Perhaps the most extraordinary thing that happened during my 2012 quest to read a book from every country (and there were many extraordinary things) involved the small African island nation of São Tomé and Príncipe.
Of the 11 or so UN-recognised countries that had no commercially available literature in English translation at the time, this proved by far the trickiest to source a book from. So much so that, as you can read in my original blog post, in the end a team of nine volunteers translated A casa do pastor, a collection of short stories by Santomean-born writer Olinda Beja, especially for me.
Now, 13 years later, that collection of short stories, is finally available to buy in English. Edited by leading Spanish and Portuguese translator Margaret Jull Costa OBE, one of the generous nine volunteers who answered my 2012 appeal, it has just been published by new Canadian indie Arquipélago Press.
The creation of this translation remains one of the most heartwarming and encouraging examples I’ve encountered of how stories can bring us together. It is wonderful to see these beguiling tales finally available in the world’s most published language.
As I say in my foreword to the book: ‘every so often, I receive a message asking if the collection of stories I read for São Tomé and Príncipe back in 2012 is available to buy in English. It is now my great joy to be able to answer: Yes, here it is.’
The Shepherd’s House by Olinda Beja, ed. Margaret Jull Costa, translated from the Portuguese by Yema Ferreira, Ana Fletcher, Tamsin Harrison, Margaret Jull Costa, Clare Keates, Ana Cristina Morais, Robin Patterson, Ana Silva and Sandra Tavares (Arquipélago Press, 2025)
One of the lovely things about this project is the interactions I’ve had through it with writers around the world. The Chinese literary master Ning Ken is a great example. After I gave a quote to support Thomas Moran’s English translation of Tibetan Sky, I received a copy of the finished book sent from Beijing, inscribed with a message of thanks from the author as shown above. His publisher tells me it means:
‘If my humble work surprised you, that is exactly what I hoped for. Rarity makes it all the more precious. Thank you for your poetically concise critique.’
The novel certainly did surprise me. Like the image that its title suggests – of a Tibetan sky burial, in which a dismembered body is left on a stone plinth for eagles to bear aloft – this is a book that turns many accepted (Western) norms upside down.
On the face of it, the novel is a love story. The troubled divorcé Wang Mojie, who came to rural Tibet on a ‘Teach for China’ scheme, encounters the alluring and mystifying Ukyi Lhamo, who has spent time studying in France. Both are on a quest for meaning, and they bond over their lack of fulfilment and conviction that answers may be found in mystical Tibet, but as Wang Mojie urges Ukyi Lhamo to satisfy his masochistic fantasies, they find themselves pushed to and beyond the limits of human connection.
Through all this run Wang Mojie’s interior monologues and authorial reflections. ‘As the author of this novel, I will interrupt the narrative from time to time with thoughts and comments,’ Ning Ken, or whoever he is positing as the author, informs us near the start. They certainly make good on this promise, filling the text with thought-provoking and sometimes mischievous asides that often undermine and sometimes soften the characters, as well as sharing some of their own struggles with and doubts about the process of writing. Indeed, it’s no spoiler to say that the book ends with a lengthy authorial disquisition on the unreality of endings, bringing in reflections on Virginia Woolf’s The Voyage Out and discussions with the characters in the novel about what would have been a fitting resolution. ‘While fiction is, of course, made up, we should think of it as the art form of the exploration of the possible, fiction imagines different possible lives,’ the authorial voice tells us.
In Ning Ken’s hands, fiction can imagine impossible lives too – at least to those of us used to looking from a Western perspective. In Tibet, the novel shows us, rules work differently, and this is partly a question of language. The concept of selfhood remakes itself, ghosts exist and people have very different views on life’s purpose and meaning, partly because the language of the nation fosters other ways of thinking – ‘We place strict limits on what we think is possible and impossible, but Tibetans do not acknowledge these limits. They don’t accept, or one might say their language does not accept, that death exists.’
In its difference and singularity, Tibet provides a brilliant setting in which to bring together Western and Eastern philosophy. Ning Ken does this through the visit of Robert, a Paris-based academic keen to debate his son who has embraced Buddhism. This is done through at times dense but often hearteningly frank and sometimes irreverent discussions – we’re told at one stage that we’re better off skipping Derrida, as he only really has meaning for exceptional intellectuals like Wang Mojie, and he’s an overthinker. For a reader like me, it was fascinating to see this culture clash filtered through a Chinese perspective.
Yet even Tibet cannot resist the pull of globalisation. Despite the hunger for authenticity that Wang Mojie and Ukyi Lhamo share, the novel bristles with examples of a trend towards ‘cultural hybridity’. Historic rituals are staged for tourists who look on listening to music played through boomboxes and sipping coke. This performative ‘postcard culture’, we learn, has arisen partly because of the hiatus in Tibetan practices brought about by ‘what we may call, euphemistically, the “intervention of history”.’
Reading lines like this, along with references to people being imprisoned for praying and the events of ‘the Square’, I found myself feeling strangely anxious. Was it safe for an author in mainland China to write about the actions of the government in this way? Then I shook my head and smiled. Whether intentionally or not, Ning Ken was once again turning things upside down for me, forcing my assumptions into the light in the process. Why did I imagine I knew what the Chinese government would or wouldn’t allow? (This is something I examine in the politics chapter of Relearning to Read, where I look at some of the mental labyrinths we go through when we read works written under censorship or in political systems different to our own.)
