Tag Archives: war

Côte d’Ivoire: if you are easily offended, keep reading

March 6, 2012 By in Africa, The stories Tags: , , , , , , , 2 Comments

Apparently, there are people who take books back to bookshops. When I was studying for my Creative Writing MA, a visiting publisher told us that after Vernon God Little won the 2003 Booker Prize there was a rash of returns up and down the country in protest at DBC Pierre’s expletives.

No doubt if Ahmadou Kourouma’s Allah is not Obliged had enjoyed a similar prominence when it was published in the UK, a similar thing would have happened. Riddled with obscenities and swear words in both Malinké and English (French in the original), many of which are hurled directly at the reader, this story of life as a ‘small-soldier’ in West Africa packs a vicious punch, not least because it is narrated by Birahima, a 10-year-old boy.

Most squirm-inducing of all are Birahima’s repeated descriptions of himself and his community as ‘Black Nigger African Natives’. Seeing this most incendiary of words exploding again and again on the opening pages, I was reminded of what my Togolese author, Tété-Michel Kpomassie, wrote about his first encounter with the term:

‘It was the first time I’d ever been called that, though I’d long ago realized that when someone having a dispute with a black man calls him “rotten nigger” or “filthy nigger” or some such name, it’s always some embittered neurotic trying to work off frustrations that have nothing at all to do with the “nigger”.’

Kpomassie’s observations hold true here. In fact, as the narrative progresses and Birahima unfolds his gut-wrenching story of running away from life with his abused and disabled mother only to be co-opted into one guerrilla group after another in Liberia and Sierra Leone, witnessing torture, massacres, rape and butchery along the way, the reasons for his aggressiveness become clear. His linguistic assaults are as much about a war with himself as they are about a war with the world, and reveal his struggle to assimilate all he has seen, thought and felt.

The shock factor is only one side of it. Pithy and waffle-free, Birahima delivers a refreshingly concise and even wry account of West Africa’s recent political history with some piquant insights along the way: ‘The woman is always wrong. That’s what they call women’s rights’; ‘Refugees had it easier than everyone else in the country because everyone was always giving them food’. He even reveals the unacknowledged glamour that the life of the small-soldier seen from the outside may have for many deprived children, for whom a taste of power, respect and good food contrasts favourably with the destitution and helplessness of everyday existence.

The voice can get a little wearing now and then. In particular, the repeated bracketed definitions from the Larousse and Petit Robert dictionaries, which, Birahima explains at the beginning, he is using ‘to make sure I tell you the life story of my fucked-up life in proper French’ feel like a bit of a missed opportunity. While Kourouma does work the odd observation out of them now and then with Birahima’s alternative definitions of ‘torture’ — ‘corporal punishment enforced by justice’ — and ‘humanitarian peacekeeping’, there are too many straight definitions for this device to pay its way.

Nevertheless, the book is a startling and fresh insight into a situation most of us can thankfully only guess at, as well as a masterclass in characterisation. It deserves to be read widely. Outraged readers should be bombarding the returns desks in their droves.

However if the second-hand copy I bought through Amazon is anything to go by, that is unlikely to happen. Inside the front cover there is a ‘withdrawn’ stamp from the Bournemouth Library Service; since the library bought the book in 2007, not enough people have read it to justify keeping it on the shelves. Now that is something worth getting angry about.

Allah is not Obliged by Ahmadou Kourouma (translated from the French by Frank Wynne). Vintage (2007)

Bosnia and Herzegovina: out of the mouths of babes

February 28, 2012 By in Europe, The stories Tags: , , , , , , , 2 Comments

Novels in children’s voices tend to be the Marmite of literature. While some people love the fresh, quirky insights that pepper works such as Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close and Emma Donoghue’s Room, others find them contrived, suspect and twee. Usually for such works to be in with a fighting chance of success, the child narrators must describe traumatic events beyond their understanding, creating a poignant gap between their generally upbeat interpretation of reality and the sad truth.

Saša Stanišić’s English PEN-championed How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone comes from this stable. Presenting the Bosnian War of the early-mid nineties through the eyes of young Aleksandr Krsmanoviæ, the book is a striking portrait of the way conflict ravages homes, lives, and psyches and the personal implications of events watched on TV screens hundreds and thousands of miles away.

Much like Hwang Sok-Yong’s The Guest, the novel intercuts periods of reflection and domesticity with scenes of extreme violence, revealing the psychological rifts that trauma inflicts. The difference is that where Hwang puts his outrages into the mouths of characters and ghosts, Stanišić rumples the chronology of the novel, sending the adult Aleksandr ricocheting back and forth between his memories and his inability to process them.

