Laos: a helping hand

April 7, 2012 By in Asia, The stories Tags: , , , , , , , , 4 Comments

When you’re trying to get through a book from every country in the world in a year, the research can take up almost as much time as the reading. Whether you’re following leads for a sovereign state with apparently no literature available in English or trying to work out the best book to choose from a nation with oodles of stories on the market, googling and emailing can eat up hours.

So I was very grateful when Matt Read stopped by the blog and left a comment saying he’d decided to help me out researching one of the gaps on my list. He’d chosen Laos and, after a bit of googling, he’d concluded that Mother’s Beloved, a short story collection by Outhine Bounyavong, was a good bet.

I was particularly thankful for Matt’s help as Laos was shaping up to be one of the tougher nuts to crack. Politics and the legacy of Laos’s 22-year civil war mean that the country’s publishing industry is in a relatively early stage of its development. Many writers, including Bounyavong, had to finance and distribute their books themselves in the early stages of their careers and translation from Lao into English is rare.

The book was interesting for another reason too: containing both the Lao and English versions of the stories (with the Lao on the left and the English on the right), it would be the first parallel text I’d come across this year. I hurried to order my copy.

Simple and engaging, Bounyavong’s collection consists largely of first person accounts of moments where characters gain new insights into the world around them. These epiphanies often centre on a clash between the modern world and the ancient traditions and require the protagonists to develop more humility and respect for the natural world and their fellow human beings. So we see the frumpy girl at the village dance making a lasting match with the man who sees past her looks and the young upstart in the VIP stand at the basketball match taken down a peg or two when the charity collecting plate comes round and he faces revealing he is broke.

Often the stories provide fascinating insights into Lao culture. The title story, for example, hangs on the local belief that anyone eating in the presence of a pregnant woman is morally obliged to share the food with her. Similarly, the strange little vignette ‘Fifty Kip’ yields an intriguing explanation of the traditional criterion for judging whether children are ready for school: they must be able to reach their arms over their heads and touch their ears.

Now and then the moralistic tone of the stories sticks in the craw a bit. The modern world, synechdochically present in the Coke cans and fag packets hurled from passing logging trucks, is always bad, while the traditional ways – captured in the flight of birds and the frangipani, ‘the flower of glory for Laos’ – are good. The beautiful girls end up working as prostitutes and the plain ones find true love.

Taken as a whole, though, Bounyavong’s writing has an intriguing and wistful quality that captures what it’s like to live in a country caught in the approaching headlights of Western commercialism. The book will be of interest to anyone keen to know about life off the beaten track in South-east Asia. A thought-provoking read. Thanks Matt.

Mother’s Beloved: Stories from Laos by Outhine Bounyavong, translated from the Lao by ? (University of Washington Press, 1999) Strangely enough I couldn’t see a translator credited in my edition – can anyone tell me who this was?

Romania: he ain’t heavy…

April 5, 2012 By in Europe, The stories Tags: , , , , , , , 23 Comments

Over the last decade, the world’s been going crazy for collaborative novels. Whether it’s ambitious, international ventures such as Penguin’s abortive A Million Penguins blog or lighthearted projects between two or three people, more and more writers are taking advantage of the opportunities the internet offers to work together.

Joining forces with a writer you’ve never met before is one thing, but what about working with someone you’ve known all your life? How would you pick your way through the labyrinth of your relationship to produce something intelligible and entertaining for a reader who’s never met you and knows nothing of the thousand jokes, frustrations and secrets you’ve built up between you over your time on Earth?

It sounds like a minefield to me, so when Bucharest UN Information Centre officer Cristina got in touch through a friend to recommend The Baiut Alley Lads by award-winning author Filip Florian and his younger brother Matei, I had to see how they’d tackled it.