What resonated most for me was how Tibetan Sky explored the experience of not-knowing. In a way I’ve rarely encountered in fiction before, it captured what it’s like to feel bewilderment in the face of cultural artefacts we don’t know how to ‘read’ – books written in scripts we can’t decode, songs in tonal systems to which our ears are not attuned. What’s more, it showed the value of staying with these experiences – exploring them and turning them around in our minds to notice how we respond. Indeed, not-knowing seems to be fundamental in the journey towards enlightenment – when the 29-year-old Buddha began his spiritual quest, we learn, he did so in confusion.
This is a book that works on you in ways that it is only possible to articulate in part. ‘Reading in Tibet is really reading,’ Wang Mojie informs us. ‘You feel as if no one else exists, you are outside of time, away from the world. It is a peaceful, dreamlike state. This dreamlike reading, the dreamlike thoughts that came to me while I was reading, made me feel as if I were floating in air, everything around me filled with my own soaring thoughts.’
The experience of reading Tibetan Sky is similar.
Tibetan Sky by Ning Ken, translated from the Mandarin by Thomas Moran (Sinoist Books, 2025)
This month, a dream came true. I spent two weeks visiting Greenland with my hero, legendary Togolese explorer Tété-Michel Kpomassie, sixty years after he first arrived in the country that became his home from home (an experience recorded in his landmark memoir, An African in Greenland, tr. James Kirkup, and recently rereleased as a Penguin Modern Classic, titled Michel the Giant, with a new afterword, tr. Ros Schwartz).
It will take me a while to process this incredible experience and I am working on several projects to tell the story of it. Watch this space!
In the meantime, however, I decided it would only be right to make Greenlandic literature the focus for my latest Book of the month. And, it being #WITMonth, I knew I would feature a book by a female author.
If you ask anyone about contemporary Greenlandic literature, one name will dominate: Niviaq Korneliussen, a young Greenlandic writer hailed widely as the leading light of a new generation of voices telling stories on the world’s largest island. Her writing is fresh, daring and confronting, and having started the month reading her novel Last Night in Nuuk, I would have found it an easy choice to feature one of her books. (And she is extremely well worth reading – if you are looking for Greenlandic literature you should absolutely start with her.)
But as I try to highlight lesser known voices on this blog, I decided to look further afield. This brought me to Nauja Lynge’s Ivalu’s Color, adapted from the Danish by the author and International Polar Institute Press.
Lynge is something of a hybrid writer. Describing herself as a Danish Greenlander, she is the descendant of several figures who were instrumental in establishing Greenlandic identity, including Henrik Lund, author of the national anthem, and Hans Lynge, who promoted independence. At first, given her Danish heritage, I was hesitant as to whether to include her in my reading. But as many of the conversations I have had over the past few weeks have involved the influence of colonialism and other political agendas on Greenland, and the way those stories are woven into the Inuit experience (and, as we have seen over the thirteen years of this project, storytelling is a messy, cross-pollinated business that rarely fits neatly in a single box), I decided to give Ivalu’s Color a try.
From the pitch, the novel sounds as though it follows a familiar formula. In 2015, three women are found murdered in the Greenlandic capital, Nuuk. Whodunnit?
Yet, the similarities with anglophone crime fiction end with the premise. Even before you turn to the first page, it’s clear that this is a book that marches to a different beat. In place of a blurb, the back cover has a lengthy endorsement from Martin Lidegaard, former Danish foreign minister. And on the inside flaps we are told that the true victim of the crime will turn out to be the Inuit people.
This political focus continues in the body of the book. In place of an epigraph, we find an unattributed paragraph appealing for a moderate approach to Greenlandic independence:
It’s almost as if there is a chapter in our common history missing. My major concern is that we open the doors to outsiders before we are ready to welcome them. Things take time. This applies to Greenland to such an extent that we might be better off seeing ourselves as a developing country, not co-opted immediately into the international economy.
The characters of the book take a similar tone. Indeed, rather than focusing on the grisly fate of the three women whose bodies have been found in a shipping container (two of whom are barely mentioned), most of the dialogue rehearses political concerns, feeding off the fact that Ivalu, the most prominent victim, was a blogger on issues connected to independence.
Unlike the traditional anglophone detective novel, there is not one sleuth on the trail of the culprit but many. They include the Chinese agent Hong and the Russian agent Nikolai (both of whom do little to disguise their roles in trying to further their countries’ interests in controlling the Arctic), as well as local figure Else.
Like the murder victims, these characters remain relatively faceless. What seems to interest Lynge is not so much the personal stories of the figures she portrays but the bigger forces that drive them. These she explores by choosing to focus on aspects a mainstream anglophone writer would not normally centre, and selecting and ordering details in a way that might seem bewildering or even irrelevant to a Western eye. It is as though the apparatus of a European crime novel has been commandeered and turned to different ends.
As a reader, I found this challenging. The old knee-jerk irritation I often feel when I struggle to understand literature that works on other terms rose in me, and I was tempted to dismiss the book as bad. Indeed, there are aspects of Ivalu’s Color that will be deeply problematic for many anglophone readers, particularly when it comes to the presentation of Hong. Lynge describes him and his actions in terms that betray a strikingly different, even shocking, approach to presenting otherness.
