Category: Reading

Ethiopian-born writer Maaza Mengiste fled her country as a young girl around a period called the Ethiopian Red Terror, when between tens and hundreds of thousands of Ethiopians were killed by a communist military government called the Derg. In her first novel, Beneath the Lion’s Gaze, Mengiste uses one family to recount the end of Emperor Haile Selassie’s rule and the intimate horror of the Derg. The family’s patriarch, a surgeon, faces a terrible choice when the military brings him a victim of torture — at the brink of death — to revive, presumably for further interrogation. The surgeon’s two sons, his daughter-in-law, and their friends each confront the terror in their own way. Mengiste’s novel isn’t for the faint of heart: There is one scene of child torture and many other difficult images. But as Mengiste told NPR, “I am hoping that if we can understand the humanity of those who suffered through this, that we start to investigate beyond the pages of this book.”

I listened to the audiobook, well narrated by Steven Crossley. I had to jot down a few character names to keep track of everyone at the beginning, but it was well worth it.

Here are a few other reviews:

• Lorraine Adams, the New York Times: “For all its beginner’s flaws, ‘Beneath the Lion’s Gaze’ is an important novel, rich in compassion for its anguished characters.”
• Aida Edemariam, The Guardian: “Mengiste has clear metaphorical points to make: that this revolution was a family affair, turning children against parents, and against each other; that a country steeped in authoritarianism and religious fatalism … can suffer a terrible moral passivity at times of crisis… She is good on the resulting lostness, and on how everyone is compromised… Mengiste is good, too, on the pervading fear that anyone who lived there then remembers.”
• Kirkus Reviews: “An arresting, powerful novel that works on both personal and political levels.”
• The New Yorker: “The real marvel of this tender novel is its coiled plotting, in which coincidence manages to evoke the colossal emotional toll of the revolution: on a crowded street, soldiers force the doctor’s elder son to drag away a prisoner whom they shot, and who turns out to be a family servant’s long-lost child; the younger son becomes a legendary resistance fighter, killing soldiers and collecting civilian bodies for burial, while his fumbling childhood best friend thrives under a senior officer of the junta.”

This is book #27 in my effort to read a book by an author from every African country in 2019. I’m halfway there!

Léopold Sédar Senghor was the first president of a post-colonial, independent Senegal, from 1960 until 1980. But long before he was president, Senghor was an intellectual and a poet. After the first year of his presidency, in 1961, he published a collection entitled Nocturnes. An English translation from the original French — by Wake and Reed — was published some years later. In the author’s note at the end of his poetry collection, Senghor writes, “I write primarily for my own people,” and this comes through clearly, with a host of references to specific places that may have been familiar to Senegalese readers in the 1960s but are lost on this U.S. reader in the 2010s. He includes a glossary in the back which only partially mitigates the challenge, so I admit that much of this collection passed above my head. But not all of it! Even to an unfamiliar reader, his poetry contains powerful images.

Some of the images are of fickle, potentially unrequited love:

I have woven you a song and you did not hear me…
I have offered you my wild flowers. Will you let them wither,
Finding distraction in the mayflies dancing?

Another plays with the concept of Western versus African religious beliefs in the context of insomnia:

Roads of insomnia, roads at noon, these long nightlong roads!
How long is it now since I entered civilisation and still I have not succeeded in appeasing the white God of Sleep.
O I speak his language yes, but listen to my accent.

Or the power of music and dance:

Rhythm drives out the fear that has us by the throat.

At other times I felt mystified, as when Senghor speaks of

And your lips are bread filling my breast that hisses like a black snake.

All in all, a worthy read from a great intellectual.

This is book #26 in my effort to read a book by an author from every African country in 2019.

The Old Drift, by Zambian-born writer Namwali Serpell, is hot right now. The New York Times calls it “a dazzling debut,” NPR talks about “exquisite acts of literary ventriloquism, the Washington Post calls it “a brilliant literary response to generations of bad politics.” It’s mostly set in Zambia, but it spans four generations (extending into the near future), a long list of characters — as Michael Silverblatt says, “you have a pencil and a piece of paper” — and multiple continents. At 576 pages (or 25 hours of audiobook), there’s a lot there. I enjoyed it, but I’ll admit that I occasional missed some of the intergenerational character connections (I should have wielded that pencil), perhaps because I was listening to the audiobook. Occasionally a “Greek chorus” enters in the form of a swarm of mosquitos: “We’re your oldest friend, your ancient enemy … We’re perfectly matched … We’re both useless, ubiquitous species. But while you all rule the earth and destroy it for kicks, we linger and loaf, unsung heroes. We’ve been around here as long as you have — for eons before, say the fossils.”