Set in the 1970s and 1980s during the communist era, the novel paints a powerful picture of life in a totalitarian society as seen through children’s eyes. The brothers play versions of themselves in the book, narrating alternative chapters and frequently casting the reader in the role of parent/referee as they correct and challenge each other’s versions of events. ‘What guarantee do I have, as a younger brother, that Filip is not mixing everything up again?’ laments Matei at one point.

This playful combativeness is nowhere more apparent than in the brothers’ accounts of the make-believe worlds they retreat into when reality becomes too grim. In a universe where ‘trolleybuses really could change into bison’ and fantastical events make ‘the world stir from its givenness’, anything can happen and there can be no definitive version of truth. ‘Brothers can write a book together, but they cannot meet the same angels and pixies at the same time’, observes Filip.

This fluidity of truth crashes up against the rigid structures of the regime with surprising and often joyful results. Unconcerned by Communism, except where it touches their own lives, the boys see politics as a matter of whether or not you are allowed to play in goal or buy sweets. Instead of the Homeland and the Party, there are the crosspatch school teacher and the peaked cap of the officer who visits their mother.

Now and then, the free movement of the narrative between imagined, ‘real’, past and present worlds can be disorientating. For a British reader with little knowledge of Romanian history like me, this was compounded by my ignorance of a lot of the events sketched into the background. With my cultural compass of very little use, it was difficult to relax into the flow of the narrative as I was continually straining to catch references on and beyond the edge of my awareness.

This of course was one of the book’s joys too. It opened a closed world and brought the reality of life there home to me. I came away with a huge admiration for the skill of both Florians and a fresh respect for what collaborative art can achieve.

Hmmn. I wonder if either of the brothers Morgan would be up for a joint venture…

The Baiut Alley Lads by Filip & Matei Florian, translated from the Romanian by Alistair Ian Blyth (University of Plymouth Press, 2010)

Burundi: diaspora power

April 3, 2012 By in Africa, The stories Tags: , , , , , , , 25 Comments

The chances of finding a Burundian book in English were looking slim. There were novels and non-fiction books out there, but they were all in French. None of them seemed to have made it through the translation net into the English-language market.

Having exhausted my googling powers, I decided to turn to the Burundian diaspora for help and fired off an email to the United Burundian-American Community Association in the hopes that its members might be able to point me in the direction of some literature that fitted the bill.

I got quite a few emails back. Several suggested analytical books by Western academics charting the causes and consequences of the civil war that ravaged Burundi for much of the mid-late twentieth century. Interesting though I’m sure these are, they weren’t quite what I was looking for. Others mentioned books in French – again, close but no cigar.

One person even asked me to help them finish a book they were writing about their own experiences in Burundi. As I have slightly less than two days to get through each book for this project, I thought this might be pushing it slightly and had to decline.

Then I had an email from Edouard. An old classmate of his from Burundi had published two novels in English. Her name was Marie-Thérèse Toyi. He hoped this helped.

It certainly did. After a bit more searching, I found contact details for Toyi, who is now based at Benson Idahosa University in Nigeria, and emailed her to ask how I might be able to get hold of one of her books as they were not commercially available online. She kindly offered to courier one to me. A few days later, I was holding a battered copy of her novel Weep Not, Refugee complete with a greeting from the author written inside the cover.

Following the fortunes of Wache Wacheke Watachoka, a Burundian boy growing up in a refugee camp because of the ethnic war between the Hutus and Tutsis in his homeland, the novel explores ‘the overpowering burden of forcing oneself to live in a foreign land where you are most undesirable’. As Wache grows up and has to confront the absurdity of the ‘nose complex’ (a widespread belief that the shape of the nose distinguishes Hutus from Tutsis) that has torn his country apart, the narrative reveals the cruel partiality that governs much of everyday life for the most vulnerable and exposes the injustices against which displaced people have to fight simply to stay alive.

