Libya: desert life

January 19, 2012 By in Africa, The stories Tags: , , , , , , 3 Comments

Few countries can have been written about more than Libya over the past year. In the wake of the collapse of the Gaddafi regime and the shockingly public demise of its leader, it seemed an obvious choice to go for a writer who tackled the oppression and terror that gripped the country during the decades of totalitarian rule.

Among the excellent suggestions of titles made to me by Libyan Dr Fuzi El Mallah and Cairo-based blogger M Lynx Qualey were two such books by 2006 Man Booker Prize nominee Hisham Matar, and I was very tempted to go with them.

But then it struck me that the side of Libya we have all seen splashed across the headlines is probably only part of the story. I wondered what else there was to this country that I felt I knew so much about.

Further down El Mallah and Qualey’s list, the answer presented itself in the form of Ibrahim Al-Koni‘s lyrical and mysterious The Bleeding of the Stone. Set in the 1930s in the deserts of southern Libya, the novel follows the ‘lone bedouin’ Asouf, who is instructed to keep watch over a series of ancient caves and wallpaintings that he has known all his life after archaeologists discover them. Charged with giving tours to Westerners and other visitors, Asouf witnesses the encroachment of the modern world on the fragile and beautiful, yet fierce, landscape that he has grown up in, until at last he himself falls victim to the unthinking rapaciousness of those who intrude upon his homeland.

Al-Koni’s sense of the connection between man and nature, his painstaking evocation of the practices and rituals of the desert dwellers, and his poetic descriptions of the landscape, where the sun clothes the desert ‘in the red mantle of its rays’, reminded me of some of the works of Thomas Hardy. The description of the decimation of the gazelles by the cruel tourist Cain, for example, whose greed for fresh meat drives him to take a Land Rover out the better to shoot down whole herds, could have come from one Hardy’s more vehement denouncements of the inroads of the industrial revolution into traditional rural life:

‘Poor gazelle! He doesn’t see how this devilish machine is a betrayal of nature, breaching the rules of noble conflict and seeking to win the day through the ugliest trickery.’

Like Hardy, Al-Koni evokes a spiritual relationship between man and his natural environment, a relationship that requires respect, reverence and balance for its continuance. Asouf, much in the same vein as Hardy’s Tess, is part animist, part pantheist, with a sprinkling of local myths and formal religious rituals thrown in. To him, both Christian and Muslim visitors to the site appear identical, all pausing before the majestic cave paintings with the same wonder. The text, too, is eclectic in its frame of reference, something that Al-Koni takes care to establish from the start with a quote from both the Quran and the Bible at the beginning of the first chapter and extracts from Greek tragedies and ancient Chinese philosophers throughout.

In contrast to Hardy, however, Al-Koni pushes the spiritual aspect of the natural world into the realm of magical realism, introducing a series of strange interludes in which gazelles speak and waddan (the ancient desert sheep that roam the mountain ranges) assume mystical powers. How many of these happen in reality and how many proceed from Asouf’s own lonely imaginings and delusions is never clear, yet they all work to further the sense of wonder and wistfulness for a shrinking way of life that pervades the text.

From the ‘Emerging Voices’ banner under which my edition was published, I assumed that Al-Koni must be a relatively new writer still earning his spurs. It was only that later that I discovered to my shame that he is one of the leading authors writing in Arabic today. From what I’ve read, he is a master of his art, easily equal to the best English language writers. He deserves to be much more widely read in the West.

The Bleeding of the Stone by Ibrahim Al-Koni (translated from the Arabic by May Jayyusi and Christopher Tingley). Publisher (this edition): Interlink Books (2002)

Djibouti: states of mind

January 17, 2012 By in Africa, The stories Tags: , , , , , , 8 Comments

Alright, hands up. Who read the title as In the United States of America first time round? I know I did. It’s only a few letters’ difference, but, as I discovered with this book, that’s all a talented writer needs to turn the world on its head.