There is also a challenging discussion of femininity and ‘primal’ womanhood running throughout the book, which at times seems to take a stand against ‘the modern age’s fussily democratic women’. This, when set against Hong’s shocking encounter with Else, raises uneasy questions.
However, as I continued on through the pages of this book, I found another Greenlandic title that I was reading in conjunction with it beginning to shift my thinking. Knud Rasmussen’sThe People of the Polar North, tr. and ed. G. Herring, features the verbatim accounts of many Inuit myths collected by the great explorer on his expeditions through his homeland. Striking and strange, these tales share some of the hallmarks of Lynge’s writing. There is a similar relative effacement of the individual and focus on bigger forces. Extreme and sometimes shocking acts are presented baldly and with little ceremony. They inhabit a framework that calibrates ideas of community, duty, tradition, physicality and individuality very differently. Perhaps Lynge was fusing the storytelling ethos of the country of her birth with the commercial structures of European literature? Wasn’t that, in itself, thought-provoking and subversive?
For me, Ivalu’s Color wasn’t an easy or enjoyable read, but it was a valuable one. It was fascinating to see Nauja Lynge testing the limits of a familiar genre and trying to reshape them to accommodate her aims. It was a reminder that truly reading widely (far beyond the offerings that the mainstream outlets curate for us) requires openness, and a readiness to embrace gaps and questions. There is still so much we don’t know.
Ivalu’s Color by Nauja Lynge, adapted from the Danish by the author and International Polar Institute Press (IPI, 2017)
This writer came onto my radar thanks to Keith Kahn-Harris, author of The Babel Message: A Love Letter to Language, with whom I did a musical incomprehension experiment a few years back.
He shared some information with me about Llanito, the language of Gibraltar (a British Overseas Territory at the southern tip of the Iberian Peninsula). It was, he told me, an amalgam of Spanish and English with bits of Maltese and Genoese thrown in. In fact, the literary scene in Gibraltar was similarly fascinating, a kind of experiment in answering the question of how small a population you need to establish a literary culture.
Yorkshire-based M.G. Sanchez is a key player in this, having co-founded Patuka Press, which publishes anthologies of Gibraltarian writing. Indeed, several of Sanchez’s own books feature Llanito and his most recent has both an English and a Llanito edition. The title that caught my eye on his back catalogue, however, was Diary of Victorian Colonial and other Tales, my latest Book of the month.
Originally published in 2008 through Rock Scorpion Books, a now-defunct publishing forum that Sanchez also founded after he struggled to find an outlet for Gibraltarian work, Diary is Sanchez’s second work of fiction. It features one novella and two shorter works that, according to its marketing material centre on ‘themes of emotional and geographical displacement’.
The title work is the most ambitious piece. Chronicling the return of ex-convict Charles Bestman to Gibraltar, the land of his birth, in the nineteenth century, it explores what it means to belong and how history can entrap us in many senses. After this comes ‘Intermission’, a stream-of-consciousness account of a UK-based magazine publisher’s snap decision to give up the world and enter a French monastery. Last and, for my money, least is ‘Roman Ruins’, the story of an Italian lawyer’s attempt to save a homeless Kosovan man.
Voice is one of the key strengths of Sanchez’s writing. The first two pieces lift off the page thanks to compelling, energetic and distinctive first-person narrators. The diary form is not easy to pull off and sustain for a whole work of fiction, and it’s credit to Sanchez that Bestman’s account is engaging, and peppered with telling observations. Meanwhile, the would-be monk of ‘Intermission’ is often extremely funny. His claim that the notorious British serial killer Fred West looked ‘a bit like an ugly Tom Jones’ had me laughing out loud. Although his spiel is occasionally repetitious and tips over into raw ranting on a few occasions, lines like this meant that I was more than happy to stay with him for the ride. There is a rich, mischievous seam to the writing in the first two-thirds of the book that put me in mind of anglophone authors such as Helen DeWitt and C.D. Rose, as well as the Brazilian writer Machado de Assis.
It’s also fascinating to see colonialism and Britishness discussed from fresh angles, as Sanchez does in the first two pieces. There is a Trojan horse element to many of the passages, with certain ostensibly harmless or familiar formulations being used to smuggle in sentiments that challenge the status quo or reframe ideas. Some of these, such as the magazine publisher’s reflections on political correctness gone mad, now feel a little dated, but many are still disconcertingly fresh.
There’s a meta element to the title work too. At the end of the text, an editor’s note informs us of the way in which the diary was discovered and praises Rock Scorpion Books for publishing it after it was rejected by many other outlets. Finding a way to be heard and recognised is, it seems, part of the story.
Language has a big role to play in this. Llanito and Spanish feature in dialogue in the opening piece, while French appears in ‘Intermission’, and Italian and Serbian ring the changes in the final story. Multilingualism and pluralism are part of the fabric of this literary world, with Sanchez rarely choosing to translate on the page. Bewilderment and codeswitching are de rigueur.
All that said, the final story is an odd fit in this collection. Whereas the first two pieces complement each other tonally, stylistically and thematically, ‘Roman Ruins’ feels as though it is out on a limb. From the retail blurb, I see that a story called ‘The Old Colonial’ is listed in its place in the collection, and I wonder if a late need for a substitution has led to this piece being shoehorned in.