The episodic narrative comes across with freshness and immediacy, at times reaching out of  the pages of the book to grab the reader by the scruff of the neck:

‘Just for you to have an idea what it was like, take a cup of ground red pepper, pour it on your bleeding wound and you will have a little idea what it was like. If you have no wound, well, we cannot discuss again, because there are things which you will never be able to understand.’

This can be very compelling, particularly when it comes to reflections on the powerlessness of refugees in lands where their rights exist ‘only in the heart of the person [they are] dealing with’, the indignity of living on handouts, the injustice of imprisonment and the cruel arbitrariness of ethnic conflicts. The section where Wache at last returns to Burundi and, at the age of 26, enrols in school only to find that he has become an alien in his own land is particularly memorable.

At times, the declamatory style and the heaping of tragedy upon tragedy (while no doubt true to many people’s experiences) is hard to swallow. However, this may say more about me as a privileged Westerner than it does about the book.

All the same, I couldn’t help wishing that Toyi had trusted her story and characters to speak for themselves throughout rather than feeling the need to harness them to drive home her appeal to the reader to help improve the lot of displaced peoples at the end. This is the only part of the book that feels forced and it stands out because the experiences and reflections narrated in the rest of the novel are far more persuasive than the closing rhetoric.

Nevertheless, this is a fascinating and valuable insight into a situation most of us cannot begin to imagine. It gives a voice to people whose stories we mostly hear second-hand from Western charity appeals and reporters. It was a great privilege to read it and it will stay with me for a long time. Many thanks to the UBACA, Edouard and Marie-Thérèse Toyi.

Weep Not, Refugee by Marie-Thérèse Toyi (Emhai Printing & Publishing Company, 2007)

Netherlands: nature talks

April 1, 2012 By in Europe, The stories Tags: , , , , , , , , 15 Comments

When you’re reading lots of books from different countries, stories from contrasting backgrounds can often seem to be talking to each other across the globe. Soon after finishing Alberto Barrera Tyszka’s The Sickness, with its memorable description a doctor’s struggle to accept his father’s terminal illness, I began Gerbrand Bakker’s International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award-winning The Twin. The novel was recommended by Dutch literature translator Michele Hutchison, who lives in Amsterdam, and it showed me a startlingly different filial response to a parent’s approaching death.

Having lived and worked on the family farm all his life, late-middle-aged Helmer finds that his father’s illness is the catalyst he needs to stop ‘hiding behind the cows and letting things happen’. With the power dynamics in their relationship turned upside down, he begins to exert control over the house and business. But when his dead twin brother Henk’s former fiancée and her uncannily named son Henk get in touch, Helmer is forced to confront his emotional stuntedness and the toll his narrow existence has taken on his ability to function in society.

Bakker’s writing is extraordinarily good, complemented, no doubt, by David Colmer’s excellent translation. Where most books confined to such a small number of locations and incidents feel static and wooden, this one throbs with a quiet fury that imbues even the smallest of actions with significance. We watch Helmer select his new bed, paint the living room and buy an antique map in the local town, feeling behind each deed the weight of decades of unexpressed anger, loss and grief.

Bakker heightens this sense of reticence through his spare style, which enables him to capture and express powerful impressions in very few words. This, coupled with his deft deployment of descriptions of the natural world to reveal the extent of Helmer’s isolation, enable him to walk the delicate line between his protagonist’s disturbing and often deliberately cruel treatment of his father and the slow unfolding of his blighted life.

In addition, the narrative’s strange beauty and the humour that gusts up suddenly to catch you unawares enable it to meander through profound themes without any pretentiousness. Its subtle exploration of what it means to be a twin and the sad echoes of the breezy predictions people make to adolescents about what life has in store for them will stay with me for a long time. Marvellous.