Djiboutian-French author Abdourahman A. Waberi reverses reality in this French Voices Award-winning novel. Africa is the world superpower, and while its Silicon valley and cultural hubs boom it must find a solution to the ills of the ‘coconut-skinned’ Caucasians, ‘who are not people like you and me’ and who immigrate to the continent in their droves escaping war, famine and disease in holocaust-ravaged Europe and the badlands of North America.

Switching between the experience of one such refugee and the story of an adopted white girl, Malaika, who, having grown up in the first-world Eritrean capital Asmara, sets out to salve her conscience and ‘desire to conjugate near and far’ by travelling to look for her birth-mother in the Paris slums, the novel challenges you to look at the world afresh, highlighting the flaws and inconsistencies in even the most innocent-seeming preconceptions.

There’s a lot of scope for comedy. I couldn’t stop laughing as I read about ‘the pagans of the Baltic islands (who practised cannibalism)’ , ‘the clownsuit called Switzerland… subjected to ethnic and linguistic warfare for centuries’ and the ‘Arafat Peace Prize’. The extract from the phrasebook that Malaika takes with her to France, with its footnotes lamenting the illogic and inelegance of the French language, is priceless. Even the introduction of the unfortunate Swiss refugee on the first page made me smile at its cultural arrogance – all too familiar the other way around:

‘Let’s call him Yacuba, first to protect his identity and second because he has an impossible family name’.

The humour is of course only the outriding breeze of a gale of indignation and righteous anger about the skewed perspective that the ‘developed’ world has on its neighbours. Rehearsing commonplace arguments and platitudes in reverse, the narrative voice highlights the cruelty hidden in complacency and self-satisfaction, mining government speak, journalese and interior monologues to reveal the hypocrisy that runs through our dealings with the world.

Often, Waberi achieves his effects by tweaking existing texts and using facts in reverse. His description of the United States of Africa as ‘so insular and so intoxicated with itself [that] hardly 14 per cent of its citizens have a passport’, for example, echoes familiar statements about another USA and packs extra punch by being close to the truth – although for quite other reasons.

This mingling of fact and fiction made me glad that I had not stuck to my intention of reading French texts in their original language. I would definitely have struggled with this one.

As it was, I found my lack of knowledge of African geography and culture meant that there were plenty of references (alongside the hundreds of nods to European and North American culture and politics) that passed me by. I’m not generally a fan of reading extraneous information in footnotes, believing that books should be accessible on some level to anyone who picks them up as they are, but I did feel that I would have benefited from more world knowledge with this one.

What I did get, though, was fascinating and challenging. And I felt somewhat vindicated in my efforts by the ‘solution’ that blinkered, partial Malaika fumbles her way towards at the end, while recognising the patronising, Afrocentric terms in which it is couched (and in which such statements are commonly framed the other way about):

‘translate… all the great literature of the world into French, English, German, Flemish or Italian. And you must insist that the children of Europe discover not only the Bible and the Torah, but the jewels of all civilizations, near as well as far. If narratives can bloom again, if languages, words, and stories can circulate again, if people can learn to identify with characters from beyond their borders, it will assuredly be a first step towards peace.’

I can’t argue with that.

In the United States of Africa by Abdourahman A. Waberi (translated from the French by David and Nicole Ball). Publisher (this edition): University of Nebraska Press (2009)

Malaysia: the world wide web

January 14, 2012 By in Asia, The stories Tags: , , , , , , 4 Comments

 

One of the lovely things about trying to find a book to read from every country in the world is the connections you make along the way. I’m continually delighted by the thoughtfulness of the people who stop by this blog and take time to comment and make suggestions of titles I could include or ways that I could find interesting books.

So I was particularly touched when one visitor, Rafidah, offered to go to bookshops in Malaysia and Singapore on my behalf and post me some titles. Intrigued (and a little nervous) to see what she would come up with, I waited for the parcel to arrive.