Certainly, there is a stilted, slightly unfinished quality to it. Characters often seem to exist to make arguments rather than to act in their own right, with several conversations featuring long expositions of the history of the former Yugoslavia and the atrocities committed during and since its collapse (although as I write this, I’m conscious that numerous literary traditions have a much higher tolerance for political and historical discussion than is generally accepted in anglophone literature – it may be that Gibraltarian literature does too). Coming after the mischievous, subversive antics of the first two pieces, the straightness of ‘Roman Ruins’ is hard to take. I also found the female lawyer less convincing than Sanchez’s male creations. All in all, the story felt uneven.
But then perhaps evenness isn’t necessarily a virtue, or a quality essential to every work or literary tradition. It may be that Sanchez and his fellow Gibraltarian writers are nurturing a literary culture that works according to other standards – one that has no need to appeal to the sensibilities of a citizen of the country that once colonised their homeland. Sanchez has since published numerous works that may have taken his writing in any number of directions. I’m intrigued to learn more.
Diary of a Victorian Colonial and other Tales by M.G. Sanchez (Rock Scorpion Books, 2012)
Last Thursday, I had the unusual experience of giving a paper at an academic conference. The event was about the future of English studies, and I was there because of a call for papers put out in association with Wasafiri magazine, a British publication championing international contemporary writing. I suggested that I might speak about my work with embracing not-knowing in reading, which forms the basis of my Incomprehension Workshops and forthcoming book, Relearning to Read. The organisers liked the sound of this, and so, last Thursday morning, I found myself joining other speakers and delegates in the gracious surroundings of York’s Guildhall for the start of the three-day event.
The University of York’s Professor Helen Smith opened proceedings, saying that she felt the event was about survival and finding positive ways that the field of English studies could continue. As an English literature graduate myself, I was a bit taken aback – surely the subject couldn’t be in so much trouble?
But as the discussion opened up and academics from universities across the UK began to speak, it became clear that there are many challenges facing those teaching English literature, language and related disciplines today. From the declaration last year that the English GCSE isn’t fit for purpose and the increased testing of performance all through school, to the encroachment of AI on students’ work practices, the sector seems increasingly restricted and hobbled.
The main issue, as several of the people sitting near me said, was a lack of joy in the classroom these days.
This made me sad. For me, reading has always been about joy. I was eight when I decided that I wanted to study English literature at university, having been entranced by L.M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables. Reading was magic, it seemed to me. I couldn’t imagine a better thing than spending three years reading stories. How miserable to think of today’s young readers having all that pleasure squashed out of them.
Still, when I thought about it, I could recognise what was being said. Last year, I ran an Incomprehension Workshop at a sixth-form college near where I live in Folkestone. It being World Book Day, I started the session by asking participants to write down how they would complete three sentences:
Reading is…
The world is…
Stories are…
At the end of the session, I invited students to read out what they’d written. One said this:
Reading is boring
The world is crazy
Stories are exciting
It was clear that something of that disconnect the university lecturers were describing had happened for that sixth-former. Although they still felt the power of stories, this had somehow become separated from reading for them. Books were not the source of connection and electricity they had been for me.
I hope my panel helped propose some ways in which that gap might be rebridged. Titled, ‘Incomprehension and Living Between’, it opened with Turkish writer and translator Elif Gülez reading from her memoir about the culture clash she experienced growing up. The extract was powerful and resonated with the small but highly engaged audience, showing how personal narrative can cut through barriers and make experience live in other minds.
Then, I spoke about incomprehension and how I try to foster a spirit of play in my work with this. I was particularly touched when one audience member said afterwards that the demonstration I had given had taken her back to the wonder of reading like a child once more.
Lastly, we were joined remotely by Indian academic Gokul Prabhu, who delivered a fascinating paper on ‘Queer Opacity in Translation’ – considering how the attempt to make things legible and understandable may sometimes work against the spirit of a text, and how translators may sometimes need to leave gaps and jolts in work that does not intend to make its meaning plain.
There was a marvellous electricity in the room, and this carried on into the afternoon, in a session on teaching creative writing, chaired by poet Anthony Vahni Capildeo, whose work-in-progress memoir I read as my Trinidadian pick back in 2012. The panel featured four writers who all teach at UK universities: J.R. Carpenter (University of Leeds), Joanne Limburg (University of Cambridge), Juliana Mensah (University of York), and Sam Reese (York St John University).
They were honest about the challenges facing the industry and sector, but so full of enthusiasm and powerful insights that it was impossible not to be encouraged. I was particularly struck by Carpenter’s statement that a poem ought to unfold in the same way that it was gathered up, although, as Mensah observed, this idea is faintly terrifying when I think about the chaotic nature of my own creative process!
I came away heartened to think that the academic branch of the field I love has such people working in it. And grateful that so many of those labouring under such pressure at the UK’s universities felt it was worth taking three days out of their hectic schedules to consider how better to foster and share a love of reading stories.
I also felt a renewed energy for and commitment to the possibilities of embracing not-knowing and incomprehension too. More soon!
Picture: ‘Municipal Offices and Guildhall, York, North Riding of Yorkshire, England’ by Billy Wilson on flickr.com
‘I’ve got a book I think you’d like,’ said bookseller Erin when I wandered into my local bookshop, The Folkestone Bookshop, a few weeks back. They were right.