The Twin by Gerbrand Bakker, translated from the Dutch by David Colmer (Vintage, 2009)

Bahrain: why translation matters

March 30, 2012 By in Asia, The stories Tags: , , , , , , 8 Comments

For so small an island, Bahrain has an impressive place on the world literature stage. It is thought by many to be the site of the mythic land of Dilmun, featured in ancient masterpieces such as the Epic of Gilgamesh. Legend also states that it was the location of the Garden of Eden (a claim reflected by the somewhat anachronistic Tree of Life that flourishes in the middle of desert land there). As such, it has a claim to call itself the cradle of the world’s bestselling story, The Bible.

Sadly, when it comes to contemporary books in translation, Bahrain’s record is not nearly as impressive. As it turned out, I struggled to find anything at all that would qualify as Bahraini  literature in English. In the end I asked author Lucy Caldwell, whose excellent Dylan Thomas prize-winning novel The Meeting Point is set in Bahrain, to see whether she had come across any contemporary Bahraini writers during her research.

She said that she had found very little, but that there was a writer she had heard about but not read herself. A colleague who grew up in Bahrain also gave a suggestion, mentioning an author who was the first Bahraini author to write and publish work directly in English. They were both talking about Ali Al Saeed.

Published in 2004, Al Saeed’s novel QuixotiQ explores the emptiness of modern existence through the eyes of a series of characters seeking to turn their lives around. When violence rips through their orderly hometown Okay, a place so stable that the local psychiatric clinic has gone out of business, the characters are set on a collision course. The resulting combustion uncovers a chain of corruption that links up through every level of society, right to the very top.

The basic premise is good but it is let down by the execution. Grammatically odd, peppered with strange expressions and veering between tenses often in a single sentence, the text makes the reader very uneasy from the start. This is not helped by the strange rootlessness of the narrative, which seems to be set in some mysterious, non-existent mid-Atlantic state, where characters such as ‘Conrad Spitfire’ and ‘Randy Challenge’ rub shoulders on streets with names like ‘Elmo Avenue’.

At times, the outlandish registers and malapropisms reach comic proportions. ‘Should he keep finagling?’ one character asks himself, while someone else walks about ‘feeling exacerbated’ and the narrative voice confesses ‘The way this whole shenanigan unfolded was a mystery’.

More worrying still, are the holes in the plot, which see characters acting without cause and often questioning their own motivations. ‘I suppose I could have taken the bus’, muses one to himself as he drives off in the car he has just stolen. In addition, the great revelation at the end is more than a little deflated by the observation: ‘How Patrick knew that, nobody knew’.

Al Saeed seems conscious of this. In fact much of the final section is given over to defensive comments that ‘sometimes things do not have to make any sense to be true’.

This awareness points to an authorial sense which suggests that, writing in his mother tongue with more revisions and better editorial support than self-publishing company iUniverse could offer him, Al Saeed might have made much richer capital out of his promising raw material.

It would be interesting to know why he felt he had to opt for a Western setting and for writing in his second language. But then again, given the track record for translating contemporary Bahraini literature into English, perhaps it doesn’t take a genius to work that one out.

QuixotiQ by Ali Al Saeed (iUniverse, 2004)

Venezuela: the best medicine

March 28, 2012 By in South America, The stories Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , 3 Comments

This project would be nothing without the people all over the planet who get in touch to suggest books, publishers, experts and organisations to help me read my way round the world. I’m continually delighted by how generous fellow booklovers are with their time and expertise, and the way these recommendations are opening up new vistas of reading.

Cherie Elston is one of those people. As arts editor of Palabras Errantes, an ezine dedicated to promoting Latin American literature (which Laura introduced me to via a comment on The List), she knows a thing or two about books from South America. All the same, I couldn’t help being impressed by the list of 65 authors she sent in reply to my email.

I’m still researching my way through it and it will probably take me years to get hold of all the books (translations permitting). But I had to start somewhere and, as I didn’t have anything down for Venezuela before Cherie got in touch, I decided to begin with Alberto Barrera Tyszka.