• “History, in short, was the annals of the bully on the playground.”
• “The first time a Shiwa audience saw John Wayne die, the women started up a fanfare of mourning like he was a long lost relative. When Wayne came back to life in the very next film, the audience erupted again. ‘But why?’ asked Agnes. ‘Were they happy?’ ‘No!’ Ronald laughed. ‘They said it was cheating!’
• “To have nothing to do was like having your fingernails pulled out, one by one.”
• “In truth, Sylvia was relieved to have failed out of school for good. She had never understood why the teachers taught why they taught. Sediment, tectonic, archipelago. Hypotenuse, equilateral, isosceles. What was any of it good for? No. She did not miss those useless lessons.”
• “Progress is just the word we use to disguise power doing its thing.”
• “The flight attendants…were done with coddling. They snatched Naila’s blankets and demanded her headset, they claimed her rubbish and chastised her tilted seat.”

“The reading of the last will and testament of Sr. Napumoceno da Silva Araújo ate up a whole afternoon. When he reached the one-hundred-and-fiftieth page, the notary admitted he was already tired and actually broke off to ask that someone bring him a glass of water.” So begins The Last Will & Testament of Senhor da Silva Araújo, Cape Verdean writer Germano Almeida‘s novel about the life of the titular character, translated to English by Sheila Faria Glaser. The book wanders through Almeida’s life and loves, and Almeida’s “refreshing voice and playful irony” (as Publisher’s Weekly put it) reminded me of the feel of Brazilian literature I’ve encountered, like Jorge Amado’s The Double Death of Quincas Water-Bray. Araújo works his way up from poverty and becomes a successful businessman, then an eccentric technophile, then an isolated writer. One of his initial business successes demonstrates the feel of the novel: Araújo accidentally orders 10,000 umbrellas rather than his intended 1,000 (and even that was “almost as a joke,” as there was little rain), writes an angry note to his supplier, but then an unprecedented, extended rainstorm allows him to sell all for great profit. The novel is filled with little anecdotes like this one. Araújo has some quirky ideas — for example on goodness and on intellectual property.

• On purpose: “By nature and social position a humble man, he, Napumoceno, could not aspire to ending the turmoil of the planet. But here on this bit of earth, poor but beloved, he would like to contribute with all his strength to bringing a reign of harmony and peace, and, who knows, maybe even well-being, to the forsaken.”
• On priorities: “No fortune is enough to make up for the loss of our peace and quiet.”
• On sex: “Life is a naked woman lying on a bed, he’d read that, he no longer remembered where, and he had accepted this assertion as the unquestionable truth and for that reason he had a morbid fear of being impotent with a woman.”
• On education and jobs:
  • “Only productive work linked to a basic education can free a man from darkness and misery.”
  • “He said that I had to be a man and that only books, only school, made men.”
• On guidance: “Crickets sing to guide people, but poor things, more often than not they disorient us because they all sing at the same time, each one pulling you toward it, no one can find his way in the midst of that cacophony of calls.”
• On reading: “He couldn’t quite determine when he’d acquired the vice of reading, because a bona fide vice it was, a sort of sedative opium that he took to recoup from both physical and spiritual exhaustion, and also from the annoyances of the day or the excitement of a deal.”
• On lump sums versus annuities: One characters wishes her inheritance as a lump sum in order to start a chicken farm (p147), consistent with some thinking around cash transfer programs and less frequent, larger transfers being associated with investment rather than consumption.

This is book #24 in my effort to read a book by an author from every African country in 2019.

Norbert Zongo, an investigative journalist from Burkina Faso, published his novel The Parachute Drop in 1988. He was assassinated ten years later for his journalism. Here’s a passage from the preface to his novel.

• Damien, Travel Readings blog: “The book written in 1988 is almost prescient.”
• Ann Morgan, A Year of Reading the World: “This capacity to evoke empathy and celebrate the humanity of his enemies demonstrates Norbert Zongo’s outstanding qualities as a writer, journalist and human being.”

• “Virtual beggars on the international scene, these leaders spent enormous sums of money so they could travel about the world to vilify our people and barter our dignity for the sake of gaining foreign aid. This so-called aid has often been more of a nuisance than a help for our people.”
• “It takes far more than a beret and a pistol to turn a fool into a wise man.”
• “There is no real happiness for anyone unless there is happiness for everyone, for all of the people.”