Waiting to Be Arrested at Night, translated by Joshua L. Freeman, is a memoir by Tahir Hamut Izgil, one of the leading contemporary Uyghur poets. It tells the story of his decision to flee his homeland, along with his wife and children, in the late 2010s, following decades of mounting discrimination and persecution of the Uyghur population in Xianjiang, a nominally autonomous region in northwestern China.
Through Izgil’s eyes, we live the experience of seeing your world contract to the point where there is no longer space for you to exist. The accounts of the imprisonments of many of Izgil’s friends and associates – often for minor or even unspecified breaches of the ever-shifting rules – are chilling and heartrending, yet it is the cruel absurdity of many of the directives that restrict everyday life that sticks in the mind. The requirement, for example, for Muslim clerics to participate in televised disco dancing competitions (and the brave attempt of one to embrace this insult as good exercise). Or the Looking Back Project, under which ‘many previous legal things had become illegal’, rendering authors vulnerable to being arrested for books that had been published with the censors’ blessing in previous years.
Perhaps most horrifying of all is the List of Prohibited Names, a sporadically updated inventory setting out which names may no longer be used. In light of this, anyone may suddenly find themselves banned from using the appellation by which they have been known all their lives. ‘A name is a person’s most personal possession,’ as Izgil, writing through Freeman, reflects. ‘If he cannot hold on to his own name, what hope does he have of keeping anything else?’
The way language is weaponised to curb and control is similarly disturbing. As the Chinese government’s restrictions on the Uyghurs grow ever tighter, seemingly innocuous words turn traitor. People called in for questioning are said to be taking ‘tea’, those removed to the concentration and re-education camps have been sent to ‘study’, if you have a black mark on your record, you are said to carry a ‘dot’.
Uyghurs too, learn to bury their meaning to keep safe:
‘A political campaign was a “storm”, while innocent people caught up in mass arrests or in a Strike Hard Campaign were said to be “gone with the wind”. A “guest” at home often meant a state security agent. If someone had been arrested, they were “in the hospital”.
Yet, language is also a source of great joy and beauty in this book. As Freeman explains in his introduction, poetry is a way of life in Izgil’s homeland:
‘Verse is woven into daily life – dropped into conversation, shared constantly on social media, written between lovers. Through poetry, Uyghurs confront issues as a community, whether debating gender roles or defying state repression. Even now, I wake up many mornings to an inbox full of fresh verse, sent by the far-flung poets of the Uyghur diaspora for me to translate.’
Poetry is central to this memoir too. Several of Izgil’s poems appear. What’s more, there is a beautiful litheness and directness to the prose, which captures key moments in the story with memorable clarity. When Izgil’s wife, Marhaba, learns that after years of fighting bureaucracy the family have finally received the visas that will enable them to escape to the US, her face opens ‘like a flower’.
Because of the quality of the writing, we feel the Izqil family’s bravery and the loss that goes with uprooting yourself from all you know (including necessarily severing ties with those who stay behind for their safety). As the best writing does, the story speaks for itself, urging itself on the reader, making the pages fly past.
Nevertheless, as I read, I found a question surfacing repeatedly in my mind. There are many urgent and brilliant stories by writers from persecuted minorities in the world today. Most of them do not find homes with some of the English-speaking world’s biggest publishers as this one has (coming out through Penguin Random House on both sides of the Atlantic). If they make it into English at all, such stories are usually released by small presses, which, as I often say on this blog, are where most of the risky, exciting, boundary-pushing publishing happens these days. (Books like Beata Umubyeyi Mairesse’s The Convoy, translated by Ruth Diver and published in February by Open Borders Press, for example.)
So what is it about this story that has enabled it to cut through?
I think there are a couple of reasons. The first is that the book paints the West in a relatively flattering light. Although Izgil likens the contempt of the Han Chinese authorities to the attitudes of European colonialists and quotes a friend saying they wish China would conquer the world because the rest of us are so ignorant about the realities they are facing, the US is a place of safety for Izgil. It is where he can finally taste freedom once more and thrive. I think this is a picture that fits with what many of us in the English-speaking global north would like to believe about our homelands.
The second is that the story necessarily reinforces certain narratives about China that happen to serve Western agendas. This portrayal of the Chinese authorities as harsh and unpredictable feels familiar and relatively comfortable. In this respect, although it may challenge other preconceptions, this book will resonate with significant aspects of many people’s prevailing world view.
This is not to call into question anything Izgil has written: the atrocities he describes are well documented. Nor is it to detract at all from the brilliance of this book. Rather, it is to say that this may be a story to which many in the English-speaking world may be able to listen to more easily than we can to comparable narratives that do not align with Western agendas so neatly.
If anything, this may make this book even more important. It may speak more directly and powerfully about the refugee experience to many anglophone readers because it will not invite the sort of resistance that can often arise when we read challenging books from elsewhere. By happening to echo ideas that feel familiar and safe, it may move us to deepen our sense of humanity and connection with those forced to leave their homelands.
Waiting to Be Arrested at Night by Tahir Hamut Izgil, translated from the Uyghur by Joshua L. Freeman (Vintage, 2024)
This book came on my radar through fellow international bibliophile Suroor Alikhan, who kindly hosted me at an online event organised by the Hyderabad Literary Festival last year. A few weeks ago, she contacted me saying that she had found a website that she thought I’d be interested in, featuring a list of more than 100 books by Pacific Islanders.