Charting Dr Andrés Miranda’s response to the discovery that his father has terminal cancer, Tyszka’s Herralde Prize-winning novel The Sickness explores health, illness, life and death, and the strange, dispassionate vehicle of medicine that shuttles us between them. As Dr Miranda’s professionalism crumbles in the face of his impending loss, he is forced to confront his limitations and reassess his relationship with the vocation to which he is dedicated his life.

Tyszka’s ability to write about loss in all its guises is exceptional. From the seismic tremors it sends through an ordered existence to the absent-mindedness it interpolates into everyday moments, he captures it expertly. He also has a talent for presenting the inner workings of paranoia, which he sets forth through an email correspondence between Dr Miranda’s secretary and a strangely dependent patient.

The imagery he finds to convey the physical effects of shock and sadness is powerful too. When Andrés first sees his father’s results, we read that he feels ‘as if he bore inside him some helpless, stumbling creature, as if he were giving birth to a disaster’ and later, when his father phones to hear the news, that he ‘has a hedgehog on his tongue. His throat fills with pineapple rind’. This directness spills into Tyszka’s observation’s about his own craft as well. ‘Tears are very unliterary: they have no form’, he observes.

This insight is not always matched when it comes to observations about other areas of human existence. There are some strange generalisations about sexuality and the sexes, which ring oddly in the work of so generally empathetic and intuitive a writer.

Now and then the portrayal of hospital life stretches credulity too. Having grown up in a medical household, I found the idea that a surgeon would cancel an operation because his friend had just had some bad news hard to swallow. Now and then it seemed that Tyszka had underestimated the thick skin that most medical practitioners have to develop to survive their careers.

But these were minor points. The book was immensely enjoyable, as well as being touching and profound. Its exploration of the emotional spectrum and the stories we tell to inoculate ourselves against its worst effects will no doubt resonate with readers around the world, as it did with me.

Thanks Laura, Cherie and everybody else – please keep those recommendations coming.

Angola: the meaning of life

March 26, 2012 By in Africa, The stories Tags: , , , , , , 5 Comments

The names of certain countries seem bound up with the conflicts that shaped them. For many in the West words such as Bosnia, Sudan and Libya will conjure up the images of death and destruction that flickered on our TV screens throughout recent decades.

The magnitude of these events and the time it takes to translate and distribute books mean that many of the most powerful translated novels still coming out of these countries deal directly with war and its legacy. So we find a harrowing portrait of the expulsion of ethnic Russians from Tajikistan in Andrei Volos’s Hurramabad and a startling child’s-eye view of the Bosnian War in Sasa Stanisic’s How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone.

However, as I discovered when I read my Angolan choice for this project, not all literature from recent war zones strikes a mournful note.

Published in 2008 by now sadly defunct Aflame Books, Ondjaki’s The Whistler, the slender first novel from the author who made his name on the world literature stage with Good Morning Comrades, brims with joy and belief in rejuvenation.  It chronicles the arrival of a man with a haunting whistle in a sleepy village. Taking up residence in the church, the mysterious visitor fills the neighbourhood with his tunes, which are so beguiling they even charm the pigeons.

The effect of the music on the village’s human inhabitants is more impressive still. Cutting through the ‘general torpor’, the melodies unsettle and invigorate the largely elderly residents so that each in his or her way breaks free from the predictable patterns of daily life. The narrative culminates in an orgy of sensation, colour and delight, leaving behind a changed community where the inhabitants have a fresh appreciation of their own potency and the rich possibilities of life.

Ondjaki has a great eye for the contrary details that create character. The novel bustles with intriguing individuals who loom from the page: from the town oddball with his penchant for defecation in the open air to the put-upon gravedigger who refuses to leave his post at the cemetery despite no-one having died for years.

Zany and dream-like, the narrative almost takes flight into poetry on several occasions. This creates some extraordinary images, although it can make the throughline of the plot hard to follow.

