04.14.09

Global Voices

Posted in Life Betwixt Book Covers at 11:34 am by Miracle ♪♫

We interrupt the polybibliogamist’s “Nobel marathon” with a reading project brought about by Global Voices.

Before anything else, I would like to acknowledge the spearheader of this idea, for it has allowed me and others who have welcomed the opportunity, to embrace literary regions that were erst remote to us – it has even led to the discovery of a memoir that will remain to be one of my favorite books.

Howbeit it is ironic that I no longer aim to submit an entry to Global Voices. Why not? The answer to that would be an allegory that a friend furnished years ago. It is because I am at this moment, a duck on water, seemingly skimming smoothly along the surface, but kicking and thrashing almost frantically underwater for buoyance’s sake. The comfort is the truth that it is by Grace that I am kept afloat – not by my paddling, and it is the same Grace that is helping me contemplate and deal with discouraging circumstances in my life with “new eyes”. This straying from the topic is also proof that I am not very focused and therefore unfit to enter book challenges. It is enough that the books are also little instruments to keep me from drowning.

Before the unexpected emotional bomb mushroomed, I had every intention of joining the challenge and had stacked a small pile of books from countries whose literature I have never yet unraveled. But for me, stacking them and judging them by their front covers and back-cover summaries and selecting just one book from the assortment was not enough. I had to read them one by one, and even planned on choosing the book I liked best afterwards, and then pass it to Global Voices.

These are the books I have finished so far:

In The Country of Men by Hisham Matar (Libya)

Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe (Nigeria)

Reading Lolita in Tehran (A Memoir in Books) by Azar Nafisi (Iran)

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In the Country of Men by Hisham Matar

“In a time of blood and tears, in a Libya full of bruise-checkered and urine-stained men, urgent with want and longing for relief, I was the ridiculous child craving concern.”

Granting that the above phrase extracted from the 168^th page embodies the whole book, one has to really read it to experience its beautiful agony. It yanks your emotions from its comfort zone and transports it to nine-year-old Suleiman’s side as he bears the burden of comforting a troubled mother and witnesses the capture and public execution of his bestfriend’s father, preceding his own father’s arrest by the Revolutionary Army.

Having a nine-year-old brother, I cannot bring myself to imagine the horrors Suleiman witnessed; and these are horrors too terrifying even for adults, and these are horrors that are truly happening across the globe.

It is Hisham Matar’s first novel and yet it has already garnered awards all over the world, and after reading In the Country of Men, one does not have to wonder why.

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Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe

Aware that I had in my hands what writers and readers labelled an important piece of literature, Achebe’s simple storybook narrative startled me a bit during the book’s earlier chapters.

Nevertheless, it was easier to come to terms with the style after having read J.M. Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello. Coetzee himself originally hailed from the same continent as Achebe and had inserted “lessons” pertaining African literature in Elizabeth Costello. Egudu, an author, and a passing character from Elizabeth Costello brought up the Senegalese writer Cheikh Hamidou Kane in his lecture:

Cheikh Hamidou was being questioned by an interviewer, a European. I am puzzled, said the interviewer, by your praise for certain writers for being truly African. In view of the fact that the writers in question write in a foreign language… can they be truly called African writers? Is language not a more important matrix than birth?

The following is Cheikh Hamidou’s reply: “The writers I speak of are truly African because they are born in Africa…their sensibility is African… What distinguishes them lies in life experiences, in sensitivities, in rhythm, in style. A French or English writer has thousands of years of written tradition behind him… We on the other hand are heirs to an oral tradition.”

There is nothing mystical in Cheikh Hamidou’s response, nothing metaphysical, nothing racist. He merely gives proper weight to those intangibles of culture which, because they are not easily pinned down in words, are often passed over. The way that people live in their bodies. The way that they move their hands. The way they walk. The way they smile or frown. The lilt of their speech. The way they sing. The timbre of their voices.The way they dance. The way they touch each other; how the hand lingers; the feel of the fingers. The way they make love. The way they lie after they have made love. The way they think. The way they sleep.

We African novelists can embody these qualities in our writings – we African novelists cam embody these qualities as no one else can because we have not lost touch with the body. The African novel, the true African novel, is an oral novel.On the page it is inert, only half alive; it wakes up when the voice, from deep in the body, breathes into the words, speaks them aloud.

Things Fall Apart is more than just the story about a strong man named Okonkwo. The book’s simplicity in plot and narrative was what surprised me at first, but in the end, I realized that it was from these selfsame things that the book exacted its power and authority.

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Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi

Due to the habit of toying with words as though twirling strands of hair around my fingers, the title’s acronym kept reappearing on my mind: RLIT. Revolutionary or radical literature? It is, in many ways.

For a book that has had its share of criticisms and substantial fame, I was unsuspecting of the result that I would emerge from its pages feeling that I have had one of the profoundest literature lessons in my entire life.

It is a memoir of teaching literature in Iran from the dawn of the Islamic Revolution through its aftermaths. The reader follows Dr. Azar Nafisi through her ordeal as a woman with a progressive mind in a society where women are insignificant and progressive minds and views are forced to be obliterated.

From the classroom to her private literature lessons, the book revolves around the terrifying life and times of which she and her students lived.How Azar Nafisi incorporated these with Vladimir Nabokov, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Henry James, and Jane Austen among others is what kept me agog.

“…I sit and reimagine myself and my students, my girls as I came to call them, reading Lolita in a deceptively sunny room in Tehran.But to steal the words from Humbert…I need you, the reader, to imagine us, for we don’t really exist if you don’t.Against the tyranny of time and politics, imagine us the way we sometimes didn’t dare to imagine ourselves: in our most private and secret moments, in the most extraordinarily ordinary instances of life, listening to music, falling in love, walking down the shady streets or reading Lolita in Tehran. And then imagine us again with all this confiscated, driven underground, taken away from us.”

This is how I have come to obtain a book that would have been pertinent for the Global Voices Book Challenge because the memoir itself is a powerful voice that not only cries for women who are trapped in such a society, but it is also a voice that urges me to relish a celebration of my freedom as a reader.

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