I was intrigued. The Pacific Island nations were among the most difficult countries to source stories from during my 2012 quest to read a book from every country. And although the criteria of the list’s compiler were a little different from mine – she included a number of titles by writers with Pacific Island heritage (including herself) – there were many fascinating-sounding works.
The book I’ve picked to feature – Is Anyone Out There? And Other Stories by Julian Maka’a from the Solomon Islands – didn’t strike me as the most satisfying of those I read from the list, but I found it interesting for several reasons.
The Solomon Islands are hard to source stories from: back in 2012, the best option I could find was The Alternative, a 1980s boarding school novel. So I was curious about what this much more recent short story collection would be like.
My interest was also piqued by Maka’a’s statement on the back cover that the collection – which he self-published in 2012, 27 years after his first collection was brought out by the University of the South Pacific – draws on various aspects of his professional life, including efforts to build staff understanding about sexual reproductive health in his capacity as the manager of Wantok FM, part of the Solomon Islands Broadcasting Corporation. This is reflected in frank descriptions of the treatment of and stigmas around sexually transmitted diseases in several of the earlier pieces.
As with many of the books I read ‘from’ Pacific Island nations in 2012, the collection seems written with a consciousness of needing to represent its nation. ‘The themes and general messages [of the stories] are different and varied,’ writes Maka’a, ‘but the one thing that is common is they reflect what life is like in Solomon Islands’.
To an outsider like me, this manifests itself most tellingly in the glimpses into local beliefs and customs, presented most richly in the title story, in which a legend about a philandering man ritually killed for breaking taboos haunts the narrator.
The emphasis on education, so apparent in The Alternative, is also strong in Maka’a’s work. The most ambitious piece in the collection, a three-part story called ‘Is This Fair?’ centres on a teenage pregnancy at a boarding school and makes clear the sacrifices that the nation’s geography and economic situation demand of families keen to give their children opportunities. Some eight thousand students drop out of education every year, we learn, and just getting to school at the start of term often requires many stomach-churning hours in a boat.
As is so often the case in books from elsewhere, it is the assumptions and things taken for granted that prove most intriguing. One of the central characters in ‘Is This Fair?’, for example, seems not to bat an eyelid at the notion that her parents will decide her career path, as set out in a letter her mother sends her:
‘In her brief letter which she wrote in language and pijin, she explained that she and dad always discussed about me. About the future that I would give them from my education – benefits to cut a long story short. She said they had differences in the job I should take up after I graduate in form five. My mother said she wanted me to become a nurse – that way I would help her when she gets sick or even my father. My father on the other hand wanted me to be a teacher.’
For all its interest, however, this book is a challenging and occasionally bewildering read. My knee-jerk reaction is to pin this on the fact that it has probably not been through the editorial processes of many traditionally published books in mainstream anglophone literature, with the result that there are structural idiosyncrasies, and spelling and grammatical oddities that are sometimes distracting. There seem to be some inconsistencies in the character names between the different parts of ‘I Am Fair?’ that make it hard to follow. There is also an abruptness to certain emotional shifts and transitions that risk interrupting the flow of the story.
But I’m also aware that what I read as errors or idiosyncrasies may in many cases not be considered as such by readers in the Solomon Islands. There, a different form of English is used, one in which certain formulations and word uses that sound odd to me may be customary. Similarly, shifts between registers and emotional states that jar for me may simply reflect different norms or storytelling traditions beyond my experience feeding into this book.
Regardless of how I read it, what remains is a sense of urgency. A desire to communicate. A hand stretched out from this place we in the UK rarely hear of, seeking connection and the chance to convey something. This is me, this book says. This is us. This is where we are.
Is Anyone Out There? And Other Stories by Julian Maka’a (Xlibris, 2012)
A few months ago, I was contacted by Bridget Farrell, founder of Bullaun Press, an Irish publisher dedicated to translations. Would I be interested in reading an advance copy of The Rarest Fruit, translated by Karen Fleetwood and Laëtitia Saint-Loubert, the second novel they were publishing by Gaëlle Bélem and also the second novel by a writer from Réunion ever to make it into English? Since then, the first, There’s a Monster Behind the Door, also translated by Fleetwood and Saint-Loubert, has been longlisted for the International Booker Prize. To my mind, The Rarest Fruit, which comes out in the UK and Ireland later this week, easily maintains this standard.
Based on the true story of Edmond Albius – an orphan slave raised by Ferréol Beaumont, a white botanist on Bourbon Island, as Réunion was known until 1848 – the novel explores appropriation and the injustices embedded in the economic forces that govern international trade to this day. When Edmond unlocks the secret to the pollination of vanilla, the consequences ripple out around the world, changing the Western palate and enriching many of those engaged in the commodity’s exploitation. But for its bright young discoverer, who harbours ambitions ‘to become the first Black botanist in this world of Rich Whites’ but ‘doesn’t have the right colour skin to have callings’, the repercussions are much darker and more painful, bringing him up against the systemic injustices and human cruelty that robbed him of his natural parents in the first place.
Rhetoric and rhythms are at the heart of Bélem’s craft. She wields repetition with a barrister’s flair, driving home the force of what she’s presenting and, by getting the reader to look and look again, forcing us to recognise injustices and assumptions that we might at otherwise choose to ignore, or else be habituated to. Take this early passage obliging us to unpack the significance of the first question Ferréol asks when he lays eyes on baby Edmond: ‘What is it?’