As it turned out, I had no need to worry. Rafidah could hardly have chosen a more appropriate (or enjoyable) book than Ripples and other stories by English language writer Shih-Li Kow.

Styled as a collection of short stories, and shortlisted for the 2009 Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, the book is actually more like a novel in which moments in characters’ lives are explored as they weave in and out of each others’ existences, tracing a web of associations that stretches across Malaysian society and out around the world.

The structure reminded me a little of David Mitchell’s Ghostwritten, except that Kow is much fleeter of foot, giving momentary glimpses and snatches of experience where Mitchell offers weighty helpings of exposition. Her supreme talent is her ability to portray voices, which she establishes with gutsy and outrageous Aunty So and So in the opening story ‘One Thing at a Time’ and maintains in various forms throughout.

What comes across is Kow’s great love for and interest in people. This is evident in her painstaking attention to detail and the way she is able to depict the conflicting motivations that send her characters ricocheting off each other throughout the book. So we hear of the hypocrisy of the houseproud woman who looks on dengue fever as a lower class disease, the paranoia of the city worker for whom sanity constitutes a myriad of niggling worries and fears, and the complex reactions of the neglected child who finds a kind of love in the attentions of a paedophile.

Often, in fact, the camera is pointed at some small detail while the major events take place on the edge of the scene, almost out of focus, as in the case of ‘News from Home’, where Josie spends the entire letter to her estranged brother talking about the death (and afterlife) of their mother’s cat.

Also interesting are the shifts between genres. Realism jostles with fairy tales, ghost stories, magical realism and much more. We find stories set in the afterlife and stories where characters have shapeshifting faces or the ability to swallow cats whole, alongside riffs on meetings, walks in the park and the rivalry of street traders. The result is a rich and full picture of human experience in which the doors of perception swing open and closed between reality and the weird landscape of the psyche.

To my mind, the key to the collection is not the title piece ‘Ripples’, which focuses on an encounter with a photographer and a discussion of how you capture a moment, but ‘A Gift of Flowers’, a story in which a bouquet is passed from one person to another until part of it ends up back with the original purchaser, potentially with life and death consequences.

This sense of the way we impact on one another and how minute details can change the world is at the heart of Kow’s work, and is what makes Ripples and other stories an engrossing and memorable read. Thanks Rafidah.

Ripples and other stories by Shih-Li Kow. Silverfish Books (2008)

Malawi: a story from the fourth world

January 12, 2012 By in Africa, The stories Tags: , , , , , , , , 2 Comments

 

Malawian artist Samson Kambalu begins his account of his childhood and rise to international recognition with a prologue remembering the day he and his Scottish fiancée notified the High Commission in Malawi of their intention to get married. Asked if he was doing this to get a British passport, Kambalu answered ‘Not really’ to the great indignation of the consul, who informed him crossly: ‘The answer is NO, OK? The answer is NO’.

The following 335 pages illustrate why that ‘Not really’ stands.

One of eight children born into a Christian family in the then-dictatorship of Malawi or ‘the abyss of the fourth world’ as he calls it, Kambalu grew up in the shadow of his intellectually ambitious yet ultimately frustrated clinical officer father, the Jive Talker of the title. Posted to remote locations all over the impoverished sub-Saharan country, the Jive Talker took refuge in alcohol and Nietzsche as his career crumbled and his family and their peers suffered ever greater privations until at last Kambalu’s parents died of AIDs-related illnesses around the turn of the millennium.

Yet this is no self-pitying catalogue of woes. Told with wit and flair, Kambalu’s account paints a picture of a vital place full of creativity and interest. Life there is a precarious business and the world is cruelly indifferent to individuals’ sufferings (‘Anybody who survives Malawi deserves to be called Superman’, he remarks at one point), yet it is a world Kambalu describes with dignity and humour.