The novel is so exuberant, however, that this hardly matters. As Ondjaki’s letter to his friend poet Ana Paula Tavares (published at the end of this edition) makes clear, his main concern is with creating a powerful impression rather than a conventional story.

He achieves this. The book is imaginative, passionate and extraordinary. And, when considered in the context of the 500,000 people killed during Angola’s 27-year civil war, it’s peculiarly moving too.

The Whistler by Ondjaki (translated from the Portuguese by Richard Bartlett). Aflame Books, 2008

Brazil: Goethe the ‘dirty old man’

March 24, 2012 By in South America, The stories Tags: , , , , , , , , 36 Comments

From one Portuguese-language country with very few novels available in translation we jump to another that has a whole heap of them (by British standards, at least).

With so many exciting recommendations on the list, Brazil was a tough choice. In the end, I plumped for House of the Fortunate Buddhas because of the intriguing circumstances of its inception: Joao Ubaldo Ribeiro was commissioned to write one in a series of books inspired by the seven deadly sins. I was curious to see whether a novel written to order in such a way would turn out to be any good. And I wanted to see how Ribeiro handled the vice he chose to write about: lust.

As with the other Dalkey Archive book I’ve read so far this year (Francois Emmanuel’s Invitation to a Voyage), voice is this novel’s driving force. Prompted to record her story by a terminal illness, Ribeiro’s fearless narrator, a self-confessed ‘queen of lectures’, recalls her heyday in the 1940s and 50s. She focuses on her and her friends’ many and varied sexual exploits ‘at a time when everything was more difficult for women’, attacking the social mores that straitjacket desire and force people to ‘live according to rules and patterns for which no human was made’.

This disarming frankness extends to literary conventions too. Unafraid to share her opinions on any subject, the narrator weighs into many of academia’s leading lights, calling Lacan’s work ‘con games’, Goethe ‘a real fucker who died a dirty old man’ and Freud ‘the greatest waste of genius since Plato, the son of a bitch’.

Similarly forthright about her own blindspots and limitations, she questions her own utterances and literary skill with urgency and humour. ‘This testimony isn’t a novel, it doesn’t even have a plot – although the novels of Henry James barely had one, now that I think about it,’ she says at one point.

This unflinching engagement with the world and her place in it, enables the narrator to venture confidently where others fear to tread. The narrative is filled with exceedingly graphic accounts of sex in all its forms, which succeed because they are free from the coyness amd awkwardness that send other writers fumbling for euphemisms and clichés.

Ribeiro’s ability to inhabit the female universe is impressive. The voice is powerful, believable and peppered with details that will have many women nodding wryly in recognition. Only occasionally did I find some of the claims about the power dynamics between the sexes hard to swallow and sense a slight Tiresian wistfulness in the descriptions of men as ‘poor machos chained to a bunch of strange expectations’.

In general, this is an engrossing and persuasive performance by a leading writer on the world literary stage. With its narrator’s bold depiction of her – perhaps Utopian – vision for ‘a world of sex without problems’, it brims with generosity, fellow-feeling and a desire to improve the lot  of humankind. The issue, it suggests, may not lie with the unbridled expression of sexual desire, but with the concept of sin itself.

Perhaps this is simply the passionate manifesto for free love it appears to be. Or maybe, on some ‘con game’, Lacanian or Freudian level, the artist Ribeiro is protesting that the basis of his commission is ultimately flawed.

House of the Fortunate Buddhas by Joao Ubaldo Ribeiro (translated from the Portuguese by Clifford E Landers). Dalkey Archive Press, 2011

Mozambique: uncharted territory

March 22, 2012 By in Africa, The stories Tags: , , , , , , , 19 Comments

I was preparing a post about Mia Couto’s Under the Frangipani when Miguel popped a comment on The List that took the wind out of my sails. He told me that I should read Paulina Chiziane’s Niketche for Mozambique ‘because it’s a cliché to only read Mia Couto and she needs more attention’.