‘It’ – this ebony child that casts him into partial shadow as it comes between the curve of a pale sun and his screwedup eyes. ‘It’ – three kilos and six hundred grams of tender flesh, wrapped up like a black lamb in a woollen cloth. ‘It’ – a living bundle of obvious trouble.
Juxtaposition plays a similar role. As Edmond’s life turns towards ruin and jail, and, in the wake of so-called emancipation, he, like many others, finds himself bound by a ‘freedom that shackles him’, we read of the vanilla-infused delicacies dreamed up by leading chefs to grace the tables of the beau monde.
Structures like these make the injustices at the heart of the story evident without Bélem needing to state them. By writing in this way, she leads us to construct the points for ourselves rather than proclaiming them. We collaborate with her and the book seems to throw its arms around us, bringing all readers into the human story rather than excluding and shaming those who might take criticism of colonialism as a personal attack.
This profound understanding of human motivation soaks the novel in empathy. Instead of two-dimensional actors in a morality play, Bélem gives us human beings in the round. For all his blind spots and hypocrisy, Ferréol is a vulnerable, lonely creature whose world is enriched by the relationship he forms with his adopted son. Likewise, Edmond for all his hopefulness and brilliance, is not immune to exhibiting internalised racism and double standards. We see systemic injustice, but we also see human ingenuity and specificity – the ability to manoeuvre around seemingly immovable obstacles and build bridges against the odds.
All of which makes Edmond’s betrayal and the fallout from it particularly poignant. That these two people should be able to hold themselves aloof from social mores for so long only to collapse beneath the weight of expectations and their own conditioning is a tragedy – a painful revelation of the dangers of failing to recognise the limits on our own thinking when we imagine ourselves to be free.
Bullaun Press’s edition of The Rarest Fruit publishes in the UK and Ireland on 1 May. And for readers in the US, another version, translated by Hildegarde Serle, comes out from Europa in June. It would be very interesting to compare both English versions. The fact of their release only a month apart is surely testament to the power of the original text.
The Rarest Fruit by Gaëlle Bélem, translated from the French by Karen Fleetwood and Laëtitia Saint-Loubert (Bullaun Press, 2025)
This book was given to me by the Cameroonian writer Ernis, who I was lucky to meet in Assam last month. Conscious that I had not read any Cameroonian literature since Peter Green’s translation of Mongo Beti’s 1956 classic Mission to Kala, I asked her what contemporary writing from the country (in addition to her own, of course) I should know about. Her response was to press this novel into my hands.
Days Come and Goby Hemley Boum, translated by Nchanji Njamnsi, is the story of three generations of women navigating a changing and turbulent world. Obliged to accept her daughter Abi’s care as she faces death, the historically aloof Anna reflects back on the events that have led her from Cameroon to Paris, and the education that at once enriched and distanced her from her roots. Abi, meanwhile, must contend with family breakdown and the pressures of caring, while Tina, a friend of her son Max’s back in Cameroon, finds herself caught up in a violent new threat sweeping her home region.
This is a book that disarms with its directness. Boum’s insights and the clarity with which she expresses them through her characters’ voices are startling and winning. Whether it’s the familiar setting of Paris made strange through Abi’s critical gaze or ‘the undeniable, exquisite delight in succumbing to violence and corruption’ that comes through in several of the episodes, there is a frankness to the writing that speaks to the humanity in people everywhere.
Often, this frankness centres on the ruptures caused by colonialism and the imposition of a foreign way of seeing, thinking and learning on a culture that operates by other means. ‘Today, I believe Western knowledge is both simple and despotic,’ states Anna. ‘There is only one God and he is present in church. Education is found only in textbooks. Art is separate from spirituality, confined to specific spaces. The law applies equally to everyone and all values have a price.’
Such thinking jars with the more sensuous, embodied, holistic ways of knowing that used to be common in her home region. ‘Our people never claimed detachment from the world nor dominion over it.[…] We were the world and the world was us: water, wind, sand, the past, the future, the living, the dead… we were all woven into the fabric of the world.’
Falling into the gulf between these two ways of being is a violent experience from which none of the characters in Days Come and Go escape unscathed. Boum makes us feel what this is like, taking us through the stages by which the women are led to conspire in their oppression and suffering so that we seem to live their experiences, from Anna’s grappling with maternal ambivalence and the toll this may have taken on her relationship with her daughter to Abi’s struggle to parent amid marital breakdown.
The most powerful section in the book is Tina’s account of how she and two friends got drawn into the terrorist group Boko Haram. This is an astonishingly insightful and compelling delineation of how people can be made to commit the worst acts, including suicide bombing. ‘Nobody asks a grenade about to explode, “Why?”‘ says Tina. ‘The reason is obvious: it has been unpinned. All they do is pull out our pins and throw us at good people.’
Boum makes us feel how those pins get pulled out. And in so doing, she commits a deeply humane act – making it impossible to ignore the humanity we share with those who do the worst things we can imagine, with all the hope and challenge that comes with this. With this understanding, we can make sense of things that might seem unfathomable to us, such as Tina’s silent appeal to Michelle Obama to stop speaking out against Boko Haram because such well-intentioned, distant activism only makes her tormentors crueller.