This humour often tips over into the deeply touching, as when Kambalu remembers his friend Joe Bugner’s reaction to the news that he had secured a place at the highly competitive, state-funded, English-style boarding school Kamuzu Academy, known as the ‘Eton of Africa’:

‘You are the man. In future all that is wrong with the world you will only see on TV,’ which was a pretty poignant remark considering there was no TV in Malawi at the time.

Far from being a purely personal account though, The Jive Talker is in many ways a history of Malawi too, with much of the political and social development of the country over the last few centuries woven into the narrative. The description of the cultural split caused by the arrival of 19th century missionaries, which saw the country change from a matriarchal society in which family members were known only by their shared clan name into a patriarchal society where everyone had to have his or her own Christian name is fascinating, as are Kambalu’s reflections on the Banda regime.

The most interesting aspects of this episodic (and occasionally rambling) narrative, though, are the powerful insights into Kambalu’s development as a conceptual artist and the creation of the philosophy of Holyballism, which made his name. Described with such intensity that they sometimes take on an almost magical realist quality, these passages reveal the alchemy by which Kambalu was able to assimilate the conflicting cultures he grew up with and broker some sort of peace with his past — no mean feat.

The Jive Talker: Or, How to Get a British Passport by Samson Kambalu. Publisher (Kindle edition): Vintage Digital (2008)

Mexico: food for thought

January 10, 2012 By in North America, The stories Tags: , , , , , , 1 Comment

 

If the test of great literature is whether it gets people to think about doing things differently, then Laura Esquivel‘s 1989 novel Like Water for Chocolate is up there with the best. Packed with mouthwatering recipes for all sorts of Mexican delicacies, it tempts readers to leap up and run to the local delicatessen in search of chorizo, chilis and jalapenos on every other page.

There’s a good reason for the intensity of flavours spicing the narrative: centring on the heartbroken Tita, the last child in a family where tradition states that the youngest daughter must remain single and care for her mother until one of them dies, it charts the heroine’s mounting frustrations as she works day after day preparing food in the family kitchen unable to marry her sweetheart Pedro. But no-one has reckoned on the effect that all that pent up passion may have on a person’s cooking, and when Pedro becomes engaged to her sister Tita is unable to help her feelings infusing the delicious wedding feast, with surprising results.

There are many familiar ingredients peppering the pages: a dash of Cinderella here, a dollop of Salman Rushdie’s emotion-infused chutneys in Midnight’s Children there, and a whole handful of Lorca’s Bernarda Alba in the tyrannical figure of Mama Elena. Nevertheless, like the best cooks, Esquivel manages to bring her own twist to these tried and tested staples, creating something deliciously new.

We may think we recognise magical realism in some of the more outlandish features — the tears that flood a staircase, the quilt so large that it drags behind a carriage like a wedding train, the sex so incendiary that it sets fire to buildings (unless I’ve really missed out) — but a closer look suggests that something subtly different is at work.

Rather than magical elements blending with the real world, these events seem to be emotional projections from the characters themselves, which may or may not be happening. ‘The simple truth is that the truth does not exist; it all depends on a person’s point of view’, explains Tita’s gutsy older sister Gertrudis, in an uncharacteristically obvious aside.

Esquivel, however, leaves you to help yourself to the wider philosophical implications as you choose. Her central achievement has been to serve up an immensely satisfying read garnished with wit and originality, and so sensual that it is guaranteed to have you craving Mexican food. Bagsy the Christmas rolls!

Like Water for Chocolate: A Novel in Monthly Installments with Recipes, Romances and Home Remedies by Laura Esquivel (translated from the Spanish by Carol and Thomas Christensen). Publisher (Kindle edition): Anchor (2002)

Bulgaria: buzz buzz

January 9, 2012 By in Europe, The stories Tags: , , , , , , 16 Comments

 

I had a book lined up for Bulgaria. I was going to read Elias Canetti‘s The Tongue Set Free. It was in my bag and everything.

