo or Arabian Sands or Scott’s diaries. It is a tale of frozen wastelands, roadside bandits and bureaucracy, as well as the extraordinary kindness of the Tibetan people. At one point Harrier and his compatriots are stranded in one village for nearly a year as local officials essentially place them under house arrest. Though they are allowed to roam the countryside during daylight hours.

I’m sure many know the book only from the Brad Pitt movie made in the mid-90s. I haven’t seen the film, but I can imagine it being the usual romanticised Hollywood version. Pitt probably meets the Dalai Lama five seconds after arriving in Lhasa, even thought Harrer only became a tutor to the fourteen year old spiritual leader much later in his seven years’ residence in the country (the title is a misnomer, by the way, as Harrer seems to have spent a maximum of six years in Tibet - which is a much less romantic title).

Harrer and His Holiness do eventually become good friends, Harrer being both the young man’s tutor and building for him a private cinema. The friendship, though, is short lived. When Mao’s Red Army invade Tibet in 1950, Harrer and his European colleagues are forced to flee. 

Tibet

Only two years later. as Seven Years in Tibet was being published, the Dalai Lama himself was forced into exile in India, from which he has never returned. Harrer did return to Tibet in the early 80s, during a brief improvement in relations between China and the outside world. Harrer heard stories of concentration camps and forced labour. It is worth noting that China has killed an estimated 1.2 million Tibetans over the years, as well as ethnically cleansing much of the indigenous population and replacing it with Han Chinese. Many of the same tactics used against the Tibetans are now being repeated against the Muslim Uyghur population in the nearby province of Xinjiang.

Seven Years in Tibet was Heinrich Harrer’s first published book. He would go on to write a number of other books about Tibet, including a biography of the Dalai Lama’s brother, Thubten Jigme Norbu. He also wrote about the scaling of the north face of the Eiger, as well as accounts of his later adventures. He is estimated to have made somewhere in the region of 40 documentary films.

Harrer took part in a number of subsequent mountaineering expeditions to Alaska, the Andes and the Mountains of the Moon (central Africa), as well as expeditions to the Amazon, Congo River and Borneo, amongst other faraway places. He died in 2006, at the age of 93. Which, as we have said before, is not a tragedy.

Despite the follies of his 20s Heinrich Harrer lived a fuller and more fulfilling life than most of us can even imagine. I can’t imagine Adolf Hitler or anyone else in Nazi High Command approving of his journeys into Bhutan, French Guiana or the Andaman Islands. Which I suppose is a kind of redemption, if any were needed.

Heinrich Harrer with the Dalai Lama

 

Bhutan - Folktales of Bhutan

Country: Bhutan               
Book: Folktales of Bhutan
Author: Kunzang Choden
Publication Year: 1994
Genre: Folklore

Dangbo..o..o Dingbo..o..o.. there was a country high in the Himalayas that had a rich oral tradition and a mythology all its own. Yet this mythology was in many ways universal to that found in the countries far below.

Tse ni – Delay.

Wherever in the world humans have settled, they have told tales to entertain, educate and inform. Greek myths. Nordic sagas. First nation Australian visions of the Dreamtime. The mythic tales found in Genesis and Indian Vedas. We have been telling stories for millennia.

Bhutan, like any other society, has its own mythology. Transmitted through the still isolated and largely rural country by the oral tradition, the collection of folktales and legends published by Kunzang Choden sees many of these stories told outside of the country for the first time. And yet they are redolent of similar tales told the world over.

In reading through the collection of short tales, the obvious analogue that one can’t help but mention is that of Aesop’s fables. Like Aesop, many of the tales feature animals. Tigers and leopards. Chickens and foxes. An entire army of frogs (which is the collective noun for  a group of frogs).

Yet there are elements of those stories that deal with the human inhabitants of Bhutan that feel more like tales from the Arabian Nights. Or parables found in the gospels of the New Testament.

The former, at least, is understandable, given Bhutan’s location high in the Himalayas, with China, India and Pakistan is close proximity. As isolated as Bhutan is, the legends Choden retells feature visitors and explorers who find themselves wandering into the mountain Kingdom. Cross cultural fertilisation is inevitable, however isolated a country might be.

Then again, many experiences are universal to the human sphere, no matter how isolated a place might be. The desire to love, marry and raise children. The need to survive and thrive. Joseph Campbell showed in his academic work how many of the same sorts of stories are universal the world over. 

 
All cultures, for instance, seem to have a story equivalent to the Biblical story of Jonah and the Whale, where a character is swallowed by a fish, whale or other aquatic creature. Though in landlocked Bhutan, the closest analogue to Jonah seems to be The Girl who was Swallowed by a Python. The girl cuts her way free in the way that other captives free themselves by a variety of methods.

Perhaps it reflects a time when we were smaller creatures and more likely to be eaten by snakes or large fish. Perhaps it is a deep seated desire to return to the womb.

Indeed, if you want something truly universal, the Bhutanese refer to their country as, Drukyul, which is thought to mean, Land of the Dragons. Which are the subject of mythological tropes from China to Turkey and England and Wales.

Many of these tales reflect morality tales we find in Buddhist and Christian tracts. Like the man who finds a large piece of turquoise and swaps it for a horse, then swaps the horse for a bull, then a ram, rooster and finally a song. It’s the woman who swallowed a fly in reverse, but just as silly. Yet the story reflects the message of anti-consumerism found in both religions.

The Tiger and the Frog has some features of The Frog and the Scorpion. Although in the Bhutanese version, the frog gets the better of the tiger. A boy goes to buy a cow, but is attacked by a Sinpo, a flesh-eating spirit, which has some of the same features as Jack and the Magic Beanstalk.

Other stories are more baffling . Like, The Princess with Three Breasts, where the titular (yes, I went there) Princess marries a man with a hunchback. They are thrown together by a blind man and both the husband’s hunch and the princess's third breast burst in the collision and they live happily ever after. It’s a love conquers all metaphor perhaps. Or the idea that any personal disadvantage or handicap can be overcome by meeting the right person. Something like that.

There is also the weird and supernatural. Like the disembodied goat’s tale that helps to feed its mistress (Hans Christian Andersen would be proud). Or the various ghosts that feature in the stories. Here it feels like we are leaning more towards the stories told by Scheherazade during the 1001 Nights. Frogs don’t quite turn into princes in these Bhutanese tales, but frogs and princesses do have business with one another, like any good folk tradition.

The Bhutanese are thought to be of Mongolian decent and like the characters in Galsan Tschinag’s Blue Sky trilogy (see: Mongolia), the trials and tribulations of goat and sheep farming are reflected in these stores with just as much focus placed on the importance of dung as seen on the West Mongolian plain.

Obviously there is a lot of local flavour and regional variation to these stories, but the same tropes are found again and again across the world. Some of these stories wouldn’t be out of place in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales or Boccaccio’s Decameron. Or in West African folklore. Or Incan ritual.

For a country of just 600,000 people, living in the rarefied atmosphere of the Himalaya, these stories have been preserved remarkably well via the oral tradition. New ways of storing data to greater and greater capacities make us lose something of ourselves. When there is no reason to store information in our own brains, we lose the ability to retain even a tiny fraction of what we were once capable of holding in our minds.

As we have externalised the function of the gut to the frying pan and oven, we have externalised the function of the mind to the smart phone. So too, maybe, have we externalised our imaginations to film and TV screens. The old ways of retaining information are slowly being lost. The stories found in Folktales of Bhutan are a window into one of the last places where these traditions endure. A Shangri-La of memory. A place to which we can dream of returning.

Kunzang Choden