This is book #22 in my effort to read a book by an author from every African country in 2019.

A young woman living in the U.K. receives a letter informing her that her grandfather’s coffee plantation now belongs to her. The letter has no return address. “Knowingly, he had denied me the opportunity to write back with ready excuses, to enclose a cheque bloated with guilty zeroes.” When she returns to her unnamed West African home country (actually Sierra Leone), four of her aunts — all daughters to polygamous wives of the same man — share their life stories. And so, Sierra Leonean and Scottish writer Aminatta Forna’s novel, Ancestor Stones, reads more like a collection of stories than a novel. But the stories give Forna the opportunity to explore diverse nooks and crannies of Sierra Leonean life, from the 1920s up to the turn of the century. Forna’s prose is beautiful as usual. (My favorite of hers remains The Memory of Love, a later novel) I initially had some trouble keeping track of the different stories; as Bernardine Evaristo wrote in the Guardian, “it’s easy to get lost.” But once I surrendered myself to the flow, enjoying each story as it came, I could appreciate — again in the words of Evaristo — Forna’s “inspired storytelling and beautifully crafted prose.” Ultimately I thoroughly enjoyed it.

• A major character in The Memory of Love makes an earlier, minor appearance here in Ancestor Stones — psychiatrist Adrian Lockheart!
• Wise advice on marriage from one mother in the book: “My mother told me: ‘Before you are married keep both eyes open and after you are married close one eye.'”
• On humor: “Gradually I learned what hardships people bore by the things they joked about.”
• On becoming like your parents: “I had spent my whole life trying not to be like my mother. I had taken the opposite path and hurried along it, all the time looking over my shoulder instead of ahead, so that I failed to see how the path curved back again in the same direction.”
• On Lagos — where one character makes a visit: “Lagos! It smelled quite like our city, and it looked and sounded a bit like it, too. But, oh, in every other way the difference between them was immense. Our city was a simple melody, whistled by a solitary man. Lagos was one hundred pipes, horns and drummers.”
• On elections: “When, in a tarnished voice, he announced we were to have elections for the first time in many years few believed it, and many didn’t hear at all because they had given up listening a long, long time ago.”
• On unkind words: “Quarrels end, but words once uttered never die.”

If you think that sprawling, multi-generational family sagas where characters have multiple names is the exclusive realm of Russian novelists, think again. Kintu, by Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi of Uganda, begins with a man killed by a mob in the outskirts of Kampala, Uganda, in the early 2000s. Swiftly, Makumbi takes us back to to the 1750s, when Kintu — the ancestor of his modern-day clan — incurs a curse. We then return to modern times and observe how the curse plays out in different branches of Kintu’s descendants.

• Aaron Bady, Lit Hub: “Ugandans have waited a long time for Kintu to exist. Since it was first published in 2014, after winning the Kwani Manuscript Project, the enthusiasm with which Kintu has been received in Uganda has been difficult to describe but remarkable to witness… The main thing to know, simply, is that this novel was written for Ugandans.”
• Publishers Weekly (starred review): “A masterpiece of cultural memory, Kintu is elegantly poised on the crossroads of tradition and modernity.”
• African Queer, Rewrite: “What makes Kintu particularly unique is how it approaches its various topical areas, with as much naturalness and ordinariness in discussion of Baganda traditional culture as would be expected of a book written within the more readily accepted Western traditions. Makumbi does not turn to the traditional as the source of an unfamiliar and distant past, but rather as an ever-living present.”

• Bwesigye bwa Mwesigire (a Ugandan), Johannesburg Review of Books: “Makumbi’s art, her oral aesthetics, are highly sophisticated, requiring more than the bland generic Anglophone novel, manufactured in the MFA factory, does. While the latter has perpetuated a myth of what is ‘marketable’ in world fiction, part of the joy of Kintu is that it’s stuff is what universal stories are made of. What Luganda speakers hear when they read the novel is not entirely out of reach to non-Luganda speakers, precisely because of its fable-like qualities.”
• Solomon Asaba, New Times (Rwanda): [This “book review” is merely a summary, including a summary of the book’s ending, with no value judgments.]
• Itumeleng Molefi, Business Day (South Africa): “Kintu is a triumph and will surely leave a mark on the African literature landscape that will be felt for generations to come.”