Then I discovered a copy of Georgi Gospodinov ‘s Natural Novel in the excellent indie bookstore McNally Jackson in New York City (where I’m staying for a week or so, hence the different bookshelf) and it sounded so intriguing that I had to buy it and read it there and then.

Normally at this point in a post, I’d give a brief rundown of what the book’s about. I’m stuck here, I’m afraid because, as the narrator, one Georgi Gospodinov, writes in the fictional ‘Editor’s note’ that pops up after chapter 2, ‘the novel itself could hardly be summarized’.

The throughline, such as it is, is the mental disintegration of the protagonist, another Georgi Gospodinov, after a divorce. But to say that seems to reduce the narrative and squash it back on to the page when it is a living, breathing, alarming entity that leaps around the room, in and out of your brain, helping itself to your insecurities.

As his psyche splinters, the writer/narrator gives himself over to experimentation, trying everything from a novel based solely on the beginnings of classic works and a novel written only in verbs to the Bible according to flies (‘The Book of Flies’) and a disquisition on the artistic significance of toilets.

As in several other books I’ve read so far, the ubiquity of Western culture is evident with The Kinks, Reservoir Dogs, Elvis Presley, Daniel Defoe, J.D Salinger and Shakespeare all featuring (along with many others). But here, instead of a sinister, controlling force, it seems rather to be an amusette or smogasbord for Gospodinov to pick at, pull apart and reconfigure as he pleases, often to startling effect.

Essentially, this book is about itself. Fly-like it lights on and digests its own events, regurgitating them in altered form for reconsideration. However, unlike much postmodern literature, it doesn’t take itself wholly seriously. Anarchic and subversive, the narrative bristles with jokes. It pokes fun at me, at you, at them and most of all at itself, while opening a door on to a fresh landscape of linguistic possibilities and ushering us all through.

Natural Novel by Georgi Gospodinov (translated from the Bulgarian by Zornitsa Hristova). Publisher (this edition): Dalkey Archive Press (2005)

Portugal: a moral dilemma

January 7, 2012 By in Europe, The stories Tags: , , , , , , 8 Comments

If you could make yourself rich beyond your wildest imaginings by ringing a bell would you do it?

What if ringing that bell caused the death of someone you’d never met on the other side of the world?

Such is the dilemma facing the unlikely hero Teodoro, an impoverished scribe at Portugal’s of Internal Affairs and Education department, in the title of story of this collection by Portuguese writer José Maria Eça de Queiroz.

Confronted with this choice (a reworking of the ‘mandarin paradox’ first posed by French writer Chateaubriand in 1802) late one night after a Mephistophelian character appears in his bedroom, Teodoro gives in, half-believing that he is dreaming. Then a messenger arrives with bank drafts making over the fortune of recently deceased Mandarin Ti Chin-Fu to him, setting in motion a carnival of excess and guilt that ultimately leads to our hero travelling to China in an attempt to make amends for what he has done.

Eça de Queiroz is widely hailed as Portugal’s greatest 19th century novelist, yet there is a freshness to his writing which makes it seem much more recent. Where English authors such as Hardy and Dickens point to the loosening grip of Church teachings on the popular imagination, Eça de Queiroz comes right out with the assertion that ‘Heaven and Hell are social concepts created for the sole use of the lower classes’, albeit hedged round with the private superstitions and blindspots of each of his characters: self-professed atheist Teodoro, for example, makes regular offerings to his patron saint, our Lady of Sorrows.

In addition, the difficulties Teodoro encounters trying to repay his moral debts to the community he has wronged find echoes in many of the debates about global development and aid today. Initially hoping to salve his conscience by making a donation to the state, he is warned off this course of action by the Russian ambassador in words that might have been spoken yesterday (if not in relation to China):

‘Those millions would never reach the imperial Treasury. They would line the bottomless pockets of the ruling classes. They would be frittered away… They would not help to relieve the hunger of a single ordinary Chinese person… They would merely contribute to the continuance of the whole Asian orgy.’