Horrified at the thought that I might be turning into a literary cliché, I swallowed my reluctance to add yet another book to this year’s tally and googled Chiziane.It took quite a bit of digging before I came across a company called Aflame Books that seemed to have published an English language translation of Niketche. Keen to get hold of a copy, I sent them an email.

A few days later a message came back from translator and company founder Richard Bartlett. He was sorry to say that Aflame Books had gone bust before it managed to publish Niketche and only a third of the book had ever been translated. He was a big fan of Mozambican literature, but the only writer he could think of whose work was available in English was… Mia Couto. He did, however, have an unpublished translation of a novel called Ualalapi by Ungulani Ba Ka Khosa if I’d be interested to take a look?

A cursory internet search told me that this Khosa fellow was really rather a big cheese in Mozambican literary circles. Not only had Ualalapi won the 1990 Grand Prize of Mozambican Fiction, it was also included on the list of Africa’s 100 Best Books of the 20th Century drawn up in 2002. This I had to see.

Told in six installments, partly through the eyes of Nguni warrior Ualalapi, the novel portrays the rise and fall of the legendary leader Ngungunhane, who presided over the region now known as Mozambique until the Portuguese  conquered it in the nineteenth century. Graphic and startling, it lays bare the bloody realities of tribal warfare and colonialism, revealing the personal and societal costs of the human desire for power over others.

Myth-making is a big theme. Delighting in unpacking Ngungunhane’s national significance as a symbol of resistance against imperialism, Khosa plays conflicting accounts of the leader off against one another. Charismatic and ruthless, Ngungunhane remains something of an enigma, driven by the impossible longing to be ‘the first protagonist and the only one that History will record while men will be on the earth’.

This running preoccupation makes his final speech before he boards his captors’ ship, in which he envisages the horrors of the colonial and post-colonial eras and imagines the Portuguese forcing children ‘to speak of my death and call me criminal and cannibal’, all the more striking. He exits the narrative to take up his place alongside Oedipus, King Lear and Okonkwo as one of the world’s towering tragic heroes.

Some fantastical events add to the novel’s mythic quality: from the woman whose menstrual blood floods a village, to the strange prophesies that come to pass. These are expressed with lively and at times wonderfully earthy imagery. So we hear of the gossiping servants leaving a house ‘with bags full of words that they were throwing to the wind’ and the shrugging acceptance that no-one is perfect: ‘who is the man who has not snot in his nose?’

Being one of the few people ever to read this powerful classic in English was a huge privilege. It felt like getting a glimpse through a keyhole into a locked garden full of astonishing plants flourishing out of my reach. It made me sad to think of all we must miss in our little English-language bubble and angry that Mozambican literature in so commonly spoken a language as Portuguese is not more widely translated and read.

I am very grateful to Richard Bartlett for sharing the manuscript and to Miguel for forcing me to raise my game. What other Mozambican literature should be translated into English? Leave a comment and let me know.

Ualalapi by Ungulani Ba Ka Khosa (translated from the Portuguese by Isaura de Oliveira and Richard Bartlett). First published by Associacao dos Escritores Mocambicanos (1987)

Fiji: no man is an island

March 20, 2012 By in Oceania, The stories Tags: , , , , , , , , 1 Comment

Regime change seems to be the theme of the moment. No sooner had I finished YB Mangunwijaya’s satirical portrait of post-independence Indonesia than it was time to start Peter Thomson’s Kava in the Blood, an account of the coups that shook Fiji in 1987.

I was particularly intrigued to read the book because Dr Chakriya Bowman, Director of the Pacific Islands Forum Secretariat’s  Economic Governance Programme, found it for me after stopping by this blog. She very kindly visited the University of the South Pacific’s bookshop and emailed me the details and pictures of all the books she found that fitted the AYORTW criteria. Thomson’s EH McCormick Prize-winning memoir was one of these.