Yet an embodied approach to knowing does not mean a reduction in intellectual rigour. This is, in many ways, one of the most erudite novels I’ve read in a long time. It includes critiques of the work of John Steinbeck, Michelangelo and Frantz Fanon – Anna is not a fan of the latter: ‘my disinclination resides in the fact that there are people indeed more invisible than the damned of the earth – their wives.’
This is a novel that walks to a different beat than the sort of writing commonly celebrated in the anglophone literary world. As a result, readers used to mainstream English-language literature may stumble here and there over pacing that will not meet their expectations, and the inclusion or exclusion of certain statements or details. There is also drama-offstage, some declamatory monologuing and various other things traditionally frowned upon on creative writing courses.
And that’s precisely the point. Boum’s storytelling operates by standards other than Western norms, knitting together the emotional, spiritual, physical and intellectual, and presenting these things as a glorious, moving, troubling unity. It is a book of extraordinary range and power. ‘What does a life boil down to?’ asks Anna. This, Boum shows us. This.
Days Come and Go by Hemley Boum, translated from the French by Nchanji Njamnsi (Bakwa Books, 2022)
I heard about this title from María Reimóndez, a brilliant Galician writer, translator, interpreter, academic and feminist campaigner who I met at Dibrugarh University International Literature Festival earlier this month. Moved by what she had to say about the erasure the Galician language and culture has battled, I asked for her recommendations.
She mentioned several intriguing authors whose work ought to be translated into English, among them Begoña Caamaño (whose two published novels rewrite male-authored classics) and María Xosé Queizán. And for work that has already made it through the translation bottleneck into the world’s most published, language, she directed me to Small Stations Press, an indie that carries an impressive number of works in translation by Galician female authors, including Luísa Villalta and Anxos Sumai.
The title that stood out for me, however, was and they say by Susana Sanches Arins, translated by Kathleen March. Drawing on the author’s family’s involvement in the atrocities of the 1936-39 Spanish Civil War, it is, according to Reimóndez, ‘a wonderful lesson in how to answer the question that many people in the West sometimes ask – what do we do with people in our families who have been perpetrators or complicit with the most terrible crimes in history?’ As soon as I got back to the UK, I ordered a copy.
It’s just as well that Reimóndez recommended the book so warmly because I might have found the blurb and surrounding text a little offputting had I picked it up independently. The book is framed as uncategorisable, written ‘its own genre’ as translator March puts it or a ‘mosaic of miniature narrations’ according to María Xesús Nogueira in her introduction – descriptions that struck me as a little self-conscious and effortful, as though the writing would try too hard to be clever and impress.
But then I started to read. My goodness. The cleverness is there in spades, yes, but it is an embodied cleverness, suffused with feeling. As Arins grapples with the actions and omissions of her forebears, particularly, those of the sinister uncle manuel, she smashes up against the limits of a storytelling framework designed to silence dissent and minimise the transgressions of the powerful.
‘they say history is written by the victors, but it’s also true that they unwrite it. that’s how uncle manuel, who was bad and acted badly, is only in the registers of local history as the mayor of his town for a few years. and that’s all.’
All structures, including language itself, this book demonstrates, have been set up to muffle the truths the author needs to express.
As such, the radical, genre-busting elements of the book establish themselves as attempts to break free from constraints and embrace a larger, more generous mode of expression. From the eschewal of capitalisation and the use of repetition, revisions and contradiction, to the presentation of the text as fragments and the striking deployment of line breaks, we experience this text as a remaking of what it is to use language to explore the human condition.
While the book may forge its own kind of genre, as March claims, it has kinship with a number of other titles that smash accepted frameworks in order to approach unmentionable truths. Two that spring to mind are A Book, Untitled, by Shushan Avagyan and translated from Armenian by Deanna Cachoian-Schanz (which I discuss in my forthcoming Relearning to Read) and Zong! Canadian poet M. NourbeSe Philip’s radical excavation of the murder of around 130 African slaves for insurance purposes in 1781 told solely in words taken from the 1783 court case that determined their drowning was legal.
As in those works, an extraordinary empathy flows through the pages of and they say. The text considers the suffering and joys of all the living beings it enfolds, from oxen dragging heavy loads through to school children arguing over what duty they have to consider the wrongs of the past decades after the fact.
One of the book’s most striking elements is its readiness to embrace and own the fallibility of the author herself. Several times, we see accounts being challenged and revised. Readers even pop up in the text, disputing what was claimed pages before or correcting details. Memory, Arins repeats, is a ‘slippery eel’ and it would be ridiculous to claim that she has some sort of unquestionable authority (the sort of authority paraded by uncle manuel, perhaps) simply because she has set her words down in a book.
As a result of this, the book never ends. The edition I own is an ‘expanded version’, incorporating feedback and stories supplied by the first wave of Galician readers.
‘stories are always undone, and redone. voices are like hands that remove brick after brick.’
Indeed, in the acknowledgements, Arins writes, ‘the best thing that came out of the book for me was a phrase: i have to tell you a story.’
Even the notion of closing the final page and stepping away is undone in and they say. This is a book that invites us in rather than proclaiming a narrative we must meekly accept. It is one in which we participate, regardless of our knowledge of the events it explores, joining its community by virtue of our shared humanity.
and they say by Susana Sanches Arins, translated from the Galician by Kathleen March (Small Stations Press, 2021)