This freshness, blended with lyricism and spiced with sardonic insights into the hypocrisy and blindness of humanity, flavours the whole collection. Playful and experimental, Eça de Queiroz  delights in turning on his readers at points, challenging them with the same quandaries he poses his characters, a technique he takes to its limits in the final story ‘José Matias’ by putting the narrative in the second person, thereby plonking the reader into the carriage right next to the narrator. Even the least successful piece in the collection ‘ The Idiosyncrasies of a Young Blonde Woman’, which is more of an extended character sketch than a fully realised story, is lively and compelling.

I shall return Eça de Queiroz (probably in about 2020, when I get through the backlog of all the other wonderful things I’m stumbling past during this attempt to read the world). Thanks to Silvia for the recommendation and for lending me the book.

The Mandarin and Other Stories by José Maria Eça de Queiroz (translated from the Portuguese by Margaret Jull Costa). Publisher (this edition): Dedalus (2009)

Syria: the power of words

January 5, 2012 By in Asia, The stories Tags: , , , , , , , , , 5 Comments

 

‘Don’t squander your precious words… Words are responsibility’

I had my doubts about this one. Having picked it up on a whim in Foyle’s (which makes it one of the handful of books I’ll be reading this year that are easily available on the UK high street), I began to question its authenticity as an example of Syrian literature when I realised it had been written in German.

After all, I’d had so many intriguing recommendations for literature written in Arabic that it seemed hard to justify deviating from those for the sake of what may turn out to be a sort of hybrid fiction, caught between the Arab and Western worlds.

In fact award-winning author Rafik Schami, who emigrated from Syria to Germany at the age of 25 and holds dual nationality, makes the difficulty of telling stories across cultures one of the themes of this book. Incorporating the tales told by the seven friends of Salim the coachman, Damascus’s best storyteller, in an effort to lift an enchantment that has struck him dumb, his witty and engrossing narrative includes a discourse from Tuma the emigrant, who, having lived in America for 10 years, attempts to explain his time in the West to his friends.

Describing how he found it difficult to speak in the US (‘How are you going to talk to people who don’t have the faintest idea about the things that really matter to you?’), he then goes on to discover similar difficulties in trying to interpret Western culture for his friends. In the end, frustrated by their repeated dismissal of his words as ‘fairytales’, he decides to lie instead.

At this point, it’s hard not to picture Schami smirking at his typewriter (he wrote this in 1989), and to wonder how much of the colour of the Damascus he describes, ‘a city where legends and pistachio pastries are but two of a thousand and one delights’, is shaded in for the benefit of his European readers.

But what cuts through this playful jousting with truth is a sense of the crucial importance of communication. Storytelling is a vital force in the novel: it’s the way that cafe owners keep their customers coming back each day, how deals are done and friendships cemented and, in many of the stories, a matter of life and death. What matters is not the truth or otherwise of what is related but that it is related.

Set in 1959 against the uneasy backdrop of the United Arab Republic, a union between Syria and Nasser’s Egypt, which saw the region awash with secret police and transistor radios designed to allow the government ‘to proclaim the one and only valid truth’ because ‘governments in Syria, without exception, made a habit of proclaiming peace and order just when they were on the verge of collapse’, the novel’s presentation of the need for a plurality of voices and accounts is deeply moving. It finds its echo in the events of today and deserves to be read in the West, the Middle East and throughout the world.

Damascus Nights by Rafik Schami (translated from the German by Philip Boehm). Publisher (this edition): Arabia Books (2011)

Austria: compacted meaning

January 3, 2012 By in Europe, The stories Tags: , , , , , , , 6 Comments

 

They say that good things come in small packages, and, with literature from 196 countries to read and blog about this year, I’m inclined to agree. So I was particularly pleased when the first book for this project arrived, courtesy of a recommendation from Heide Kunzelmann at the Ingeborg Bachmann Centre for Austrian Literature, to find that it was a mere 123 pages long.