When they work, the time shifts and child’s voice, which is also varied with a third-person narrator, allow for some telling comment on the cruel illogic of war. The young Aleksandr walks us through the absurd hypocrisy of concepts such as enforced ‘voluntary repatriation’ and ‘our language which we’re not allowed to call Serbo-Croat anymore’ more succinctly and memorably than any adult would.

There are also some extraordinarily tense scenes and some powerful experimental passages. I particularly liked the chapter recording some of Aleksandr’s attempts to phone every house in Sarajevo in search of his long-lost childhood friend Asija.

Occasionally, though, the shifts become a little wearing and overly disorientating. This is not helped by wonky formatting in the e-edition, which means that chapter headings are split between pages for much of the second half of the book.

Some of the more surreal scenes towards the end also fall a little flat. The passage where the young Aleksandr has a long dialogue with the river in which he is fishing, for example, while indicative of his retreat into fantasy in the face of horror, is hard work.

Nevertheless, this is a powerful and, for the most part, compelling book. Its unflinching presentation of the extremes of human suffering makes for some gripping sequences, which will stay with me long after I’ve archived the book away into the great e-library in the sky. And my tweeness radar barely beeped once.

How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone by Saša Stanišić (translated from the German by Anthea Bell). Publisher (Kindle edition): Grove Press (2008)

Tajikistan: imagine

February 17, 2012 By in Asia, The stories Tags: , , , , , , , , 7 Comments

‘Is Tajikistan a real country?’ asked someone when I said it was next on my list. ‘Are you sure it’s not one of those made up places?’

I don’t know what ‘those made up places’ are — are we talking Neverland, Utopia or Walford here? — but strangely enough I think the citizens of Tajikistan might have chimed in with my companion’s sentiments back in the early nineties, when ‘one day everything, literally in a single instant, tore away irrevocably from its old bearings and went careering downhill like a snowball, picking up more and more atrocities on its way’.

Charting the outbreak of civil war in Tajikistan following the collapse of the USSR, Andrei Volos’s Hurramabad, which is named after a mythical city of joy and happiness, portrays the eviction of ethnic Russians who ‘suddenly found [themselves] in exile without having to move anywhere’. This is told through seven interlinked stories, each revealing the private calamity of a different individual and the way it contributes to the undermining and toppling of a collective reality that had existed for 70 years.

Anti-Booker prize-winner Volos is usually considered to be a Russian writer (and he writes in Russian), yet he was born in what is now Tajikistan, where his family had lived since the 1920s (his father suffered a heart attack and died when they were evicted). His personal perspective on the tragedies and atrocities he describes — from the man using all he has in the world to buy a gravestone for his brother before he leaves his homeland for good to the man coerced into kidnapping and sex-trafficking young girls to Afghanistan for arms — gives a muscular, biting edge to the writing, which at times launches vicious attacks on the authorities that stood by while their citizens were robbed, raped, ruined and rejected.

What is extraordinary, however, is the way that Volos has been able to sublimate and channel this emotion into a towering work of art in such a short space of time (the original text appeared in 1998). Indeed, the things described are so shocking and so far removed from anything that we in Western Europe have had to deal with for decades that I found my brain reordering 1992 to read 1929 the first few times I encountered it, as though it simply couldn’t entertain the proximity of these events.

While the constant switching from one story to another can be a little tiring and disorientating, the pieces themselves are immensely powerful. For my money ‘The House by the River’, in which Yamninov, having been forced to sign away his property to a government thug, embarks on a desperate and soul-destroying attempt to save the family house he spent seven years building, is in a league of its own. But each piece is compelling.

Over and above this, though, Volos’s use of imagery (aided no doubt by Arch Tait’s excellent translation) is among the very best I’ve read. The text glitters with spine-tingling similes and metaphors. From the ‘low overcast sky… like a hat pulled down over someone’s eyes’ to the abandoned assumptions that ‘immediately leapt back the way mountains do when you take the binoculars from your eyes’ and the heat ‘like a poultice slapped over the eyes’, Volos demonstrates time and again his ability to reach out from this forgotten corner of the world and take you to his characters.

The result is engrossing and shaming. With this book, Volos makes the experience of being evicted from your homeland by force — an experience to which many of us have been deadened by reams of newsprint and the blue flickers of the nightly news — immediate, human and real.

It left me feeling I’d been living in a fairytale until I read it.

Hurramabad by Andrei Volos (translated from the Russian by Arch Tait). Publisher (this edition): GLAS (2001)

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)