In fact, as Thomson acknowledges in his 1999 Foreword, Kava in the Blood contains not one story but two. Alongside his ‘account of what happened at Government House’, where he worked as Permanent Secretary of Information during 1987, he tells the poignant story of his love affair with the country his family emigrated to from Scotland four generations before he was born.

The question of what constitutes nationality and national identity is at the heart of the book. Not only is this the catalyst for the coups, sparked after Fiji’s first non-indigenous-dominated government came to power, but it also forms a powerful theme in Thomson’s personal life.

Despite having been born and brought up in Fiji, Thomson is forced to confront the fact that he has not been completely accepted into the ‘closed shop’ of Fijian society when the indigenous community closes ranks against ‘outsiders’ in the wake of the first coup. ‘I felt a creeping sense of delusion at being part of a country which, because of my European forbears, was now pointing a finger at me and saying “vulagi” — the Fijian word for visitor, or in this sense, foreigner’, he explains, going on to write wistfully of the ‘sense of oneness’ his indigenous peers must feel with the landscape and culture he loves.

This love is apparent throughout the book. It shows itself in Thomson’s humorous accounts of some of Fiji’s more bewildering traditions — ‘to those not used to it, a kava [Fiji’s national drink] session can have similarities to Chinese water torture,’ he writes — his deep knowledge of the nation’s culture, plants and animals and history, and his lyrical descriptions of life under the ‘arching starscape of our southern skies’.

The narrative is packed with fascinating and affectionate insights into Fijian society, including reflections on everything from Fijian patois through to the island’s prison system and the after effects of British colonial rule. Thomson’s recollection of establishing a polling station on Naqelelevu in 1976 in his capacity as district officer the day only one of the six eligible villagers turned out to vote is particularly memorable:

‘With absolutely no sense of the ridiculous the polling station was declared open. The voter went through the identification process and then turned to the little audience of seated villagers, ballot paper in one hand […]. Grinning self-consciously, he stood there long enough for the audience to take their mental snapshots of his moment of importance, and then another official guided him to the white wooden polling booth we had shipped with us.

‘The booth had been set up some distance from the table, giving the event an added sense of space and time. The official politely advised the protagonist to take his time with his vote. Inside the booth he did just that, while the rest of us on Naqelelevu that day looked on solemnly. Finally the booth started wobbling as he went through the motions of pacing his mark on the ballot paper. He emerged. Everyone pointed to the ballot box, and he went over to it and dropped the paper into its slot. He then stood for a while in front of the box like someone whose [sic] just won a TV gameshow, with a sheepish grin and not knowing quite where to put his hands.

[…]

‘With [the] lonely ballot paper… inadvertently eliminating the principle of the secret ballot, we packed up our gear, and bade farewell, sailing off to the south and leaving the islanders to their thoughts on the wonderful machinery of democracy.’

These rich recollections, along with Thomson’s exquisite accounts of his childhood on the islands, which read like extracts from a tropical Swallows and Amazons, more than make up for the jerky and episodic nature of the book, which sometimes feels more like a series scrapbook notes and jottings than a memoir. The addition of Thomson’s photographs into the 2008 edition heightens this impresion, giving the whole thing an immediate and personal quality. At points reading it feels as though you are sitting with Thomson under the giant rain trees outside his Waijevo residence, looking at his family album and waiting for the kava cup to come round.

Although writing in exile, after the second 1987 coup and four days of unlawful incarceration, during which he says ‘the umbilical cord to my homeland was cut’, Thomson’s love for Fiji clearly persists. As his two Afterwords suggest, his story of his island homeland is one from which he finds it hard to tear himself away. I did too.

Kava in the Blood by Peter Thomson (Booksurge, 2008)

PACIFIC APPEAL: do you know any good novels, short stories, memoirs, writers or even oral storytellers from other Pacific nations? Do you have friends or relatives in the region who might be able to suggest stories? Leave a comment or email ann’at’annmorgan.me and let me know.