Slender though it may be, Frozen Time rivals many a weightier tome for depth and scope. Written by South Korean-born Anna Kim, who moved to Austria from Germany aged seven and regards German as her mother tongue, the narrative follows a young researcher in Vienna’s Red Cross Tracing Service as she attempts to help a Kosovan man discover what happened to his wife during the war in former Yugoslavia.

The narrator finds herself drawn more and more into the man’s trauma, and, as the lines in their professional relationship become blurred, she is forced to confront unfinished business of her own in Kosovo.

Kim is one of those rare writers who manage to combine economy of language with rich significance. At times she condenses so much meaning into her spare sentences that they feel more like poetry than prose. This impression is strengthened by the way the layout and structure of the text reflect the shredding effects of loss on a psyche: sentences tail off into dashes, paragraphs hang broken on the page and the narrative leaps between times and perspectives, as though unable to stay focused on any one train of thought for long.

Kim’s presentation of the way trauma plays out in the mind is equally impressive. From the horrific images and memories that crash into mundane activities, to the paranoid projections that twist the memory of the beloved (reminiscent at times of Rivka Galchen’s Atmospheric Disturbances), she provides a masterclass in dysfunction.

Translator Michael Mitchell writes about the difficulty of rendering some of the subtleties of meaning in the text — in particular the shift between the formal German ‘you’ (Sie) and the informal version (du) — in his introduction. Nevertheless, he has created a powerful version in which the frequent modulations between registers of language (formal, professional, intimate and child-like) mirror the mental shifts the text describes. Highly recommended.

Frozen Time by Anna Kim (translated from the German by Michael Mitchell). Publisher (this edition): Ariadne Press (2010)

South Sudan: the first New Year

January 1, 2012 By in Africa, Blogcast, The stories Tags: , , , , , 5 Comments

 

New Year is a time for fresh starts. And they don’t come much fresher than in South Sudan, where, since declaring independence from Sudan in July 2011, the leaders of the world’s most recently declared sovereign state have been getting to grips with all the challenges that come with establishing a brand new country from scratch.

As I discovered when I interviewed senior civil servant Deng Gach Pal around the time of independence, these challenges are particularly formidable in South Sudan. Ravaged by 21 years of civil war, much of the country lacks the most basic infrastructure, with roads, schools and hospitals few and far between. In fact, when I phoned the country last month, I still had to use the old Sudanese dialling code to get through. And as today’s sad reports of infighting have shown, even peace itself is brittle and intermittent.

Small wonder, then that, as far as I could discover there has been little, if any, literature published in the country’s short history (under the terms of this project anything published before the date the country was established would not count).

I did find some mention of a Writers’ Association of South Sudan on the internet, but beyond their draft constitution, dated 8 July 2011, I couldn’t find any more information about them (if any South Sudanese creative writers would like to get in touch, it would be great to hear about what it’s like building a national literature from the ground up).

So I was honoured and delighted when the Chair of the Civil Service Recruitment Board in South Sudan, Julia Duany, agreed to write and record a story for the launch of this project. A former refugee and research associate at the University of Indiana, Duany published her memoirs Making Peace and Nurturing Life: Memoir of an African Woman about a Journey of Struggle and Hope in 2003. She returned to South Sudan in 2005 to help prepare for independence, spending five years as Undersecretary in the Ministry for Parliamentary Affairs.

Here, reading in English, South Sudan’s official language, Duany remembers the aftermath of the conflict that she describes as a ‘pantomime of hell’ in her homeland and looks forward with hope to a brighter future as the South Sudanese celebrate their first ever New Year.

‘To Forgive is Divine Not Human’ by Julia Duany. Publisher: ayearofreadingtheworld.com (2012)